• 0 Posts
  • 562 Comments
Joined 2 years ago
cake
Cake day: July 24th, 2023

help-circle








  • Charge parents with neglect if they should have been expected to notice and respond to problems. That should be a jailable offense.

    Great, send everyone to jail. Overcrowd prisons and put children into care. All because a parent let their child on social media…

    I’m more saying the age limit is clumsy here

    It isn’t. We have age limits for all kinds of things. How should this be any different?

    Social media is completely different though, since parents are in direct control of the devices their kids have access to at home, and what’s available on their home network. Parents have the power to handle this themselves, so they should be expected to do so.

    Parents can also control whether children buy alcohol, yet we still have restrictions on children.


  • I didn’t insult you, I remarked that you didn’t appear to have understood my comment, and by the looks of it you still don’t.

    Apologies if you’re upset by my comment. That was not my intent. I was just pointing out the absurdity of your judgemental comment.

    I’m not the one taking issue with something I don’t own. That’s my entire point. You are discouraging someone from wanting something just because you personally don’t value it.

    The piano is the headphone jack.

    You don’t need a headphone jack, and feel the need to disparage others who do. “I don’t use a headphone jack, so you shouldn’t want a phone with one.”

    Similarly, I don’t need a piano. However, I don’t go around telling people they shouldn’t want/play one, because I recognise that the things I want in my life are different to the things other people want in theirs.





  • It’s not fiction, that’s the reality.

    Profit is a purely ideological drive, medicine and healthcare do not need profits to exist.

    No shit. Everyone knows that. But it does exist. That’s the world we live in. Income tax doesn’t need to exist, but it does, and things would go wrong if you suddenly stopped paying it.

    Moderna did not single handedly make the covid vaccine

    Who said they did? Many companies did, and some had government or university help.

    I can go deeper if you want

    Go as deep as you like. I’ve already explained the situation, though.

    I am speaking in good faith. How do you go about avoiding companies simply refusing to create new medications when they know for a fact making new ones would cost billions and they’d never get the money back?

    I don’t like that that’s the situation. I want companies to make medications and sell them at a loss, but that’s a fantasy world. I’m being pragmatic. We can improve IP laws without completely killing off future medicine development.

    “Just, like, don’t make profit, broooo” would be nice, but that’s not how the world works.




  • And their parents should take responsibility to only introduce them to SM when they’re ready.

    But they don’t. So what’s your solution? To me “sorry kids, but you should be mentally damaged if your parents don’t have the inclination or ability to block social media” isn’t a solution.

    You can’t just leave kids to be fucked over in the event their parents aren’t properly regulating them to the fullest.

    We have laws preventing children from buying alcohol, but based on your thinking, we should get rid of those. After all, it’s the parents’ responsibility to ensure their children don’t get drunk…

    That’s on the parents.

    This is just going back to the “well it’s on the parents. And if kids get damaged in the process, that’s unfortunate, but society shouldn’t try to prevent it”


  • More companies will develop that drug.

    But think of it this way. You’re the CEO of a pharmaceutical company that makes drugs, vaccines, etc that saves lives. You do this for a profit.

    You’re presented with a plan to make a drug that, idk, lessens the symptoms of Crohn’s Disease. It’ll cost $2 billion to create and bring to market.

    After it’s done being created, and the drug spends 10+ years in clinical testing, it’s on shelves. You have to price each box at $10 in order to break even after 5 years, so you do so.

    But the law has changed, now anybody can manufacture the drug. A competitor who didn’t foot any of the development costs or do any of the hard work is selling each box at $0.80. you can’t compete with that, you make an enormous loss and your company edges closer to bankruptcy.

    One of your workers comes to you with plans for a $2bn project that will hopefully reduce migraines. Given lessons learned from the previous example, do you go ahead with the plan? Will the board even let you?

    I agree that IP laws in the sector need to be pared down, but scrapping them entirely would prevent any company from creating new drugs, as they’d be absolutely certain they wouldn’t be able to recoup development and regulatory hurdle costs.

    In an ideal world, all drugs would be made by governments, for a loss, and open sourced, so the market could compete on price. But that’s not the world we live in.


  • Hence why I said “as old as.” Someone who is 15.5 is basically 16, yet they fall under the rule.

    There has to be a cutoff somewhere, otherwise you fall into the trap of “well 15.5 is basically 16, so 15.5 is fine. And 15 is basically 15.5 so that must be fine too. And I guess 14.5 is basically 15 so…”

    We have age cutoffs for other things. Buying alcohol, cigarettes, driving, voting, etc.

    Because they’re not protecting their safety,

    Kids would be safer and mentally better off with less access to social media. You even agreed to this yourself in your first comment.

    All those bullet points you listed are wrong. The state has laws surrounding what you can and can’t do. So laws do have a say.

    You say disciplining children is up to the parents, but the reality is you can’t just do what you want. If your idea of disciplinary action to your child is starving them, the state will rightly intervene. Because the state has laws to protect children.

    Privacy concerns are legitimate, that’s my biggest worry with this proposal, and certainly worth discussing. “We shouldn’t have laws to protect kids in this way, for some arbitrary reason I haven’t explained” is not.

    Children should have safeguards. Parents are not always aware, technical enough to prevent, or caring enough to prevent kids from being damaged by social media (and boy does social media mess kids up). It is not my position that children of those parents should have to suffer unnecessarily.

    There’s frequently a similar argument in the UK when it comes to free school dinners for poorer families. Some say “well the parents, no matter how poor, should pay, even if they have to make other cutbacks”. And while that makes sense, some don’t, so what do the “no state involvement” crowd want? The kids to be malnourished? I’d rather we accept that not all parents are good and build a baseline level of protection for all kids.