MudMan

That’s a cool argument you’re having with a thing nobody said.

Educating children about sex in general is educating children about sex (and nobody here has argued against it or equated it with being anti-porn).

There is a rising trend in European lefitsm, and particularly in European feminism, that argues that all porn is inherently pernicious and ultimately should not exist.

Note those are two separate statements.

You definitely dabbled in the second of those statements when you claimed that “that [can’t] be considered safe for anyone”. Whether you meant to say what you said is in your head, but as presented that slope is both mighty slippery AND very consistent with some of the very anti sex-work trend I’m talking about. The false equivalence and misquote at the top of your response doesn’t lead me to believe you’re treating this “objectively”, either.

Waaay better than the porn bans and online age verification schemes, honestly.

I question why this is just for “children who show mysoginistic behavior”, though. Sex ed should be universal, and this should be a major part of sex ed.

I assume the fear here is parents complaining about their kids being talked about porn, which may end up being a larger underlying issue than the porn itself. I guess you just have to trust that education professionals handle the opportunity well and this doesn’t become a stern talking to for problem kids, which is likely to do as much as stern talking tos have done historically.

“Young humans” sure. Not young humans, you absolutely do you.

There’s a bit of an emerging trend in leftist European circles in particular that sees porn as inherently patriarchal and wrong and we’re not ready for how much anti-porn is going to be the new terfism yet. This is going to suck a lot, and not in a good way.

There are boys in trousers in the picture, though. And no real “short” skirts.

I mean… you do you, but some of this may be an eye of the beholder situation.

I genuinely don’t know that I follow that explanation. For one thing, what reasons would there be to ban paid blind boxes, online or offline, while allowing outright games of chance with a monetary payout? In what world is a Magic the Gathering blister more of a problem (for a consenting adult, anyway) than an online casino?

But also, by the larger point you’re making it seems like you’d be fine with a government saying “porn is banned for everybody because reasons” but not with “porn is banned for kids”, at least in a scenario where that comes with age verification.

To be clear, I agree that both of those are… not good. I just don’t know that I can wrap my head around the logic of thinking the more extensive issue is more acceptable than the alternative. You could argue that the porn ban is an excuse to add mass surveillance, but at that point we’re not talking about the porn ban, we’re talking about the mass surveillance.

Oh, and for the record, there is plenty of will someone think of the children regarding loot boxes. Both on its own and bundled together with a blanket assessment that gambling is immoral and/or illegal. It’s actually a fairly close match to the porn issue, where concerns about children are being wrapped around a more targeted hostility around the concept from both sides of the political spectrum.

I… don’t know where you’re from, but actual gambling is legal here for adults. Are you suggesting that people should be able to place bets on actual sports but not buy a random loot box in a game? That seems incredibly extreme.

Which still leaves a bunch of other stuff people have used kids to attack on all sides of multiple political aisles, but hey, if that’s the one you want to caveat I’m happy to flag how weird the caveat is.

Yeah, I read about some of the tightening at the time and I’m not disputing that there are technical ways of… you know, making your country’s Internet a mostly separate bubble for non-techie users.

The point is it’s both hard and extremely invasive to get there. You can’t just wish upon a star for VPNs to not be used for a particular application without going to those extremes. Especially if the thing you’re trying to prevent is people watching Superman two weeks early or wanking to a mainstream porn page.

It’s kind of unfortunate how much this has been encourage by petty online fights. People were very excited when “will somebody think of the children” was applied to, say, some social media content or gaming loot boxes because the Internet did not like those things, so they were very happy to ignore the pre-existing parental control devices and request blanket bans. Then people remembered that a bunch of old, prudish people on both sides of the political aisle don’t like porn and it was too late.

Man, people love the “they first came for” argument online and I should have guessed the first time it really pays off in the 21st century it’d include the absolute most depressing things possible instead.

Anyway, this is bad and I don’t like it, but UK politics are almost as bad as US politics, so I’m happy to let both stew in their own cautionary tale juices.

I guess that works for VPN services offering servers outside the country. That’s not what VPNs are, though, and you still can’t ban the concept of VPNs having a connection outside the country. VPN software is available open source and all it takes for it to connect abroad is my phone with a VPN connection to my home computer being abroad.

I mean, Russia (and even China) still have people using VPNs all over the place. This (and a lot of the push for age verification and comms backdoors) reeks of barely understanding the desired result and entirely misunderstanding how the tech works.

See, there’s a lot of online chatter about how much sense Linux folder structures make, with everything grouped by type all over the filesystem. And then this happens.

DOS 5.1 folder structure or bust, I say. Home directories are evil, if your filename doesn’t fit in 8.3 characters you’re doing it wrong and if you can’t find it with dir . /w it shouldn’t exist.

How do you “ban VPNs”? That’s not how software works, and VPNs are… you know, a key part of a bunch of online infrastructure. I get that they mean “ban them to bypass restrictions”, but the entire point of a VPN is you can’t tell from the outside what it’s being used for. You may as well ban thinking about butterflies. You can write it down, but you can’t enforce it.

For the record, not an American. Which, you know, I thought was obvious from my post, but hey.

I’d add that there’s a difference between caring about outcomes and not having values but, honesly, this is not a conversation worth having.

It takes a prodigious amount of entitlement to look at things that way. The leap of logic from a tangible action to… some other thing that happened requires keeping the loosest possible tally and looking at international politics strictly from the lens of how it affects your worldview, rather than the actual impact on the ground.

No, my dear online performative leftist, the US deciding to reverse their policy and cut tens of billions of international aid is not “the same” as whatever war, political stance or act of interference you vaguely remember being mad about a decade ago. They can both be bad without both being the same.

I mean, never mind that the Iraq and Afghanistan wars were started by Bush, in turn the proto-Trump that opened the door for the fascist base to encroach on the US right, the fact that those things happened doesn’t mean that the new, different thing Trump did that none of his predecessors did isn’t worse than what their predecessors were doing. The people that relied on US aid relied on US aid, independently of whatever US tanks were doing thousands of kilometers away.

Trump also reversed policy regarding Israel, incidentally, with the recognition of Jerusalem and moving the embassy. That’s the type of false equivalence that led to him being in power in the first place. Because man, I was not on board with Biden’s stance on Palestine, and I am sure Harris would have been way too lenient with Israel for my tastes, but if you think that’s the same as openly suggesting mass displacement for the sake of turning Gaza into a tourist resort and that it made no diplomatic difference in how fast and what type of ceasefire could have been attained you’re out of your mind.

And this is the last I say about it. I have zero patience for this type of willful ignorance in general, but I also have no energy to be angry. Thanks for the reminder that leaving even a tiny crack for US politics, even if it’s coming from the left, is way too much. The entire thing is toxic. Malign actor indeed.

Buuuullshit.

Utter garbage.

Extremely nope.

It takes deliberate ignorance to reach that conclusion. Forget the cuts in aid, which an article two posts up the chain here was directly linking to a worsening of cholera in South Sudan, the notion that anybody in Brazil or Mexico is going “I can’t tell the difference” is ludicrous. Your mileage may vary on whether Trump invading Venezuela is a good or a bad thing, but I’m pretty sure the regime there isn’t going “same thing, really”.

I guess the Argentitian government would say things are better now, considering they just got bailed out in what amounts to buying a midterm election. In that case I’d wager it’s the opposition who doesn’t find things were just as bad a couple years ago.

What the hell do you have to be on to think only Europe has noticed open fascists being in charge in the US. This is why I’ve been taking a break from this place, holy crap.

He doesn’t say he doesn’t, so I assume he does.

The problem is the way he got banned also blocks him from his shared auth, which in turn blocks him from purchases and device functionality:

The Damage: I effectively have over $30,000 worth of previously-active “bricked" hardware. My iPhone, iPad, Watch, and Macs cannot sync, update, or function properly. I have lost access to thousands of dollars in purchased software and media. Apple representatives claim that only the “Media and Services” side of my account is blocked, but now my devices have signed me out of iMessage (and I can’t sign back in), and I can’t even sign out of the blocked iCloud account because… it’s barred from the sign-out API, as far as I can tell.

Seriously, it’s like a one page blog. You could have read it in the time it took you to make me read it for you.

Hah. Shocked that you didn’t just take the easy way out and wrote “salt to taste”.

Agreed 100%. I think it’s understandable to feel schadenfreude on someone this deeply embedded being bit by the arbitrary business practices of big corpo in a worst case scenario type of situation.

But the problem is the business practices, not the person being affected. The guy’s job feeding Apples gargantuan content engine doesn’t make this alright.

…

Please do not use recipes from AI summaries without clicking through to the correct amounts.

I mean, hell, I won’t use a recipe I find on a recipe site without cross-referencing at least a couple other recipes from other sites, because some of those are janky as hell. But the best-guess of a summarization LLM on what all those numbers and ratios are meant to be? Yeah, no. Not by itself at all, unless you’re just trying to jog your memory on something you already know and can recognize the correct values if you see them.

I mean, “now” is doing a lot of load-bearing work in that sentence, but it’s also hard to argue it isn’t markedly worse than it used to be.

I guess unless you’re Russia and their circle. I’m starting to wonder about China, too, considering the geopolitical wedgie they’re giving the US right now.

Because it was a 500 dollar transaction and the card they purchased was an apple-branded product in a major retailer.

It was a 500 dollar transaction because this guy is a pro developer in Apple’s ecosystem and apparently uses a 6TB plan for both personal and professional storage.

The Trigger: The only recent activity on my account was a recent attempt to redeem a $500 Apple Gift Card to pay for my 6TB iCloud+ storage plan. The code failed. The vendor suggested that the card number was likely compromised and agreed to reissue it. Shortly after, my account was locked.
    An Apple Support representative suggested that this was the cause of the issue: indicating that something was likely untoward about this card.
    The card was purchased from a major brick-and-mortar retailer (Australians, think Woolworths scale; Americans, think Walmart scale), so if I cannot rely on the provenance of that, and have no recourse, what am I meant to do? We have even sent the receipt, indicating the card’s serial number and purchase location to Apple.

Much as I do think mixing pro and personal accounts is a mistake, as a person who has to pay several major corpos for subscription plans for professional software that include cloud storage, I admit I get it. Receiving spam about how full your free personal Google Drive is kinda sucks extra if you are already paying a bunch for an enterprise account with a bunch of storage on the side.