Water is very common. Others might or might not work. Most ofthe others are rare. (Amonia is not rare, I have no idea how useful it might be)

Water is extreemly common in the universe. It also enables a lot of useful chemistry that complex molecules need. In turn it is reasonable to expect water is part of all life - not a given but most of the other options rely on something far less likely to occure.

This assumes there is life. Not a debate I’m touching. Although if there is physics is against us ever discovering it. Even if earth is an extreem outlier in taking so long to develop intelligent life and every other star has it in a few hundred years few will ever detect another lifeform

I was taught basic programming in school - by people who clearly had no clue. (it was clear to 11 year old me, and in hindsight I was far to kind in my evaluation of their knowledge) I was also taught on the then very modern apple IIgs - I wouldn’t be surprised if you have never heard of that, but all you need to know is nothing I was taught is relevant anyway - if you were taught on windows 7 a lot of what you learned has changed anyway.

Point is we need to teach people to teach themselves because things change.

I have all the parental controls I can enabled - but hotspot is one soften requested feature I can’t block. I can block chrome completely but I can’t unblock it for my kids online piano lesson because they are on youtube which means every video is unblocked despite only one channel of interest. Next thing I know they have been watching youtube shorts slop.

i also can’t control the school issued device which they have do some homework on. Often homework includes watch an educational video on youtube

I have never supported mandatory age verification on devices - it cannot work.

i want the same things people who are for is want - but I want a system that works in the real world. I don’t know what that system is. I know parents and schools are hurting because we don’t have a useful solution.

At what point do I change from a concerned parent protecting my kids to an over protective hellicopter parent?

the school devices are locked down. However your experience shows why the locks are not good. Too many useful searches could be bad. They are not going to assign a team of humans to review every search result. Either they whitelist things so restricted that you can’t research anything or they blacklist so little things not on the list spread faster than they can block. (Both is a real possibility)

I don’t care about your device. The school devices are lockee down - but it isn’t feasable to lock everything down and still have a useful device for the things they need to do.

Almost everything is a webpage these days. Or a youtube video

They are enabled - the kids have found bypasses. Turning on the hotspot and then using their school device for instance

But not my kids phone that they turned the hotspot on before then. even if I take it their school device can be got from the backpack

It only takes one kid to figure out the bypass and it spreads all the kids. Some of those kids are talking to kids going to other schools.

every week my kids hear about a new game the school isn’t blocking while they are in class. Sometimes the teachers catch them, but kids are good at hiding what they are doing - and switching to what they should do when the teacher comes near.

I can’t - teachers give them homework that must be done on the device all the time.

Every week my kid hears about another game (not boobs) that the school didn’t block and thus they can play when the teacher isn’t looking. There are also a lot of non educational youtube videos they can watch, but since some of their real educational videos are on youtube they don’t block most. (Again youtube will block boobs - but that is not all I’m worried about)

They are only easy to setup if you don’t care about getting them right. Either you block a lot of useful content (only approved, audited things allowed), or you block only things that are known evil (that is you audited it). Either way the vast majority of the internet is not audited and we have no idea which of that is good vs evil. (nevermind trying to get a consistent definition of good/evil). The name “onlyfans” makes me think of sports fans and thus something I’d allow kids to access - of course I know better, I’ll be there is someone out there who would be setting up the firewall who doesn’t know it is in fact adult content.

Age verification needs to be done by someone (probably a government agency, though it need not be) who has verified age. That someone needs to be legally liable (and able to enforce) the tracking rules for anyone who uses their system to verify age. You want to verify someone’s age with me, first you need to prove you are following our privacy rules - including our regular random audits.

It needs a better cryptologist than me to get the details of the above system right.

Of course if even if you have the above I’m not sure how you will get anyone to use it. Perhaps we can have schools put a hard block on any system that doesn’t follow the above system, but the vast majority of the web isn’t going to opt-in. Note in particular this includes a lot of the useful sites I as a parent want my kids to access so it won’t help me as a parent.

As a voters you don’t get much a choice. In any voting system there is a case where all your choices are for something you are a hard no on.

No we can’t. We try, but kids are not 100% of the time in our sight. They are sitting in their chair “doing homework”, but when they see us coming they switch apps - who knows what they are doing. They are getting up at 3am when we are a sleep, again doing who knows what. Even if we put controls on, anytime there is a way to bypass the control (often a website that looks good enough to fool the automated approval system school has set up) that will spread to the entire school and all kids get access to that for a week in school before it is shutdown.

If you want age verification to work, you need a strong legal effort (international!) so that anyone who makes something online that gets kids (intentionally or not) faces a strong enough legal issue (read years in prison) that it is really stops this. Part of that is enough money for investigation so that it is a given you will be caught. I don’t think you can do this, and so the whole effort is pointless.

I want perminate standard time. Mostly because any US state can do that now, but year round dst requires us congress to change the law. I want to be done with the nonescence now and what the clocks read doesn’t matter much so long as they are consistent.

Your odds of finding the winning ticket on the sidewalk about about the same as buying it. So I walk around once in a while looking for winning tickets. I haven’t found one yet, but who knows. Bonus - I get some much needed exercise in the process.