> Frankly who cares about [sex stuff] when ...

Don't ask me. I think the focus on sex things is utterly insane. However, even on Hacker News many people definitely seem extremely concerned at least about people under 18 having access to Internet pornography, which to me, clearly isn't even remotely close to the biggest problem adolescents are facing.

In America we're worried about 3D printed ghost guns. Why? Ostensibly it's because ghost guns are showing up more at crime scenes, since 3D printing is just so accessible these days. How many gun deaths do 3D printed guns currently account for? As far as I know, something on the order of magnitude of around 0.01%, at least in America. That number is probably mostly small because we never actually really did anything about regular gun violence.

This is not a new pattern. Nuclear energy has very few fatalities in its track record. Shockingly few when you consider its reputation. Depending on how you count it, it is pretty much a rounding error by any reasonable measure. Meanwhile, we send at least somewhere around 10,000 bodies to the morgue every year as a result of pollution from natural gas power plants. How many from nuclear? Probably less than one on average. Certainly nowhere near 10,000 no matter how you shake it, twist it or bend it. Even the dumbest and least reputable studies couldn't force the number to half as high, which is pretty funny to me. Is nuclear fission still the future? Given the density and reliability of energy production from fission it's hard to entirely count it out even in a mostly solar + battery future... yet here we are, with politicians arguing about the safety of ~0 deaths per year energy production method vs >10,000 deaths per year energy production method.

Does it matter that politicians are so interested in regulating sex when bigger issues are at stake? Well, yeah. It's no less alarming even if it seems trivial. Not everyone has to pick every battle, but to me free expression is my bugbear so I give a fuck when it's in the mouths of politicians. The apparatus for suppressing expression never stops where it starts. Never. It wouldn't be right if it did, but the point of trying to come up with something that sounds like an obvious net good is that it can make people more forgiving to implement a terrible idea and set an awful precedent.

Which, of course, is why it's pretty likely in the near future you will need a driver's license to reply to this comment.

Somehow, it started with Internet pornography.