strong authentication which is open for unique human users only

Unless you completely ditch anonymity, this can only turn into a state captured propoganda platform. Whoever controls access/auth will have the keys to the content.

What’s the logic with no ID? Biometric ID and surveillance data is advanced enough that you will get ID’d if you’re arrested/kidnapped anyway.

Because most places in the USA have atrocious worker protection laws. Even if you’re in a name brand, corporate job with thousands of people on board with unionizing, they can close your office or fire everyone with no repercussions.

Just look at Blizzard, Google, Starbucks, etc… They take a chainsaw to any union talk and have never been bothered with consequences. If you’re employed by a tiny, family owned business you have even less leverage. Your personal relationship to the owner is much more important to achieving your goals than paperwork solidarity with the 2 other employees.

There has also been a huge, prolonged campaign of union busting specifically to weaken their power in these political scenarios

They just need a little more Critical Support™️

An interesting thing to note before people get upset: this is literally one dude with a megaphone while Good’s vigil had thousands.

In a million years I couldn’t come up with a more poetic representation of USA’s political atmosphere: one angry white guy with a microphone and a wall of bulletproof vests against thousands of people unified in the cold dark night.

I view it as a philosophical difference more than anything. Only an absolute lunatic would actually push the button without an extreme amount of pressure; it’s just not a rational action of self preservation. A Solomon plan, as in the parable, is a choice that will kill you. Say what you will about the people pulling Israel’s strings but they have enough sanity and power lust to not throw it all away.

All nuclear players are handling loaded guns. Any bluster or rhetoric is hot air because you don’t know what they’re made of until they pull the trigger. And that is the most unique decision in human history in the hands of a tiny group of people. Nobody should ever have been given the personal power to vaporize entire cities, you can’t generalize that failing to a state policy level.

Complicated dead man switches don’t solve the problem or absolve the decision maker, it’s just a layer of abstraction. You still have to choose to enable it and accept the consequences of killing millions of people. Telling the world it’s enabled is just indicating your current line in the sand (a nuclear event). That’s no different than setting a line in the sand for a conventional threat to your capital city. Either may be an understandable and high pressure threat to the individual decision makers: both are reactions to the other belligerent, both end with the button pusher dead.

And both sides always have the option to renege on their promise and launch first before that line. Even if they hold to their promise, saying “I warned you” doesn’t make a mass revenge holocaust or suicidal holocaust more ethical than the other. The only humane choice is total disarmament and deterrence with an empty gun, which will never happen of course.

Yes it would be damn near impossible because basically all communication would be dead as fast as it happens and any belligerents wouldn’t be in any shape to give convincing evidence (assuming they survive and it doesn’t trigger a worldwide exchange).

If two countries are at the brink anything can happen: a radar blip, a failed first launch, fog of war, equipment malfunction, etc… Nobody’s official policy is “we’ll nuke anyone for any reason”, they always claim self preservation/retaliation. If a conventional war with Iran goes poorly it would be a rapid flurry of Israel maybe launches or threatens to launch => China (or whoever) retaliates => USA (or whoever) counters => comms are disrupted or locked down => troops are mobilized etc…

The same events could be true of a purported dead man switch system: can anyone prove that the switch was improperly triggered? Does it matter now that most people involved are ashes?

It would be over in about an hour or two and would take decades to properly reconstruct, if ever. Every state would jump at the chance to frame the tragedy in their favorite light and you personally will never ever know the truth.

In that light it doesn’t make any sense to worry about speculation or opinion pieces or rumors. There never will be a way to prove or disprove theoretical apocalyptic policies. There are a billion reasons to criticize Israel and hate Zionists but this isn’t much better than a puff piece.

They’re two sides of the same coin and not functionally much different. In a world with nuclear weapons everyone must have a “last resort” strategy like this: the perception of the destruction of the state triggers nuclear annihilation (against anyone/everyone; you plan for all options). The only other theorized response is to voluntarily roll over and die so humanity can live, and nobody with nukes is going to admit to that.

In a real scenario you could never verify if the first launch was from a credible threat retaliation or not. Even if you could, first strike vs retaliatory is cold comfort when everyone is starving in a nuclear winter. It’s not worth getting upset over a wikipedia article with a bunch of journalist quotes and opinion pieces. We’ve known about MAD since 1962.

…???

Most games on steam are drm-free or have a very weak DRM which is easily removed.

Blatantly false. Take a glance at all the novice/low budget devs who tightly couple their game to Steam’s proprietary multiplayer api.

Lootboxes kinda suck, but at least they only use them for cosmetic items

That doesn’t mean they weren’t trailblazers for one of the most parasitic features of the 21st century.

Steam has parental controls implemented

The controls don’t even work for this. Even if you scrutinize every game before white listing, the devs can patch in loot boxes (or any toxic mechanic) at any time without your knowledge.

And putting that aside, “bad parenting” is such a shit cop out when Steam’s main page is devoted to high revenue [toxic] games. This is like blaming parents when cigarette companies made ads specifically appealing to children, as if the inability to legally buy their product absolves them from the damage done.

Sure, if you go in with the idea that the ban won’t impact their social media usage then it obviously follows that it won’t impact their usage. And that might be true for a while, but:

• Declining usage compounds and any barrier to entry drops users. Reddit wouldn’t be suing to stop this if they didn’t think it was a major threat to their platform.
• The single largest factor in platform membership is peer membership, and the most influential peers in adolescent development will always be real life friends
• A cohort aging up doesn’t mean that the next cohorts will automatically follow. Late millennials weren’t tied to Facebook, Gen Z wasn’t married to Snapchat, a drop in TikTok usage will eventually precipitate a need to migrate somewhere else
• Global social media usage, by human screen time, has been declining from its 2022 peak (excluding a North American exception), with the largest drop among younger users

Putting all of this together, it seems very plausible that child bans could hasten this decline. It would probably work twice as well if more public money was directed to alternatives (third spaces, clubs, etc…).

You can covertly buy and take illicit drugs all by yourself and have a good time. Bypassing a ban to get on a social platform with very few of your social peers is… pointless?

So what if you get to watch a tiktok from the other side of the world, none of the kids in your class are sharing that experience and building the peer pressure.

IIRC master was the normal ass English word for your superior in any type of subservient role (employees, servants, indentured, school children, etc…). In the “Master Bedroom” instance, master makes sense as the title of a household patriarch.

As soon as they started forcing non-whites into new world chattel slavery, all tiers of white classes suddenly thought it was degrading to use the same word they forced on the lesser races. This is where English started adapting new words for the old usage of master, such as boss from the Dutch baas.

If anything, refusing to use master in any context is far more racist than normal usage. You’re perpetuating the idea that a word’s use by slaves automatically (and retroactively) sullies it for all time.

The Chinese families bit is most likely a reference to widespread, problematic family dynamics stemming from shared social pressures in China. Just in living memory, a household might have gone through: a revolution, the cultural revolution, famine, rapid urbanization, one child policy, economic booms, economic bubbles, etc…

That will leave any family pretty fucked up, though it may not be universally bad (hence, only the middle of the horse). In the future, we’ll probably see similar echoes of trauma from the USA’s current historical flashpoint.

It’s more likely that Steam leans into the “Steam[Device] Verified ✅/❌” labeling. If anything, that makes navigating the marketplace much easier for a mid-performance buyer. They’ve already done it with steam deck, it’s a good angle to pressure both devs and consumers into their device.

People buying this won’t be “daily driving” their pc in any sense. I think the idea is unlock steam’s library (and marketplace) the massive casual phone/tablet crowd. If I didn’t already have a dedicated gaming PC I would definitely be interested.

Astroturfing new bot accounts I guess

Not if we stop tracking it 🤠

I’ll take a crack at it:

• It’s a massive privacy/surveillance concern. Look at the issues that come with doorbell cams and now multiply the number of cameras and scatter them all over
• It’s another platform for mega corporations to track and sell data to advertisers or any malicious actors, but at an entirely new intrusive level. They no longer have to approximate what’s getting your attention when they literally know what has your attention. Good luck anonymizing or hiding your usage when you can’t spoof the real world in front of you.
• It’s unnecessary e-waste, at best providing the exact same functionality you’d get from your phone with the added benefit of… not reaching into your pocket? You still need a free hand to use it…
• It’s a distraction in a way that other tech can’t touch. Pedestrians/drivers getting notifications shoved directly into their eyes won’t end well.
• It probably has all the same inherent problems as previous generations of smart glasses. Primarily: your eyes aren’t designed for extended/repeated focus on an image less than an inch from your face and at the edge of your vision

As I said in another comment, the reason to not get on their bad side is the fact they’re a highly insular and powerful gang that just so happen to be in charge of his protection detail for his entire (hypothetical) term.

It’s easy to tweet the truth to power until that corrupt power is the only thing stopping the next Maga nut from taking a shot at you. Whole situation is completely unsurprising and not a mark against his character for me.