> In the US, the homeless population exploded, in the 1980s, when they closed down all the mental institutions.

... and for good reason, because it turns out that people with no support network (which most mentally ill people and a lot of prisoners are) are perfect victims for all kinds of abuse - both from other inmates and from "wardens". They didn't end up in an asylum randomly, they ended up in there because their family didn't want or could not provide care for them.

And it's not just mental "health" institutions or prisons... all forms of "care" breed abuse. The Catholic Church for example is still reeling from constant discoveries of abused children in orphanages. Elder care institutions, particularly severely understaffed, routinely have to deal with inmates being injured by anything from a lack of care (e.g. bed sores) over physical abuse to sexual abuse [1].

And to make it worse... private/family care without independent oversight is just as bad. A lot of homeschooled children are heavily abused, caregiver burnout and its fallout is also a nasty issue, and particularly in men with dementia, they can also be the abusers.

In the end, the root problem is that we as a society haven't yet figured out how to properly deal with the balance between care work, employment work and rest, and we also haven't figured out how to properly reward and audit care work.

[1] https://www.theguardian.com/australia-news/2022/jun/06/shock...

> much like the faith required of scientist today

You might be missing the point of science.

It's ultimately an endeavor of finding testable descriptions of the world in the face of being fallible. It's not about the "why". It's about "how" the world is. No faith required. "Why" the world is is a philosophical question and perhaps a religious one. But that has nothing to do with testable theories.

Any scientific theory gains credibility by providing ways to test it. Each such experiment that fails to disprove the theory increases confidence in the theory's validity. There is no faith required for any of that and no god either. If you can predict that conditions A and B lead to C happening, and I can try it and see that indeed C is happening, then you have science going on, without any faith.

Can you explain to me what loopholes that opponents believe this law will exploit?

Is it just "more ID is bad"? Or is there a specific concern that this bill is a targeted overreach to increase censorship and surveillance.

It genuinely doesn't seem like any more of a threat than age-gating Playboy at the bookstore. What have I missed?

It isn't about the tools or using them, it's about the scale. The scale of impact is immense and we're not ready to handle it in a mutitude of areas because of all the areas technology touches. Millions of jobs erased with no clear replacement? Value of creative work diminshed leading to more opportunities erased? Scale of 'bad' actors abusing the tools and impacting a whole bunch of spheres from information dispersal to creative industries etc. Not even getting into environmental and land-use impacts to spaces with data centers and towns etc (again, it's the scale that gets ya). And for what? Removing a huge chunk of human activity & expression, for what?

> for every theory of relativity the is the religious non-sense and superstitions of the medieval ages or today

If Einstein came up with relativity by standing on "the religious non-sense and superstitions of the medieval ages," you'd have a point.