Online age-verification tools for child safety are surveilling adults
cnbc.com606 points by bilsbie 21 hours ago
606 points by bilsbie 21 hours ago
>An FTC spokesperson told CNBC that companies must limit how collected information is used. [...] The agency pointed to existing rules requiring firms to retain personal information only as long as reasonably necessary and to safeguard its confidentiality and integrity.
the very same rules that have allowed literally every single piece of my data to be leaked several separate times, and now i have free credit monitoring instead of privacy? and all of those companies still operate normally, as if nothing ever happened? very neat.
>Discord said it is using the additional time this year to add more verification options, including credit cards, more transparency on vendors and technical detail of how age verification will work
and why didnt we start with credit cards? instead of facial recognition with peter thiel? (this is a rhetorical question)
I have gotten several notices of medical data being leaked over the last two years. I thought HIPPA law had very harsh fines for this, but I guess they just look the other way.
Seems like if you just disclose and make assurances that "you take security seriously" then it's fine.
I once worked with both PCI and HIPAA at a consulting firm. Neither had very high bars. PCI compliance was just a yes/no questionnaire that said something like "I do not store unencrypted CC numbers in my DB." No one validates the questionnaire. I just submit it and I got a shiny badge to put on my clients site.
HIPAA compliance was just a half hour webinar.
To be fair, I think HIPAA works in offline contexts (employers can't ask your doctor about your health) but as far as how easy it was for me to get access to customer CCs and medical information... Let's just say the barrier was basically nonexistent.
HIPAA doesn't have a private cause of action so if a violation happens, it's a wealth transfer to the government, it doesn't mean anything to you or any individual.
And most companies can simply price it in as cost of doing business at this point.
unfortunately, even if the fine seems harsh, if it is less than the profits generated the fine is an operating expense and not a deterrent.
> I thought HIPPA law had very harsh fines for this
Not at all. The maximum fine a company has to pay is capped at $2 million per calendar year for a violation, and that's assuming it's even eligible for the highest tier of penalty.
Some of the accounts being blocked from certain access are themselves 18! You would think Reddit would consider that, but nope it doesn't.
Age of account was sufficient for Google and third-party services for verification until recently. My gmail account is almost 22 years old, in continuous use. I have a credit card on file with Google Pay. Why would I need to submit a photo to engage with a private service, outside of volunteering to help train a surveillance apparatus?
Is there any forum short of a senate subcommittee that the public can ask companies these questions? The silence is deafening.
Contact your senator and ask them. Call your senator's offices and ask to meet with them or a representative in person, they can schedule an appointment, and most maintain offices in major population centers in their states.
...That would be a cost center, sir. If you don't like our product, you are free to not use us and make your own while foregoing doing any business in anywhere with either of one of the two major political parties.
There is a reason why I don't accept private enterprise as something separate from Government. The nature of the incorporation legal fiction makes them proxies of Government power and influence, hence why I believe private enterprise should in some ways be as heavily restricted by Constitutional guardrails as the Government itself (allegedly) is.
Probably because the transfer of accounts (typically for reasons of better spamming, but in this case for adult access) is possible.
However, that makes me wonder what mechanism might "unverify" an account holder's age upon transfer. I suppose it's simply a need to re-verify (take a new photo) upon every login, but then folks could transfer the session cookie to avoid needing the new owner to perform a login (unless a new device ID/fingerprint makes the old cookie useless).
Since you don't have to verify every time you use the account, transfer of verified accounts will still be a "problem" though. It's just a CYA to be able to say "we verified this account owner."
But… You could transfer the account after age verification too. The only way to be sure is to ask for ID every time people use the website / application, then children will be truly finally safe from the horrors of the Internet.
The website will only function when webcam is turned on with passport next to your face. Session is immeditely revoked on failure.
> You could transfer the account after age verification too.
Isn't that what I said?
Yes, but you also said it's a CYA, when indeed it's not sufficient CYA if only a former account owner, but not "this account owner," had been verified.
It's definitely CYA. Because not transferring accounts is almost definitely in the TOS. So "we didn't know it was someone else using the account, thats against our TOS" will be the response.
> … I suppose it's simply a need to re-verify (take a new photo) upon every login …
Clearly the only foolproof solution is a 3rd-party camera pointed at your face at all times whenever you use a computer.
And a *plug to measure the heart rate at all times in the convenient and unobtrusive way, to ensure the face is of the mammal, and not the mannequin.
10 years was enough for Tom Fulp.
SOTA is age inference: The platform studies your behavior to estimate your age.
On the credit card point though, cards don't work perfectly as age verification either. Plenty of minors can access prepaid cards or family cards
>cards don't work perfectly as age verification either.
there are 0 "perfect" age verification systems.
plenty of minors can have their brother/sister/parents supply their id, or do the verification video. the on-device verification discord rolled out was, within hours, broken. i remember news reports of kids submitting photos of their dogs and being verified as of-age.
credit card solves most of the problem with much less downside than submitting my face (i am already okay putting my card info into most sites)
Prepaid cards can't masquerade as credit cards as there are easy ways to differentiate them (the numbers have meaning) and a minor getting access to the family credit card is the parents giving them permission. I'm not convinced credit card for age verification is a good solution for all cases but for cases where you've already used a credit card to access the service it would be perfect.
I agree, we shouldn't be optimizing for the case where a child steals a credit card. That's just not in the threat model. I mean, they could steal IDs too, and children can already steal credit cards and buy, like, vbucks or whatever. Which probably causes more tangible real-world harm than seeing a pair of boobies or whatever we're trying to protect against.
However, I still think credit cards are overkill. They reveal way too much information, including addresses. I wouldn't trust most companies with my credit card either, at least not online. In person it's different, the scanners are secure especially if you use tap to pay. But online, you just have a pinky promise that your info isn't being stored.
Frankly, I'm getting sick and tired of being put in the situation where I have no choice but to just blindly trust people to do the right thing. Obviously, it's not working, and we need real solutions.
I agree that CCs are overkill for every case except those where you have already given them a CC. There is no risk of revealing to much information for age verification when you already are giving them all that information.
> now i have free credit monitoring
Might not even matter ...
"TransUnion and Experian, two of the three major credit bureaus, have started dismissing a larger share of consumer complaints without help since the Trump administration began dismantling the CFPB."
https://www.propublica.org/article/credit-report-mistakes-cf...
It's not like they were really doing a very good job anyway. My data has been leaking for two decades now.
How much money did the CFPB actually give back to wronged consumers?
Pre-trump's attempts to eliminate the department, almost $20 billion.
https://www.consumerfinance.gov/enforcement/enforcement-by-t...
And one would hope that the purpose of the CFPB would be to dissuade lenders from wronging consumers in the first place, meaning the net benefit to consumers was likely much higher.
Their mere presence was effective. I know people who had trouble with banks refusing to fix their own screwups and demanding evidence that couldn’t exist.
They changed their tune the second there was an open case on the matter.
Also of note is they were responsible for medical debt cases, which are particularly difficult for people to resolve because of the shared responsibility between the patient and the insurer, which allows the insurer to deflect responsibility until the bill ends up in collections.
Here's a good interview with the director of the Free Speech Coalition on the consequences of these "protect the kids" moral panic laws, which include widespread surveillance, banning VPNs and raising the cost of running an independent website to unsustainable levels.
Remember it's not just about pornography. It's anything deemed "harmful to minors" including platforms like Reddit, Bluesky or stuff conservative lawmakers think is harmful like discussion forums for LGBTQ people, sexual health information or dissident political opinions.
They also examine how these laws, which are often backed by the religious Right, are getting support more broadly from people who see it as a way to rein in Big Tech who are creating "social media addiction" and so forth.
And even within our industry there is a lot of money to be made by creating and selling compliance products, so even on forums like this you will find people advocating for them.
"Another Internet Law That Punishes Everyone" - Power User Podcast 1/9/26: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=8bnp3nmpK9g
This is so much bigger than the “religious right” though, UK and Australia have far less of that and parties from both sides of politics here and in the UK seem to be competing to out-do each other with surveillance, censorship and control of adults online under the guise of ‘child safety’.
And all being pushed so, so much harder in just the last couple of years, all at the same time. I don’t know what’s the source…
Governments around the world have sought to control the internet and strip away anonymity for years, they've now found their foot-in-the-door moment so they're all going for it in their own way.
Some of it is governments watching and copying each other, some of it is dialogue happening at international events, being driven by groups like the Global Coalition for Digital Safety:
https://initiatives.weforum.org/global-coalition-for-digital...
It's probably not being driven by one single group, there are a number of private and government orgs whos interests in controlling information converge.
It's thinly veiled authoritarianism, just the state pushing for more control
the religious right may be one faction in this push for digital surveilance but I don't think they're the ones behind the EU push for chat control and device lockdown or the insane 3d printer proposal in california.
This is a trans-ideological movement.
The fact that these tools are 'active' centric, i.e : You must perform an action to validate you're NOT a child, these will never protect children. A predator simply needs not to verify anything and appear benign and ironically more anonymous than law abiding people.
I'm not saying the inverse is the answer either, just that if anyone without an agenda of surveillance looked at this for a second, the penny would have dropped. So I can only assume that this was the purpose the whole time.
Sob stories about children are always weaponized for oppression.
It was used to bash interracial marriage, gay rights, suppress dissent, attack the first amendment, and now this.
Whenever you hear some dramatic story involving kids about how you have to live a little less free, know the tactic.
The best way to protect children is to educate them to protect themselves, but that argument generally falls on deaf ears, doubly so when there's an opportunity to use "but the children" as a political cudgel.
Don’t forget the second amendment.
I don't understand your point. Can you quote the part of the second amendment that specifically addresses children, or schools for that matter?
> Sob stories about children are always weaponized for oppression.
This is common for opponents of the second amendment as well. "Think of the children!" etc etc.
While I think you and I would agree if I argued it was more about culture than firearms per-capita, it's pretty hard to say children aren't suffering some pretty real harms from said firearms (to say nothing of adult suicide statistics when firearms are kept in the house)
Reducing the number of guns doesn't solve the root issue (which I think we'd also agree on), but it should minimize the harms while being dramatically easier than changing the American ethos. Hell, America could likely get 80% of the results (no school shootings) with 20% of the effort (additional restrictions on firearms, more akin to Canada)
I further think the second amendment is causing Americans more harm than it's worth, though that's a seperate discussion; some examples include suicide statistics, accidental discharge, a lack of protection even when carried legally (such as in Alex Pretti's murder) and the fact that, when firearms could be anywhere, police must treat every interaction as potentially fatal - with all the force that requires
whats incredible to me are how many useful idiots out there STILL fall for it.
___ said hamas beaheaded 40 babies and that turned out to be a complete fabrication. That fake info was used in part to justify killing thousands of kids in ____
meanwhile the recent strike on Iran resulted in 80 little girls getting killed (with plenty of evidence) and its swept under the rug while we get blasted about the 7 soldiers that died.
>whats incredible to me are how many useful idiots out there STILL fall for it.
That's about 99% of the population.
More useful idiots are born every day, most of them never are educated and do not see their past blunders as anything wrong happening, they are completely blind to the real implication of their actions.
I know some idiots that read newspapers and technical papers and yet would rather have company like discord providing safety for their new born daughter but would vote for small govt republicans (or democrats, i don't care, it's just a label that is applicable now. they are mostly all the same) and do nothing about calling out the actual child predators and taking proper action against them. It is bonkers
Age verification doesn't stop determined bad actors, it just builds a database of everyone who cooperated...........
Exactly my point.. And all the industry experts who they must have consulted in to write the laws are coincidently invested in personal data harvesting. Who could have foreseen this happening.
> A predator simply needs not to verify anything and appear benign and ironically more anonymous than law abiding people.
Roblox takes the sane approach with this: communication features are completely disabled for "unverified" users.
A much better approach would be to hold platforms responsible if they allow a stranger that does not have explicit parental consent to communicate with or get information about a minor.
This would block the most common classes of abuse on platforms like Roblox, Fortnight, Lego (kids) Fortnight, YouTube Kids, Minecraft, and "educational" social networks / games.
Note that it doesn't require any centralized surveillance at all. Parents just need to control the kids' ability to create random accounts, by (for example) turning on parental controls as they already exist on most tablets/phones, and blocking app installation / email applications (or other 2FA vectors).
When the parent allows an account to be created, they just tick the "kid mode" box. This even works with shared devices that don't support multiple accounts (so, iPads and iPhones).
Age verification inherently requires identity verification.
The UK's Online Safety Act originally had a proposal that would allow users to purchase an ID code anonymously in cash from a corner store, presenting only ID to the cashier the same way as buying alcohol. This was never implemented, because it's more useful for the government and corporations to link all online usage to a government ID.
> Age verification inherently requires identity verification.
Not necessarily. There are facial scan tools which make a guess based on visual appearance of the face. They aren’t perfect, but they might have error rates comparable to systems which require linking to government ID systems.
I didn't know the Online Safety Act had this proposal. Do you have a source?
I've been proposing the same thing on this site for months. IMO anonymous age verification with no record-keeping is the only form of age verification that should exist. No zero knowledge proofs, no centralized government identity provider, nothing.
How do you prevent selling those ID codes to kids?
Sometimes this question comes up with an implied subtext of: "It needs to be bulletproof."
It really doesn't, and especially if the ostensible rationale is blocking the ills of social media. If your friends aren't there, there's less motive to waste a bunch of allowance-money dealing with a sketchy adult to get there.
The same way you prevented adults buying pornography for kids prior to the web, and the way you prevent adults from buying beer for kids now.
Namely, you don't prevent it (I was 11 when I first saw hardcore pornography, on a VHS tape, at a sleepover party), but it does place a (surmountable) barrier in the way, which will reduce access to some degree. The degree to which that happens depends on a lot of things that are hard to predict. We have culturally normalized access to a lot of things for children, and reversing that will likely take more than just changes to a law.
If it's good enough for beer and cigarettes it's good enough for social media.
How do you prevent people verifying other people online? Are you going to send cops to some guy's house because he has 3 google accounts? How do you prevent kids sneaking verification from others?
> presenting only ID to the cashier the same way as buying alcohol
Selling alcohol to minors is illegal in the UK. Some do circumvent this by various means (e.g. fake ID or having an adult purchase on their behalf, both of which are also illegal), but the same is already true for the current age verification system.
Same way you prevent selling beer to kids. Impose harsh penalties for violators.
How do you prevent kids verifying as adults?
That's the same question.
Meanwhile apparently 70% of Australian under-16's retrained/regained access to social media.
See, even intrusive, surveillance and privacy-busting methods don't work.
I mean I think these laws are stupid and would happily lend my license to anyone in my family to bypass this shit. Especially since for most verifications they literally just need a picture of my driver's license—the very definition of publicly available info.
The entire point is to de-anonymise adults. Especially in countries that are escalating the policing of online speech.
If it was actually about kids, we'd have done it a long time ago. With more focus on things like porn and gambling (including 'loot box' gambling in games) rather than social media.
My default reaction to the introduction of any age-verification for any service is the closing account. Goodbye Discord, account closed out of protest.
The second option is ignoring the verification request. Goodbye online-gaming-with-strangers on Xbox. (I see this as a positive). Same goes for Ubisoft who aggressively wanted my secret papers to verify my identity.
I've yet to come across anything I want or need outside banking or government use where age verification benefits me, or is so useful/important that I would willingly hand over critical secret documents. I've not even needed to use a VPN for anything. It doesn't mean it won't happen, but when it does, option #1 or #2 is going to cover everything.
Which circles back to the main point here - if I ignore it, then effectively I get identified as a non-adult. How does this protect anybody?
(UK-based, might not be the same everywhere)
> I've yet to come across anything I want or need outside banking or government use where age verification benefits me, or is so useful/important that I would willingly hand over critical secret documents
So far. As these laws proliferate (and companies continue complying in advance), at this rate, it won't be long before you can't meaningfully do anything on the Internet otherwise.
What's wrong with being flagged a non-adult? Being a non-adult means you are limited to supervised child-safe spaces. Child-safe doesn't mean "no adults" allowed. It means "monitored and censored"
Aside from the concept of adults masquerading as non-adults, nothing so long as those spaces are moderated fully. I have no problem with skipping the verification, but I do question the moderation of most services.
The problems start when the space become not-for-children and identity validation is mandatory to use them, which will exclude people like me who categorically refuse to hand over personal secrets in order to have access. It does not warrant the inherent risk involved with granting access to personal details unrelated to the service offered. I reckon this will happen when someone decides it's better commercially to make a service adult-only than to moderate non-adult accounts. It's a slippery slope, and a predictable next step once adult have become accustomed to handing over papers for some services to have to do it for many, if not all.
Well, ad are supposed to be different for children, right? So in theory we would get less ads by being ID'd as a child. Now, this would probably cause a new law where they would allow child ads...
The EU is rolling out the EUDI system this year where citizens can verify their age (>16, >18, >21) without revealing any personal information. This is a solved problem over there.
EUDI has had various criticism with its approach for not supporting unlinkability (with the same attestation used across verifiers they can be traced to the same user).
There are some long Github threads in the official repo along with a PDF[1] of cryptographer's feedback about the privacy issues. Also covered in this[2] article.
This is unlike BBS+ which supports unlinkability and which was even recommended by GSMA Europe to such address downsides. In the Github discussions there seems to be pushback by those officially involved that claim BBS+ isn't compatible with EUDI[3] and there seems to be some plateauing of any progress advancing it.
[1] https://github.com/eu-digital-identity-wallet/eudi-doc-archi...
[2] https://news.dyne.org/the-problems-of-european-digital-ident...
[3] https://github.com/eu-digital-identity-wallet/eudi-doc-archi...
According to the EU Identity Wallet's documentation, the EU's planned system requires highly invasive age verification to obtain 30 single use, easily trackable tokens that expire after 3 months. It also bans jailbreaking/rooting your device, and requires GooglePlay Services/IOS equivalent be installed to "prevent tampering". You have to blindly trust that the tokens will not be tracked, which is a total no-go for privacy.
These massive privacy issues have all been raised on their Github, and the team behind the wallet have been ignoring them.
Doesn't the act of notifying >16 today and >18 tomorrow leak birthdates?
Not unless you actually meant 16<x<18 today and >18 tomorrow.
You can be 30 and verify >16 today and >18 tomorrow, obviously without being 18.
which is nothing in comparison to leaking all of personal information
you can also introduce some jitter like changing age range only once a week/month/year for everyone
Birthday, zip code and gender is enough to uniquely identify most Americans.
Well don't reveal your birthday then. Wait 5 days to confirm >18.
If you run into a liquor store yelling "Im finally 18, here's proof." that's on you?
If you want privacy you need to fuzz the transition. Many platforms support that today. Or you can create a separate account when you graduate.
But also, knowing someone's birthday without trying it to other information greatly reduces the risk of harm.
The uncomfortable part is that they try to solve a real problem (protecting minors) by requiring universal identification. In practice this means every adult has to prove who they are just to access any part of the internet. Once that infrastructure exists, it’s hard to imagine it not expanding beyond its original purpose.
Discord specifically wanted to solve this by assuming everyone was a minor until they proved their age. Minors still have access to most spaces unless that space (or DMs with adults) was flagged / identified as adult-content.
This is a pretty clear counter example to your snowball fallacy.
Protecting children means protecting them from people who wish to harm them, that includes the government and platform owners, since these laws don't provide any actual protections to children from those two entities it's reasonable to assume that the law is trying to facilitate child exploitation rather than prevent it.
You have to keep in mind your idea of child protection is likely different from most of Americas'. The law makers' idea is to maximally enable them to perform (largely) uncompensated white collar work. Protected means that by the time they are 22 they have maximally warped their brain into an economically viable specialty and are in massive personal debt. If they make Roblox a $1M in the meantime of course that money won't go to their brainwashing, that would make them lazy.
Its hard to imagine that it won't launch _already_ expanded beyond it's original purpose. My expectation is that there will be precisely 0 seconds between it and it being abused. The people building it will plan the abuse before it's even launched.
It also means any child abuser who wants access to children away from the eyes of other adults just has to avoid providing ID.
I'm just whipping the dead horse again. Surely the poor thing is beyond micronized dust at this point.
This could have been avoided [1] if the real goal was to protect small children. No need for third parties or sharing sensitive data that will eventually be "ooopsie leaked totally by mistake" or outright sold/shared. No perfect, nothing is.
Leave parenting to the parents. Stopping bad/evil parents is not possible.
The tiktok/youtube recommendation algorithms will undoubtedly cause more harm to minors than wandering onto an adult website and learning about how babies are made.
It's by design. Pedonazis have been used as the justification for the surveillance apparatus for decades now.
[0] "Cypherpunks Uncut." https://www.dailymotion.com/video/xt3hpb
And you could relatively well determine the age of a person, by looking at the age of his social graph. No kids knows more then 5 adults, except over family groups.. thuse age identification should be viable via social login even without beeing bound to a passport.
The race will be on for children to gain as many adult contacts as possible so they can pass age verification.
Of course they are. That is their purpose.
It's curious why there are no reverse systems where, when accessing an adult resource, you have to prove that you are a child?
I've seen some forums (mostly political) where you have to prove that you can act like a child to be welcome. So that's kind of like what you're talking about?
(If anyone is offended by this, don't worry, I'm talking about the other side; I'm sure your side is full of reasonable adults who just get a little carried away sometimes.)
All actors already know your age with 99% accuracy: tech giants (Google/Meta etc through your searches/choices) and government though your... birth. The same holds for your gender, job, spouse and more. And they share all of it to many other endpoints. They just want age verification to cover the rest 1% and to transfer the responsibility to the user.
The problem with any online age verification system is not only that many other info is leaked (personal, IP address etc) but even the fact that YOU apply for such a service and might use it for nasty things.
I figured that it would go without saying that the only way to do age-verification is to stop everybody at the proverbial tollbooth. Did people really think they were going to avoid the stop-and-frisk?
Don't give them an inch. The US defense budget is $1T. They can't spend it all on surveillance, but let's say the tech companies and the government spends that much every year combined. Our victory condition is to increase the cost of surveillance and deanonymization to >$10K per person per year, which is very doable. Every little habit and precaution you take against online tracking will raise the cost, probably a lot more than you think. Spreading the word multiplies that. Every open-source program and protocol spec that aims to decentralize and anonymize is like an incinerator for the surveillance dollars. And if you're more competent than that, you may consider following in the footsteps of Daniel Bernstein or Edward Snowden and make some trillion-dollar dents.
Anonymous and uncensored information exchange can prevent the vast majority of violent conflicts and shorten the necessary ones. Most violence in human history could have been prevented if every human being had 1) the ability to telepathically communicate with anyone else in the world without being eavesdropped, and 2) the ability to broadcast information anonymously to all of humanity in real-time. I will leave the details of why for you to deduce. These things are within reach right now for the first time in history. So we can and should build the decentralized web, and democratize the entire computing supply chain all the way down to chip fabbing and electricity generation. It is the greatest unrealized potential of the Internet, and we mustn't cede ground to ensure the path to that future remains open.
Why do people fall for propaganda so easily? Just sub out the words "child" with "memory" and you get Rust. The correct response is "Yes, you do cut out a class of memory related bugs, but you invented that class arbitrarily. There is no data suggesting that your class corresponds to reality."
It makes sense for some specific situations, but the goal is always to move towards a classes society. Classes (including Types, Traits, Lifetimes) are something you use because you have to, not because you want to. They warp thinking (and traceability) in measurable ways.
I am sympathetic to the privacy concerns.
But to be honest I don't understand where they come from. Seems people are upset about being de anonymized on the internet. It was my understanding that it is trivial for the government to deanonymize you directly through their own tooling and trivial for private industry to deanonymize you through statistical analysis.
So in that sense, what new thing are we fearing that will come to bear that hasn't come to bear already? Seems to me we are already in a post anonymous world and just maybe most people don't understand that memo until this story came out. Media runs with it so much because people read about it not because it is actually anything new per say.
We are not in a post-anonymous world. People who care can absolutely still remain anonymous, for the time being, with enough effort. However, the number of services we can use is being increasingly cut off by these measures. If the trend continues, then we will soon be in such a world, but we are not there yet.
I hate comments like yours beyond belief. "Oh, I'm so smart. It's too much effort to stay private, so I've accepted that a dystopian surveillance state where every action anyone ever takes is recorded permanently and accessible to anyone is inevitable. Look at these fucking idiots worrying about this issue. Can't they just accept it will happen and shut up?"
It is also worth noting that there is a distinction to be made between government and corporate surveillance. Even if it were possible for state actors to de-anonymize specific targets with reliability (it's not, with sufficient opsec), that is very different from a corporation being able to do it. Once a corporation has your data, they will sell it to anyone and everyone, making your entire life public record for anyone to find with a bit of digging. That is a threat model that is much more likely for Average Joe than being targeted by the government, but it is also a threat which is easier to defeat than that of a state actor. This cynical defeatism is baseless.
... says "asdff."
Lack of creativity for that username really. Slapped home row and called it a day. But still I'm sure FBI knows exactly who I am. Same for European and middle eastern intelligence orgs. I'm sure ad networks all over the world have me fingerprinted, especially considering I run firefox and block ads, like that alone narrows me down to probably less than a million people globally, maybe substantially less than that.
And this is just me spitballing. Imagine if this is your life's career, 40 hours a week for 40 years, plus a whole department of coworkers all on this effort. And multiple companies and governments each with their own departments on these efforts. How far this would have advanced by now what 30+ years into world wide public computer networks. How far ahead the state of the art actually is compared to what the public must assume. What lawmakers must assume.
Never provide such information. Forge it if you must
Companies have lost our data so many times with lost penalties. Anybody remember Cambridge Analytica? Hell no company is getting my personal data.
Not sending your ID to remote server is intuitively correct. What if they will force you to do it though?
Is your wallet big enough to afford to say no and unplug? Mine is but what about the 99%?
This is probably fantastic news for the VPN providers. Lots of people who otherwise wouldn't have bothered are now likely incorporating VPN connectivity into their daily routine. This very obviously includes kids.
I also wouldn't be surprised if there were plenty of people only dimly aware of the idea of a VPN who are now sitting up and taking note.
I personally don’t use VPN’s except for work but I have multiple clients installed on my devices “just in case”.
VPNs only work while there are jurisdictions that don't have age verification laws and services don't ban access from those jurisdictions.
That's technically true right now, but I keep holding out hope that these sorts of draconian restrictions will drive even harder to stamp out privacy-preserving solutions. I'm old enough to remember the days before the internet well, when _everything_ was made for children because you never knew who was and wasn't. I was afraid that legislation would drive the internet back to public television (as it seems to be determined to do) and I was really grateful for Freenet when it was first announced. It never took off, but not because it didn't work, just because at the time not enough people thought it was necessary. Maybe this will be the push to get enough people on board to make it (or something like it) feasible? Anonymous communication is a technically solvable problem, as long as enough people agree that it's worth pursuing.
> Maybe this will be the push to get enough people on board to make it (or something like it) feasible?
That won't save you from being targeted. Flawed methodology from the prosecution doesn't matter if all your stuff gets seized, and they really want to hurt you. See Black Ice:
[1]https://old.reddit.com/r/Freenet/comments/4ebw9w/more_inform...
[2]https://retro64xyz.gitlab.io/assets/pdf/blackice_project.pdf
And kids will do very stupid things to get "free" VPN access.
Such as following directions from a YouTube video that instructs them to do sketchy things.
And old people will do stupid things as downloading APKs as well. But in both cases, the smart people and the careful people have to pay the cost of supporting the in-experienced whether via constant surveillance or via no more accessing apps to your own computer or phone
I mean, how much longer do you think VPNs will remain legal in the US?
They're used for more than just anonymization. You know, their original purpose.
and? they will not ban vpn, they will ban free vpn providers and require KYC for the other vpn providers.
Self-hosted vpns and b2b vpns will remain unaffected but that doesn't matter, they don't look for 100% coverage, 70%-80% is good enough
So what is Instagram doing?
I always wonder if this will fix the bot and ad/click fraud issues rampant on the Internet.
The uncomfortable part is that both sides are right: there are real harms to kids online, but tying real-world identity to routine internet access fundamentally changes what the internet has been for decades
Even with all age verifications implemented, some parents will just toss their phone with tiktoks to their toddler, just to keep them quiet for a second or two.
> causing major headaches for social media companies attempting to strike a balance for users between legal compliance and privacy.
I can see how the problem is real. (Not sarcasm.)
In technical terms, "balance" is trivial. Put an air/security gap between information collected for age verification and the dossiers they have on users.
In business terms, conflict. They have relentless incentives and pressures to collect, collate and leverage every bit of information that can increase their return on users. Legal gray and black behaviors are rampant and tolerated where protectable. The number of paths to a creative interpretation of "balance" is unbounded. Right up to the c-suite.
It is sad, but self-aware, if they feel awkward trusting themselves with a mandated database full of tasty information they are not supposed to taste.
And as we all know it its USA monopoly privilege
Even if they didn't track all possible details of current adults, they would contain the details of future adults.
But maybe this is yet another attemption to produce mindless factory workers who won't rise against their lords even if someone inserts something something to them. While recording it, of course. For the profit... Erm, science.
Damn, can't have nothin nice
Well, that's shocking news...said no one ever.
> Social media company Discord announced plans in February to roll out mandatory age verification globally,
Discord’s age verification is optional and only required to disable the image content filter, join adult servers, and a couple other features. I’m not saying it’s a good decision, but I am getting tired of the repeated claim that it’s mandatory to go do age verification to use the service.
This lazy reporting is hurting the messaging because readers will believe that mandatory age verification was implemented and everything is fine, so new laws will not change anything for the worse. It needs to be clear that age verification laws would change the situation considerably, not be a nothingburger.
I don’t plan to do the Discord age verification and neither do most of the people I interact with on Discord. It’s not mandatory.
I don’t recommend anyone rush to do the Discord age verification unless you really need to for some reason. Don’t believe all of the lazy articles saying it’s mandatory.
You're downplaying it in the same way that others are overplaying it.
- There are servers that are labelled adult only because it's simpler to label _everything_ as causing cancer than it is to only label the correct things. I can't join channels for some games because they're "adult"; even though they're not
- There are servers that are getting rid of content because they don't want some automatic system to label them as adult, even though they're not. There's a game server that got rid of it's meme channel, because people could (but don't) post content that some system might see as adult.
So it is a bigger deal than you're making it out to be. It's negatively impacting people and servers that have no interest in having anything adult on them.
> It's negatively impacting people and servers that have no interest in having anything adult on them.
So who should police that? I am in certain communities that try to be stricter on moderation (which I love!) but it's hard work, lots of people trying to be at the edge of rules (with normal things like swearing, insults, etc.).
Whoever labels adult only and does not care is not wishing to put the effort to police that it actually is not.
Personally I do generally mind much more annoying, aggressive, stupid posters (in various channels), than the fact that I am not allowed to post some stupid adult-looking meme.
>I don’t plan to do the Discord age verification and neither do most of the people I interact with on Discord.
until it becomes law, like it is (or in the process of becoming) ~everywhere.
Okay? Then we’ll deal with that if it happens. If it does happen then other services will have the same requirements.
The baby eating machine is busy telling us that it's coming to eat our babies and your best answer is "wait and see"?
No? I’m against age verification too. Please re-read my comment above for why the Discord example with wrong information is counterproductive to arguments against age verification.
It’s important to get facts right.
>If it does happen then other services will have the same requirements.
that is exactly what everyone is angry about.
And I am too! My comment above was that the claim that Discord’s age verification is mandatory was false.
It’s also misleading in the context of this journalism because it makes it look like it’s already done and therefore new laws wouldn’t change anything.
Maybe! But laws like California’s new law and the Texas law both are making it mandatory from a legal compliance point of view.
The direction of these restrictions is not “optional”
It will be when everyone starts leaking from the big players. Age verification will make software development impossible or be impossible to implement without huge investment.
> Age verification will make software development impossible or be impossible to implement without huge investment.
Not really, you'll just be forced to use services from eg google or meta. And pay for them. And share user data.
Just because it's not openly shared does not mean that there aren't large databases of everything from working refresh keys to entire profiles indexed out there for the large services. Most data leaks and breaches don't get reported, or acknowledged, or are downplayed in their potential effect (but weirdly, also given more weight than they deserve since it becomes pointless to have so much data that doesn't add anything new to, say, a profile of a person)
And if my foss software doesnt implement those systems? Or someone downloads my foss software and removes those restrictions?
We will go back to the days of underground networks, offline if needed. NNCP, UUCP, and FIDO.
You know that none of those things actually protect children from predators which is the supposed reason for these changes. So when they inevitably don't work Discord will take the next step of requiring age verification from everyone.
Why, oh why, would you give them the long term benefit of the doubt for literally no gain to you whatsoever?
> for literally no gain to you whatsoever?
I literally gain from using their services for communication and voice chat with friends.
“Literally no gain whatsoever” is completely wrong.
I’ve tried Matrix/Element for years. I’m still in some IRC channels. I know what the alternatives are I can confidently say I’m gaining value from the ease in which Discord allows us to voice chat, screen share, and invite less technical people to join.
You will gain nothing relative to the status quo today. You're giving up your identity in order to just... stay the same. This is a textbook definition of no upside.
They are extorting your identity from you and you're somehow OK with that.
> Discord’s age verification is optional
...for now ... What stops them from changing this in the future?
Additionally Discord may verify your age based on the collected data without consent.
> ...for now ... What stops them from changing this in the future?
Then I’ll deal with that situation if it arises.
You are totally downplaying it in an effort to not see what others are talking about.
Man... How did yall white Westerners turn out to be the weakest people in the world?
You were supposed to be the bastions of freedom and justice, and the rest of the world begrudgingly admired you for that and were slowly improving to become like you, but ever since 9/11/2001 the rich old people that rule you have been feeding you boogeymen to make you their complacent b*tches and you lay down and crawl along and accept everything without even a whimper.
Now your countries are little different from Russia or China or Dubai etc where the old money cabals run everything, and it's not some third world backhole that was suffering already anyway, but you yourself that are the worst victims of all their laws and wars.
> Now your countries are little different from Russia or China or Dubai
The fact that many independent national newspapers (including this article from CNBC) are openly calling-out the surveillance state and entering the debate into the public conscience should tell everyone that USA (and the West) is very different from Russia or China or Dubai.
USA is not perfect, but at least is has active public discourse. We can openly (and legally) debate these things, and if we convince enough people, then we can change them.
> The fact that many independent national newspapers (including this article from CNBC) are openly calling-out the surveillance state and entering the debate into the public conscience should tell everyone that USA (and the West) is very different from Russia or China or Dubai.
So, the only benefit of the USA is that some media can still complain. And the regime just ignores and does what they want. Regardless dems or reps, they criticize the reduction of freedoms when they are in opposition, but as soon as they grab power, they keep reducing freedoms. It's like they are all just puppets of someone you can't even name without being called names.
> USA is not perfect, but at least is has active public discourse. We can openly (and legally) debate these things, and if we convince enough people, then we can change them.
Yep, they convinced you you are free because you can argue while keeping more and more freedoms and rights from you.
Today, the only difference between Western and Eastern regimes is that one side chooses the "Brave New World" way and the other the "1984" way. But eventually, they'll all converge into Zamyatin's "We" kind of dystopia that inspired both of these.
I think pointing to a single puppet master is reductive. Demography and geography predict essentially all of these changes. Protesting and civil disobedience can obviously tip matters, but the authoritarianism taking the us has been a long time coming just based on the centralization of federal power that started almost as soon as the ink was dry. The tendencies of landlocked resource heavy states are going to be authoritarian. Coastal trade based states will tend to go pluralist. Giant continent spanning states need coordination and continuity, so they go authoritarian. The federated nature of the original US, the EU and countries like Switzerland let those differing tendencies coexist. So once the US began centralizing power it was only a matter of time.
The fix is only barely in the realm of the possible. US states have to be given back their power, and the federal government must be limited to its original remit. This will let coastal states tend to pluralism, and resource heavy and or landlocked states tend to authoritarianism and as long as money and feet are free to cross state borders. It will all work out. Ditching first past the poles and mitigating gerrymandering would also obviously help.
> Ditching first past the poles and mitigating gerrymandering would also obviously help.
Mitigating gerrymandering is a lost cause with first past the post because someone has to draw the lines and whoever is in the majority at the time is going to find a way to benefit themselves. It's especially hard because in a state which is e.g. 60% for one party, drawing the lines in a "normal" way can pretty easily result in a bunch of districts that are each 60% for that party (i.e. they get 100% of the seats with 60% of the votes), and getting it to not do that is the thing that could require a bunch of strange looking lines.
Whereas if you switch from first past the post to score voting, gerrymandering is basically irrelevant.
First past the post de facto disenfranchises the majority of the district including members of both parties whenever the split isn't almost exactly 50:50, because then the outcome is effectively a certainty even if significant numbers of voters change their minds. Everyone who supports the losing major party or any third party fails to benefit them, and everyone who supports the victorious major party in excess of what they needed to secure the district is also not moving the needle even a hair.
Whereas with score voting, you can have more than two viable candidates, and then hyper-partisans can't win in a district where 40% of the voters hate them because they'd lose to a member of their own party, or a now-viable third party candidate, who can appeal to voters on both sides. Changing the composition of the district changes which candidate wins even when the change doesn't put a different party in the majority, and with more than two viable parties there may not even be a "majority" party anymore.
The problem is someone got the Democrats to start promoting IRV, which is barely better than first past the post in many cases and actually worse (i.e. more partisan) in some pretty common ones. Which in turn got a lot of Republicans to start opposing all voting system reforms because they didn't like the results. Meanwhile they would both benefit from using score voting instead of FPTP or IRV. I mean seriously, does either party actually like this partisan hellscape?
With scoring isn't the logical play to score your favorite the highest and zero out everyone else? Then it just devolves to fptp.
No, to begin with the people who want to play stupid games would give the highest score to every candidate they approve of and the lowest score to everyone else, and then it devolves to approval voting, which is significantly better than FPTP -- and IRV.
And even doing that is people being too clever by half.
Imagine there are three candidates. The one you prefer is polling at a score of 6/10, another that you like almost as much is also polling at 6/10 and a third that you very much don't like is polling at 4/10. If you were voting honestly you'd give the first candidate 10/10, the second 8/10 and the third 1/10. So what should you do if you're voting strategically?
If you do the one that devolves to approval voting you give the first two candidates 10/10. But that's pretty dumb, the third candidate was just barely in the race and all you're doing then is screwing yourself by giving your second choice a better chance against your first choice.
If you do the one that devolves to FPTP you're really screwing yourself, because then you're putting the third candidate, which you hate, back in the running by tanking the chances of the second candidate that you were pretty okay with. You're making it so if your first choice doesn't win you get your third choice, which is bad for you, because the amount you wanted the first to win over the second is much smaller than the amount you wanted the second to win over the third but then you foolishly failed to express that even though the voting system allowed you to.
You can find some "proofs" that giving every candidate either a 1/10 or 10/10 is the optimal strategy, but the thing those proofs take as an assumption is that you know exactly how everyone else is going to vote, i.e. you have perfectly 100% accurate infallible polls. Which, of course, you don't.
And then think about what you have to do with that second candidate you'd like to give 8/10: Under that logic you're "required" to either give them 10/10 or 1/10. But you can't be sure if giving the second candidate a 1/10 will cause the first candidate to win or the third. Without knowing that, you can't know which one is actually better for you.
At which point the optimal strategy is to hedge by picking a number in the middle, and choose which one in proportion to how strongly you feel about each risk. But that's the same as voting according to your actual preferences! You end up giving the second candidate 8/10 because that's the measure of how much more you prefer that they defeat the third candidate than that they don't defeat the first.
The only real strategic choice here is to put some consideration of the polling into the weighting. If Hitler is on the ballot then you're definitely giving him the lowest score, but if he's only polling at 2/10 and you're pretty sure he's not going to win, you might want to give someone else you only moderately disfavor a 3/10 rather than 5/10 because you're not that worried about the probability of Hitler defeating them even if you're very worried about the consequences if it happened. But you still don't want to give them the same score as you give Hitler because you still want to hedge at least a little bit against even a small chance of something that bad.
Interesting, and what are your thoughts on the star variant? Also what is so bad about irv?
STAR is basically fine, it's a variant on score.
There are several problems with IRV, but the most obvious one is that it can often knock the moderate candidate out of the final round.
Suppose you have a district that goes 60% for one party. That party runs two candidates and the other party runs one. With IRV, one of the first party's candidates is the most likely to get knocked out, because they'll each average ~30% of the vote (half of 60%) while the other candidate gets the other 40%. But if the majority party then has a preference for their own extremist, it's their moderate that gets knocked out, and then in a district that goes 60% for that party, the extremist has a decent chance of getting in.
The same dynamic can also cause the minority party candidate to win. 51% of the majority party (i.e. 30.5% of the district's voters) prefer an extremist, but enough of the majority party is afraid of them that in combination with the 40% of the vote from the minority party, the minority party wins the run off. Even though the "winner" would have lost to the majority party's moderate using score voting regardless of whether the extremist was on the ballot and even in a two-candidate election using FPTP.
> Demography and geography predict essentially all of these changes.
> The tendencies of landlocked resource heavy states are going to be authoritarian.
What are you basing this on? Where can I read more about this?
Montesquieu, Wittfogel, and Sachs are the old ones. Modern writers acknowledge geography isn't destiny, but it would definitely be fighting uphill for Russia to maintain democracy. Mobile middle class seems to be the real driver of democracy, and coastal trade is what created that in most modern democracies. Seems like maybe technology could change that. But big regions make mobility harder. If you have to move half a world away to reach different laws the pressure to retain you is less. Where a doctor in Hungary can pack up and take a train to find a government more to their liking. The shrinking of the middle class drives authoritarianism fairly reliably according to these sources. Sometimes the older ones call it the merchant class.
What are you even talking about?
Like,I don't like what I see in the US (I am not a US citizen), but in Russia or China you get KILLED for talking against the current government.
How can you even compare that
> in Russia or China you get KILLED for talking against the current government.
This has started happening in the US. ICE protests.
Active public discourse seems to have not made even a slight dent in the growth of surveillance in the last 25 years.
Wild exaggeration.
Here's an example just recently:
https://www.npr.org/2026/02/17/nx-s1-5612825/flock-contracts...
It's a constant and ongoing public concern.
Public discourse is a speed bump not an immovable barrier. The proof is in the state of things advancing in the same direction for the past few decades at least. Speed bumps are still valuable but not if you want to block the road. So public discourse alone isn’t the silver bullet you make them out to be.
It's quite a defeatist perspective. You're saying that because we can't fix or prevent everything, then we should choose not to fix or prevent anything?
Many US states do not impose government surveillance or have age verification laws.
But the point I was mainly making was regarding the comment equating USA and the West to Russia or China. Go to one of those countries and we'll see how long you can openly complain about government surveillance before you end up in jail.
They all go in the same direction. Russia and China are closer to the end-goal, but the USA and the West now run faster, so there's a good chance they all reach the end goal at the same time.
> You're saying that because we can't fix or prevent everything, then we should choose not to fix or prevent anything?
No, it is just being realist.
Public discourse is like wind. It comes and goes. But incentive based motivators are like gravity. It is a constant force, and sooner or later, it will win.
To make change, incentives should change.
I'm not telling you what can or cannot be done. I'm telling you that the example you chose to counter GP's "wild exaggeration" statement, was in itself an exaggeration. It doesn't make the point you think it makes. I'm telling you that if you want to change something, continuing to only do the thing that proved ineffective in the past won't cut it.
> Go to one of those countries and we'll see how long you can openly complain about government surveillance before you end up in jail.
Those people never had it any other way so their complaints are either "the usual", or come from people who can cause real trouble. Those people get silenced almost everywhere in the world. Want to know what Germany does if you "insult" a politician?
In Russia people openly complain about the government all the time, as long as this doesn't cause real trouble no one bats an eye. Russia has nowhere near the capability of the US and China to surveil people anyway. And in China most people don't openly complain because their lives are orders of magnitude better than just a few decades ago, many see it as the price for the better life.
"I'm not that bad yet" is never a strong argument. 50 years ago the press was "impeaching" presidents. Today presidents are "impeaching" the press. See the progress? It accelerates.
Main point is that the public discourse doesn't matter. These lawmakers are jamming what they want because they know Twitter is a rant box with no action.. If we want change we need proper coalitions at the worst and a working government at best. Yelling on social media is useless.
Over some Democratic party campaign wedge issue like illegal immigrants (who I guess are the only people who should be protected from constant surveillance, so special.) They will immediately not care about this at all when they are in charge of ICE, or whatever they rename it. Democrats love Flock (i.e. get paid by Flock.)
So you can imagine how much surveillance has expanded in countries without such discourse.
In the US. There is no discourse and active criminalization of the people protesting pipelines, neutral markets and internet, right to own, etc. Even right to protest is under attack. What discourse? Private equity and monopolies is what everybody is willing to give away their comfort to. The effort of raising your own kids? Nah. I want govt to nanny me and everybody else. Better policing? Nah. We need the quick solution and surveill the neighborhoods. Better get back on your feet programs and social safety net for people needing it? Nah get off my backyard and take those homeless with you.
It is constantly people wanting convenience and vertical integration in favor of homegrown human solutions and then complaining that their rights are not met because of course they aren't. Corporations never cared for people.
Idk I feel like I writing a documentary. And not a response now
A circus performer kept a troupe of monkeys and fed them 10 nuts each day. He fell on hard times and told the monkeys: 'from now on I can only give you seven nuts a day. I will give you three in the morning and four in the afternoon.' The monkey s were furious and raised a great clamor. 'Very well,' said the man, 'I will give you 4 nuts in the morning and 3 in the afternoon.' The monkeys were delighted.
Somehow we have more public “discourse” than ever with less public “debate” than ever. People just yelling rude names at each other and repeating nonsense talking points, while the trajectory of what’s actually happening continues to worsen. I include Congress and the executive branch in this characterization.
I regret that I have but one vote to give to this comment.
It seems like at least half of what everyone consumes in all of 'social media' is 'politicized' but no one is interested in debating. Debating would have to mean we're talking to those gross people from the opposite 'team,' asking them to justify the policy they are advocating for, listening to them, and trying to convince them of our own positions.
When was the last time we witnessed any politicians or activists trying to change minds? Right-wingers scream dumb slogans like "They're sending the rapists over here!" and left-wingers scream back their own dumb lines like "Racist! America was built by immigrants!" And both sides dismiss the other side's arguments as the nonsensical ravings of the evil and/or stupid.
It's pointless. Very few people will be convinced by arguments. Refuting someone's entire belief system will not lead them to reevaluate their lives and follow us as though we were Jesus. This just doesn't happen.
The reason for this is people believe things without actually thinking about them. People manage to believe in things that are mutually exclusive. Debating them will just make them hate you for your air of superiority.
Discourse is useful for validating one's own beliefs. Throw ideas out there and if others can't refute them then they are probably good ideas. I don't think there is any other use.
What a depressing take. The whole reason we put 435 people in the same room (well, plus 100 people in another room) to run the lawmaking process was for them to convince each other with arguments. If we're going to make decisions based exclusively on who can yell generalized slurs the loudest, we're completely doomed.
Politicians don't convince each other via logical arguments, they convince each other with leverage, favors and all sorts of secret underhanded backroom deals. That's how power works.
I know it's a depressing take. It's a depressing world. And it's only getting worse. We're in an age where truth is essentially irrelevant if not actively detrimental to whatever cause any given person believes in.
And half or more depending on the platform are foreign agents and/or bots to continue stirring shit up. It’s sadly too easy and the platforms themselves promote that engagement.
Imagine how far we are from allowing our own stances to change for the purpose of finding out the truth that would benefit us all
>The fact that many independent national newspapers (including this article from CNBC) are openly calling-out the surveillance state and entering the debate into the public conscience should tell everyone that USA (and the West) is very different from Russia or China or Dubai.
For how much longer will they stay independent? Media empires love to consolidate; most of the largest video services will soon be owned by a fan of govt surveillance.
Turns out open debate doesn't matter in a post truth society. They don't stop CNBC because they know it doesn't matter how they report anymore. The propaganda is so ingrained that facts won't deter the masses anymore.
> The fact that many independent national newspapers (including this article from CNBC) are openly calling-out the surveillance state and entering the debate into the public conscience...
LMAO! Bro/sis/secret third thing, you won't even start to believe how brave our press was when Putin had not consolidated his power yet. Ever heard of NTV? Or maybe Sobesednik, which lasted until 2023 I think? TV 6 or TV2 perhaps?
Seriously, this better-than-thou attitude will be your downfall one day. I know it was ours.
Engagement is not discourse.
This is the core strategy of the alt-right playbook. By replacing discourse with engagement, the logical structure of politics becomes meaningless, and victory becomes automatic.
The playbook worked. The alt-right is in power now. We won't get the power back by playing the very game they destroyed.
So yes, this started as a different situation, but in the end, power is power.
> the very game they destroyed
I am a minority who disagrees with liberals. Is it conservatives fault I get attacked by liberals for attempting to question them? No. Enough of this distortion.
Enough of what distortion? Could you be more specific?
Is it conservatives' success that liberals fail to represent your interests? Probably. Is that success a result of conservatives actually succeeding to represent your interests? Unlikely.
If politics were structured by reason, then liberals might stand a chance at losing that game. Wouldn't that be nice? Of course, that would imply a deserving winner, which is sorely missing from our post-reason situation.
In Russia, China, the people are under threat of literal torture and murder.
You gave up way before that
> Man... How did yall white Westerners turn out to be the weakest people in the world?
Slowly, and then suddenly.
The cracks were obvious when digital records made record keeping more practical, and the first electronic payment systems appeared, but once everyone was doing everything online the damn just burst wide open.
Democracy had enemies before the founding of the Republic. Our founders warned us that it would require constant maintenance: "a republic, if you can keep it," warned Franklin.
Washington cautioned us that political parties would allow unprincipled men to subvert the power of the people.
Jefferson highlighted the criticality of public education: "If a nation expects to be ignorant and free, in a state of civilization, it expects what never was and never will be."
For Adams, it was the willingness of citizens to sacrifice their private interests for the sake of the community. He cautioned against purely self-interested rugged individualism, now a fake American ideal.
All of these have eroded from a combination of assault and neglect. This problem is asymmetric: those who assault democracy have more to gain than those who defend it (e.g. by looting it, or getting compensated by a foreign power, etc.)
In 1971, 2 months after Lewis Powell argued businesses use their political power to aggressively influence the law, Regan brought him on as a Supreme Court Justice. It was much more efficient to buy a justice for life. He helped set the stage for First Amendment protection of corporate speech, and Citizens United; ultimately legalizing the ability to secretly give a political candidate money.
The rot is really, really deep.
See also "boiling frogs".
But then I'm replying to @mr_toad so you probably knew that already.
Your sardonic comment says a lot but does not address the real freedom we have. Which is to NOT use those platforms that require age verification. The more people that don’t use them the more it will hurt the companies that loose a customer base; then maybe their lobbyists will force a change.
So you’ll just not use Windows, macOS, Linux, iOS, or Android? In other words, you’ll just not use any computers? Seems nonsensical.
Did I miss a memo on Linux somehow requiring age verification now? How would that even work?
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=47270784 "System76 on Age Verification Laws"
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=47239736 "Ubuntu Planning Mandatory Age Verification"
I thought I saw one about Redhat too, but can't find it.
Laws and lawmakers just concern themselves with making broad "laws" with little regard to specificity and applicability. California, Colorado and Illinois mandate OS "providers" to generate a signal. It is a copy pasted bill with little grounding in reality but a lawmaker is not going to say no "protecting children".
Pushed by AVPA - a group of companies standing to profit from this: LexisNexis, some Thiel corp, etc.
California's law explicitly requires the system and apps to take the user's word for it and not use other information to determine age, which more and more feels to me like kind of a brilliant move to cut the legs out from under other attempts to use the same for surveillance while still satisfying all the surface-level "protect children" sound bites.
You missed US states competing on setting up age verification legislation that lets anyone sue any developer who produces systems that don't do age verification for life-destroying amounts of money.
Hé man I thought us Europeans were kings of dreadful regulations!
Eh private prosecutions and third party standing are generally disfavored to such an extent that sure, attention-whoring legislators will propose it, but whether it even passes constitutional muster on the state level is an open question, and open in every state.
The standing is provided by your child seeing naughty things on the internet.
There was some proposal from California or something to require OSs to enforce age verification, it was discussed in some other thread.
For what it's worth, the "verification" in the California law (not a bill, it's already passed and takes effect 2027) is basically the Steam birthdate popup interstitial. There's explicitly no actual link to any outside information, just requiring that the system save a value the user sets and then that apps use that value for any age gating.
> Which is to NOT use those platforms that require age verification.
That is getting harder and harder. Platforms that are not susceptible to age verification (yet?) are on their way out - when have you written an email the last time for personal (i.e. non-work, order or customer support related) reasons? A physical letter [1]? The (root) cause is, centralized platforms like Whatsapp are much much more convenient and on top of that network effects apply - when 90% of your social connections use Whatsapp exclusively, it's hard to not use Whatsapp as well.
And then you got digitalization of government services and banking. More and more governments push for the removal of paper forms and require a web service. Banking regulations enforce 2FA, which almost always comes in the form of a phone app. The web services require a browser and an OS, which may require age verification sooner than later (see the recent spat about California's law), and the phone apps are only available for the walled gardens of unrooted, Play Store certified Apple and Android phones - that can and will be forced to verify ages as well.
Hard cash is out as well, many governments have set hard caps on cash transactions due to "anti money laundering" laws, in other countries you need to have a bank account to pay for mandatory things like taxes or public broadcast fees [2], and an increasing number of vendors refuses to accept cash as well due to the associated handling cost and risk of fraud (i.e. employee theft) and robbery.
That last point alone will make it impossible to survive in society without engaging with one or more of the walled gardens.
And mercy be upon you if the US Government decides to put you on one of their black lists. No more banking, even as an European, because everything touches VISA/MC/SWIFT, your cloud accounts (and with it your phone and app stores), all gone, you are now an unperson [3].
[1] Some countries are already shutting down postal services over that, e.g. Denmark: https://www.theguardian.com/world/2025/dec/21/denmark-postno...
[2] https://www.verbraucherzentrale-niedersachsen.de/themen/rund...
Convenient and Cheap. That's all most people care about.
Privacy was already lost when everyone adopted mobile phones and gave them everything with constant location tracking, and used the free email accounts.
It's interesting that age-verification is the straw that breaks the camels back, but I guess porn has that power.
Yeo, convenience is the most powerful "drug" we have ever come up with. We need our next hit... Now!
Complacency.
The west had a golden age from the fall of the Soviet Union, removing their main rival. It also reinforced its reinforced its belief in the inevitably of progress (the "end of history" nonsense, for example). They cannot now cope with threats or danger.
That said, comparing the west to Russia, China etc. is a gross exaggeration.
China has much lower crime, cheaper healthcare and is making progress in other aspects.
We’re rapidly regressing into prideful ignorance. People are being encouraged to drink raw milk and fear vaccines.
19 century illnesses are making a resurgence.
Citizens are being indefinitely detained for “looking” like immigrants.
> China has much lower crime, cheaper healthcare and is making progress in other aspects.
China is also a horrifying place to live unless you are content just to participate quietly in society and never put a political sign in your yard or even just talk about the wrong thing with your friend in a private WeChat.
https://reclaimthenet.org/china-man-chair-interrogation-soci...
I mean such is life for anyone who is not a full-blown citizen of the United States. If you speak bad of the current administration or its allies expect to be punished extrajudicially
> If you speak bad of the current administration or its allies expect to be punished extrajudicially
I have no fear of calling the current US president a pedo, or saying "Fuck the Police" on my Twitter.
Let's not equate the USA to places like China or Russia.
I don't see much difference these days. Substitute wechat for X and that's the US for anyone non-white.
I'm hallucinating whenever I see an election sign in non-white's yard I guess
If you think China is some mass surveillance state where every single yard of dissent is carpet bombed: yes, I can see why you think that way.
Just like the US, it can take a whike for thr CCP to get around to every individual. It's a large country. Your mistake is thinking that that's the line it has to get to before we can compare a country to China/Russia.
I don't disagree. It can (thankfully) take quite a while to get around to every dissenter. I also don't disagree that we have to wait for a particular milestone to compare ourselves to China/Russia.
Where you lose me is: > I don't see much difference these days. Substitute wechat for X and that's the US for anyone non-white.
Again, I agree with you on most of your points. But I think you're doing yourself, and all freedom loving peoples a disservice by dividing the victims of this state action. Hence my sarcastic reply.
If there is to be any resistance to state over reach, telling the racial majority of the country that it doesn't happen to them or it's not a "white/euro american issue" is counterproductive at best.
> I think you're doing yourself, and all freedom loving peoples a disservice by dividing the victims of this state action.
There have been at least 2 explicit murders by state actors on the streets, hundreds of wrongfully deported people who aren't back to this day, and thousands stuck in concentration camps.
No, it's not at '6 million jews' level (yet). But I'm fairly comfortable admitting that these actions are at a scale where we aren't too different from Russia nor China. Downplaying it now is how we get to those massive, unignorable numbers later on.
>If there is to be any resistance to state over reach, telling the racial majority of the country that it doesn't happen to them or it's not a "white/euro american issue" is counterproductive at best.
It disproportionately is not happening to them, though. That's what made the 2 murders mentioned earlier so high profile. Undeniably white suburban citizens gunned down.
I'm not telling them to not take action. It's more like their inaction or outright support is why we got this far to begin with. No snowflake feels at fault in an avalanche.
> China has much lower crime, cheaper healthcare and is making progress in other aspects.
It is also a totalitarian regime where criticising the state can get you, and possibly your family, ‘disappeared’
Sure it is, luckily we’re catching up!
> For Indigenous Americans it’s unthinkable, but true. ICE is arresting, detaining Native Americans.
https://idahocapitalsun.com/2026/02/10/for-indigenous-americ...
Detain first , ask pesky questions about citizenship and civil rights later.
I’m not in the US but yeah the country has always had a strange relationship with law and order, at least from an outside PoV. The Kent State massacre is always one that sticks with me as particularly messed up.
I don’t think the USA is necessarily changing at all, this is what it has always been the whole time
China is also an ancient civilization. Americans view of themselves is highly inflated by the sheer luck of being two oceans away from everyone during both world wars. Save for Pearl Harbor there were no notable attacks on the American homeland. It's a lot easier to be a superpower when the world destroys itself and you step into the breach. Millions of Soviet civilians died on their own homeland. In their own cities. Millions. Most Americans have no idea and can't really comprehend it. Even today a shocking number of Americans don't have a passport and really know nothing about the world beyond their shores. These people are overrepresented in an American Congress that is anti-democratic. People on the coasts, like in New York City are underrepresented in American government. The entire state of New York gets the same amount of senators as flyover states, many of which are welfare states (take more funds than they contribute). This is because in a modern economy what NYC produces is more valuable than what a state with barely any people in the middle of nowhere produces. Yet the middle of nowhere is represented more. It makes no sense.
The current administration is only convincing the world that America is a threat. We live in an age where two oceans offer far less protection than they did when America rose to superpower status. The fact Russian intelligence operatives can so easily infiltrate American political discourse is just one example. Watch any congressional hearing about cyber and you might be forgiven for thinking we have already been invaded. Beating up on third world pariah states impresses no one but the current administration. The United States bombs Iran but blinks at Russia. The administration started a trade war with China then backed off, not one meaningful concession was achieved.
Unless America reverses course fast the decline will only continue. The world will move on. No country is inevitable.
> China is also an ancient civilization.
So is Europe, and we are talking about the west in general, not just the US.
> Americans view of themselves is highly inflated by the sheer luck of being two oceans away from everyone during both world wars.
Again, most of Europe suffered during the world wars.
> The fact Russian intelligence operatives can so easily infiltrate American political discourse is just one example
They also infiltrate European politics, as do the Chinese.
Europe is not an ancient civilization. It is a continent and politically, an amalgamation.
Most of the "Western" civilizations old enough to attempt comparison with China were not European in the modern sense at all. The classic example is usually Rome, which treated most of Europe as barbarians to colonize and enslave. The engine and wealth of the empire was along the Mediterranean. Ancient Rome was thus really a Mediterranean power not a "European" one. I think you could successfully argue Romans had more in common with other ancient Mediterranean powers or even ancient Mesopotamians than modern Europeans.
As to the rest of your points true enough. It is well known that today's Europeans find themselves in between a rock and a hard place given the current split between American and Chinese hegemony.
The power of Rome and the influence of Greece means that modern Europe's culture was shaped by Greece and Rome, and by Christianity.
The Roman Empire covered much of Europe about 2000 years ago, and those places have had a great deal of cultural continuity since then.
Simply incorrect. Get a map of modern Europe and Rome at that time. Then plot not only the Roman territory, but also population and flows of commerce. Compare.
It does not map to modern Europe. It encircles the Mediterranean with much of Europe either not included or on the periphery. Most of Europe was to the Romans barbarian hinterland 2000 years ago. Even at its greatest extent you will see Rome was always centered on the Mediterranean. The "West" would have been entirely alienated from said culture had the flame not been kept alive by the East when the West fell.
Except Chinese hegemony is illusory beyond what it considers its immediate sphere of influence which also means it really cannot project force in any way but economically. It can barely take care of business at home. It's puzzling to many as to why America sees China as somehow equal in threat and in capability since in reality neither is remotely true. China doesn't even have a policy that is truly expansionary since Taiwan is an irredentist claim. Its armed forces have not seen combat since 1979 and that was largely a ground war. Without connections or having acquired one previously it's becoming difficult to obtain a passport to leave, although, it's also not all that easy to find a place for you to settle as a Chinese citizen without some sort of skills that allow you to pretend like society under you is unstable.
Why would you say "but economically" in your first sentence?
Is hegemony merely a competition about who can blow up the most people? If you think the Chinese economy doesn't count for anything re force projection because they haven't bombed anyone lately idk what to tell you.
Why doesn't the USA stomp out Russian aggression in Ukraine? Does American force projection only come into play when bombing third world poverty states? Should I thus conclude American hegemony is illusory? Do you think the wars America has prosecuted in the past two decades have made the country stronger?
"Save for Pearl Harbor there were no notable attacks on the American homeland."
September 11, 2001 is why Iran is being attacked a quarter century later.
I meant during the two world wars, which should have been obvious. The idea you think I know what NYC is but forgot about 9/11 says more about you than I.
Iran had nothing to do with 9/11. If that was the point you were attempting it is incorrect. Not even the current administration is attempting that line of reasoning.
HAHAHAHAHA my goodness. You actually believe that?
Everyone in China is constantly violating laws, the difference is that black letter law is essentially meaningless and the country is run by an administrative state that is controlled by the party.
You can't really get things done without breaking the law. China doesn't properly tabulate, and therefore cannot release, anything like accurate crime data. But the crime rate is certainly higher since it's pretty much impossible to even go online and do just about anything without breaking some law. What is written is so vague and nearly any conduct can fall under it.
The ambiguity doesn't make the country safer, they just have a media hegemony and active censorship. Healthcare is woeful and "cheap" comes with "quotas on patients seen" meaning that doctors frequently have 1-2 minutes to see patients and one can become an MD much earlier than one can in the US. And since the perception is that no food is really 100% safe, it's more acquiescence, and not confidence, that people show.
Hell, you having the option of choosing to opt into vaccines is even an improvement. In China you are stuck with the state prescribed schedule and that's it. Unless you're extremely wealthy, but then again, where is that not an exception?
yep. You are not wrong.
Those who trade freedom for security will obtain neither.
I appreciate you saying this. It gets SO OLD having everything in society dominated by "think of the children" rationales that basically translate to "increasing authority and further-reduced freedom", with a spicy dash of omnipresent surveillance.
Yeah unfortunately I suspect the authoritarian surveillance is the whole point. Protecting children is obviously not a priority for the Epstein class.
It was indescribably pathetic watching HN users of all people defend Client Side Scanning and Bitlocker flaws. The only people qualified to logically protest have already drank the Kool-aid.
The west is lost.
The world is lost, I don't think it is any better in non-western countries.
US domestic surveillance predates 9/11. It just became more open once an easy excuse was available.
> You were supposed to be the bastions of freedom and justice
That was a lie we told ourselves. In reality we started with slavery which is about as far from freedom and justice as you can get, and then shifted to mass incarceration (often just slavery with extra steps) locking up more of our own people than Russia or China ever did. These days our prison population is trending down as we're getting better at imprisoning people in their own homes and communities with GPS trackers and parole/probation requirements but it's still laughable to call ourselves the "land of the free"
I hear this point of view, that mass incarceration is slavery with extra steps. But a (very quick and not in depth) google search shows that the cost to keep a person in prison for a year is $60-100k. And as far as I can tell in the cases where prisoners are laboring, while for admittedly shit pay, its not in $50k/year let alone one where where a profit would be returned for the "owners/jailers"
Now, if you're saying that the slavery comparison is more in that prisoners are legit balance sheet items for private prisoners to collect tax money? Well there is an argument there to be sure. But this seems like a structural problem. The existence of private prisons at all.
None of that is arguing in favor of crazy sentences for non-violent crime, however directly comparing it to chattel slavery confuses the argument against mass incarceration.
Prisons and more specifically prisoners are massively profitable to their jailers/owners no matter if they're private, state, or federal. Even private corporations are profiting from the US prison system. The federal government runs a corporation called FPI/UNICOR which sells out prisoners for profit. States also have programs or companies that lease their prisoners out to private companies who pay those prisons (or the government) a lot of money to get an endless supply of workers who can't complain about working conditions or being paid pennies a day (almost all of which goes back to the prison anyway). Some prisoners are forced to work for no pay at all.
Prisons will let people who are supposedly so dangerous that they need to be locked up and denied parole out of jail long enough to work their shifts at fast food restaurants, retail stores, plants (like Tyson Foods) and warehouses and they'll run their own companies inside the prisons themselves like call centers which get contracted out to private corporations or government agencies for a profit.
Some prisons also run farms, modern day plantations, that use slave labor to sell millions of dollars worth of food and crops to corporations whose products show up in our stores. Whole foods, kroger, walmart, and target all sell products made by prison labor. Food and crops raised on prison farms even get exported to other countries.
Inside the prisons everything prisoners get they have to buy from the prison which overcharges them for everything. The workers make pennies but the markups on what they need can be 600%. The commissary vendors are for-profit and the prisons get kickbacks from them to get exclusive access to the captive customer base. Private companies partner with prisons for release cards and make profit from that. Phone calls from prisons can cost over $20 for just 15 minutes (https://brilliantmaps.com/jail-call-cost-usa/). The US prison system is designed to make money. Private prisons tend to make more profit on their prisoners, but so do state and federal prisons, the vendors they employ, and private corporations. Of course even while the government and corporations rake in money taxpayers are still on the hook for a lot of unnecessarily expenses, including the costs of policing and the court systems that feed the prison system a steady stream of new and returning prisoners. Everybody knows that we could save billions in tax payer money is we focused more on keeping people out of the system, but there's profit to be made from slaves so no one will fix it.
It's almost as if there's nothing special or unspecial about any of these populations. Just transient cultural factors that (in addition to generally being understood in limited hindsight and through rose-tinted glasses) will inevitably erode and dissolve under sustained attack.
> lay down and crawl along and accept everything without even a whimper.
People just want to live their lives. Maybe you think you would be doing differently in their position, but until you've had a chance to prove it, I don't believe you.
We never were? Neoliberal freedom never constituted strength nor is companies having the general public by the balls a new thing here.
This. Every time I point out that I shouldn't have to leak my residential address to private businesses to register to vote or complete KYC, 15 people immediately come out of the woods to point out that addresses are public information.
The point is they shouldn't be. That's how people get stalked, harassed, and murdered at their home.
> shouldn't have to leak my residential address to private businesses to register to vote
If the 'SAVE America Act' passes, you're going to be open to leaking a heck of a lot more than that, and it'll all go in to a national database.
TBH I'm not opposed to the government knowing where I live. Having ways to find and lock up actual criminals is not a bad thing.
I'm also not opposed to certain private businesses or financial institutions needing to know who I am. Having ways to identify financial criminals is not a bad thing either.
What I'm vehemently opposed to is these private businesses needing to know where I live. They are not the ones doing the locking up. That's what the government does. Private businesses can identify individuals without needing to know their residential addresses.
This is HN mate.
It's full of people from ad-tech who believe data protection is the enemy and the GDPR is a European conspiracy against growth.
You should learn to simply bend over and grab your ankles with both hands whenever they (or anybody else) asks for your personal data.
EDIT: and predictable 'drive-by' downvotes from those in the industry too lazy to try and defend their position and write a rebuttle!
This totalitarian agenda has been in the works for far longer than a quarter century. It's not just rich old people either.
We're witnessing the creation of the beast system in real time. The one that is prophesized in the Book of Revelation.
It is both scary to watch and yet fun to be alive to see it come to fruition.
It is occurring in every dimension, including the ability to track who buys and sells with crypto currencies along with the ability to punish or reward people based on ai hardware software infrastructure deployments.
Reddit bans users based on what they upvoted:
https://www.reddit.com/r/RedditSafety/comments/1j4cd53/warni...
"We know that the culture of a community is not just what gets posted, but what is engaged with. Voting comes with responsibility."
Are you talking to someone else?
This seems like an unnecessary threat based in your bias.
Chatgpt seems to concur.
Politicians have spent decades eroding our education systems, at least where I am located. Bread and circuses. Coming up next in Germany is how they will slash personal assets in quarter (not merely half), using a reform of support for unemployed people. Instead of working out how to get finances redistributed (oh wait, now I will be called a "communist" or "socialist" as if that were some devilish insult), they are working out how to get to the savings of the simple worker.
Congrats Germany, for electing another CDU government. We are digging our own graves here and we are too uninformed and too entertained to see it. Next election will probably be the breaking point, when AfD manages to get many majorities, due to how unhappy CDU, SPD, and other mainstream parties have made the populace. And then we will have these right-wing extremists as our government.
Looking to the US, they have hit it even worse now. Full authoritarian guy at the top, who might even prevent the next elections, unless he is sure that he will win or can make it so that he appears to have won.
When you take a high trust society and then endlessly lie to the people, what exactly are you expecting to happen? Serious question here, we are under direct assault from the "elites" here and we are clearly shell-shocked and not yet dealing with it.
Many of us are open to suggestion. But if all you're going to do is call us bitches, then shut the fuck up. Wanna help? Cool, I'm willing to accept it. Maybe try that.
> Man... How did yall white Westerners turn out to be the weakest people in the world? You were supposed to be the bastions of freedom and justice
This is a misunderstanding of American history. From its founding by wealthy white male landowners and slaveowners, the US was by design a plutocracy, enshrined in the Constitution with various anti-democratic (small "d") measures such as separation of powers, the electoral college, the Presidential veto, the unelected Supreme Court with lifetime tenure, and representation of land rather than population in the Senate. Originally, Senators weren't even directly elected. And of course neither women nor Black men had the right to vote. (EDIT: I forgot to mention the extreme difficulty of amending the Constitution, and as a result, the Constitution hasn't been amended much since the Bill of Rights.)
The only thing that held the plutocracy in check was "all political is local". The US was an agrarian nation, not yet hit by the industrial revolution. The fastest form of communication and tranportation was the horse. What has changed radically in the 20th and 21st centuries is that modern technology allows the ultra-wealthy to organize and conspire (see Epstein and friends, for example) on a national and even international scale. Political election campaigns have always been privately funded—another essential feature of the plutocracy—and now they're obscenely expensive with TV and internet advertising, which further consolidates the power of the ultra-wealthy campaign contributors.
The biggest problem with the US is that we haven't had a political revolution in 250 years. We're still operating under the ancient rules.
Even during the suffering of the Great Depression, it took a "white knight", an ultra-wealthy leader FDR with some sympathy for the lower classes, to provide some relief. And note that the most successful third-party Presidential candidate in recent history was Ross Perot, a billionaire who self-funded TV informercials to spread his message. The game is rigged in favor of big money and has always been so rigged.
> with various anti-democratic (small "d")
Yes, because the designers of the system were well-read and understood that raw democracy, like oligarchy and autocracy, is something that republics devolve into.
Rule by the many is great, but the historical evidence shows it's clearly unstable. The Constitution is designed to maximize the advantages while hedging against its inherent instability.
> The game is rigged in favor of big money and has always been so rigged.
I would say the game is rigged in favor of production, of which capital is a big part, because those who don't produce end up being governed by those who do.
> Yes, because the designers of the system were well-read
Well-read in the 18th century. And they borrowed heavily from 17th century philosopher John Locke. Imagine relying on 17th or 18th century medicine now.
The founders weren't nearly as wise as they're alleged to be. For example, they thought their system would suppress political parties, and then political parties arose almost immediately.
> Rule by the many is great, but the historical evidence shows it's clearly unstable.
Which historical evidence are you referring to? Most of history is nondemocratic.
In any case, the US broke out into an extremely bloody civil war less than 75 years after the Constitution was ratified, so it hasn't been "stable", not that stability is even desirable under a plutocracy.
> I would say the game is rigged in favor of production, of which capital is a big part, because those who don't produce end up being governed by those who do.
Let's see a rich dude produce anything all by himself. We like the pretend that the one rich dude is producing everything and his thousands of employees are basically superfluous.
> Let's see a rich dude produce anything all by himself. We like the pretend that the one rich dude is producing everything and his thousands of employees are basically superfluous.
We're certainly in agreement here, but I would say that most modern wealth is fictional: based on equity, which is based on credit, which is based on confidence, which at the end of the day is just vibes. So most of the 'wealthy' people exist as such with social permission because they're employed in production, and if they fail at that job the wealth rapidly evaporates. However, they're definitely wildly overpaid in the US. That, imho, is because culturally this country still wants to cosplay at having an aristocracy.
> So most of the 'wealthy' people exist as such with social permission because they're employed in production, and if they fail at that job the wealth rapidly evaporates.
It's misleading to say "they're employed in production", using the present tense. Many were engaged in production, and some choose to remain engaged, but others don't. It doesn't seem to matter much. Bill Gates quit his job 20 years ago, claims to be trying to give most of his money away, yet he's still one of the wealthiest people in the world. The dude was already ultra-wealthy by age 30. Sure, he engaged in production for a number of years, but most ordinary workers have no choice but to engage in production for 40 or 50 years or their life at least.
The ultra-wealthy are not wage earners, paid by their labor. They are capital owners, and capital continues to earn returns regardless. If you're smart with your wealth and diversify, and by smart I mean not dumb—safe long-term investment doesn't take a genius—it's extremely hard to lose it all. That would happen only if you put all of your eggs in one basket. I'm not aware of too many riches to rags stories, except among professional athletes for example. But those athletes were wage earners rather than capital owners. They don't own the sports teams.
A lot of complaints about the way the world works—what alternative do you propose?
> what alternative do you propose?
Your question is ambigious. Are you asking what a different system would look like, or how we would get there?
As for the first question, there are many obvious ways to improve the system. Here are some suggestions: abolish the electoral college, abolish the Presidential veto and pardon, abolish the Senate, abolish lifetime Supreme Court terms, add term limits for Congress, publicly fund political campaigns and outlaw campaign contributions as illegal bribery, allow public recall campaigns against the President, Congress, and Supreme Court, etc.
As for the second question: "The biggest problem with the US is that we haven't had a political revolution in 250 years."
> As for the second question: "The biggest problem with the US is that we haven't had a political revolution in 250 years."
Be careful what you wish for. We're arguably in the middle of one right now, and the good guys are not winning.