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Tariffs can be paid by the seller/exporter. If a very significant part of a company's business is done in the US, and the tariff is sufficiently high, they will lose market share if the customer eats the entire cost of the tariff (which is the whole point of the exercise in the first place). So they may decide to socialize this cost a little bit, by increasing prices in all countries, by a lot less than the tariff, and making customers in other markets in effect subsidize the Americans. Everyone except Americans .pays a bit more, prices don't rise as much for Americans.

It's interesting to see how little of that is going on, empirically, by looking at these kinds of quantitative studies.


Without coercion today, why would anybody try to give the US a break at the cost of its other trading partners...?

Because a corporation doesn't have trading partners, it has a mission to sell to customers. If customers are disproportionately in the US, which happens quite often, then you can entirely rationally decide that pissing them off with a big price hike is worse for the bottom line than pissing everyone off a little.

https://www.reuters.com/business/retail-consumer/global-reta...


Why would they be pissed off at the business for not absorbing the tariff? The business didn't arbitrarily enact them, Donald Trump and ipso facto his supports did.

Because the US has the strongest economy in the world.

Or, it's the biggest house of cards.

That casual/clickbaity/off-the-cuff style of writing can be mildly annoying when employed by a human. Turned up to the max by LLM, it's downright infuriating. Not sure why, maybe I should ask Claude to introspect this for me.

You can do this in multiple steps. Start with a credit card usable only with Canadian merchants, which will cover a great majority of transactions of a great majority of Canadians. I'll have an MC for travel and the ordering from non-Canadian merchants, and this Canadian credit card for the other 95% of my expenses. If a significant percentage of Canadians have such a card, major non-Canadian services will add it as a payment option (e.g. ChatGPT or Claude). Then you branch out by either joining or co-branding with the EU credit card company if such a company succeeds.

A world with a patchwork of payments processing options will look different for travel and business, in some ways worse, but such is life in a "multipolar world" which the Americans elected their leadership to conjure up.


In my experience, a very significant proportion of self-reported "anti-fascists" and "anti-imperialists" turn out, upon closer scrutiny, to actually be anti-US-fascism and anti-US-imperialism. They ignore, downplay, deny and ridicule all allegations of fascism and imperialism when perpetrated by others, like China or Russia.

In a somewhat related vein, there are entirely too many "anti-colonialists" in what is now fashionably called The Global South who, when push comes to shove, reveal themselves to be actually kind of okay with colonialism as long as it's not perpetrated against them. When a colonialist war of aggression is perpetrated against these white folks called "Ukrainians", and perpetrated by Russia, a country they really rather like, then what's a little colonialism between friends? Heck, Russia shows up with a colonialist militia to prop up dictators and mine for diamonds and gold all over the Sahel and it's like, heck yeah, thank for your kicking out the French. Really interesting logic.


Tankies. I argue with them constantly.

My opinion, they're mostly middle class westerners that grew up in a cradle of empire, sucking from the teat of exploitative resource extraction. Then when they stopped seeing the benefits of imperialism as their country fell into late stage capitalism and eating itself alive, they turn their resentment against capitalism and correctly identify it as what's ailing their society, but somehow completely fall for the propaganda that there are socialist countries on this planet that are "fighting capitalism." They do nothing to challenge their deeply rooted western arrogance or imperialist savior complex, and begin lecturing people from smaller nations that actually, it's not imperialism when a country with a red flag does it.


I like to think that it is drummed up to increase division between left leaning people but of course I don't really know.

Best of luck to you.


Hah, leftists don't need help drumming up infighting, it's our national pasttime.

Show one example of Chinese imperialism. Or soviet imperialism. Or Vietnamese imperialism. Or Cuban imperialism.

>Chinese imperialism.

Tibet, Xinjiang, invading Vietnam.

>Or soviet imperialism

You're joking, right? The quintessential imperialist power of the Cold War. Post-WW2 subjugation of eastern Europe. Occupation of the Baltic states. The failed colonialist war against Finland. Suppression of attempts to leave its imperialist orbit in Hungary in 1956, Czechoslovakia in 1968, to a lesser extent Poland under Gomulka. The disaster in Afghanistan was started b1y the Soviet colonialist war there, of course.

>Or Vietnamese imperialism

Laos was a client state for a while, and their involvement in Cambodia crossed the line into imperialism at various points in the 70s.

>Or Cuban imperialism.

This one has a long and storied history. Cuban mercenaries were used to bolster far-left authoritarians and Soviet-aligned strongmen all over Latam and in Africa too. Even to this day they gladly send mercs to fight Russia's fascist war of aggression in Ukraine.


  > Or soviet imperialism.
How can you call yourself a Marxist if you have apparently not bothered to read a single book on the history of the USSR? Shining examples of imperialism are unavoidable turning points in Soviet history. The invasions of Hungary and Czechoslovakia are the most well-known, but one must not forget OMON terrorizing Lithuanians, the infamous MVD troops cracking the skulls of Georgians with sapper shovels, and many many other examples.

Show one example of Soviet imperialism, you say? There are entire museums dedicated to the subject!


Do you mean PRC? The invasion of Tibet is canonically imperialism according to Party doctrine: they were "freeing the population" from the reactionary ruling class, which is maybe a great thing to do, but is by definition imperialism.

Making threats against sovereign Taiwan is imperialism, though of course a soft form for now. However it has engaged in imperialist economic pressure such as when it prevented vaccine deliveries to Taiwan during COVID-19, forcing the country to develop its own domestic vaccine.

The genocide and economic exploitation in Xinjiang is old school imperialism.

As for the soviets, if American operations in Cambodia, Laos, and Vietnam are imperialism, then so too were Soviet operations in Afghanistan.


For Tibet, may I remind you the local population rose up against tyranny. That they requested assistance from their central govt into putting down rabid theocrats is only fair tbh. But as every time, when the people are fighting against criminals, the western press only gives the microphone to the said criminals, especially when the stolen property of those criminals is being freed (the property being humans). Also only fools still believe in a genocide in Xinjiang. Show me the camps. Show me the victims. Show me the refugees. Show me any muslim person genuinely outraged about it. I can show you plenty for Palestine, but for some reason for some western leftists, these people do not count.

When one is this far gone into a nationalist information bubble haze, it ceases to be productive to argue with them. Everything this poster demands to be “shown” is openly available in abundance from the relevant victims, decades of it. But offered such material they will quickly categorically dismiss it all and move goal posts again.

Yes when CCP undertakes an ethnonationalist settler campaign into Tibet and then instructs the settlers to “call for help”, it can be presented as Tibet “asking” for CCP authoritarianism. Same playbook as Russia in eastern Ukraine.

Yes, when the Xinjiang muslim population is terrorized by police state and concentration camps in a country with no free speech, it is hard to find locals publicly complaining and advocating for themselves.


1) I'm not Chinese, but I still have skin in the game for I am an internationlist. 2) Apart from a few google maps pictures, there are no pictures of those extermination camps. 3) Tibet has been part of China for centuries. Only since Mao landreforms that criminalised slavery have we been hearing about Tibet's "independence" movement. 4) If Xinjiang has concentration camps, then why are the Chinese allowing the UN , tourists and journalists in? Right now in Palestine, UN workers and journalists are shot on sight. Tourists are non existant. Muslim countries refuse to qualify any of the anti-terrorist measures as genocidal, but denounce the extermination campaign against the Palestinian people.

So as to keep the conversation productive, could you please define "China?" I have no idea what you're talking about when you say, "Tibet has been a part of China for centuries," but it sounds like the sort of ethnonationalism that the CPC likes to play with.

> If Xinjiang has concentration camps, then why are the Chinese allowing the UN , tourists and journalists in?

They didn't used to, I should know, I tried to go and was rejected.

Yes, Israel is committing a genocide in Palestine, and a far more violent one than the CPC committed against Xinjiang. The PLA did not snipe Uighur Muslim children in the back of head and did not airstrike hospitals in Xinjiang. It still committed a genocide.

Remember the words of Chen Quanguo: "Round up everyone who should be rounded up," immediately before ordering mass arrests.

I'm sorry, but I've had this conversation too many times, I will simply need to give you the challenge I've given everyone else. Please, can you canonically dismiss each of these sources? https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Persecution_of_Uyghurs_in_Chin... There are 402 of them. I understand it's a relatively monumental task, but that's the unfortunate reality you find yourself in when you argue against consensus, it's a lot of work. If you can't do that, then, I don't understand why I should believe you instead of the mountain of evidence against you. And no, "it's all CIA" doesn't really work considering the diversity of sources.

By the way, you never addressed imperialist threats against Taiwan. Could you please explain how threatening to invade a sovereign nation isn't imperialist?


As a marxist, I am obsessed about contradictions. I found two regarding the 402 sources that you've shown. I do not pretend to have read and understood all of them. I just scanned a couple titles, recognised a few famous newspapers.

1) Why is that that are very few if none of the sources you've linked are Islamic sources ? If Muslim people can recognise the plight of the Palestinian people, why can't they recognise the plight of the Uighurs?

2) Those sources are, for most of them, from countries that were extremely hostile to the idea of islamic and arabic independence movement. Why is that they wished for the continuation of Colonialism, wish for the destruction of the Palestinian people, and yet cheer for Uighur independence?

What we are facing here doesn't require spooks forcing journalists to write articles with a gun cocked against their head. This is gramscian cultural hegemony. Bourgeois journalists are reporting on those "facts" because it directly serves the interest of their wealthy Masters, and if we follow the rule of "don't bite the hand that feeds you" they would rarely if never contradict them.


> As a marxist

Great! Me too. In fact I am a communist. That's why I can't enter the PRC without facing prison. Discussion of class consciousness is currently banned.

> 1) Why is that that are very few if none of the sources you've linked are Islamic sources ? If Muslim people can recognise the plight of the Palestinian people, why can't they recognise the plight of the Uighurs?

I don't understand how something like a newspaper can be "Islamic." As far as I know, all well-regarded news organizations are secular. So, I guess that is why none of the sources I've linked are "Islamic sources": because newspapers are secular.

Also, who is "Muslim people?" Every follower of Islam on planet earth? Why is it their specific responsibility to take notice of something in Xinjiang? Because the people have a religion of the same name? What's that matter?

This is what I meant when I wrote, "smells like ethnonationalism," this seems to me like an ideology that creates Statehood around people, and draws lines around people based on their ethnicity or religion. I prefer to take people as they are, rather than lump them into arbitrarily defined categories. Why aren't men in France doing anything to stop school shootings in America, which are committed almost entirely by men?

> Those sources are, for most of them, from countries that were extremely hostile to the idea of islamic and arabic independence movement.

Which sources? What does it mean to be hostile to "the islamic and arabic independence movement?" Which countries?

> Why is that they wished for the continuation of Colonialism

Who is "they?"

> Bourgeois journalists are reporting on those "facts" because it directly serves the interest of their wealthy Masters

And reports out of the PRC serve the interests of the CPC. The bourgeois journalists have provided substantially more evidence. The CPC restricted entry to Xinjiang, and when it finally acknowledged the existence of the reeducation camps, still never let foreign journalists in. As a Marxist, I choose the side with the most evidence.

By the way, some of the sources include: a PRC based associate professor in Fudan University (Chuchu Zhang), a newspaper famous for exposing corruption in South Africa (AmaBhungane), and other independent or NGO sources that I challenge you to claim are afraid to "bite the hand that feeds them." Did you know that Blackwater had plans to build a training center in Xinjiang? Did you know that it set aside 2.7$ million USD for establishing business in Xinjiang? Did you know that American companies helped build the surveillance system used in Xinjiang? (Thermo Fisher Scientific, Promega) But, it's the journalists that are bourgeois? (https://www.thenation.com/article/world/china-xinjiang-genoc...)

You still have not addressed PRC imperialism against Taiwan.


> In my experience, a very significant proportion of self-reported "anti-fascists" and "anti-imperialists" turn out, upon closer scrutiny, to actually be anti-US-fascism and anti-US-imperialism. They ignore, downplay, deny and ridicule all allegations of fascism and imperialism when perpetrated by others, like China or Russia.

Or, to put it another way: they're really anti-Americans.

It's interesting to see the exaggerated responses to Trump. Objectively, he's less authoritarian than say the PRC, but he's unlocked a lot of probably pre-existing resentment in US allies (probably derived from https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Narcissism_of_small_difference...), and gotten a much stronger and more vicious response.

I mean, if you're mad about what happened to that 5 year old immigrant with the hat in Minneapolis, what you you think about what's happening to kids in Xinjiang and Tibet (e.g. https://www.nytimes.com/interactive/2025/01/09/world/asia/ti...)?

> Gyal Lo, a Tibetan education researcher, became alarmed by the boarding schools in 2016, when he saw that his two preschool-aged grandnieces, who were attending one in his hometown in northwestern China, preferred to speak Mandarin, not Tibetan.

> When the grandnieces, then ages 4 and 5, went home on the weekend, he said in an interview, they appeared withdrawn and spoke awkwardly in Tibetan with their parents, much changed from when he saw them in the previous year. Now they behaved “like strangers in their own home,” he said.

> “I said to my brother, ‘What if you don’t send them to the boarding school?’” Gyal Lo said. “He said he had no choice.”

> Gyal Lo set out to investigate the changes that families were going through as the schools expanded across Tibetan regions in China. Over the next three years he visited dozens of such schools, and saw that many Tibetan students spoke little of their mother tongue and were sometimes only able to see their parents once every several weeks or even months.

It's much worse and more systematic.


I mean, not to descend too deeply into the stereotype of nerds and comic books, but you'd probably be a lot more distraught and critical of Professor X making terrible, self-interested and decidedly unfriendly choices than you would be about Magneto doing Magneto things.

Annexing Greenland, even if it did happen, is objectively not nearly as terrible as the genocide of Uygurs or murdering tens of thousands of Ukrainian civilians. You just don't expect it from America, that's all. But no worries, give us time, the rest of us are re-calibrating our expectations and next time we won't be nearly so comically shocked.


> I mean, not to descend too deeply into the stereotype of nerds and comic books, but you'd probably be a lot more distraught and critical of Professor X making terrible, self-interested and decidedly unfriendly choices than you would be about Magneto doing Magneto things.

I mean, that's a rationalization for feelings, but I don't explains the responses. Isn't Canada pursing closer relations with China because Trump, for instance? That's like deciding to ally with Magneto because Professor X fell short of your expectations.


Feelings have nothing to do with it (anymore?). Just a different logic for a different world.

Canada is doing the normal things countries do in a multipolar world in which none of the big players (other than maybe the EU if they become a big player) will be a truly reliable ally from which no danger to its sovereignty emanates.

Due to geographical and logistics constraints, China is in many ways far less dangerous to Canada than the US, if the likelihood of the US going full fash and invading us is anything above 0. It's a good move to offset your complete dependence on the big and somewhat friendly player next door, who can swallow you up whole if it decides to do so, by engaging more closely (than before) with a big and somewhat unfriendly player far far away, who can do little damage to you in case your relationship sours. Realpolitik the big boys call it, I think.


I’m sure the western chauvinists all over Hacker News and Reddit are actually correct. NATO, US, EU going into East Slavic civilization are the innocent ones. “what's a little colonialism between friends” who has ever said that? Why not stick to what is actually said, that it’s an aggressive war by NATO?

I'm from Ukraine and I'm very curious about this "East Slavic civilization" you mention. What is it? Are my cousins who are fighting to defend their homes, relatives and neighbours from Russian fascists part of this civilization, or only the scumbags trying to re-colonize them?

Yup yup. Evil NATO denying the native “panslavism” that all Slavic people yearn for, to put them safely into the Russian yoke they so love.

/s


Let me fire up Claude code.


Let me fire up Tesseract.

https://github.com/tesseract-ocr


I fought with Tesseract for quite a while. Its good if high accuracy doesn't matter. Transcribing a book from clean, consistent non-skewed data its fine and an LLM might even be able to clean it up. But for legal or accounting data from hand scanned documents, the error rate made it untenable. Even clean, scanned documents of the same category have all sorts of density and skew anomalies that get misinterpreted. You'll pull your hair out trying to account for edge cases and never get the results you need even with numerous adjustments and model retraining on errors.

Flash 2.5 or 3 with thinking gave the best results.


Thanks. I was surprised that Tesseract had recognized poorly scanned magazines and with some Python library I was able to transcribe two-columns layout with almost no errors.

Tesseract is a cheap solution as it doesn’t touch any LLM.

For invoices, Gemini flash is really good, for sure, and you receive “sorted” data as well. So definitely thumbs up. I use it for transcription of difficult magazine layout.

I think that for such legally problematic usage as companies don’t like to share financial data with Google, it is be better to use a local model.

Ollama or HuggingFace has a lot of them.


Surya is a lot better in that.


Russia firmly in that second tier along with better behaved peers that have brighter demographic futures and an actual economy, like India, Indonesia and Brazil.


Russia is self destructing as we speak.


As far as I can see they have a massive uprise in industrial capacity and reformation in general. People underestimate countries in war.


The fundamental question that needs answering is: should we actually prevent minors below the age of X from accessing social media site Y? Is the harm done significant enough to warrant providing parents with a technical solution for giving them control over which sites their X-aged child signs up, and a solution that like actually works? Obviously pinky-swear "over 13?" checkboxes don't work, so this currently does not exist.

You can work through robustness issues like the one you bring up (photo uploading may not be a good method), we can discuss privacy trade-offs like adults without pretending this is the first time we legitimately need to make a privacy-functionality or privacy-societal need trade-off, etc. Heck, you can come up with various methods where not much privacy needs trading off, something pseudonymous and/or cryptographic and/or legislated OS-level device flags checked on signup and login.

But it makes no sense to jump to the minutiae without addressing the fundamental question.


> The fundamental question that needs answering is: should we actually prevent minors below the age of X from accessing social media site Y?

I suspect if you ask Hacker News commenters if we should put up any obstacles to accessing social media sites for anyone, a lot of people will tell you yes. The details don't matter. Bashing "social media" is popular here and anything that makes it harder for other people to use is viewed as a good thing.

What I've found to be more enlightening is to ask people if they'd be willing to accept the same limitations on Hacker News: Would they submit to ID review to prove they aren't a minor just to comment here? Or upvote? Or even access the algorithmic feed of user-generated content and comments? There's a lot of insistence that Hacker News would get an exception or doesn't count as social media under their ideal law, but in practice a site this large with user-generated content would likely need to adhere to the same laws.

So a better question might be: Would you be willing to submit to ID verification for the sites you participate in, as a fundamentally good thing for protecting minors from bad content on the internet?


> The details don't matter.

The details very much DO matter.

You can look at all manner of posts here on HN that explain exactly how you should do age verification without uploading IDs or giving central authority to some untrustworthy entity.

The fact that neither the governments proposing these laws nor the social media sites want to implement them those ways tells you that what these entities want isn't "verification" but "control".

And, yes, most of us object to that.


> You can look at all manner of posts here on HN that explain exactly how you should do age verification without uploading IDs or giving central authority to some untrustworthy entity.

That's not how ID verification works. The ID verification requirements are about associating the person logging in with the specific ID.

So kids borrow their parents' ID while they're not looking, complete the registration process that reveals nothing, then they're good forever.

Or in the scenario where nothing at all is revealed about the ID and there is no central authority managing rate limiting, all it takes is for a single ID to be compromised and then everyone can use it to authenticate everywhere forever.

That's why all of the age verification proposals are basically ID verification proposals. All of these anonymous crypto suggestions wouldn't satisfy those requirements.


> Would you be willing to submit to ID verification for the sites you participate in, as a fundamentally good thing for protecting minors from bad content on the internet?

The friction would be sufficient to give up. Arguably no loss to me and certainly none to the internet.

This is what has happened already, I am not giving my id to some shitty online provider. If I lose more sites so be it.


I would rather parenting be the responsibility of parents and I resent the selfish individuals who wilfully burden others with the various costs associated with their demands for safety from their own choices over taking responsibility for themselves. No impact to others is too great for those who insist anything they don’t wish to be exposed to is dealt with at the societal level.

If an at risk child’s parent is unwilling to do what they believe is the right thing by their child then they have failed the child and need to get a grip - confiscate the device or change the wifi password or sleep with the router under your pillow if you have to it’s really not that hard.


> Would you be willing to submit to ID verification for the sites you participate

I would not. Because there are better options out there if the objective is purely age verification that's as rigorous as the status quo for buying alcohol or cigarettes.

Here's one option: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=46447282 that I proposed. It is by no means the best or only one.


This is a good opportunity to link to the recent archive of Hacker News, for when this happens: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=46435308


> The fundamental question that needs answering is: should we actually prevent minors below the age of X from accessing social media site Y?

This is only an interesting question if we can prevent it. We couldn't prevent minors from smoking, and that was in a world where you had to physically walk into a store to buy cigarettes. The internet is even more anonymous, remote-controlled, and wild-west. What makes us think we can actually effectively age gate the Internet, where even Nobody Knows You're A Dog (1993)[1].

1: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/On_the_Internet,_nobody_knows_...


> We couldn't prevent minors from smoking,

Smoking rates among minors have plummeted and continue to decline.

That's not really a good example because the war on underage smoking has been a resounding success.

Yeah we didn't stop every single minor everywhere from ever smoking at any time, but the decline was dramatic.


I'd argue that the reduction of underage smoking has much more to do with things like social acceptability and education about the dangers of smoking, and not about physical controls on the distribution of and access to cigarettes. There also appears to be a recent trend of younger people not drinking alcohol to the extent that my generation and Boomers did, which is wonderful, but probably has nothing to do with physical access to beer.

This is the right way to reduce childhood social media use: Make it socially disgusting, and make it widely known to be dangerous.


Have you met a horny teenager? The war on porn will not be a resounding success.


But we can do age verification that's as strict as buying cigarettes and sacrifice next to no privacy.

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=46447282 That should be good enough for anyone, unless their real motive is to force everyone to upload their IDs.


The real solution, IMO, is a second internet. Domain names will be whitelisted, not blacklisted, and you must submit an application to some body or something.


I agree. There were attempts to do something like this with porn sites via the .xxx TLD I believe, but that inverts the problem. Don't force the public to go to a dark alley for their guilty pleasures. Instead, the sites that want to target kids need to be allowlisted. That is much more practical and palatable.


Yeah.. the opposition was just a bad take IMO... "but it will create a virtual red light district" which is EXACTLY what you want online, unlike a physical city, you aren't going to accidentally take a wrong turn, and if you're blocking *.xxx then it's even easier to avoid.

Then require all nudity to be on a .edu, .art or .xxx, problem mostly solved.


> Then require all nudity to be on a .edu, .art or .xxx, problem mostly solved.

Who's doing the requiring here? Sounds like yet another path to censorship dystopia.


In the case of cc-tlds the respective government... In the case of other TLDs ICANN.

edit: .edu provides for educational content, .art for artistic expression, .xxx for explicit content.


Who decides where the art erotica boarder is? There is plenty of content that would straddle that border, I have seen art that could legitimately called pornographic and pornography i would describe as art. Who decides? And then you have prudes Florida Texas red states trying to prevent remove any thing from an .edu and would happily ban the .xxx entirely and would find any .art suspect and probably ban it.


I dont see why phones can't come with a browser that does this. Parents could curate a whitelist like people curate playlists, and share it, and the browser would honor that.

Combined with some blacklisted apps (e.g., all other browsers), this would be a passable opt-in solution. I'm sure there's either a subscription or a small incentive for someone to build this that hopefully isn't "Scam children".

It's not like kids are using PCs, and if they use someone else's phone, that's at least a severely limiting factor.


They do, don’t they? Apple devices have had a robust whitelisting/blacklisting feature for at least a couple of years. I use it to block websites and apps to lessen my phone addiction. I’m sure Android offers similar features


Block -> opt out

Allow -> opt in

And a techie customizing it is v. different than turnkey for parents.

But yeah! Same principle, that's why I'm sure it's been done / will be done.


AOL returns!


sounds like an app store


It's never been about porn. By marking certain part of the internet "adult-only" you imply that the rest is "family-friendly" and parents can feel less bad about themselves leaving their children with iPads rather than actually parenting them, which is exactly what Big Tech wants for obvious reasons. If I had a child I'd rather have it watch porn than Cocomelon, which has been scientifically developed so that it turns your child's brain into seedless raspberry jam. Yet nobody's talking about the dangers of that, because everyone's occupied with <gasp> titties.


> If I had a child I'd rather have it watch porn than Cocomelon

As a parent that regularly fears who my children will encounter in the world, I’m glad there’s an “if” at the beginning of this sentence.


Don't worry, most likely your children will come across the normal sorts of bad people - cheating partners, bullying peers, abusive bosses, rude customers, lying beggars, maybe robbers and thieves. It's fortunately unlikely they'll meet a guy who is outspoken about his opinion that scientifically capturing people's attention to get them addicted to screens is morally much worse than showing them "penis into vagina episode 74786". We don't want their innocent minds to be poisoned with ideas that question the status quo.


Honestly if internet porn were "penis into vagina episode 74786" I'd have no problem with my kids who are old enough to desire it, to watch it. The problem is that all internet porn I've seen demonstrates undesirable behaviours and attitudes towards sex and towards their partners. Hitting, degradation, homosexuality, sex between family members, harmful body modifications, verbal abuse, etc, are on the front page of every porn site I've looked at. I honestly do not understand how this is supposed to be stimulating.

I have no problem with my kids watching a couple progress from kissing to foreplay to passion, if those kids already have the hormonal desires to experience these acts. But contemporary websites teach that violence is an integral part of sex - and I do not want my children learning this.


If your child wants to watch porn, he/she will be able to get it.


> should we actually prevent minors below the age of X from accessing social media site Y?

Who's 'we'? The parents? The government? Device manufacturers? Answers should differ wildly depending on who is doing the enforcement.


Nice job of sidestepping the "fundamental question" of whether that can be done and what damage it would do. You do not get to answer the question as you posed it in a vacuum.

It's not a "robustness issue". Nobody has proposed anything that works at all.

But to answer your "fundamental question", no. Age gating is dumb. Giving parents total control is also dumb.


Can we actually prevent children under 16 from buying beer?


If they are persistent enough, no. But then everyone knows it's not going to stop every child in every situation. It sets a president for what society thinks is a sensible limit though, and society raises children not just individual families or parents.

Do we want kids becoming alcoholics? Do we want them turning up drunk to school and disrupting classes? Do we want to give parents trying to do the right thing some backup? So they know that when their kid is alone they can expect that other adults set a similar example.

Sure, you can't stop a kid determined to consume alcohol. But I think the societal norm is an overall good thing.

The same should be applied to the online space, kids spend more and more time there. Porn, social media, gambling etc. should be just a much of a concern as alcohol.


We can't prevent all children from getting beer, but we can prevent most of them without compromising any adult's privacy. And everyone is ok with that state of affairs and the trade-offs. No one's calling for internet-connected beer cans that make you take a selfie before you can open them.

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=46447282


> we can prevent most of them without compromising any adult's privacy

But we don't. Even with in person age/ID checks the clerk will often enter some of that data into the store's system and then who knows what happens with it.


> the clerk will often enter some of that data into the store's system

I've only seen them enter the date of birth. No identifying information. If they record the ID itself I'd recommend going to a different store. Or ideally, writing your legislators to have the practice banned.


Depending on the size of the town, date of birth could be used to severely narrow down and target a specific person.

If one suspects a partner of buying alcohol and could convince or coerse the clerk, or even just peek in the book, and see the partner's date of birth written there, then that is good enough proof for many people and many purposes.


We should end carding for alcohol for everyone because domestic abuse exists?


That's a ridiculous conclusion. Identifying a single problem with an implementation is not a reason to abandon the implementation completely.


It seems to be what you're saying. Otherwise I don't know what the point of your previous comment was.


Is there actually a difference between transactions between humans in meatspace (getting a government ID, then using it at a store) and age estimation algorithms?


EFF explains a few differences between showing your ID in person and verifying your age online [1]. With respect to transmission, storage, and sharing of user data by the verifier/website, the risks of age estimation overlap with those of age verification.

[1] https://www.eff.org/deeplinks/2025/12/why-isnt-online-age-ve...


Um no.

Along with the diary, tax records, cellphone and family photos were stolen from someone's home, then sold for $40,000 to a far-right activist / centrist paragon of journalism James O'Keefe (whichever you prefer). Said paragon was alleged to have paid these (eventually convicted so I'm allowed to say) criminals more money to steal more stuff from this home.

While the warrant's probable cause section was redacted (maybe inappropriately), the facts of the case are still that the person being raided was alleged to have actually participated in an ongoing conspiracy to commit theft and transporting stolen property across state lines.


Has a lot more to do with scale than with the organization being government or heavily regulated.


I second this. Very difficult to read through the slop. I get that it saves time, but it's verbose and repetitive in all the wrong places.


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