It's all of those, yet none are the real root reason.
For that, you must look at the main beneficiary. Which country stands to gain the most from a completely dilapidated Iran? Which country stands to gain more when all the regional powers that could stand up to it have been destroyed?
It is not. Precocious sexual drive is possibly amongst the worst things there is for gaining sexual maturity. Also known as 'thinking with your dick'. CSA aside, you can do a ton of damage to your life by just going along with your sexual drive.
I am a virgin at 27 years old. What am I missing about the sexual experience? Is it somehow locked out to me? Or… can I access it intellectually, and reason about it with its ups and downs?
There's a reason the consent age does not start at puberty.
Sexual identity is an important component of gender identity. Encouraging people to make conclusions about their gender identity before they understand their sexual identity seems risky to me, especially when a child is being asked to make decisions with potentially life-altering medical consequences.
To be clear, a person does not need to have had sex to understand their sexual identity. They need to know what they find attractive and how their sexual identity relates to their own body. Even if someone feels like the opposite gender, that does not necessarily mean their sexual identity will automatically align with that.
It may be true that the transgender experience is something more fundamental to the self than “mere” sex. But when the choice is between one set of trade-offs and another, such as intervention versus non-intervention, I would contend that understanding one’s sexual identity is a critical piece of information.
It doesn't seem very hard to implement in your own site, so it might gain some traction? It's not super-complex, I understand it is some sort of interconnected spin on webrings, which are still somewhat popular among small websites.
If anybody wants to find truly random small websites, I recommend using Wiby (search engine). It has some neat stuff.
> It doesn't seem very hard to implement in your own site
Depends on how technically sophisticated the author is. Many of the blogs I was thinking about were not written by people familiar with web stuffs. They are hosted on managed hosting services like wordpress.com and blogspot, or on hosting providers with streamlined services that require no technical skills to use. Setting up this tool may very well be beyond what the authors are comfortable with or capable of.
Assuming you consider services like Wordpress and blogspot outside of the small web, people advocating that domain refuse to acknowledge why those services are successful to begin with.
If being part of the small web requires technical expertise, it will always be limited to tech minded people who also happen to cook and play guitar.
> Wow so you guys don't have ideological brain worms at all.
You have to remember that the supermajority of this site are ultra AnCaps who believe that anything which infringes upon the right of companies to kill people is Communist satanism and a significant minority agrees wholeheartedly with Peter Thiel's weird brand of techno-accelerationism and actively participates in NRx movements.
Like, I understand what you want to get at and I wholeheartedly agree! Just don't be too surprised at the pushback.
I don't think I have ever paid attention to a single age rating in my entire life. Does anyone do outside of fundamentalist parents who wouldn't let kids play most video games anyways?
Very spiritually European move.
What regulators should do is focus on easily applicable percentage-based fines. Make sure it's not just another line item.
It's my understanding that lots of parents use these numbers as guidance. I will make my own decisions about what my child can play, but the ratings and all the labels makes it much much easier to make an informed decision.
For the parents that are not into gaming, being able to just go by these numbers is much better than having no such guidance.
> Does anyone do outside of fundamentalist parents who wouldn't let kids play most video games anyways?
Yes. In fact I believe they help breaking down the fundamentalism by making it so clear that gaming is not inherently bad or good for your child. It all depends on the content.
Having age ratings is useful so I dont have to play a game to know its age suitability. Its common for very young children to play games, and age ratings help parents
make informed responsible decisions. There are some dark addictive patterns being used in gaming such as changing the odds of reward to optimise engagement (and make money) - these patterns need an age rating. Additionally, I think age ratings encourage developers to avoid content which would increase the age rating, since they then target a wider audience.
This is not a regulators move. This is the industry slightly adjusting their recommendations to parents.
Will this change anything? Maybe it will help the industry avoid being targeted by actual regulation.
Yes parents I know use them. Including me. I check labels, apply my own opinions on what matters and what does not and decide what I allow.
I am not interested in playing hours of videogames to be able to decide. Not in googling through ai-slop and idiotic gamer videos to find out what is in.
I think it's improved from when I last tried it, but it still isn't great. You can get like 60% of the battery life compared to macOS.
Someone with more recent knowledge correct me on this, but I believe idling is the biggest power drain in Asahi. You will want to shutdown and/or hibernate whenever possible.
The problem is what to do with those people who can't vote. At worst, they'll rise up in arms and create an ever bigger mess.
If you're not into social and demographic engineering, then you're going to face a real problem.
My solution would be to get it over with and shoot everyone who disagrees with the system I'm trying to build. It sounds childish but it does actually genuinely work. It has been put in practice in so many places it's easy to lose count.
That only works in the immediate term. It isn't even a stable short term solution, let alone medium to long term. Consider what the incentives of such an approach are when iterated.
Unless you aspire to the way of life in places like North Korea.
It really depends on what stage of a regime's lifecycle you apply it at.
Obviously it's not going to be as extreme and as simple as 'go shoot people house-to-house until you're powerful :D', but repression is much more often than not effective. Think of the Arab Spring, the 2018 color coup attempt in Nicaragua, etc.
Hell, even if the incentives are completely misaligned, you can get away with it as long as you're strong and ruthless enough. The whole world thought Myanmar's military junta would implode and break under the weight of all the freedom fighters… and it's still hanging around, not the worse for wear. If you're willing to burn everything to the ground before you lose power, you can often raise the stakes to a level the other party simply can't afford.
> Unless you aspire to the way of life in places like North Korea
Here's the thing: the right-wingers already aspire to that way of life. They will implement it. At this point, it's not about whether I aspire to live like that, but about who's going to take the reins of power of that type of political structure.
Right but all those examples you're listing are what I was vaguely referencing when I referred to the incentives of such an approach when iterated. The resulting government won't inevitably implode (although it often will eventually) but it doesn't result in a particularly functional society either.
> They will implement it.
> Better us than them.
Well sure, if you've already accepted defeat then I suppose that's the logical course of action. But that doesn't seem like a reasonable position to me given the available evidence.
Not quite sure this works out as nicely as that. Argentina has both compulsory voting and a legal voting age of 16 and it managed to produce Javier Milei (who makes Trump look like Kissinger).
What's the best way to have a sane system? I'm not sure. I personally lost all faith in democracy.
A start that would not require big changes to our existing system would be open primaries. That would incentivize moderate candidates. Or perhaps eliminate primaries altogether and go with a two-stage general election like some places have for their local elections. Everybody runs, then the top two run against each other (unless one got an outright majority in the first run). Skip the more elaborate instant-runoff styles of voting because that is too advanced for average people.
Argentina is notoriously corrupt and suffers from an overly politically powerful military. Not even compulsory voting can fix those. There are dark private forces currently waging war on democracy it will be a catastrophic disaster if they win.
> Argentina is notoriously corrupt and suffers from an overly politically powerful military.
Huh? If there's one thing that Argentina did correctly that no other Latin American country under military regimes in the past century did, it was breaking the political power of the military. Most members of the National Reorganization Process died in jail, the army was greatly downsized and culturally reprogrammed and it strengthened civilian institutions. It worked well until it didn't (and the breaking point happened before Milei, to be entirely clear).
But the point is that the issue lies elsewhere. Do you think Australia won't lurch to the anti-liberal and anti-democratic side as soon as someone with the right combo of charisma and psychopathy arises?
I know how it will happen. Nearly every single veto power group will give them a free pass. Naïve humanist liberals will pontificate about the ideals of democracy and freedom to do whatever you want. Boring fence-sitters will legitimate their discourse and ideas under the veil of neutrality and objectivity. Those who worship Ba'al will seek to build a symbiotic relationship. And before you realize it, White Australia has risen up once again.
> Do you think Australia won't lurch to the anti-liberal and anti-democratic side as soon as someone with the right combo of charisma and psychopathy arises?
Indeed, all of our friendly western liberal democracies should not get too comfortable thinking this insanity won't come to them. Some of them already experience increasing amounts of it, and the rest could easily be in that position.
And thank god for that, at least. He is too stupid to make his petty policies more durable, instead relying on methods that are just as trivial to undo as they were to implement in the first place. We would be in a much worse place if he had the cunning of Kissinger.
For that, you must look at the main beneficiary. Which country stands to gain the most from a completely dilapidated Iran? Which country stands to gain more when all the regional powers that could stand up to it have been destroyed?
I think the answer should be blindingly obvious.
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