A few comments:

1) we already have property taxes so I don't understand the objection; a land value tax is just a property tax with a different way of assessing value.

2) I don't think this idea of "not owning property, only renting it" is actually that crazy if you take a long term view over it. Land is a finite, shared resource. We already acknowledge that you don't have absolute rights over land that you own in the same way you do over, say, a toaster. We place all kinds of restrictions on what you can do with it, we tax its ownership, we have eminent domain laws, etc.

The idea of treating land as a pure asset has had a lot of negative social effects and ultimately will lead to a kind of neo-feudalism where the megarich own everything and the underclasses are perpetual renters.

Everything is a finite shared resource.

That's the point of ownership.

>The idea of treating land as a pure asset has had a lot of negative social effects and ultimately will lead to a kind of neo-feudalism where the megarich own everything and the underclasses are perpetual renters.

The idea that land is not a pure asset leads to regular feudalism.

I think the point is that (up to a limit that we're a long way from reaching) we can make more toasters to satisfy any additional demand that arises for toasters. But we can't make more land to satisfy any additional demand that arises for land. So we have to share the land in a way that we don't have to share toasters.

For all practical purposes property/ownership is a service provided by society, not a static "attribute" of stuff (the only exception is when you live entirely without any sort of contact with other people, in which case, however, the concept of property becomes void, at least practically). And any service carries a cost with it.

For instance, in our kind of societies, the institution of property requires, at the very least: (1) legislature that defines what property is and all the related rules, (2) the administrative part that handles property transfers and other issues, and keeps the record of who own what, (3) the judiciary system that interprets the legislation and resolves disagreements and other issues related to property, (4) the police or some other body that enforces and protects the whole system within the society, (5) the army that protect the property of the society against the claims of external groups. In our societies many of these institutions carry also other functions, but enabling the system of ownership is an important part of their job. And this service is very expensive --- so not paying any taxes on property means that those costs must be covered by some other sources (e.g. selling natural resources, income taxes, ...) and, usually, lead to a transfer of wealth within the society.

So the idea that you just "own" something (your house for instance) and any kind costs of that imposed on you by the society/government are unjust is completely and patently misguided. If anything, the opposite it true.

(That does not mean that the tax system must be necessarily constructed to reflect that, as there is no single and obvious correct way to design a tax system, and other important considerations enter that issue.)

how is this any different from the statement "a property tax means that you don't own the property but rent it"

Expectation that this comes with 0 cost just because it would suit you is a bit naive, innit

It very much does matter.

>Hey can I come into room 1?

Sure. That's the lobby.

>How about room 101?

Sure. That's where we keep the nuclear launch button. Don't press anything red.

Hacker or pentester.

Nope. There’s just a sign saying “red = launch nukes”.

Or maybe just a red button.

Or maybe just a green button that launches the nukes, without so much as “are you sure?”.

There are freedom respecting Linux projects, but those lead by redhat\ibm employees (past and present) don't.

Look at it from the perspective of a parent giving a device to a kid. Before, you’d have to deal with a maze of blocking content. You’d have to allow/blocklist a huge number of apps and services manually. If your kid discovers some new one you or your blocking service has never heard of, they’ve gotten around your parental control wishes.

With the age verification API, you just set the age in the OS (and lock it down with MDM or whatever) and now all the apps and websites have to respect it and act accordingly.

Your kid can’t just make a new account or download another browser or do some other crazy workaround to get around your restrictions. That setting is there at the OS level.

Fingerprinting, perhaps it is a higher risk, the age range is being more directly provided. However, once a user is under 18 they're already triggering more stringent privacy laws and rules, an inability to enter into contracts, etc, and then when you get to the "over 18" age range it all becomes rather vague.

Also, I highly doubt existing social media and Internet applications haven't already figured out most of their users' ages rather trivially using other means. Discord implicitly admits to this by saying that 90% of their users will not even be asked to verify their age. Discord already knows how old 90% of their users are with high confidence.

Of course when we talk about someone like Google or Discord we are talking about a privately operated service provider and business, which is a separate issue than the OS-level privacy flag and is worth separating as a distinctly different concept. Private businesses were always able to scan your identity documents or face pictures if they wanted to do that as a prerequisite to using their products or services regardless of the law. In almost all states, this practice was never banned, and even in states with more stringent biometrics collection requirements like Illinois you can still do this as long as it's implemented in a legally compliant way.

Go back to 1996 and tell someone that in 30 years the government will be legally able to look at everything they have written, taken pictures of, or recorded in the last 5 years in private and it use to retroactively punish them for any crime.

This is the law for cellphones and computers for anyone who lives within 100 miles of an ocean, border or airport.

The most draconian possible next steps we can imagine are far too Utopian for the world we live in.

As soon as it is established that you are not in the process of entering or leaving the country, what you are saying is not true.

E.g., A police officer in your city can't look through the contents of your phone without a warrant at a DUI stop just because you are within 100 miles of a border. The local police or TSA can't stop everyone in the airport and sift through their phones and documents on their person just because they are inside an airport. It must be in the context of a border crossing activity.

What you are saying about the government being legally able to look at everything you have written, taken pictures of, or recorded in the last 5 years in private to retroactively punish you for a crime is also broadly not true. The only thing that has truly changed is that it is far more difficult for average people to avoid leaking information through third parties.

If I take photos in private and keep them on my computer in my house, the government still needs a warrant to access those photos. The difference here is that entities like Meta could voluntarily give the government access to their data without a warrant if they chose to, and they may be more willing to divulge information via subpoenas. Also, a lot of people tend to just post information publicly that's easily accessed.

"Retroactively" punishing you for a crime is also a gross mischaracterization. For one thing, every crime you get punished for is "retroactive" in the sense of the crime having taken place in the past, so your use of the word is meaningless alarmism.

It was like 100 lines, a third of it is tests, and another third is a parse_calendar_date function.

What are you talking about, "infrastructure"? How complicated do you think storing a date is?

I don't understand the uproar. Systemd isn't perfect but it gets so much hate for the value it provides

Those are also just fields, and there's incoming laws in countries that target them. No internet for unsupervised women for example. You wouldn't want to break usability for the fine government servants of Afghanistan would you?

“What if instead of a user agent string, HTTP headers contained a string of your DNA, or a count of all the women that’ve ever rejected you for trying to get them to install Gentoo?”. Time to boycott web browsers I guess! even though none of it is mandatory! You’re really asking for someone to condescendingly send you the Wikipedia page for the slippery slope fallacy. I’m not going to be the one to do it, but I came close.

Systemd is doing just that and calling everyone who disagrees with them fascist.

Do you feel like systemd has been collecting your PII since 2020? If so, you have only yourself to blame, since it only stores what the user types in and nothing more. Birth date is exactly the same. Type some nonsense in that field if you like, or leave it blank.

I don't know, I use Open BSD.

  The gecos field normally contains comma separated subfields as follows:

    name    User's full name.
    office  User's office location.
    wphone  User's work phone number.
    hphone  User's home phone number.

Maybe one day you'll switch to a freedom respecting OS.

Children are made from a cell of the mother, combined with some DNA of the father. It is not created out of nothing or from scratch, it quite literally just one of the cells of the mother. So if a child survives one of the cells of the mother survives the mother's death.

Obviously the process involves resetting the "death counter". In fact there's a disease where that step seems to have gotten skipped: progeria.

This idea that corporate personhood is some perverse idea is silly. Corporations are just people acting in groups for economic benefit. Everything they do is done by members of those groups (or people they hire).

Similarly, AI is an inanimate tool, like a keyboard. No comment is posted by “bots” - comments are posted by humans running software.

The fact that they don't is crucial, and probably the very reason why the concept of corporations was invented.

Edit to add: I did buy my modern version of a CD player. It has no tone controls. I just have to accept whatever sound profile the manufacturer thought was normal and proper for everybody, which involves lots of bass and not enough middle. Nevertheless, albums! It's a way of life.

That's most humans.