If we’re doing conspiracy theories maybe that’s why he’s using up all the good missiles

Waiting for the AI bubble to pop

Hey everybody, this guy doesn’t know what the mirror is for! ~i also have no idea~

It will be effective if the prohibition takes the form of these companies no longer existing, at least in their current form, OR if the majority turn against them, making them irrelevant. An age gate won’t do anything, not on its own

Underage drinking is still more common than it should be, despite strict laws. The point is, it doesn’t do any good to go after the consumer, regardless of age. in order to make a meaningful impact, legislation would have to destroy or significantly neuter social media companies altogether, globally. Anything else will be a disappointment.

The more effective way to reduce these harms is through social/cultural change, but that’s easier said than done.

Prohibition didn’t work for drugs either, so why would it work here? Why do we need to learn that lesson over and over again?

It would add steps and make it more expensive, but how would you prevent registered companies from selling access to anyone who wanted to use that connection? You can’t really. Like the user above said, they’re ignorant to think they could force control. Users will find ways to circumvent these measures and will always be a step ahead.

In the case of Russia, China, Iran, North Korea, etc. they have control of the routes in and out of the country. In other words, if an individual is inside one of those countries and tries to connect to an outside resource, that connection passes through a government-controlled device and every request is ostensibly approved or denied. This would not work in most other countries. Those governments would have to wrangle many disparate entities to seize control at scale. Even then there are ways to disguise connections beyond using a VPN.

(I feel like most people here are gonna say “duh, we know”. This is for the people in the back.)

No, you cannot ban VPN tech. The cat’s out of the bag. You and I would still gain access. But an attempted ban could have quite the chilling effect on the average person, driving the tech underground and enabling bad actors.

Eats shoots and leaves!

I’m somewhat of a visual basic GUI expert myself

towed beyond the environment

That’s just one reason 401k is shitty. 401k was invented by Wall Street to enable them to use our retirement money as “float” and collect fees on top of that. It was sold to companies as a less expensive replacement for the pension plans most jobs used to offer back in the day. It was sold to employees as a “set it and forget it” way to do “investing”, and somehow became the default option.

A 401k just rides on top of the stock market and gives the bare minimum of control to the user. Everyone has the same shitty dozen or so conglomerated investment funds to choose from. All that while the operators collect fees that might seem small to the layperson, but if those fees were allowed to compound they would actually make a massive difference in their wealth over a long career.

If your company offers a match, yeah, take the free money. Sometimes you’re allowed to take loans as well which can help if you have tons of debt. (The cool thing about those is the interest gets paid into your own account). Otherwise, basically anything else is the way to go, whether that’s a self-directed IRA or even just a regular brokerage account, real estate, literally anything. The only problem being the learning curve, but learning is more accessible than ever. If you really don’t want to learn there are also broker-managed accounts now that are fairly cheap.

He already has

You need to start a museum lol

If I read this right it goes beyond the cheap no-name Chinese stuff that we hopefully all know to avoid by now. This would prevent US companies from outsourcing manufacture to foreign countries, which pretty much all companies do at this point

Goteem

Yeah, growing up as a teen it was the opposite. I was burning CDs and had this phone stuck up my ass

Yeah, fair enough. If it works, it works, and to each their own.

The suggestion from the user I replied to, of needing a browser toolbar, did get in my craw a bit. Like what is it 2005? I don’t think I’ve even used one since before Chrome was in beta.

One of my banking apps (Citi) didn’t even work in stock Android on a Pixel. It thinks I’m rooted lol.

Everything works well enough in the browser though. Nowadays I just do all that stuff on a desktop PC. Not everything needs to be an app or even done on a phone.

The desktop versions of bank websites have everything I need, whereas mobile versions can skip out on certain features. Plus, these apps tend to hoard perms for “security” reasons, or so they say.

If you have a strong password and legit MFA (like TOTP or a physical key), use a trusted device/browser that’s good enough. There shouldn’t be a need to grab my location or nearby devices.

Bonus points if the bank lets you review login sessions and deauth devices, flags things like impossible travel, etc.

Credit unions tend to do better. DCU is one example. They excel at security, don’t do any silliness with perms in their app, let you review logins and devices, and have a strong MFA implementation. The big private national players just want to sell you to data brokers to pad their margins while you pay ridiculous interest rates on their crappy products and get nothing in return.