Epa095 (u/Epa095) - Readit News

Epa095 commented on EFF launches Age Verification Hub eff.org/press/releases/ef... · Posted by u/iamnothere

cocoto · 4 days ago

Such sites would be illegal if not sharing the header back from the source website and be banned as much as adult websites incorrectly setting this header. It’s not a real problem.

Epa095 · 4 days ago

Making them illegal does not fix it. There will be a indefinite whack-a-mole game which is very hard to solve without draconian control over the Internet.

The problem is that it's easy to make, easy to deploy, easy to make money on, and a single site opens up the whole Internet. It will happen even if it's illegal.

Compare this to adult webpages setting the header. They will probably be quite willing to do so, since they want to make their money legally, and there is probably little money in serving to kids anyway. And even if a single out of thousand adult webpages refuses, it still only opens that single site.

Epa095 commented on EFF launches Age Verification Hub eff.org/press/releases/ef... · Posted by u/iamnothere

rlpb · 6 days ago

I'd be OK with an "I am a child" header mandated by law to be respected by service providers (eg. "adult sites" must not permit a client setting the header to proceed). On the client side, mandate that consumer devices that might reasonably be expected to be used by children (every smartphone, tablet, smart TV, etc) have parental controls that set the header. Leave it to parents to set the controls. Perhaps even hold parents culpable for not doing so, as a minimum supervision requirement, just as one may hold parents culpable for neglecting their children in other ways.

Forcing providers to divine the age of the user, or requiring an adult's identity to verify that they are not a child, is backwards, for all the reasons pointed out. But that's not the only way to "protect the children". Relying on a very minimal level of parental supervision of device use should be fine; we already expect far more than that in non-technology areas.

Epa095 · 4 days ago

It would be possible to make a website which proxies other sites, but strips this header, right (maybe with some added ads)?

If so I would expect such sites to appear, and the only way to secure a child device is to have a whitelist of webpages (to avoid the proxies), putting us back close to where we are today.

Epa095 commented on America is going through a big economic experiment economist.com/the-world-a... · Posted by u/andsoitis

Epa095 · 6 days ago

So, let's say one wants to hedge against the worse scenarios here, a stock market and bond-market crash. Where do I put my pension?

Epa095 commented on Pebble Index 01 – External memory for your brain repebble.com/blog/meet-pe... · Posted by u/freshrap6

sequoia · 6 days ago

> We want to help people, but only if and when it’s profitable for us

If s/he is running a company and not a charity, this is responsible, understandable, and predictable.

Epa095 · 6 days ago

Yes, and that's exactly why we need regulations, and can't leave it to the market!

Epa095 commented on 2025 USA National Security Strategy [pdf] whitehouse.gov/wp-content... · Posted by u/Epa095

Epa095 · 11 days ago

For Europe it paints a picture of significant political meddling, says among other things:

- Over the long term, it is more than plausible that within a few decades at the latest, certain NATO members will become majority non-European

- Many of these nations are currently doubling down on their present path. We want Europe to remain European, to regain its civilizational self-confidence, and to abandon its failed focus on regulatory suffocation.

- The current administration wants to "Cultivate resistance to Europe’s current trajectory within European nations"

- "We want to work with aligned countries that want to restore their former greatness"

There is less about China, and one can guess that the following quote is aimed at them:

"We seek good relations and peaceful commercial relations with the nations of the world without imposing on them democratic or other social change that differs widely from their traditions and histories."

Epa095 commented on Show HN: I built a dashboard to compare mortgage rates across 120 credit unions finfam.app/blog/credit-un... · Posted by u/mhashemi

Epa095 · 12 days ago

Good work!

Does anyone else think that the government should do something like this? Either enforce that vendors sends their offers to a central database which is publicly accessible, or at least make it available so the vendors can choose to send data there (maybe enforce it for big vendors, to get it started).

In general I think it makes sense for the government to be responsible for the market place, and the infrastructure around the market. The data should be avaliable publicly through a API so one could build different frontends and analysis services on it.

Example markets are electricity, deposits, mortgages, housing.

Epa095 commented on CachyOS: Fast and Customizable Linux Distribution cachyos.org/... · Posted by u/doener

kokada · 16 days ago

At least for Bazzite, Nobara and CachyOS, there is the SteamOS desktop option that boots directly to Steam's Big Picture that is quite unconventional in some ways (e.g. this desktop mode kinda also acts as a display manager, so there is the option to boot to your desktop from Big Picture mode and this option is generally broken without specific integration with the session manager).

Sure this could probably be a package in a more "traditional distro", but I'm almost sure most people don't expect their Display Manager to be replaced with Steam when they install a package.

Epa095 · 16 days ago

No, but I would after e.g dpkg-reconfigure steam-bigwindow

Epa095 commented on Mag Wealth (2024) saul.pw/mag/wealth/... · Posted by u/andsoitis

lazide · a month ago

Billionaires don’t generally become billionaires by spending a lot of money on watches or apples or the like.

They become billionaires (generally) by owning things and making those things more valuable in other people’s eyes.

The vast majority of Elon Musks wealth, for instance, is in stock of Tesla, SpaceX, X, etc.

It’s an entirely different kind of situation, because the wealth is generally due to other people’s estimates of the productive output/wealth generation of those assets increasing over time.

In the musk example, it would be like if someone bought and then came in and funded the expansion of a big apple orchard that previously no one had ever heard of, and then made it internationally famous so that everyone wanted to be a part of it - and sold shares in that orchard to people.

Now people are eating more of that orchards apples, everyone values that orchard more, and now what previously he owned but was cheap is now worth a lot.

That is legitimate value creation, as much as you might hate him or the process.

If he did it by burning down other orchards, he would be a criminal. But like in the spacex case (or Tesla case), it’s pretty hard to argue that is what happened. Maybe some light fraud here and there, at most.

It mostly came from a lot of salesmanship and light/moderate gaslighting, but they are legitimately valuable companies - albeit maybe shouldn’t rationally be at the P/Es they are. But he is making the irrational happen.

And that is making a lot of people money that otherwise wouldn’t, and making something happen that otherwise wouldn’t. Those people are very happy he is doing what he is doing.

For the alternative, see the USSR. I’ve known people who lived in that system, and it was terrible.

Epa095 · a month ago

I dont want the USSR, and I don't see the relevance. For me this is a discussion about the role of money and wealth in our economic system, I am not arguing for plan-economy. The dynamic allocation of resources provided by a market based economy is great. But there are many ways to run a capitalist society, I certainly don't belive we are at the end of history here.

Billionaires certainly CAN get more wealthy by a process as you describe. They can also get more wealthy by just owning stocks and do absolutely nothing. Last 20 years the S&P 500 has increased 8-fold. That means 64 times over 40 years, 512 times over 60, 4096 times over 80 years. With the s&p average since 1926 of 9.8%, the numbers are 42-fold after 40 years, 272 after 60 and 1770 after 80. Salaries has certainly not risen at the same rate.

My views are probably shaped by coming from a place with more old money, where more people are rich from inheritance than their own creation. And their share of the totalt wealth of the society increases even when they are just passive owners. For me this is a reinvention of Feudslism, where the owner class controls the economy because they inherited it.

Now, this is a bit of a tangent to the original discussion though. What I had been trying to say is that independently of the reason for why the billionaire has the money, the spending on that apple is not providing value to the economy. In your original post I read you to mean that, and that the billionaire provided value by buying that apple. Of course he did on the micro scale for the farmer, but not at the macro scale. All he is doing is slightly shaping the economy to provide what he wants, using money as the lube.

So billionaires can be so for a lot of reasons. They can have stolen the money, passively gained them, gained them on the back of others creating value, or they could have created the value themselves. Independently of the source, they now have power over the economic machine. They might use it to improve the machine (good) or they can make it create things the billionaire wants in place of things other people wants (less good).

Epa095 commented on Mag Wealth (2024) saul.pw/mag/wealth/... · Posted by u/andsoitis

renewiltord · a month ago

Yeah, that fear is a way for you to feel envy without damaging your self-image.

Epa095 · a month ago

Thanks for the analysis...

But as I said, I have no problem facing my envy. I can be envious of independently wealthy people, and the feeling I have for billionaires is not the same. I don't know why my psyche would accept the envy for some but not for others.

I also really don't feel the shame you seem to project to me regarding envy, I tvink it is a complicated emotion with good and bad sides, certainly nothing to feel ashamed of.

But before I continue, is there any point continuing? From the comments so far you seem pretty settled in your believes about my emotions, and if you have decided apriori that whatever I say it's my mind defending itself, there is not much point continuing.