There's an obvious theme with lawmakers in California—they pass laws to regulate things they have zero clue about, add them to their achievement page, cheer for themselves, and declare, "There! I've made the world a better place." There are just too many examples. For instance:
- Microstamping requirements for guns—printing a unique barcode on every bullet casing (Glock gen3 cannot be retired, thus, the auto-mode switch bug cannot be patched...)
- 3D printers should have a magical algorithm to recognize all gun parts in their tiny embedded systems
- Now, you need to verify your age... on your microwave?
At this rate, California should just go back to the Stone Age. Modern technology is simply not compatible with clueless politicians who are more eager to virtue-signal than to solve any actual problems or even borther to study the subject about the law they are going to pass. There will be more and more technology restrictions (or outright bans on use) in California because it's becoming impossible to operate anything here without getting sued or running afoul of some overreaching regulation.
The incentives are all wrong. You can serve up to 6 two-year terms in the Assembly or up to 3 four-year terms in the Senate, but regardless of which combination you do, nobody in the California legislature can serve more than 12 years combined across both Houses of the legislature.
So we don’t have professional legislatures with long-term electability incentives or leadership goals, we have a resumé-building exercise that we call the legislature. They’re all interchangeable and within 12 years, 100% of it will be changed out.
> So we don’t have professional legislatures with long-term electability incentives or leadership goals
Raises an interesting question of who is less popular, the Californian government or the US Senate. The experiments with long-term professional legislatures have generally not been very promising - rather than statesmen it tends to be people with a certain limpet-like staying power and a limpet-like ability to learn from their mistakes. In almost all cases people's political solution is just "well we didn't try my idea hard enough" and increasing their tenure in office doesn't really help the overall situation.
And yet, term limits are something many people want in the hopes that it will solve some of the problems in Washington DC.
There, the professional legislators can't get anything right either.
Do you think there's a middle ground of increasing the term limits to, say, 18 or 20 years?
Term limits are anti-democratic, and it's just a way for voters to not take responsibility for their voting.
A much more real issue is actually age limits. If someone starts in the Senate at 40 and serves for 24 years, term limits hardly seem to be the big issue. They are retiring at a normal time, and they should still be functioning at a high level.
Conversely, someone who gets elected at 70 and then gets term-limited at 82 is still over a normal, reasonable retirement age. The typical 82 is not in the physical or mental condition to be taking on such an important, high-stakes role.
Both of my parents are in their mid-70s and are in very good mental health for their age. They are very lucid, and my Dad still works part-time as a lawyer. They are also clearly not at the same intellectual powers they were a decade or two ago. Some of it can even just come down to energy levels. I have to imagine being a good legislator requires high energy levels.
Many public companies have age limits for board members, and they even have traditional retirement ages for CEOs. In the corporate world where results matter, there is a recognition that a high-stress, high-workload, high-cognitiative ability job is not something that someone should be doing well past their prime.
Al Gore had to leave the Apple board because he turned 75. In the U.S. Senate, there are 16 people 75 and older.
Age limits might be an alternative. Say at 65 or 70.
That's at an age where wizened legislators can move into advisory roles, instead of needing to find a next career.
> they pass laws to regulate things they have zero clue about
While you are correct with this statement in this context, I would say it applies to most things in government in general.
The vast majority of lawmakers have zero experience solving any real world problems and are content spending everyone else's money to play pretend at doing so.
The reality is, most government "solutions" cause more problems than they solve, after which, they blame their predecessors for all the problems they caused and the cycle continues.
> There's an obvious theme with lawmakers in California
You can remove the in California
Policies enacted elsewhere usually don't have the Brussels Effect.
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this
Young people generalize everything and end up not solving problems.
Older people have already seen all the patterns, and realize you have to focus on specifics, and that helps clean up the general issue.
The old people's tolerance for general problems is why the general problems persist.
A realistic dynamic is the old people are comfortable with the general problems and have positioned themselves to benefit from them. Indeed, they solved the general problems that troubled them in their youth with political activism in their middle age. The young people have different political needs that require general problems to be solved.
Also young people have a terrible track record of actually identifying problems, they are pretty clueless in the main.
Yeah but let’s not and say we didn’t.
I guess let’s say we also add Colorado to the growing list
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I’m more curious in the genesis of these laws, whether their sponsors received written suggestions or ghostwritten bills, etc. as a form of parallel construction.
It seems all at once, everywhere that many groups that have a vested interest in forcing precedent and compliance of non-anonymous access across the computer world. It smacks of something less-than-organic.
This law doesn't do anything that prevents non-anonymous access. Here's how you would access things anonymously if you bought a new computer that implemented this.
1. When you set up your account and it asks for your birthdate, make up any date you want that is at least far enough in the past to indicate an age older that what any site you might use that checks age requires.
2. Access things the way you've always done. All that has changed is that things that care about age checks find out you claim to be old enough.
The only people it actually materially affects on your new computer are people who cannot set up their own accounts, such as children if you have set up permissions so they have to get you to make their accounts.
Then if you want you can enter a birthdate that gives an age that says non-adult, so sites that check age will block them.
From a privacy and anonymity perspective this is essentially equivalent to sites that ask "Are you 18+?" and let you in if you click "yes" and block you if you click "no". It is just doing the asking locally and caching the result.
I was curious about your question and googled. Here's the legislative history of the law: https://leginfo.legislature.ca.gov/faces/billTextClient.xhtm....
Reading the first analysis PDF:
> This bill, sponsored by the International Centre for Missing and Exploited Children and Children Now, seeks to require device and operating systems manufacturers to develop an age assurance signal that will be sent to application developers informing them of the age-bracket of the user who is downloading their application or entering their website. Depending on the age range of the user, a parent or guardian will have to consent prior to the user being allowed access to the platform. The bill presents a potentially elegant solution to a vexing problem underpinning many efforts to protect children online. However, there are several details to be worked out on the bill to ensure technical feasibility and that it strikes the appropriate balance between parental control and the autonomy of children, particularly older teens. The bill is supported by several parents’ organizations, including Parents for School Options, Protect our Kids, and Parents Support for Online Learning. In addition, the TransLatin Coalition and The Source LGBT+ Center are in support. The bill is opposed by Oakland Privacy, TechNet, and Chamber of Progress.
Death threats mainly. Personally I think it would be easier if they just made it so that platforms ran a tiny LLM against the content that will be posted - determined if it is a death threat, then require them to be identified before it's posted, then it would solve a lot of these problems.
TLDR: Evil people be doxxed internally not everyone.
That turns jokes into contracts that nobody wants. Bad idea.
a "tiny large language model"? lol
Yeah, a small one that is cheaper because they'll be processing billions of messages per year.
Good thing all the kind people doing death threats won’t just bypass it?
> Now, you need to verify your age... on your microwave?
Anyone buying or selling a microwave with an app store deserves this mess.
Downvoter (and GP) didn't RTFA. This is addressed in the parts of the law TFA quotes.
Technology is currently worring for a lot of people so the moronic response is to simply reject it.
Not just 3D printers but all subtractive CNC machines too.
Frankly, look at how hard it was to make a sten. Even just a lathe and a welder is likely sufficient.
I'm, again, glad to run linux. The distro I run has no affiliated online "account" at all, and I would expect this exempts it from the requirement.
I'm no democrat, although I'm sure as hell no republican, and as a resident of the state, I'm also a routine critic of the California state government.
I agree that a lot of their activities are indeed, performance art in nature.
However I do agree with the identification requirements on guns and ammo.
You can't shoot someone with a computer, no matter what OS you run.
The idea that lethal weaponry is the same as any other consumer product is just not accurate.
Political office in general attracts the sort of people who like the "performance art" parts of it. It doesn't attract the sorts of people who like "getting things done" because the political process by design moves at a snail's pace, and if you actually solved problems you would remove issues run on in the next campaign.
This doesn't have anything to do with democrats and republicans, considering that this bill passed unanimously through every committee and both chambers.
It's about as easy to restrict the proliferation of firearms and ammunition as it is to restrict the proliferation of open source software. Anyone can make functional firearms out of supplies from any hardware store, this is true regardless of how many laws you pass. Look at the weapon that was used to assassinate Shinzo Abe. That was manufactured and used in a country with gun control laws that basically make California's gun control look indistinguishable from Texas. No number of laws have ever or will ever stop criminals with a rudimentary grasp of basic physics and basic chemistry.
You can't put the genie of firearms back in the bottle any more than Hollywood can put the genie of p2p file sharing back in the bottle. Trying to do so is like trying to unscramble eggs. It doesn't matter how valid your desires or justifications for attempting to so are, it's an act of banging your own head against the cold, hard wall of reality.
It's a logical mistake to say that because an extremely motivated person can still cause harm somehow that implies no regulation or policy can have any positive impact anywhere.
I don't have a stance here on what "the right" policies around gun control are but it is clearly a much wider field than just a preplanned assassination with diy parts.
A non-exhaustive list of a few very different scenarios that are all involved with anything touching or rejecting gun control:
- highly motivated, DIY-in-the-basement assassination plots like you mentioned - hunting for food - hunting for fun - wilderness safety - organized crime and gang related violence - mass shootings at things like concerts, sporting events, colleges. Sub point of mass shootings at schools where the law requires children to be. - gun violence involved with suddenly escalating impromptu violence like road rage and street/bar fights - systematic intimidation / domestic terrorism of particular groups or areas - gun related suicides
All of these are very very different. None of them have perfect answers but that doesn't make thinking about it "an act of banging your own head against the cold, hard wall of reality" nor does it make anyone interested in working on some of these problems naive or stupid like you imply.
If you're being earnest or maybe jaded, I'd say dont give up hope and don't let perfect be the enemy of good.
If you're just being a dick then so be it, maybe someone else gets something out of this comment.
> It's a logical mistake to say that because an extremely motivated person can still cause harm somehow that implies no regulation or policy can have any positive impact anywhere
That kind of mistake is common here, but I don't think it is due to a failure of logic. I think it is something deeper.
I've noticed that people who have worked deeply and/or a long time as developers tend to lose the ability to see things as a continuum. They see them as quantized, often as binary.
That's also why there are so many slippery slope arguments made around here that go from even the most mild initial step almost immediately to a dystopian hellscape.
This is prevalent enough that it arguably should be considered an occupational hazard for developers and the resultant damage to non-binary thinking ability considered to be a work related mental disability with treatment for it covered by workers compensation.
A way to protect against developing this condition is to early in your career seriously study something where you have to do a lot of non-binary thinking and there are often aren't any fully right answers.
A good start would be make part of the degree requirement for a bachelor's degree in computer science (and maybe any hard science or engineering) in common law countries a semester of contract law and a semester of torts. Teach these exactly like those same courses are taught in first year law school. Both contracts and torts are full of things that require flexible, non-binary, thinking.
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