[cgriswald]

Which is exactly why all people everywhere giving up their privacy will also be ineffective.

Drugs, alcohol, cigarettes, pornography were all illegal for me to access as a kid but I wouldn’t have had any trouble getting any of it.

[blindriver]

over 10 years ago, I had an intern from Harvard CS tell me that privacy is irrelevant unless you're doing something that you want to hide. I was gobsmacked that someone would not cherish their privacy but since then I've realized many don't care at all and have the same attitude that "I don't have anything to hide."

[hunterpayne]

Well that's your mistake right there. You hired someone from Harvard. Unless you are hiring that person to use their connections to market your product, there is no reason to hire someone from Harvard. They just bring bad ideology and STDs from Russian hookers to the table and nobody wants that.

PS This post is partly satire, I will leave it to you as to which part is serious.

[sarchertech]

Maybe at 16, not at 8.

[tsimionescu]

Many of my school colleagues started smoking around 10-11 years old. All of us had tasted alchol by then, and some of them were definitely drinking the occasional beer. Older kids sometimes brought porn magazines in school and would show younger kids too (still talking about pre-highscool here). Now, this was childhood in Romania in the 1990s and early 2000s, soon after the fall of communsim, so maybe not so applicable everywhere else, but still - I doubt that there is any problem for a resourceful 8-10 year old even today to get some of these things.

[sarchertech]

There’s a difference between “saw a playboy once” and having regular or semi regular access to it.

Same goes for alcohol and cigarettes.

In the US, if you had regular access to those things, you had parents who didn’t care.

It’s also not about kids on the margin. The vast majority of 8 year olds in the US have not tried alcohol, drugs, or cigarettes.

I can’t rely speak to post Cold War Romania.

[cgriswald]

The older kids are often the easy source for the younger kids. At 8 I had already seen a Playboy and knew kids who had seen harder stuff. I could have easily gotten a teenager to get me cigarettes (and drugs, but I didn’t know what those were really). I had also already tasted alcohol. Any of this I could have stolen from any number of places.

At 16 it was easier, but at 8 it wasn’t hard.

[sarchertech]

There’s a difference between “saw a playboy once” and having regular or semi regular access to it.

Same goes for alcohol and cigarettes.

If you had regular access to those things you had parents who didn’t care.

It’s also not about kids on the margin. The vast majority of 8 year olds have not tried alcohol, drugs, or cigarettes.

[cgriswald]

There’s also a difference between “saw my first” and “saw a playboy once.” I need you to understand I was a good kid whose parents cared until they divorced some years later. And yet I had multiple sources of access to this stuff without looking for it. Now, as an adult, I can see more ways I could have gotten it if I wanted it.

[sarchertech]

Again, if you occasionally caught a glimpse of a playboy, that’s not a significant problem.

If you were regularly smoking cigarettes, drinking alcohol, and reading porn magazines at 8 yeas, your parents fell down on the job. An 8 year old doesn’t have the wherewithal to hide that from parents who are paying attention.

> Now, as an adult, I can see more ways I could have gotten it if I wanted it.

Yeah a kid with the mind of an adult could access all kinds of illegal material.

Making it illegal to rob a bank doesn’t mean that’s it’s literally impossible. It’s about stopping enough people from trying that society functions.

The state of the world before the internet was that it was hard to keep a kid from ever glimpsing a titty, but it was relatively easy to keep a kid from having regular access to hard core porn-much, much easier than it is now. My take is that as a society we need to figure out some way to make this easy enough for parents to do that it becomes the default. Just like drugs, alcohol, and porno mags.

Another issue is that online porn and algorithmic brain rot is free (at least enough of it is). With IRL contraband, lack of money is a big limiting factor for kids. The IRL equivalent would be if the local liberal let 8 year olds checkout hard core porn DVDs.

[cgriswald]

Yeah. Anyway, porn, cigarettes, alcohol, and drugs were very accessible to me despite being a good kid with parents who cared in a world where those were all legally forbidden to me.

All this talk of “glimpses” is you trying to read too deep into a single example.

I’m not using my adult mind to figure out how I could have gotten this stuff as a kid. I’m using my adult mind to recognize that if I had been motivated as a kid, there are additional ways I. as a kid, would have been able to figure out how to get it.

I’m not throwing my hands up in the air and saying this is impossible or that we should just open up access. I’m saying requiring ID for access wasn’t effective before and it won’t be effective in a world with easier access. Yet the cost of that is quite high. Scan these threads for actual ideas, I’m not arguing for any particular one but there are plenty of them and some I think are good.

[bdangubic]

you are writing this as if you were never a kid yourself... there is absolutely nothing I wasn't able to "get" as a kid - some stuff I had to jump through some hoops but end-result would always end up being the same. if I wanted to watch hardcore porn, there was a way, if I wanted to smoke a cigarette, there was a way. if I wanted to drink, there was a way. and make it "forbidden" made it ever more appealing for me to get it as a kid. I grew up in society where alcohol was not a big deal, I was buying alcohol for my parents when I was 6-years old, would get sent to the store to get stuff and among the stuff was always beer and sometimes wine if my parents were expecting some guests. most of my friends growing up never thought of alcohol as something cool, we had easy access to it so it was like a rights of passage or anything like that and it showed, just about no one was doing any drinking while we were teenagers. when I came to america junior year of high school I was stunned at home much effort my schoolmates were making to acquire alcohol - could not really understand what the big deal is until I realized that was because it was forbidden and acquiring beer etc for a friday evening chill made one a cool kid.

the only barrier I have ever had to doing stupid things was the wrath of my parents. the punishment(s) levied when I did stupid shit was always such that I would very seldom-to-never-again consider doing whatever stupid shit I did. it always starts and ends with parents. you can put in whatever "laws" you want (which will always get weaponized politically at some point either immediately or at a later time) but end of the day the buck starts and stops with parents...