I support Age Verification

(Not to be confused with: I like Age Verification.)

For a few reasons.

• 1. The government already has all of your info and is spying on you from any device with a camera or microphone and wireless connection and without a warrant or meaningful accountability. We know this objectively because the FBI, desperate to look competent, inadvertently publicized footage obtained illegally in the Guthrie case that shouldn’t have existed.
• 2. It’s not 2014. We have enough information now to know definitively that social media (and increasingly, use of LLM’s) is harmful to children’s mental health, and that its negative effects are more pronounced on developing brains. (Though they affect adults as well.) These systems harm a person’s mental health and cognitive abilities, and while this bit is anecdotal, I know several teachers who struggle to teach kids because they’re no longer able to focus on anything for more than sixty seconds. (And the question: “Why do I have to know this if an AI can do it for me?” is becoming a common refrain.)
• 3. Private entities also already have your data. Go look yourself up on spokeo.com or some other background check site if you don’t think so. (And be sure to put in a request there to have your info deleted while you’re at it.) Or sub to a deletion service that will remove it for you.
• 4. People say that to cut kids off from social media will isolate them, but I grew up in a world where we only had email, chat rooms, snail mail, and land lines, and somehow we magically made friendly connections anyway. It’s a nonsense argument, and ignores that social media itself is isolating people to a much greater extent.

Essentially, I think Age Verification is the lesser of two huge evils, and I don’t expect the government in my country to force social media companies to disclose and change their algorithms to eliminate the harm being done to kids, so Age Verification becomes a necessary evil. (Hopefully a short-term one, but we’ll see.) The social media companies have too much money for any civil suit to meaningfully impact them financially.

Obsessive monogamy is usually super fucking toxic, and “cheating” is way less of a betrayal than a dozen other things people put up with in relationships.

People will literally throw away years or even decades of stability and companionship over a single moment of weakness, like some weird sexual martyrdom, but they’ll turn themselves in circles to forgive actual ongoing abuse.

And to be clear I have never cheated on anyone, though I have been the third person. This is just a general observation from my many years in the game.

The US isn’t the great Satan, they are quite contemporary satan. Russia, China and Iran are all imperialist, anti democratic and have even worse human rights violations.

You don’t have to pick a side, these are all asshats, some more than other though.

Intelligence is a pathogen. Wherever it develops in the universe, it rapidly spreads and consumes everything, wiping out most other life forms and eventually itself. It has probably developed over and over again over time all over the universe including our own galaxy. It may be relatively rare, but there would still be millions of instances. The fact that we have found no evidence of intelligent life elsewhere is not because it doesn’t exist or is too far away, but because we have missed the band of detectable transmissions from these societies that existed closer to us. There will be others, but we may be gone by then. We should definitely not be working to spread to other worlds. We should perish here from our own behaviors as we are meant to.

Most controversial opinion I’m willing to share:

I think we should replace incarceration for certain crimes with corporal punishment, such as canning. Ideally we would build the agony booth from the mirror universe of Star Trek.

Incarceration is overly harmful to the future of the offender. Incarceration is expensive for society. Authorities hesitate charging people with crimes for these reasons. Corporal punishment solves this.

As long as there is no long term damage, I believe the physical pain is more human than the lasting harm going to prison can cause.