I am terrified because the majority of discussions are not treating Problems #3 or #4 seriously.
Problem #1: Verify ages for adult-appropriate content.
Problem #2: Do not create a new surveillance system for the government.
Problem #3: Do not create a --dynamic-- per-user internet-access permissioning/control/denial system for the government. This would be madness.
Problem #4: Do not create a --general-- per-user internet-access permissioning/control/denial system for the government.
Problems #3 & 4 are very very serious. Any age-verification system, or generalized control-system, will become a pervasive requirement for a large percentage of internet sites, simply by being convenient for risk-adverse sites to adopt. Which means, this will be (not could be: will be) a pervasive government managed system of per-user internet control/denial.
We need zero knowledge proofs. Or similar. Minimum.
Form of solution:
• Any third-party institution meeting publically-defined government requirements, can be an attestor.
• Attestors provide persistent age-verification tokens per user-device, on user request/verification: Using actual identification and one-off-anonymized device identifiers.
• Sites are given one-off, device and user-identity anonymous, attestation tokens, derived from the device token, on request.*
Maximum anonymization is necessary so:
• Governments can't identify your devices.
• Sites can't identify your devices or you.
• Government and sites cannot collude to remove anonymity (via this system), enabling a new surveillance system.
Attestation tokens need to be persistent so:
• The government is not being given dynamic control of our internet use.
Age-attestation tokens, must be provided independent from any other types of attestation, so:
• We didn't just invite the government to link multiple permissioning systems together, which will inevitably be used in coordination. And so failure to supply age-attestation tokens is a clear documentatable act.
Unrestricted (other than by public standards), third-party attesters:
• So users can choose an attester they trust. So there are multiple points of attestation. So there is individual accountability, natural documentation, and reputation risk for any denial of attestation.
Anything less anonymized, independent, persistent or available than this is a nightmare situation. Really.
I am terrified because the majority of discussions are not treating Problems #3 and #4 seriously.
A nicer way to say that is: "I can't decide whether to up vote or down vote you!"
There is real irony that we still use non-unique-to-purpose addressing to sign up for no-need-for-our-identity newsletters. In this case, in particular.
That makes perfect sense to me. I am sure the site's motives are fine, and yet the tech we still use is ridiculously aged and unsecure. Even on pro-security sites.
Democracies building the tools of total autocracy. Real but fringe threats used to create the ultimate centralization of leverage.
Can we actually think of the children? All the children? Their future?
When democracies forget that government is the greatest natural threat to freedom, they forget and undermine the reason we have democracies.
Technical solutions to zero-knowledge proofs of age-of-adulthood without loss of anonymity are recent but available now. The strongest argument for these is to take the wind out of alternatives.
Strangely, promoters of surveillance avoid these solutions.
Even stranger: the bizarre but prevalent counter argument that anonymity protecting solutions won't work, because the surreptitious goal of other solutions is precisely to strip anonymity. We apparently shouldn't do that, because the abusers won't like the wind being taken out of their "front" problems, with real but freedom-preserving solutions!
You can just lie by using someone else's ZKP. If that's not considered to be a problem, then the California approach of just asking the device owner is much better and you still don't need the ZKP.
You are describing strong surveillance. Exactly the problem ZKP (or similar tech) solves/avoids.
And on the other issue, requiring sites to verify ages before serving adult material, isn't the same as criminalizing shared/mishandled age verification credentials. Its a mitigation issue, not a nuclear threat.
I am left wondering if you had any coherent point to make.
There are some people who care about policy, care about a generally healthy environment. Which has a strong self-interest aspect, as it should, but not narrow.
Few people manage to vote for their own narrow interests in a reliable coherent way. Even the rich and powerful reliably foot gun themselves.
I believe the vast majority, the vast majority of the time, reliably and enthusiastically vote for their group's shibboleths. Regardless of what they might say or believe their own motivations are. Even seemingly sophisticated and principled thinkers. It shows via the reliable, trivial to resolve, but reflection impervious group-coded "misunderstandings" that even "serious" people defend and nurture. The group reinforced, often meme-reflex deflected, unthinkables. Across the political spectrum.
I think people overwhelmingly voting in line with their group is the effect, not the cause. People start off by being in a group, and their group teaches them what's good and what's bad, as well as how different policies will affect them personally. Mind you, they're most often taught wrong - but uniformly wrong within their group. They're similarly taught about WHO's good and WHO's bad, and how different political parties will affect them personally. Loaded with all these misconceptions, they apply the self-interest mindset and end up with a voting pattern that to an external observer doesn't look like self-interest at all. That's an oversimplification of course, everybody is part of multiple overlapping groups at every point in time and joins and leaves groups frequently, creating a gradient of opinions in a society. But the main mechanism is the same.
The result is mostly the same as with your explanation, except yours doesn't explain why there are primary elections and how they can be so unpredictable.
Right, so the government should be based on brands rather than people. USA trying to make a people centric system still ended up into a brand centric republican vs democrat, just that now those brands changes dramatically every 4 years just people still vote for the brand even after it changes.
Its much more stable when you have stable political party brands like in multi party system, then a person voting for the same brand for 40 years will vote for roughly the same politics instead of it changing all the time.
Branding effects are not the core problem, they just make the core problems worse.
CORE PROBLEMS:
A system that continually converges down to only two viable parties, rewards divisive candidates and handicaps broadly-liked third or fourth party candidates.
A system that allows one party to capture all three branches of government. Incentivizing extreme power plays/centralization in and between parties. (Usually starts within a party.)
A system that lets parties integrate at Federal and State levels, suppressing or eliminating the otherwise strong benefits of Federal/State government decentralization. Creates massive incentives for out-of-state capture of state politics.
A permissive system for players to cache out as system-undermining lobbyists after a tour of "service".
CORE SOLUTIONS:
Maximum seat-run limits for parties, forces cross-partisanship and coalitions as some level. Any is better than none.
Separation of parties at Federal and State levels. And/or limits on numbers of states a party can operate in. Use the Federalized system of decentralizing Federal/State government to achieve parallel decentralization of parties.
Take money out of politics. Hard to do perfectly, but any limits make a big difference. Brands operate on pervasive non-rational visibility and repetition, i.e. money.
Voting systems that give wide-appeal candidates an advantage.
Voluntary acceptance of a post-tour lobbying bans, as a requirement for political and policy appointments. Remove that pervasive conflict of interest machine. Disincentivize game players from public "service".
i find it so easy to "switch" to 3D with pairs of images like this, it strikes me as strange that cheap stereo-3D isn't a standard interface element.
Other than getting used to making the switch, I don't think there is any cognitive load. Just pairing normal lens focus with a different triangulation distance, which is something we quickly learn to do without thinking when using any glasses or lenses.
I find it a lot more calming than Wiggle-D. And paired with some simple head/eye tracking via laptop cams, it could be really versatile.
The animated plots are great. Be great to have a trackpad rotatable version. (And the need/benefit for head tracking gets really obvious when I move. The perception of reverse/non-sensical dynamics is strong.)
> Would it be beneficial -- or even possible at all -- to adjust my body's default/subconscious breathing patterns to match those mentioned in the article?
Common physical reflexes, autonomous responses, and subconscious regulation, are there as aids to us. The fact that they are not universally beneficial is one of the purposes of having higher level control. Not to universally suppress responses, but to notice and cope when they misfire.
It would be interesting to have a map of breathing patterns across a wide variety of situations, to identify the range of situations where prolonged exhalation is adaptive.
My guess, based on the common reflexes of mouth clamping and breath holding before great physical exertion, is that prolonged exhalation is part of an adaptive psychological orchestrator for when we prepare to take on something difficult, risky (but necessary), or that needs a fast strong response.
Our fast acting emotions, and slower acting moods, are similar guides. Patterns of stimulus and response from our baseline physiology and psychological, that we absorb into our higher level operation, as generalized guides for analogous responses to contexts at higher abstraction levels.
With minor maladaptive responses inevitable, if we don't pay attention. And severe maladaptive responses often ingrained as overcompensation for situational or developmental traumas.
The craziest thing I noticed about a breathing pattern and risk taking was when a murderer was in an interrogation room with a police officer when after they couldn't find his gun; he had stowed it on his ankle. The suspect took a deep inhale after reaching for his gun while the officer was focused on the computer screen in front of him, exhaled and swiftly aimed at the officers temple and fired. Then he broke out of custody and was caught shortly after.
This link is much funnier if you don't give the punchline away. /s or /h or /ffs?
I am still trying to figure out how being against science, higher education, new energy, skilled South Korean workers, and for tariff-of-the-day lotteries, crypto grifts, Chinese-made "American-manufactured" phones, random wars and red hats is pro-manufacturing, pro-domestic investment and balancing the budget.
It's the "new math" of economics. I can't keep up.
The problem is the bank didn’t leave a buffer to meet their requirements, so arbitrage between reality and official reality comes to the rescue.
If a bank only loaned 60% of a buildings value, it could be devalued, the operator would eat the shortfall, but the bank could reappraise, with the loan continuing as before.
[So a regulation setting a banks maximum loan percentage, at a percentage less than they are required to maintain, is an obvious regulatory fix.]
However, another way to look at this from a banks point of view is while they may loan 80%, they might have been happy to loan 100% but for regulations. So perversely, they may not be as concerned about this happening as it appears.
For them, the 80% max loan is already providing a buffer, in terms of the risk they would be happy to take. So if they can avoid acknowledging they have loans that have risen in percentage terms, it is in their business interest to encourage, facilitate, giving operators breathing room.
And in the meantime, inflation, property value growth, and future demand increases provide three statistically “expected” ways for the situation to self-correct over time.
For financial investment products, all value is “expected” value.
And the operator may not be losing money, so much as paying for the buildings accrued value growth. Which would be a wash, but avoids the practical problems of defaults. Not the best, but not losing (as much) money as it appears.
And for the bank, if the loan payments are made there is no problem.
So there are two hidden buffers: banks willingness to loan more than regulators want them to, and natural property value increases, lowering rent prices (i.e. inflation) over time.
> The problem is the bank didn’t leave a buffer to meet their requirements
They did though. It was a $20M building and they only loaned out $16M, providing a $4M buffer. It isn't possible to require an amount that the value of the building could never fall below under any circumstances because that would require the loan amount to be zero. It's always possible for the value of the property to crash, e.g. it becomes contaminated with toxic waste and the remediation costs more than the property value, or the area's major employer shuts down and the area becomes a ghost town.
Meanwhile increasing the size of the buffer has costs that can exceed the value of a larger buffer, i.e. fewer people can afford a mortgage, which is both economically bad and not in the interests of the bank who wants to make more loans rather than fewer.
> However, another way to look at this from a banks point of view is while they may loan 80%, they might have been happy to loan 100% but for regulations.
The reason banks require a down payment instead of loaning out 100% of the value of the property is definitely because the banks want the buffer to not be zero.
> And for the bank, if the loan payments are made there is no problem.
But that's the issue. If they prevent the landlord from lowering rents to increase occupancy then they may not be able to make the payments anymore, and then the bank is screwed.
> They did though. It was a $20M building and they only loaned out $16M, providing a $4M buffer
The problem is the bank is regulated to only maintain loans at 80% of property value or lower.
If they give a loan at the maximum allowable level, they don't have a (legal) buffer.
Thus the strong incentive to perform creative bookkeeping, to avoid having to repossess property they don't want. Instead of simply recognizing the falling property value in their accounting, which without a forced call, is the property owners loss, not theirs.
Problem #1: Verify ages for adult-appropriate content.
Problem #2: Do not create a new surveillance system for the government.
Problem #3: Do not create a --dynamic-- per-user internet-access permissioning/control/denial system for the government. This would be madness.
Problem #4: Do not create a --general-- per-user internet-access permissioning/control/denial system for the government.
Problems #3 & 4 are very very serious. Any age-verification system, or generalized control-system, will become a pervasive requirement for a large percentage of internet sites, simply by being convenient for risk-adverse sites to adopt. Which means, this will be (not could be: will be) a pervasive government managed system of per-user internet control/denial.
We need zero knowledge proofs. Or similar. Minimum.
Form of solution:
• Any third-party institution meeting publically-defined government requirements, can be an attestor.
• Attestors provide persistent age-verification tokens per user-device, on user request/verification: Using actual identification and one-off-anonymized device identifiers.
• Sites are given one-off, device and user-identity anonymous, attestation tokens, derived from the device token, on request.*
Maximum anonymization is necessary so:
• Governments can't identify your devices.
• Sites can't identify your devices or you.
• Government and sites cannot collude to remove anonymity (via this system), enabling a new surveillance system.
Attestation tokens need to be persistent so:
• The government is not being given dynamic control of our internet use.
Age-attestation tokens, must be provided independent from any other types of attestation, so:
• We didn't just invite the government to link multiple permissioning systems together, which will inevitably be used in coordination. And so failure to supply age-attestation tokens is a clear documentatable act.
Unrestricted (other than by public standards), third-party attesters:
• So users can choose an attester they trust. So there are multiple points of attestation. So there is individual accountability, natural documentation, and reputation risk for any denial of attestation.
Anything less anonymized, independent, persistent or available than this is a nightmare situation. Really.
I am terrified because the majority of discussions are not treating Problems #3 and #4 seriously.
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