That's a non sequitur. Creating long-term professional politicians is not going to create legislators competent in the various domains they legislate on. It's going to create politicians competent at being elected long term, whatever the means.

> 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.

Your solution to politicians being out of touch with reality is to let them remain in office longer?

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?

> professional legislatures

That should not be a profession.

Decisions should be made by people who are the most informed about the subject matter. By definition you cannot have someone who is the most informed about everything.

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.

Policies enacted elsewhere usually don't have the Brussels Effect.

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.

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this

Yeah but let’s not and say we didn’t.

For most modern guns, it would be the firing pin, also called the "striker". Nobody manufactures microstamped guns, but if they did, the striker is a $20 part you can replace in ten minutes - or you could just spend half an hour on target practice at your local range, because 200 rounds are apparently enough to wear the etching down to illegibility.

Do you have a term sheet?

Not just that, but the the copy of Minix in the intel IME of every intel processor.

Not to mention all the printers, routers, etc that run freertos/thread x/vxworks.

> The reality is, most government "solutions" cause more problems than they solve

The "reality" is that propaganda heavily encourages you to ignore the government successes and only focus on the failures. I'll leave it as an exercise for the reader to determine who benefits from that.

I see Massachusetts as sort of the non-insane liberal counterpoint to California.

Things work here and nobody seems to be passing the "oops my unintended side effects and clueless regulations messed things up horribly." Or, if they do, it is at something like 1/10th the level.

We didn't start warning label spam everywhere. We don't have weird propositions that are causing run-away housing prices. There aren't bar codes on our 3d printers, or cookie banner requirements on every website. Well, ok we do, but that nonsense all came in from other places.

We did pass laws to lower PFAS/PFOAS. That seems reasonable. Government can work.

most government "solutions" cause more problems than they solve

Zero basis in fact. We’re in the wealthiest nation on the planet. Most of us live better than any previous generation. To claim all that success is completely in spite of government is ridiculous.

It's true, and yet there are real market failures that even a very ineffective government can improve on dramatically, like innovation & research output via basic science.

Yeah, the commercial firms invented them all on their own just to keep tracking customers and oversharing whatever data they gather with random third parties while still getting to complain about stupid laws that require them to do so [0].

[0] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=46521179

The micro stamping law is in no way reasonable because removing the micro stamping from the end of a firing pin is laughably trivial. The only people who won’t do this are people who weren’t going to break the law in the first place.

Even people who didn’t want to break the law might find themselves on the receiving end of law-enforcement if the firing pin wears such that the micro stamping is no longer identifiable.

The micro stamping law does nothing to prevent the flow of guns to people who should not have them, and does everything to prevent the use or purchase of guns by people who can lawfully own them - which is the whole point of a law like this. The people who make these laws are well aware of this.

The age verification law, coupled with the proposed hardware attestation that our good friend Lennart poettering is working on will ensure that anonymity on the Internet is gone. This is precisely what lawmakers are aiming for. And just like the micro stamping law, the intent of the law is not the literal word of the law.

Downvoter (and GP) didn't RTFA. This is addressed in the parts of the law TFA quotes.

Democracy rewards mass appeal, and that in turn encourages demagoguery and gives a platform for stupidity. It's been an unavoidable problem with the system since Athens.

Frankly, look at how hard it was to make a sten. Even just a lathe and a welder is likely sufficient.

Why should it be law? I am a developer in California, and a long time Linux nerd. If I were to release a hobby on my GitHub for fun, without age verification, am I now subject to fines? Imprisonment? Why should their be a legal requirement?

How is this good at all for a free society? You are basically making a "what about the children?" argument. its the parent job to protect their children. why should anyone suffer this b.s.?

All the better to do targeted advertisments and underdeveloped minds!

> You can't shoot someone with a computer, no matter what OS you run.

No, you can just target-lock them. The computer database (and now, LLM) is probably the biggest threat to freedom in existence. You can keep your popgun. They'll know where it is, and come with bigger ones.

China be doing some pretty heavy-duty damage with computers, but age-gates won't stop them.

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.

3d shape classification is different from matching a set of well-known, mostly fixed patterns (like eurion constellation) necessary to detect currency.

With 3d shapes of non-governmental origin this is at best difficult and at worst intractable. Consider the fact that many parts of a gun can be split into multiple printable pieces to be later assembled, making it very nontrivial to decipher the role of the shape.

With currency, the government has the controls for the supply of the target shape (it can encode hidden signals onto banknotes) and effectively controls the relroduction side (through the pressure on printer manufacturers). But it cannot control the supply of gun-part-shapes (it is not the only source for it), and since the problem is likely intractable - neither can it enforce the control on the 3d printing side.

Paper money being almost non-fungible is a great achievement, but is it as easy to make any mesh nonfungible as well?

> It seems relatively simple to implement gun part recognition today, especially with the recent leap in image recognition capability

And it's sits fine with you because you are the one who wouldn't pay the price for this "simple image recognition capability". Except you would pay of course, indirectly but at least you wouldn't know for sure so your conscience would feel at ease.

> All this does is require the user to select a non-verified age bracket on first boot.

This is the age verification requirement which you rudely and incorrectly said doesn't exist. Nothing is done with the data (for now) but age is in fact verified on the assumption that the user doesn't lie.

Instead of lengthy condescending missives about the behavior of other users, you should instead write "I'm sorry for being negative and bringing down the quality of discussion."