So why wouldn't that extend to all those other things I listed?

There's a fundamental difference between the action prohibited and the means by which that is carried out. We can ban drunk driving, now we can enforce that by arresting people driving drunk or shooting everyone who walks out of a bar that touches a car. The latter is extreme but technically does the thing we are after. If we murder everyone who walks out of bar drunk, we technically prevent drunk drivers.

That's the issue. We are trying to make it where computers keep us in check. That's a bad idea for sort of the same reasons why installing breathalyzers in every car would be a bad idea. We're trying to paper over actual enforcement. So that way when there's a failure we don't have to blame law makers for making bad choices or law enforcement for not doing their job, we can just blame computers.

I just hope you can understand why that's bad.

Like... The flock cameras. Made to be able to pinpoint the motions of criminals so that law enforcement doesn't have to. That's a great starting intention, but having cameras that watch everyone at all times, that's bad. And I think you can understand why it would be bad.

Kids still drink, kids still vape, kids still get behind the wheel when they ought not to. It's up to us humans to enforce our rules on other humans. And the more we forget that, the more we hand power over to whoever is controlling the computers or technical aspects or whatever.

If parents don't want their kids watching porn, that's a pretty easy fix that doesn't require us to hand over critical functions of our computers to some 3rd party to, at some later date, do something we know not of.

Like goodness how is the bad aspects of this not obvious outright? Like how did we start getting to a point where we're so blind to how all of this can go off the rails so quickly? All these are bad things for reasons that's really complicated that might not fit in 5000 characters or less. But they're bad. The whole having a computer verify age by scanning the barcode, what happens when that company signs off on a deal with health insurance? What would happen if the Kroger plus card data was sent over to your insurance provider? Everything you bought at the grocery store is something that your insurance provider has access to?

Like c'mon how are we not seeing this? It's not about "kid should have access to porn", it's about how we go about enforcing the whole "kids shouldn't have access to porn." You have to understand, I'm making a statement not about the "ends," I'm making a statement about the "means."

We all seem to be always getting so caught up on the end goal that we forget to stop and consider the actual path we've selected. We're so preoccupied with whether or not we can prevent something, that we don't stop to think if we should reconsider how we go about it.

Please I'm begging you, there's a really important point in this and we keep failing to see it, A LOT! Like, I'm glad everyone is starting to understand the dangers of having a Ring camera everywhere, but it's so frustrating that it took a Super Bowl ad for it to finally sink in how bad an idea it is when a lot of people were pointing this out very early on with the Ring TOS.

I'm getting old and I'm getting tired that this keep happening, I don't want any of us to be agreeing to something that's got a pretty easy fix for it already, that's got massive ramifications down the road if we go down the purposed path. It's not ends, it's the means, it's the means. We keep selecting ones that have that really bad consequences.