Regulate porn to increase birth rates? How does that work? Less porn usually means less sexual activity overall, which would lower birth rates, not raise them. In China for example porn is banned, and their birth rates are still low.
Banning pornography alone hasn’t moved the needle on fertility in China. However, in places like Tianmen, where broader pro-natalist strategies were implemented, including porn bans, there’s evidence those multi-pronged efforts had measurable impact.
What’s less clear is the claim that pornography is inherently harmful to children’s development or wellbeing, the research is mixed at best. And the justification that age-gating websites and apps is purely about safety remains deeply unconvincing.
So then either this effort is misguided, a hollow gesture for optics, or a small piece of a broader agenda that hasn’t been made explicit. It just seems to me that this is creating a lot of chaos for a hollow gesture.
Obviously that goal was achieved but the direction the iPad went in was different than its minimalist and cheap original trajectory.
Adding a stylus and all the ‘Pro’ stuff confused what the iPad originally was, and now it’s more closely aligned with a new form-factor MacBook with a limited OS.
Maybe Steve would have gone a different way, but perhaps all computing devices are destined for the same convergent evolution … a kind of carcinization of form factors and purposes.