My Distaste For Your Solution Does Not Mean Disregard For The Problem
from the just-saying dept
This keeps coming up in different contexts, so I thought I might write a short (ha, as if I can write short things!) blog post that I can point to on various occasions. I spend a lot of time here on Techdirt highlighting why your favorite solution to (*waves hands*) some big societal problem won’t work, and will probably make things worse.
We can go down the list. Getting rid of anonymity to fix social media. Creating a new “fairness doctrine” for cable news or social media. Age verification for social media. Removing Section 230 to stop bullies. Creating a “duty of care” for social media companies. Requiring social media companies to get a special license from a Digital Platform Commission. Creating laws for blocking entire websites because of some copyright infringement.
And on and on and on.
In some debates I’ve had over the past few weeks, whenever I highlight the problems of various proposed solutions, rather than responding to them, I’m told that my statement shows I “don’t care” about the underlying problem (though usually in angrier language about how I want people to die, don’t care about the children who are dying, don’t care about starving artists, don’t care about the end of democracy, etc.).
That’s wrong.
I do care about all of those things. That’s why I think it’s important to point out why your preferred (or proposed) solution doesn’t help and will often make the problem significantly worse.
Too often, these comments from supporters of these solutions are really a form of “we must do something, this is something, we will do this.”
I understand that there are real (and justified) concerns about the problems you’re trying to address. But it does no one any good to put in place solutions that don’t actually solve the problems. In fact, it can do significant harm on multiple levels.
Now, the retort that some will have is that I can’t criticize a proposed solution unless I have something “better.” Well, in many cases not doing anything is a “better” solution than making things worse. Sometimes I do have suggestions on better ways forward, and I’ll write about them. Sometimes, the issues are complicated and intractable enough that I don’t have a good solution, and know enough not to suggest something in a space where I don’t see any good options. But that doesn’t mean that your solution is any good.
So, please, can we stop assuming that my concerns about your solution mean I don’t care about the underlying problems? There may be cases where I think your interpretation of the problem is incorrect, or overblown, or out of context. There may be times when I think you’re underplaying the problem. Neither of those matter.
If the discussion is about the solution, we can focus simply on whether or not that solution will make things better or not (or worse or not!) without making it a referendum on whether or not I take the problem itself seriously.
Comments on “My Distaste For Your Solution Does Not Mean Disregard For The Problem”
I always figured you took the problem seriously. When you don’t take the problem seriously, your posts tend to be a bit sarcastic (I’m looking at former-twitter).
“Now, the retort that some will have is that I can’t criticize a proposed solution unless I have something “better.” Well, in many cases not doing anything is a “better” solution than making things worse. ”
I wish more people acknowledged this.
Re:
“But we must do something and this is something.”
Wrong title?
“You have been directed here because you suggested a simple yet unworkable solution to some problem…”
All you need is an H. L. Mencken quote to round it out.
Age verification
As I’ve posted in the past, and sorry to harp on it, I have proposed age verification using a server header and a browser setting. If there is something wrong with this rubric, point it out.
Server says in the header block (First thing that gets returned before any content) “This site is intended for X age”. That is a simple setting. No programming required, just a string to be added to the return.
The user’s own browser has a setting that simply doesn’t show the content if the user is too young. Since kids can rarely afford their own devices, parents get to act as gate keepers by configuring the device before giving it to Johnny. This does require some programming (more secure), either in the browser or in a script manger add on (not very secure).
No, it doesn’t stop everything. Will it stop 95%? Likely. Will it stop 80%? I think so, given a competent software implementation. “But but but kids will crack it!” – see competent. It can’t be impossible, but it can be difficult.
I don’t see any obvious flaws, but then again, I’m not always correct either.
I think it’s a good compromise until one of three things happen:
1. People stop thinking it the job of the world to raise their kid.
2. Americans stop freaking out over sex and going to the bathroom.
3. Someone else proposes a less invasive, more free choice.
But this is so obvious, it is an inescapable conclusion that those that want to “protect the chiiiiillllllldddddrrrreeeennnnn!” are actually seeking to control adults, and don’t really give a shit about the kids as long as they get what they want (power).
Re:
The ‘problem’ with our solution is that it requires parents to protect their own kids, and it does not allow busybodies to protect your kids for you. Also, it does not have a potentials chilling effect on the viewing of porn by identifying those that view it. Therefore you solution does not meet the needs of those who wish to control others.
Re:
Two problems that I see:
First…
Sorry, but this is the “nerd harder” solution. For this to be an effective proposal, you need to bring to the table the details that make it, as you put it, “competent”.
Second…
You vastly underestimate the intelligence of children, who have all the motivation in the world to work around your solutions.
For a simple example: Not all browsers will implement your solution. Child-in-question will find and use one such. Your riposte would be “include all such browsers in the censorship regime”, and you would immediately be in a rabbit hole (or arms race) that you cannot possibly win and retain anything that looks like the internet.
Re: Re:
Age verification by a site is also easily cracked, as what kid cannot get a parents credit card details, or a photo of a driving license. Couple age verification with video at the time of verification and an older sibling or fried does the login, and then lets the younger person use the session.
That is, without intrusive and continuous video monitoring, online age verification enables the session. Ulike a club, where age verification verifies the age of those who enter, online verification only sometimes verifies the age of the person who opened the door, and cannot see who, or how many enter through that opened door.
Re: Re: Re:
The OP’s comment requires that all websites include a “recommended age” tag in the original browser response, and the browser itself decides what to do with that.
This wouldn’t even require changing browsers for a child to evade; my kids would just open the debug console and do a “change in place” on the response.
And then they’d write a bookmarklet for their friends that does this, and send the URL for the bookmarklet to those friends. Those friends would pass it on to their friends, and so on. Unless kids aren’t allowed to bookmark stuff on the Internet, this is broken.
A better approach for me was teaching my kids enough that they’re not trying to get around age controls in the first place, unless those controls are stopping them from accessing content they should be reasonably expected to have access to. And in those cases, they have no problem gaining that access, sometimes to the relief of their school teachers.
Re: Re: Re:2
Turning off developer tools is trivial and the same sort of browser setting that needs to be controlled with an age limit. Simple solution is don’t let kids use your account, make them an account with out administrator rights.
Re: Re: Re:3
Yes, that is trivial.
However, this ignores the fact that you can get control of a computer at a lower level. Most parents won’t even know what UEFI (or BIOS) is. Even if they do lock out booting from external media in the firmware, some firmware is backdoored (most notably Dell firmware, but others as well) so the firmware password can be reset if it is forgotten. Multiple such backdoors have been reverse engineered and code generators made. It only takes one motivated or tech-savvy kid to get a live USB out.
Plus, even if developer tools are turned off through “trivial” means (usually enterprise policy, which can be somewhat difficult to set without some tech knowledge and motivation) the headers can be modified before the browser sees the response using tools like Burp Suite or mitmproxy.
Re: Re: Intelligence of kids
“You vastly underestimate the intelligence of children, who have all the motivation in the world to work around your solutions.”
My across the street neighbor is a teacher. He told me a 2nd grader showed him how to set up a proxy server in Windows to bypass the school system’s filters so he could access sites he needed.
Re: Re: Re:
Well, that’s an issue someone should raise with IT. I know I had to chase a few of those sorts of proxies down a few times until we started downloading the same list of open proxies the kids found (traffic analysis helped there) and adding them as a a local block list provider.
However, a proxy doesn’t really enter into the situation here. Again, children usually cannot afford to purchase the platforms they use. Parents need to set up those platforms before giving it to the child (or pay someone else to do so. But really, how hard is it to enter month and year of a birthday?) Deploying this to schools is a browser setting, and enforced at the platform level like any other setting using their chosen mechanism. If a school can’t afford IT people to set this up, well, Universal Access funding doesn’t cover salary last I looked, and right now I can’t recall where we got public funding for some of our IT crew. I know the network admin was paid via E-RATE (Texas), and the security gal was paid for by another public fund other than the O&M budget.
Re: Re: Re:2
Who can, what, just “nerd harder”? And then the kid look at the banned stuff—-now all the more tempting—on their phone, maybe via a wi-fi hotspot from some nearby house.
When I went to high school in the 1990s, people would sometimes open up Playboy in the computer lab. The teacher would tell them to knock it off, and that was the end of it. Who cares?
There are proxy settings, but you’re vastly overstating the simplicity. For example, a kid could visit https://web.archive.org/save/example.com. One could block archive.org, but not without collateral damage. It’s why China quickly unblocked github.com, despite it having political content they disliked.
Re: Re: Re:3 Speaking of archive.org
I hear that Three (the UK ISP) will block archive.org using BGP hijacking if parental controls are enabled, redirecting all traffic to a proxy that serves a HTTP response.
Trouble is, it will still do that even on a HTTPS connection, leading to HTTP traffic appearing in the middle of a TLS handshake, which the client really dislikes.
Re: Re: Re:3
As I was one doing the “nerd harder” directly, with inadequate funding, almost no staffing, I have to wonder why you keep thinking I don’t understand the challenges.
Again, you are demanding a 100% solution. For the third time, again, such solutions are not possible. Stop trying to frame it as such and see it as a “Best Endeavor” effort. Trust me, you’ll sleep better. I know I did.
Re: Re: Re:4
I don’t know whether you do or don’t understand, and it doesn’t much matter—none of this is about you specifically. Writing stuff like “Deploying this to schools is a browser setting, and enforced at the platform level” and “raise [the issue of proxy bypasses] with IT” makes it sound like a simple thing, which it’s not. And a group with inadequate staffing or funding shouldn’t be trying to solve a non-problem.
I’m certainly not demanding a 100% solution (per the above, I dispute the “problem” and think 0% would be a better target). It’s just that the thing being proposed looks a hell of a lot like two things we already tried, that didn’t work—as in, “this is completely unusable and we’re removing the feature from our browser”, not “it only blocks 80% of the bad stuff”. (Which, by the way, says nothing about sites that are blocked and shouldn’t be.)
Why would this thing work where all previous such efforts have failed?
Re: Re: Re:
It only really takes 1 Google/DuckDuckGo/Searx/(insert search engine here) search for a kid to start to figure out how to get around a firewall. Back in primary school, I learned how to use a commercial VPN offering, then later on I learned about onion routing. At the time, I had admin access on a personal laptop. Now, I could bypass nearly any firewall you could configure, using a variety of means (WireGuard, OpenVPN over TCP port 443, SSH tunneling over TCP port 443, Tor, Tor with Snowflake (short-lived proxies distributed over a domain-fronted web site), and I could likely set up more unusual tunnels (IP over DNS and IP over ICMP) should I need to).
Why did I learn this? Because firewalls inconvenienced me (overblocking). At secondary school, the domain used for Ubuntu PPAs was blocked, breaking software updates on my computer. The workaround was to configure apt to access those repositories over Tor so as to bypass the firewall. At home, a lot of Minecraft servers were blocked by the ISPs content filter for some reason. My parents literally gave me the credentials to override the filter because when I encountered it, it was getting in the way rather than actually blocking age-restricted content, as I had no desire to search for such content. Eventually, they stopped using the firewall since it got in their way once (it broke payments for an indoor skydiving centre they were booking) and I immediately busted out Tor Browser and was able to get a working version of the website.
Children have intelligence, and if your cotton wool covering gets in their way, they will gain a huge reservoir of motivation to find a way around your cotton wool.
Re: Re: Re:2
Yep, I remember back at mine, the IT staff had their own separate gateway with none of the restrictions in place on it that the rest of the network had. It was fairly trivial once a bunch of us students learned of its existence to get access to it, and the staff weren’t going to snitch on us for using it because they didn’t want to have to explain to the higher ups that they had their own private system that existed purely for their use in pirating media on the institution’s network connection.
Re: Re:
As a 45 year veteran of at scale (meaning something north of a few thousand servers) technology, I think I am likely more aware of the technical details than you are crediting me with. And I will hasten to add that experience is simply another way to go wrong with confidence, but it “should be” a tiny bit harder for me than for one with less experience.
As a twenty year veteran in K-12, I think I am likely somewhat aware of the inventiveness of children and their parent’s economic need to work three jobs, inability, unwillingness, laziness, or substance abuse issues that make it possible for their child to get up to mischief.
They don’t need to. Only the one’s the parental unit allows on the device they purchase for their child.
You anticipated me badly. Again, a child usually cannot afford their own devices. Parents need to either take responsibility for raising their child, inflicting their particular moral choices themselves or pay someone that can. If they can’t afford the service of setting it up and don’t wish to do it themselves, that is their choice as well.
Which is very likely why I didn’t jump down that rabbit hole. In fact, reference the 20 year stint in K-12 and I have at least one story for each year where I explained these very facts, patently (no one was murdered, despite my inner warring emotions) explaining this point.
As for inducing adult content sites to include the header in the first place, in my other twenty years after K-12, I’ve rarely come across sites that would not willingly place the header. Those that don’t, we drop back to the simple stand by of blocking lists the parental units apply (or pay to have applied) to the device destined for the child.
An old maxim: Perfect is the enemy of good enough. If it’s good enough, trivial to implement, then lets go with an even only 80% solution until someone smarter and better funded, more intelligent, than an aging reprobate like myself can manage.
Re:
That isn’t age verification per se. It’s also fine as an optionfor parents if it isn’t a legal mandate. Software and services with similar ends have been around for ages, so problem solved.
Re: V-Chip?
So your idea is basically to use an even less effective, software-based V-Chip, which Congress mandated and few people ever used?
Great idea!
(BTW – any 10-year-old can install a new browser on mom’s computer (which likely already has multiple browsers on it), rendering your solution pointless.)
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/V-chip
Re: Re:
If you’d like to put it that way, I can’t refute you. How Clipper framed the solution is a different light than this framework.
Clipper was designed as “Keep bad stuff out”. What I’m thinking of is simply that the server either says nothing at all, (no restrictions) or that there is content commonly thought (by who is a valid question there) that below a particular age (What ever it is) is inappropriate for that age group. What happens after that is device (which parental units purchase for their kids) dependent.
If you are concerned enough to want to restrict the browsing habits, then preventing the installation of software would be higher on the list to control than internet browsing.
Unix (or Linux) is excellent at implementing usage controls for the past 30 years. Android isn’t too bad either, and I have no idea in iOS, so you may be correct there. Windows, meh. You don’t get what you paid for.
As to the clipper chip, I’m wondering why people didn’t pick up on the fact that most kids cannot afford to purchase their platforms. A parent needs to do that for them. The clipper chip was designed to try to prevent anyone, not just kids, and failed at… well, almost everything. The dirty secret here is that Dad was afraid he wouldn’t be able to play his porn VHS. Don’t laugh. I was an adult at the time. It came up. And while what I proposed does have the weakness that it takes a concerned parent to make sure things get set up, it does not impact those that are adults and purchase their own hardware.
And there are no mandates here. I’m against that. If a parent doesn’t want this on their system, simply do not turn it on.
Re:
My suspicion is that a kid who’s sophisticated enough to crack browser security is not going to have their innocence ruined by seeing porn on the Internet. They’ve seen it already.
For that matter, any kid who’s old enough to be interested in porn is going to be able to find it. Heck, when I was a boy (I’m an old man now), every other boy I knew had a stash of girlie magazines somewhere. Well, at least, every straight boy, and most of the others might not have been that interested but still stashed them to fit in better with the peers. We didn’t talk about alternative sexual and gender preferences very much. My barber did a lot of clandestine sales of raunchier stuff than you could pick up on the newsstand or in a regular bookstore. (He had some 8mm movies, too, but I didn’t have a projector that I could use surrepetitiously, so never bought.)
I can’t imagine that finding sexually explicit material is any harder nowadays than it was back then. My answer to “it’ll harm the children!” is “it never did you or me all that much harm, did it?”
Re:
We tried it in the 1990s: look up PICS and RSACi. It was built into Internet Explorer for a while.
The first problem with a simple “age” tag is that nobody agrees what’s appropriate for what age, which becomes evident the first time one sees a penis on British television (something even most R-rated films would never dare to show in America). Is it okay for a child to see a nipple? Does that depend on the sex of the person to whom it’s attached, or on their gender, or would either condition be unacceptably discriminatory? Guns and gun violence, though, the USA hardly seems to mind at all—a view that many Europeans disagree with, which is reflected in ratings.
So, you’ll have to have separate ratings in each category. Which I think is what PICS sought to allow, though it was a moot point because almost no site administrators actually used it to rate their sites. Did parents want to block 99.9% of sites, leaving a Disneyfied view of the web, or block only those that specifically declared themselves “adult”? (Also moot because it was mostly the kids who knew how to adjust that setting. I suspect more kids blocked porn from their parents than vice versa.)
Humans can’t even agree on what “adult” means. People seem to think it means “at least 18 years old” in the USA—and, by extension, the whole internet—though the age of majority goes as high as 21 in Mississippi and the age of consent for sexual activity goes as low as 13 in several states.
Re: Re:
I didn’t spend the time required to try to sort out PICs from cat memes when I searched. RSACi, (Recreational Software Advisory Council) was simply a different type of RIAA and MPAA. If you want gates to keep your kids out of things, then you’re going to have to appoint gate keepers, there is simply no avoiding it. However, to accommodate your point, adding another header or combining it with the council that came up with the rating is also trivial and doesn’t break an age only header.
Agreed. But requiring an analysis of each individual’s level of maturity and responsibility is more effort than 99% are willing to set forth when they are not stakeholders in the issue. So simple chronological age becomes the inescapable lazy way out. Observe that most jurisdictions (not simply the US) have mechanisms to emancipate minors at need.
And again, the point here is not to force a top down solution, simply invite the stake holders to rise to the occasion. Apache, lighthttpd and nginx servers need no mods, simply configuration. Browsers are a trivial software change, and most alternatives are simply ports of the base code from others. No, it’s not a 100% solution. The only question is if it’s worth pursuing a 80%+ answer, and if so, how to start.
Re: Re: Re:
And I’m saying that even a half-assed content assessment was more effort than 99.9% of people were willing to set forth in the 1990s. Here’s the PICS I meant, by the way. The page also mentions an alternate “Voluntary Content Rating self-rating system [that] offers as its only guidance the instructions that self-raters should determine whether their sites are ‘not suitable for children under the age of 13,’ and whether they include material ‘intended for an audience 18 years of age or older.'” That was from 2010, and uses a name=”voluntary content rating” meta tag, with a value of “mature” or “adult”. Ever seen one of those?
Regarding the latter, I see some guidelines saying that information about birth control means a site is unsuitable for people under 13. Who, despite what adults may want or expect, are often fucking each other. So, we’ve got at least two systems that could be used as starting points—but no view of how to finish this, and some serious fundamental disagreements on what’s appropriate for children.
Re:
This seems like it could actually have some benefit. For people who want to opt out of seeing such content, it would work with far fewer false positives.
For people who actively seek out such content, it would be trivial to bypass should it be enforced by the endpoint through any of the following methods:
1)Replacing some or all of the software on the endpoint. Most parents don’t bother to lock down the firmware of the computer (even when it is not backdoored by the manufacturer) and it would be trivial for a child to boot a live DVD or USB image with software they control. Even if they can’t flash one themselves, they may be able to get one from a friend – additionally some computer-related magazines give out free live DVDs (this is how I obtained my first live DVD).
2)Tampering with the header at the network level. This would be trivial to do with something like Burp Suite or mitmproxy, assuming HTTP(S) is being used. Both of these tools could be scripted to remove the header automatically.
3)Transferring the content using a different method. If someone tech-savvy was willing to help, they could set up their own server that did not set the header. Additionally, HTTP(S) is not the only protocol out there – a FTP server could also distribute content. Plus, large hard drives will always exist and can always be passed around – headers don’t really apply to a sneakernet.
Despite these flaws, this system would still provide benefit over existing systems (mainly a reduction in overcensorship), as far as I can see. After all, if someone wants to view blocked content, they already can, as flaws 1 and 3 already apply to existing content filters (with control of the endpoint client-side filters are negated and network-level filters can be bypassed with software like Tor Browser, and most filters will not be aware of a sneakernet, FTP, or your friends web server). For someone who wants to avoid age-restricted content (such as young me), the system you propose would work far better. Then again, there is quite possibly something I have missed with this system.
Re: Re:
Does it still happen now that DVD drives are a rare peripheral device?
Re:
Huh. This isn’t a bad idea.
I could do this in like two minutes on domain/server.
You’d need the browsers in on it, and yes that would probably solve 85%+/- and that’s a hell of a start.
I’ve been raging that kids Cannot program because they’ve really not been taught to (tho I assumed it would be standard curriculum decades ago, alas). The kids that Can? You can’t stop “them” anyway. I was an 80s phreak, they didn’t/couldn’t stop Us. And it’s much less than 15% but kids are otherwise clever.
I like your idea.
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Brevity Is The Soul Of Wit
Perhaps someday an AI editor can condense several paragraphs into something concise, such as “Stop virtue signaling. Your idea is dumb and won’t work”. And then, we could make an entire social media site out of it, and call it something simple, like “X”. It would be hugely popular.
Re: A turd by any other name
Kdawg you make Elmo look like Shakespeare.
Re:
Perhaps one day Koby will stop posting before his physical death.
Now THAT would be good news.
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Re: Re:
The idea that Koby has a limited lifespan makes me so hard. I need to find another man to help me discharge this issue, preferably into his anus as a demonstration of pure love that can only be achieved between men.
Re: Re: Re:
Herman we know it’s you bro.
Re: Re: Re:2
We’ll get to Hywoman eventually.
There’s a femboy clitty cage with his name written all over it.
Re:
Especially with advertisers!
The problem is that public policy is hard and lost on most people; other people don’t care about it because they have other motivations. Some examples:
It’s no surprise that internet policy is just as bad as policy in other areas.
Well said. I feel this in my soul.
There is this, but let’s not forget those for whom the “unintended consequences” are very much intended.
At times, I’m not sure which is worse between willful ignorance and outright malice. The latter is obvious worse in individual cases, but the former seems so much more widespread.
Right. When your solution is literally worse than nothing, you must stop what you’re doing. But some of these “caring” people don’t actually care: the illusion of action is more important than the result.
That’s part of the problem with the political (and often economic) landscape in the world nowadays. Short-term actions are prioritized over well-planned long-term strategies. Show the public that you’re doing something, and that there is an immediate impact. Be it for your ego, your next election, your connections. Then… “après moi, le Déluge.”
Re:
Ironically, it used to be conservatives keeping liberals from going too far, or maybe vice versa for some things.
Yep, this, what he said right here, dawg
Yep got it.
Ok so this is really about problems with solutions to solutions for problems.
to many facts to prove
The only reasoning for having and PROVING, you are YOU on the internet, if its made into law.
Is so that they know who they need to track down. They wont need a consent from a Judge, BEFORE they can look up your info, it will be RIGHT out in the open.
But thats 1 of many problems. Which includes all the server break-ins and lost data, that already have happened.
Think of the problems this makes for In person PROOF, of your use of a credit card. Your data and info is PUBLIC, how do we PROVE who you are? ‘THEY’, the corps, USE THAT DATA… For your protection.
An anonymous system is interesting. and its a psychological one. That you will share your MOST deepest concerns with a Stranger, you may never see again, Before you will with those CLOSE to you.
You can create an OPINION, and think and HOPE no one KNOWS you think that way. Like asking a question about Math,and knowing that Your OWN friends and school, WONT know that you dont Understand something.
Litmus Test
There is a simple litmus test for taking Rights away from one group to solve an issue that is impacting another group:
Does the relinquishing of Rights of Group 1 fully and permanently solve the problem faced by Group 2?
Yes/No
Show your math.
Sometimes 'do nothing' is the better option
Now, the retort that some will have is that I can’t criticize a proposed solution unless I have something “better.” Well, in many cases not doing anything is a “better” solution than making things worse.
If two people are standing in front of a burning building and the only liquid on hand is almost certainly gasoline ‘no you shouldn’t throw that liquid on the fire in an attempt to put it out’ could be read as ‘doing nothing’ and ‘shutting down proposed solutions’ but it’s also keeping the fire from being made worse.
When a proposed solution is only going to cause problems ‘let’s do nothing rather than that’ is entirely valid criticism even if no ‘alternative solution’ is presented at the time.
Thank you, sir.
Dear Mike Masnick,
(((Hugs)))
-rich
Every supporter of FOSTA has done more to protect sex traffickers and kill victims than all of FOSTA’s opponents combined, despite all the “You oppose it because you hate kids” projection.
But we HAVE to do something NOW NOW NOW NOW NOW!!
As a society that has embraced clicking a like button actually does something about that kids cancer, we see this stupidity getting worse.
My bit about humans not learning & pretending its never happened before goes here.
Patriot Act
Billions of dollars wasted on tiger repelling rocks.
Billions spent creating yet another group of power hungry officers that can never do any wrong or be held accountable.
Our privacy destroyed, thrown onto a giant haystack that someday might turn up a needle that will make it all worth it.
We have people dying on our streets because there is no social safety net that works, we have the mentally ill warehoused in prisons that managed to be worse than the care homes Reagan closed, and the biggest concerns are a kid might see a tit online.
We have lots of big problems, but instead of wasting so much time on making sure the blame is properly assigned before trying to do anything, lets stop expecting everyone to agree before we can do anything.
I really don’t give a shit that Tiktok has gathered information about the life hack of how to put lipstick on better, I am really concerned about those who are homeless who served this nation and deserve so much better.
We lionize these political leaders for life, but someone who went and fought for us is on the street being ignored by the people they were protecting is acceptable.
How much help could have been provided to these vets if we hadn’t had 200 tiktok hearings & hundreds of publications printed at our expense of the findings of committees who are not in contact with reality.
It is time to accept that sometimes the suggested solution is absolute crap, and we might not have a better idea but that doesn’t mean we should continue with the current solution of tossing virgins into volcanoes because I don’t have a better idea at the moment.
Although… tossing politicians into volcanoes could help solve many of our problems.
You don’t have to be a cow to be able to say the milk doesn’t taste good.
Re:
Or as my son says, I don’t have to be a helicopter pilot to know a helicopter shouldn’t be upside down in a tree.
the people who say we must do something completely miss out on the most obvious thing they should do, pay attention to their own children. instead they prefer to act as if that is an insane idea, other people and/or organizations, schools should be the ones to do this!
most of these problems can be easily eliminated by paying attention to your children, listening to them, interacting with them. for some tho that is an insurmountable task that can only be done by government.. how did people become this damned stupid? did they study hard for it?
you don’t want your kids seeing something? then prevent it yourself, do not rely on others to do this!
you don’t want them bullied? or to find out where to buy drugs or whatever? pay some damned attention to them and discuss it with them, if you rely on someone else to do it, you are an utter and complete fool and your child will grow up to be just as stupid and foolish as you are.
do you really want that? would it make you proud to say, ‘my son, he’s just as stupid as i am!’
people like that disgust me….
If they had to defend their “solutions” on the merits, they would be unable to defend said “solutions.”
I mean, can we do that, without talking about whether you take the problem itself seriously?
Sometimes, a solution is so bad on it’s own, that you don’t really need to talk about anything else. But in a lot of cases, what we’re really doing is weighing the net pros and cons of the new thing vs the net pros and cons of the status quo. It’s a relative comparison, and you can’t make it without quantifying how bad you think the root problem actually is.
If you don’t see a problem in the first place, your tolerance for any downsides in the solution is going to be pretty low. (And vice versa)
But it does matter, quite a lot, if the entire reason we’re disagreeing is ultimately because one of us thinks the problem is overblown.
I don’t think you need to give a better solution, but I don’t see any reason not to acknowledge the underlying problem. It doesn’t cost anything. At worst, it kind of just sets a baseline, but at best it really adds to the conversation and potentially helps point the conversation towards a solution.
Huh. I work with environmental stuff and there was this harbor infrastructure expansion project with 2 small natural mangrove lakes inside the legal area of the project with alligators and fish and it’s considered protected area due to the vegetation and legal restrictions. To summarize it, the mangrove and the lakes sediments are contaminated with high concentrations of all sorts of chemicals but the environmental authority decided no remediation was needed even though the legislation says it must be done because it would stir the deposited contaminants and cause more damage than leaving it there because very little of the problem lies in the superficial layer. The public ministry prosecuted the environmental agency but lost. I agree because it would just transfer the problem to wherever they’d dispose of the contaminated sediment and it would destroy the ecosystem.