"If it’s a 10-item list, it can only include so many things."
So narrow-minded. You need to liberate your agenda to become truly transformational.
You are still trying to appeal to the Democrats' traditional base, namely base ten. Granted, in base ten, a 10-item list can include only ten items. But why not hexidecimal? Why not sexigesimal! A 10-item list can include sixty items!
Once you have liberated your mind, you'll see that a 10-item list can include as many things as you like.
But by all means, eschew the traditional binary. A 10-item list with only two items is never going to win elections.
Matt is erasing the lived experience of those of us that spend way too much time in the corporate world, where 10-item lists with more than 10 items are the norm.
I'm sure #4 is popular, but you can take my credit card travel rewards from my cold dead hands.
As for #10, when the inevitable security leak happens and people are able to see who's viewing Internet porn, I wonder if some women would be surprised that that list includes literally every single man. (Researchers in the UK tried to study the effects of porn consumption but had to abandon things when they literally couldn't find a control group.)
Right, the issue with #10 is not that it’s bad on the merits, but that in today’s technological and political climate this amounts to building a database of people’s identifying information alongside exactly what porn they’re watching. We don’t really have a good way of proving age online without handing over a copy of your ID, which contains a lot more information than just that.
In order to create an account on Epic, Sony, Nintendo, etc. for my kids, I had to 'prove' that I was over 18 by doing something that is ostensibly only possible for someone over 18, for example, a one-cent charge to a credit card. I believe the same is true of anyone creating such an account, i.e., my kids couldn't have just lied about their age and created an account.
I'm not saying that is a perfect solution, but it does show that in a space where parents are (rightly) concerned about their children being exposed to strangers online, companies come up with not-so-intrusive, clever-ish ways of proving age without handing over ID or creating a national registry.
#10 is a good idea politically, but it becomes unworkable if you measure its success as all-or-nothing because you'd have to solve piracy first. If implemented, I could imagine a lot of parents (like myself) would be happy to see some positive, bipartisan action, as would a lot of social/religious conservatives who like the idea of banning things they find morally repugnant. It's really hard to imagine, however, a huge constituency willing to protest openly that it's a little more difficult for them to surf porn on the john.
Exactly. A second benefit of the reform Matt is proposing (although not one that I'd trumpet loudly to the religious conservatives) is that forcing pornography behind paywalls could help mitigate some of the worst and most exploitative practices in the industry. Jon Ronson did a mini-podcast series in 2017 on the effects of 'free porn' on the industry, which were predictably terrible: https://www.engadget.com/2018-07-17-the-butterfly-effect-audible-irl.html
In a similar vein, Bari Weiss interviewed a woman who talked about the other side of that issue, where she has built a lucrative career on OnlyFans by building a brand of sorts. I was shocked by how much money one can make charging for what is basically a digital nudie booth. It seems like a much healthier model than PornHub (which I gather was the focus on Ron Jonson's podcast) and it automatically excludes a lot of teenagers because they're typically broke and don't have access to credit cards... or at least cards that their parents can't audit.
How do you do that when so many porn companies could just easily be based in a different country. Sure you could put a block on individual sites nationwide, but with VPN, it would be useless.
The existence of VPN and torrenting hasn't put much of a dent in the ability of American media companies to command huge premiums (and market share) for cable television and streaming services. I think in practice, what we see is that most people would rather pay a small fee every month for something that's legal, easy to use, and feels more ethical and safe.
VPNs don't really make media free, they just allow you to get past global walls. E.G. they fool your computer into thinking you're in the U.K. so that the Netflix account you pay for will give you access to British exclusive content they have for that market. As for torrenting, yeah, people would generally rather pay of a streaming service than go though that hassle but that may not be the case with pornography companies, which some people would rather not give their credit card info to.
I don’t have a problem with picking the low hanging fruit and if that’s all the law is written to accomplish I think that’s fine.
I think I’m quite suspicious about the language being narrowly tailored enough to only do that and make a big difference though. I feel like you can either have enforcement with lots of places for collateral damage or you end up making people use relatively easy work arounds.
That's perhaps the point. Its like in the 80s when Tipper Gore held those hearings on effects of music on today's youth. The hearings were farcical to say the least (there's a good "You're Wrong About" podcast about this that showed how the hearings were in part about the Music industry's lobbying efforts against blank tapes. But I digress).
Slapping warning labels on music basically made no difference whatsoever. In fact, it was a probably a net positive branding mechanism considering artists target audience were kids trying to rebel against their parents.
My point is, some sort of similar "ineffective" policy targeting adult websites could serve the same purpose. Actual effects of the policy are negligible, but it's a signal to culturally conservative voters that you're not totally in thrall to far left values.
It's silly, I know. But all you have to do is look at the last guy in charge to see that blustering about various policies but not actually doing anything substantial can be effective politically.
I think this is one of those you need to see the language in the bill things though. Like I could see it being written in a super broad way that made all kinds of things illegal or a narrow way so it was more of a messaging thing.
I mean the last time they tried something I Like this Craig’s list couldn’t have personals anymore. I mean the history of regulations is full of unintended consequences.
I remember reading about how Rhode Island legalized prostitution by accident. But actually served as an example of how legalization could work. But of course it was promptly repealed.
A one-cent charge to your credit card gives the credit card companies a database of who is looking at porn. Any company asking for a one cent charge is actually doing it to reduce friction for your future payments - they often say it’s for age verification to get people to agree, but there’s no such requirement for games.
Credit card companies already know about every purchase you make with a credit card; the OP was worried about a database leaking and others were worried about having to hand over ID and/or the porn sites keeping records (that could also be leaked). I am just pointing out that there are ways of providing reasonable evidence that you are an adult without handing over all of your personal information to a porn site.
As for the game sites, they voluntarily enforce age restrictions to avoid (more) regulation and legislation. They offer other means (that I forget at the moment) that do not involve credit card transactions, that is just the one I picked so it's the one I remember. I watch my kids interactions over their shoulders and games like Roblox and Fortnite really do appear to be keeping the kids shielded from random strangers; they also offer a whole host of parental controls that certainly cost them to develop and maintain. I'm not buying the notion that they are just scamming me for my credit card info.
Maybe just have the site post a question like "who sang 'Billie Jean'?" and give the visitor five seconds to answer so they can't run to ask their big brother.
I found this sub-thread entertaining - but I am 37. I think we need to remind ourselves that people who turn 18 today are younger than Swift Boat Veterans for Truth.
I don't know who sang Billie Jean, and I'm 40 years old. Your idea would be pretty unfair toward, say, people who immigrated to the U.S. as adults and who don't have a good knowledge of American pop culture references.
My federal law would have these sites post three questions in succession. If you fail to answer any of the three, then you're locked out of the site for the next 24 hours.
It won't be a perfect solution, but it preserves anonymity and *mostly* cuts out under 18 year olds. And if it unfairly locks someone out, well, there's no sacred right to browse porn sites.
Now I'm picturing recent immigrants compiling study guides of common American pop culture references, so that they have the knowledge to be admitted to their favorite adult website :)
American pop culture? Maybe! But I pity the 10 year old hoping to see porn who has to answer the question of "what is the airspeed velocity of an unladen swallow?"
(The only valid response, of course, being, "what do you mean, an African or a European swallow?")
What if we did it the other way around, as an opt-in system? Browsers can tell websites “I’m a minor” and then if the websites show restricted content to them, they are on the hook for it. It would be super easy to check if a website was compliant. And I think Google and Apple would be happy to build that feature into Android and iOS and make it hard to circumvent.
Currently, parental control systems work by maintaining a running list of all questionable content in the universe, which is a never-ending task. Shifting the burden onto the websites without making them solve the problem of who is a minor seems like a good middle ground.
And finally I think an opt-in system is more likely to pass first amendment scrutiny.
Even that doesn't do it. (source: I work in alcohol law, and a big part of the job is dealing with age verification and fake IDs). You can buy essentially perfect copies of American state drivers' license or ID cards online with modified age information on the card. Even if each porn company is forced to query a state database, that only works if each person's unique identifier in the database remains secure and private; there's also a huge market in forged or stolen credentials (Social Security numbers, Driver's License numbers, etc.)
Lots of men, me included, give zero shits about porn. But tbh, take the same tech we use to check ID for online booze and weed purchases, mandate them for porn, and while we’re at it, social media, aka intellectual porn.
Marie - since you were wondering why the conversation is heated... :)
"An acquaintance of mine is a teacher at an elementary school. One day, in the teacher’s lounge, several female teachers were talking about a student who was 10 or 11. This boy had brought pornography to class (presumably he had printed it off the Internet but I don’t recall).
The female teachers were absolutely convinced that he must have been molested. Ten years old was much too young for a boy to want to look at images of hardcore sex. They started to call social services to figure out who was molesting the boy and how they could get him out of his home.
The male teachers, who until this point had sat around silently, finally exploded. They did an impromptu survey of the age they all took an active interest in sex. The ages ranged from 8 to 12. Were any of them molested? They all said no. Puberty kicked in and it was off to the races.
The women didn’t believe it. This caused a lot of interesting conversations because they were absolutely dumbfounded that boys that young were thinking about sex. The men, on the other hand, basically called the women stupid. How could they not know that? It’s what consumed their entire childhood once their bodies “woke up”."
I believe it. To me it’s a matter of “is” vs “should be.” Should it be easy for a 10 year old boy to access hardcore porn online to print off? No, it should not.
Also, a study that can’t find a man who has NEVER seen porn doesn’t mean that everyone CARES about porn or even regularly accesses it.
Fair enough and I don't know how strict they were about the "never seen porn" thingy.
But one thing I wanted to ask - what do you think you're achieving by depriving male teenagers of access to porn? What's the reason(s) for your position? Or is it purely moralistic/religious or "aesthetic"?
Their brains are still developing and a lot of the hardcore stuff can really mess with you psychologically. Why can’t they use R-rated movies and Victorias Secret catalogs like guys did in the 90s? I also do not think minors should have legal access to booze, cigarettes, gambling or drugs. But, ultimately, this would not have been in my top 10. I’m mostly disturbed by how defensive the SB commentariat is about it.
You talk about depriving male teenagers of access to porn, but mention a 10-11 year old with porn at school in your earlier comment. Do you see an argument for keeping porn away from a 10 year old who wants to access it?
I personally would probably trade strict limits on under 14 access for looking the other way on 14+ but I imagine that would just alienate both sides.
The ferociousness comes not from the check itself- if it was still in a traditional store just show the ID would be enough. The problem comes online with storage. Effectively the proposal becomes “de-anonymize” online porn -which is much more provocative.
I can’t recall people being so upset about anything else on this blog. And after just having had the conversation about more diversity of identity being important here…
They were also pretty upset when Milan said that legalized gambling has bad effects. Certain subjects seem to trigger a libertarian response in certain readers.
I could make an argument against TikTok. It is giving a lot of useful info to the Chinese government. Trump wasn't wrong in wanting ByteDance to sell the US component.
Also - TikTok is wonderfully addictive and, just like porn or sales or compounding and interest rates in general, it wouldn't be a bad thing to explain to youngsters/teenagers the psychological mechanisms it is triggering...
Fair, but if you want the stuff for booze to improve, make porn gated behind the same thing. Porn companies are usually the pioneers for making tech more streamlined. I’m convinced porn is why we have YouTube.
but please remember, always : "Pornography Usage Increases With Religious Upbringing and Church Attendance" and "pornography consumption is most heavily concentrated in religious and conservative states".
They are only looking at the very small % of pornography -subscribers-.
People who are so dumb that they pay for porn.
I'd chalk this up to it being less acceptable to talk about porn in these states, and so a greater (though still small overall) % of the male populace doesn't know about the ubiquity of free porn.
Re: a possible leak, you think they don't know now! There's a reason the EU considers your IP address to be private data. They absolutely know who is looking at what. There's just no market for the data (because credit card companies don't like porn), so they aren't using it aggressively. But it's all right there in their logs. Porno ads could follow you around like mattress ads if there was market for it.
They absolutely do sell those data to 'brokers' (in the US) because it reveals demographic information that can be combined with other telemetry to target ads, etc. For example, there is a very high probability that an IP address that accesses porn sites comes from a household with at least one male. Combined with the time of day, amount of time spent, days of the week it is accessed, etc., a broker can sell it to Meta or Google or whomever, who combines it with IMEI or cookie data or whatever and serve ads for razors or ESPN subscriptions or whatever else.
Very true, although I think handing over something with your name or bank account information on it would "feel" less anonymous, even if it really isn't.
With that said, I'm not sure any of this would matter much politically. The modal man is not basing his vote on access to free porn; it's just a non-issue. And a man who did base his vote on that probably would be willing to put up with the minor annoyance/privacy invasion of an identity check, even if he didn't particularly like it.
But I think most adult men would just...watch less porn, which isn't necessarily a bad thing.
That is... a very naïve set of statements. Pornhub gets more traffic per month than Netflix, and it doesn't get that traffic because people don't like it. The party that takes people's access to free and seemingly anonymous porn usage will in fact likely pay a price for it even if people don't necessarily tell pollsters about it specifically. It's something that would affect people's lives much more obviously than 90% of what Washington does.
It's not naive at all. I am well aware of the massive amount of traffic that Pornhub and other sites attract, and I am well aware of the massive number of people (a group that includes virtually all men, and I am a man) who watch porn on the internet.
My argument has nothing whatsoever to do with whether or not people like porn. It's about whether people *value* porn. There is a difference between "thing you do because it is kind of enjoyable and easy" and "thing that you actually value." The vast majority of men like porn, it's true, but they like it in the same way that they like, I don't know, arguing about politics with strangers behind a screen. If MY suddenly instituted a new policy tomorrow where you need to pay an extra $400/year (beyond the base subscription) to access the comments section on Slow Boring, I almost certainly wouldn't do it, even though I *like* commenting here. Ditto for porn.
I do think it would be a strike against Dems for some people, but it would also be a boon for Dems for some people. My guess is that the group that thinks we should make a real effort to prevent kids from seeing porn and cares a substantial amount about that is bigger than the group that wants to maintain seamless porn access for themselves and cares a substantial amount about that (the "and" bit being very important there - parents care a lot about their kids!). And, as I said, the people that really value porn a lot might grumble, but ultimately they'd probably just register or pay some money or whatever and move on.
You say that as if there's some big campaign to limit porn access right now... there isn't. No one in power is even seriously proposing this, not even evangelicals Christians. There's some degree of "concern" about kids having access to porn but most people just see it as a fact of modern life and move on. The sentiment isn't even as strong as it was during the 70s when porn was still relatively hard to access. If there was a popular crusade against porn, then sure, maybe making some sort of compromise for political capital might be worth it but that's not the case at all.
Yes, I know. I was referring to a hypothetical scenario in which item #10 on Matt's agenda were an actual legislative priority, and the political considerations that would come into play in that hypothetical scenario. Which is the subject of many comments on this thread!
To be fair, you are correct that the odds of this happening are pretty much nil.
I assume most men do view porn and it does not bother me at all. What's surprised me in these conversations is how defensive men seem about it and how unwilling they are to accept inconvenience in accessing it.
With regard to security leaks, aren't there paid porn sites and things like OnlyFans that also have credit card information? Do they have security leaks all the time, and if so does anybody give a shit who's on the list? For just basic age verification you could even do a one time $0.01 credit card verification like R C described in another comment, and not store the card information.
I take it you've never been much of a consumer of porn? Things were much more difficult/annoying before streaming video came in. You were pretty much stuck with still images unless you were willing to give your credit card number to various websites that looked like fronts for the Russian Mafia and download a bunch of files you were pretty sure would give your computer viruses. Pornhub is mostly successful because it at least seems much safer and more anonymous and people do NOT want to go back to the old days.
Like, imagine you enjoyed streaming movies through Netflix and suddenly someone decided to pass a law that would force you to go back to getting your movies through cable TV and VHS all to supposedly help some kids you don't know and who will probably just get around the restriction anyway.
As to site security, look up what happened to the site Ashley Madison.
I actually do have first hand experience with both finding porn in the old days and with Pornhub, and I definitely agree that the modern sites are much better and safer than virus-laden websites or shady peer-to-peer files. If anything the success of Pornhub and xTube and whatever else seems like it could make it easier to implement a solution with the bigger trusted sites.
The analogy seems more like if Netflix decided to make me enter a passcode or something before streaming an R-rated movie to make sure it wasn't a minor accessing my profile, and that would be a little annoying but not that big of a deal.
I also don't think a PornHub leak would be as salacious as Ashley Madision, given that the latter was focused on enabling actual real world infidelity.
I'm willing to believe that the technical and privacy challenges are too difficult to implement a workable solution. I just don't get the strong resistance of porn consumers to even consider possible regulation.
Yeah having it be as difficult to access as tobacco seems fine.
Funny thing about Ashley Madison though, while there were plenty of real men on that site looking for sex with someone other than their partner, there were extremely few women. Weren't most of the female profiles bots?
The Ashley Madison leak seemed genuinely humiliating for those affected, since it revealed them as extremely gullible and also lacking enough game to just cheat on Tinder or whatever like a normal person.
You're kind of writing Bernie's and AOC's talking points for them there. "The people who oppose interest rate caps would prefer that poor people struggle against insurmountable financial odds and stay poor forever just so that they can get an upgrade on their international flight to the Maldives."
I hope people can understand that the alternative for poor people paying high interest rates is not paying low interest rates but receiving no credit at all. Maybe that's the goal, but let's be honest with our paternalism.
But yeah I also want to be able to go to the Maldives on points too.
> I hope people can understand that the alternative for poor people paying high interest rates is not paying low interest rates but receiving no credit at all
Research on payday loans suggests this is actually better.
1. As a welfare enhancing policy this makes sense because rates can get so bad that eventually only the financially illiterate take the deal.
2. And politically you can stick it to greedy banks by capping rates.
Yes, for every credit card use or payday loan that turned out well, there are dozens of cases where it turned into a massive financial black hole. I'd be more willing to allow them if bankruptcy was more accessible and easier, but instead we've made that harder to access.
I think Matt specifically addresses that in the post. But sure, the folks who understand that but agree with the policy proposal say it's still a better outcome.
I don't see why the credit card company wouldn't be maximizing revenue per customer. You are getting flights to the Maldives because of vendor fees your vendors are paying. Poor people pay high interest rates to make up for the risk of extending them credit. It's not a cross-subsidy except to the extent the credit card company can't tell which kind of customer you are. But if you're travelling to the Maldives, the credit card company knows.
The consequence of capping interest rates will be that some current customers don't get credit cards, or have to pay fixed annual fees instead.
The other dynamic are the transaction fees. Everyone pays the fees today (not everyone carry’s a balance). Ostensively the fees are match the rewards. I wonder if lower interest just generally would mean higher fees.
There was one place (cant find the reference right now) they made a rule about merchant fees, and when it when into effect the credit card drastically reduced rewards. I suspect the people who are picking cards based on rewards are not the ones paying interest.
This is correct (I work in consumer banking— you’ve heard of my company, you probably have one of our cards. I’m also a woman, for what it’s worth). It depends on the corporate strategy to a certain extent, but generally the better rewards go to the higher FICO scores. If we could wave a magic wand, everyone would use their card all the time and always pay it off. We’d lose the interest but gain the interchange fee and wouldn’t have to write off a bunch of bad debt.
Why? There's absolutely no way to make a draconian porn ban that affected everything. But it's totally possible to increase the difficulty of finding porn.
For example, child porn is not widely available like regular porn. I assume it's out there on the dark web somewhere because people get arrested for it, but you don't stumble into it when you do a Google Image search, like regular porn. Even 4chan deletes child porn posts. Why? Because 4chan knows they'd be shut down if they ignored the anti-child porn laws.
If there were laws about regular porn, you'd still be able to find it pretty easily because there's huge demand for it, but it would be marginally harder. The most convenient way to get it for adults would be to just show proof of age instead of figuring how to join a private IRC group or whatever. Teen age boys would still want to look at porn, but they don't have much money, so the market wouldn't cater to them, it would cater to the people with money.
The primary thing that restricts child porn is not really the enforcement regime, which despite its many high-profile hits is still fairly paltry and weak.
What restricts child porn is the overwhelming degree of social sanction against the consumption of that material, a sanction so severe that it effectively amounts to social death for those who receive it. Registries are a policy tool that are on the merits almost useless but have the effect of amplifying and enabling this social sanction.
I personally believe this law idea is good, not because it's going to do much, but because it's time for us as a society to push back on the idea that it's totally normal and okay for "literally every man" to consume video porn, including the vast majority of teen boys. Obviously we don't want a social sanction on the level of CP, but we also don't want a reduction in demand nearly so drastic as that either.
I work in criminal defense, and I've worked a lot of child porn cases, and I can tell you child pornography is readily available through regular internet channels. We've never had a "dark web" case that I can think of.
Yes, and it seems like there are many people interpreting the primary goal of #10 to be no teenager ever finds porn. As a parent of an early tween I would be happy if I didn't have to worry as much about him or one of his friends accessing porn out of curiosity. Put it behind the internet equivalent of a brown paper wrapper.
child porn is *absolutely* widely available. yeah google is pretty good at hiding it, other search engines aren't always. and if you are looking for a search engine to find it, you will.
But there are presumably a lot of people who aren’t very motivated to find it who have been prevented from finding it. Same could be true for conventional porn.
Online poker is in no way as available to Americans now as it was in 2005. Do Americans still play online poker illegally? Yes, but many fewer play now.
But those sites already had to take payment in some form, which made them easier to regulate.
In fact, I believe it was the credit card companies that successfully applied pressure a couple years ago to the free porn sites to get them to delete about 80% of their content because it was unverified. Now all content comes from production companies that maintain legal records or amateurs who provide verification videos.
I can't imagine it's true that less people play poker online in the US in 2022 than 2005. And if it is true it's because poker was particularly popular in 2005, not because of internet regulation
The numbers fell off a cliff in 2006 with the passage of the Unlawful Internet Gambling Act and never came close to recovering. Poker didn't magically get much less popular in January of 2007.
Not to mention that if it did you could make a pretty convincing case that it did so precisely because the passage of UIGA meant that fewer people could easily access online poker and therefore lost interest in the game generally.
The World Series of Poker gets bigger every year, card rooms have expanded, poker streaming is booming. I don’t think it works to say poker was more popular in 2005 than today.
Credit card rewards are also paid for by increasing merchant fees, which is why a lot of merchants are now putting a surcharge on credit use. This seems very inefficient since cards are a lot more efficient/safer than cash generically so essentially it's the bloat of the rewards that is making merchants not want to accept them anymore. I like rewards too but abolishing them would be good.
Yeah, rewards are cool and all, but TBH, would give them up in a hot second if we could just do the transaction and lose the side hustle, and in exchange, lower transaction fees to as close to zero as possible. At the end of the day, it is an odd market distortion.
The rewards won't be abolished. Some merchants will charge more for cards because they are either dumb (don't understand the cost of handling cash) or can't negotiate a good deal with the credit card company. But you don't see Amazon doing this and, in fact, many vendors offer their own cards with even better benefits.
Whenever I see one of those cheapo businesses that get big mad about taking credit card transactions and charges a surcharge, I am always tempted to pay in pennies just to make a point.
The travel rewards are largely funded by the merchant fees, as evidenced by AmEx having both the most generous rewards (see 5x MR on Platinum airfare, 4.5x MR on Everyday Preferred groceries, etc.) and the lowest percentage of revenue being from interest (higher AFs and higher merchant fees). The folks who earn the travel rewards are, across issuers, more likely to always pay-in-full, which is the main reason no one has been able to dethrone the AmEx Platinum (Citi has already given up (Prestige is closed to new applicants and likely to see further benefit erosion) and Chase seems pretty unhappy with the Sapphire Reserve... Cap1 is nibbling but will likely end up in Citi/Chase land and the others are all basically staying away): the interest-dependent model doesn't work in that segment.
Why do you think the credit card company is taking a loss on you and making it up from lower-income borrowers? I think it's reasonable to assume the credit card company is also making money on your credit card use.
re: Credit Cards, I am not sure you lose the points in a scenario where you have interest caps. Corporate Cards have those programs, and most of those never see interest charges that go to consumers.
I think the list should be more focused on inflation and productivity. It's what people care about, and it's also I think relatively actionable. Matt has said this elsewhere: US policy has been dedicated to "job creation" for 20 years, and that is now getting really harmful. Tariffs, "buy American", union requirements, permitting, environmental review etc.
Real question, are you a parent of a child age 8 or older? Because if you were I think you would find the inclusion of real porn limits to be the most salient issue on this list, possibly tied with universal free school meals.
I’d much rather they do that by taking popular measures to unfuck the education system than implement a wee bit of the PRC’s real identification verification infrastructure online, thank you kindly.
I am much more concerned about my child’s experience in my city’s public school system in ten years’ time than her accessing porn online.
I understand that, but I think it’s also an objectively terrible idea and should be replaced by something like a national civics education standard that appeals to the mushy middle.
This seems… unrealistic. I think you believe this is more important than everything else and impute that as a major concern to other parents without any real supporting data.
I don’t believe there’s any evidence to suggest this is actually the case.
For example, I am much more confident in my ability to constrain my child from accessing porn than I am in, say, preventing her from being bullied in middle school.
I am also vastly more confident that I as a parent can play a constructive role in teaching her about sex and how to preserve her safety and fulfill her emotional and physical needs than that I can do the same regarding basic academic matters.
Put succinctly, I’m way more concerned about the quality of my area’s public schools than about whether she sees porn and I have to sit her down and explain its lack of realism to her.
I don't disagree that the quality of my child's school is more important, but it doesn't feel like something the federal government is going to solve AND it feels a lot harder to get a coalition to agree on what "quality public schools" means.
I mean, a federal “mushy middle” civics curriculum to rein in both DeSantis and my city’s woke-ass school board would be an immensely reassuring start, much more important than any of this.
I suppose any bill for a "mushy middle" civics curriculum would create some sort of panel of historians and leading civic individuals that would devise its contents, but something makes me think that Republicans would still seize on the debate over the curriculum's contents to try to embarrass Democrats. For one, it would be characterized by the extreme right fringe as "federal government brain washing" and interference in local education, a "federal power grab" of sorts. Secondly, conservatives would likely attack it for not being sufficiently patriotic about America and its history, even if it was pretty rah-rah-America-is-great--look at how they relentlessly attacked Obama on this front, despite his patriotic narrative about how great America's ideals are and how it has grown closer through time at living up to them. Third, the curriculum would unleash a lot of extremely toxic takes from leftists wanting to inject all sorts of 'critical' ideas into it--the left would also likely characterize the curriculum as brain washing, and would try to tar Dem politicians for supporting it. Wonder what Dems' allies in the teachers' unions would think about having to teach a new "federal mandate"... Just could imagine this being a giant mess.
I think a lot of parents wouldn’t be happy with a “mushy middle” plan except insofar as it prevents the other side from dictating to them, which I have to imagine would mean a lot to rural parents in NY or CA, or urban ones in TX or FL.
Yes! If you are a parent with kids number 10 is an issue. It’s also a serious issue for the left that when you post about it a thousand liberal people come after you claiming you are essentially Hitler and you are advocating some new holocaust. It’s just porn folks, it’s a suggestion of sensible regulation of a well known vice.
Liberals would rather concoct a fantasy nightmare about some privacy issue that seems like it comes from the deranged ramblings of one of those libertarian dudes who forced the census to start anonymizing information than admit that their primary issue is that they, personally, would rather not have to deal with any additional inconvenience when accessing porn.
I think that is part of it, but I don't want automatically to assume bad faith on the part of people making these arguments against regulation. I think there is a legitimate privacy and security concern. However, to not even want to approach a way to reform the system isn't going to be sustainable. My guess is that Republicans are going to massively overreach when they take congress but some of that overreach may not poll as poorly as liberals hope. If the Republicans are the only ones for regulation, then a lot of middle of the road folks will be like "Well they are overdoing it, but the left wants to practically hand a laptop loaded with furry porn to my 6 year old". That situation will be much worse for security and privacy because Republicans will use it as a tool of discrimination and marginalization against the groups they don't like as soon as they have the power.
"if you were I think you would find the inclusion of real porn limits to be the most salient issue on this list"
I'm sure that this is an issue of concern to parents --- just as violent video games were a concern to parents 15 years ago. They were so much of a concern, that Hillary Clinton campaigned to limit children's access to violent video games back in 2008 (and before). This was popular and common sense. Exposing kids to violence would of course make them more violent, right? There were academic studies that backed up this common sense too. Well, it turned out that common sense and academic studies got it wrong. Violent media (including video games) doesn't increase violence. If anything, it does the opposite [1,2] (both by Matthew Yglesias).
So, yeah, I'm sure that a lot of parents today are concerned that porn will harm their kid. And I'm sure that campaigning to limit access to porn is popular. I'd also bet dollars to donuts that porn is no more harmful to kids than violent video games. The academic studies that say otherwise won't replicate (psychology articles rarely do) --- just as the violent video game studies didn't replicate.
The most salient issue for parents should be an actual problem --- not a repackaged video game panic.
Most readers of this blog are rich enough to afford school meals and educated enough to know how to configure adult content filters, so they don't care about those.
I’m not a parent. What I meant is this seems like an issue you could easily legislate. Republicans wouldn’t oppose it. So its electoral value is likely to be limited.
If it's broadly popular and you could get republican support, doesn't that mean it's an even better idea to include in the list? You're trying to win over voters, so popular things are a good idea, and if you're saying something that even appeals to conservatives then you're more likely to persuade voters to support you. Not to mention that you create a bit of a bind for the opposition- either come out against it (which would be unpopular) or come out and say (GASP!) your opponent's idea is a good one that you support. All of these seem like good outcomes, and far better than the endless smashing our faces into walls advocating for unpopular ideas that have no hope of ever becoming law.
No. You want to push popular ideas your opponents oppose. If there'd broad agreement and you hold the White House and both chambers of Congress, you should just do it.
Having said that. I've been shocked by the amount of disagreement with Matt's porn proposal in this comments section. I thought it was weak because it was a no-brainer, but clearly that's not the case, so I stand corrected on that.
You're talking about what to do when you're already in power. The point of this exercise is to focus on what you should run on to get into office in the first place. There's a huge difference between "we have the votes to do this, so should we do it?" and "I'm hoping to get you to support me for office, so here's what I want to talk about".
Actionable, sure, but try running on a "don't buy American" or "environmental reviews are too costly" platform and see where that gets you.
The whole purpose of the exercise is to have good ideas that are also politically popular and feasible. There are better policy ideas out there, but they're less popular, more technocratic, less likely to successfully pass Congress, etc.. All the things you're talking about are things that need to be done quietly to avoid a public backlash, which makes them things you absolutely don't want to be loudly proclaiming your support for as a politician.
I agree with you that inflation should be a target but I’m having trouble coming up with policies that would do that. I’m all for killing the Jones act, but that’s going to piss off labor, and I’m not sure it’s worth it. Do you have other thoughts?
I feel like the Jones Act might actually be a viable target if only because as a share of the electorate the interests it's pissing off are, AIUI, vanishingly small. The countervailing narrative that "you're paying too much for everything for no reason and the U.S. doesn't even have a competitive merchant marine to show for it!" is a reasonable bread-and-butter sales pitch.
Force longshoremen's and dock workers' unions to accept automation at seaports, and force railroad unions to accept more automation on cargo rail. I know this is a very sacred cow for the Democratic Party, but it would actually have some noticeable effect on prices. American seaports, especially LA/Long Beach, are very inefficient compared European and Asian seaports, and that is reflected in the price of goods.
What are the odds that the democrats can do anything about inflation between now and November that would actually make a significant dent in inflation numbers? My amateur guess is roughly 100,000/1. If the focus is ONLY on inflation then the democrats are setting themselves up to debate solely on a losing issue for them. They absolutely want to campaign on doing something about inflation, but talking solely about a policy that makes you look terrible is not a good way to win an election. It would be like Giannis arguing that the MVP voting should be solely focused on free throw shooting percentage. The democrats need to try and steer the discussion towards subjects that they can make compelling appeals to voters on. One should be coming up with inflation messaging that deflects republican attacks. But they need to bring up other things after that deflection occurs or else we're going to see lots of republicans essentially saying "look at gas prices. Look at grocery prices. That's after the Dems have been in control for 2 years. On election day, look at those two things, and it will be clear who you should vote for." And they'll win easily if that's what the discussion is solely focused on.
Worse than that, it's not just 'between now and November', it's extremely difficult for Congress to have meaningful control of inflation in any case. Firstly, Congress does not control the Federal Reserve, who set their own decisions on whether they're more bothered about inflation or growth or unemployment or whatever.* Secondly, inflation is driven by many factors, many of which are beyond Congress's control. Congress cannot prevent failed grain harvests in Canada, cannot prevent the Ever Given from blocking the Suez Canal or Vladimir Putin from blockading Ukraine's Black Sea ports, cannot have any impact on China's zero covid policy and the closure of factories in Shanghai, and while they did have some control over pandemic stimulus measures, they also had no way to accurately predict the course of the pandemic or the speed with which red state governors and electorates would get tired of restrictions, or what proportions of covid relief would be necessary or wasted, would be spent on bills or new jetskis or on state tax cuts.
It's a commonplace to say that Presidents are given both too much credit and too much blame for the state of the economy, and it's no different for Congress. A Congressional 100% effort on reducing the effects of inflation might have some minor impact at the edges but it probably wouldn't be noticeable for the average voter who is paying no attention. There's not a 'reverse inflation' button that they're just perversely neglecting to press.
My * was meant to be a footnote that personally I dislike central bank independence and wish parties would end it, but I accept that opinion is outside the Overton Window for now.
"First trimester abortions and abortions with bona fide life or health of the mother reasons constitute the overwhelming majority of actual abortions" The other substantial sympathetic group of second and third trimester abortions is where the fetus has no or little chance of survival (or is likely to be massively disabled, like "in a coma for the rest of its life" disabled).
The case that particularly comes to mind is of a friend who had a 34-week abortion of an anencephalic fetus. For those with some Greek, that's not literally "no head", it's the absence of most of the brain and skull. It has enough brain for the minimal life-preserving requirements (maintaining heartbeat), though it requires a ventilator and to be fed through a tube. But it has no chance of long-term survival; a few weeks after birth is the most it can expect, and there is no ability to respond to stimulus. It's effectively born into a persistent vegetative state.
Anencephaly is normally diagnosed earlier, but they missed it for my friend and she ended up having a very late abortion of a fetus that had zero chance of developing into a baby. Could she have continued until birth? Sure, but why the heck should she?
I'd also want to look at making sure that women can afford early abortions. Even if that's just a government-guaranteed repayment plan so no-one ever has to save up for an abortion and so delay it.
Agree that exceptions are also required for fetuses that cannot survive outside the womb. Matt tweeted an example from Louisiana last week where a woman's water broke at 16 weeks and the pregnancy could no longer continue, and rather than have a sad but quick, humane abortion (which was what she initially chose), she had to go through hours-long labor and delivery of her doomed fetus. Heartbreaking.
Yeah, it was 20 years ago and I was a terrible friend to her at the time and, unsurprisingly, we drifted away after that. I like to think that I'm a better and more caring person now, and I do raise her story because I hope it will help someone else in that situation.
Agree that abortion is justified in these cases but they are exactly the edge cases that Matt points out as causing things to get tied up. We're talking about a federal law that stops states from prohibiting abortion in certain circumstances. These edge cases can be taken up at the state level. Will some states insist on Draconian laws that don't allow abortion in these cases? Sure but trying to prevent that makes the perfect the enemy of the good
If my choices are “protect first trimester open access and immediate threat to mothers life” or “nothing,” I choose the first. But if my choices are “argue to protect access in just the specific edge cases we mostly agree on” or “argue for open second and third trimester access bc of edge cases”, I’m going with the first.
The argument for the second is that there's very close to 100% overlap between those two sets (to first order, nobody carries a pregnancy for 30-weeks without intending to bring it to term) so enumerating edge cases or assessing them just introduces bureaucratic overheard and possibly-incomplete enumeration into what are almost definitionally already heartbreaking 'edge cases' for all involved. Thus there's not really any tangible gain for those who are amenable to option (1) in the first place but significant overhead and frictional losses relative to just adopting option (2).
The problem is that arguing for abortion on demand through the third trimester forces you to argue full-term fetuses aren’t human beings, which is pretty disgusting to most people. If you say “we only want to allow the cases that are basically compassionate euthanasia” you win back the moderates and you actually help people in really awful scenarios.
1) energy dominance: Matt’s plan plus air conditioning and heating subsidies for low income households during hot or cold months
2) housing abundance, use the commerce clause to impose Texas style land use policies on blue states. Villainize high income urbanites who prioritize their home values over affordability.
3) A national HOPE scholarship. In Georgia, college tuition is very cheap for students who maintain good grades and almost free for those with excellent grades. Make this national. Impose stiff taxes on college administrative costs to reduce bloat and DEI bullshit.
4) First trimester abortion on demand, guaranteed access when two doctors say there is a serious risk to the health of the mother.
5) Legal marijuana.
6) Health care abundance. Open borders for English speaking doctors and Spanish speaking doctors with bona fire job offers. Federally chartered medical schools. Better pay and working conditions for medical residents. You shouldn’t have to amputate your twenties to become a doctor. Drug prices pegged to Canadian levels.
7) Tax capital gains at the same rate as labor income and use the proceeds to fund child allowances.
8) More roads and bridges for stressed out commuters. Federal laws to prevent NIMBYS from litigating construction projects. Streamlined environmental impact reviews
9) Free contraceptives for anyone who wants them.
10) Humane prisons for low level offenders. Murderers, rapists and child molestors should go to to traditional prisons. Young offenders who stole stuff or got into a fight or sold drugs should go to something like a CCC camp where they can sleep in dorms, engage in healthy outdoor labor, and mix with the opposite gender on weekends as long as they avoid drugs and liquor and follow program rules. The purpose of these camps would be more to teach clean living than to impose pain. Those who break the rules go to traditional prisons.
Basically, I take successful red state programs and nationalize them, I offer young people cheaper college and legal pot, I offer women free contraceptives and early term abortions, and I go hard on material benefits for the 10th to 90th percentiles of the income distribution.
I think this is a great list and it personally demonstrates the value of list making to me. I think #8 is a terrible idea, because I'm an urban transit rider who drives only on vacation, and some of these others wouldn't be my top priorities, but they're really good, popular ideas and I'd feel comfortable advocating for them to a wide range of the population.
I could nitpick here and there, but overall I like your list better than MattY's and I think it would have a more positive impact on average Americans' lives. You out-Matted MattY! Kudos! I especially like your point #10.
Put it this way: If a wizard let me borrow his wand and wave it just once, and I had a choice to magically make either your #10 or MattY's #10 come true, I would pick yours.
I agree with Tabitha below that I don't really like your #8, because of induced demand. "If you build it, they will come" and your new road will be just as crowded as your old one was, now with extra CO2 emissions.
"Better pay and working conditions for medical residents" = as the wife of a former medical resident, I approve.
"Induced demand" is the idea that traffic expands to fill the available space. If you add an extra lane to a road, more people will drive there. I don't have exact references on hand, but multiple studies have show this. I don't know whether it applies to housing.
It's different for housing and cars. Everyone has to live somewhere, and once you move into a house/apartment/any kind of building, that building is going to stay in place regardless of how much or little time you spend in it.
With cars, you are much more free to choose what to do on a daily basis (of course, your choices are constrained by things like the necessity to get to work or school). Depending on your life circumstances, on any given day you can drive your car, carpool, work from home, take a taxi/Uber, take public transit, or ride your bicycle. The level of congestion on your local road is one of the factors that affect your choice. Wider road = less congestion = more likely to drive your car rather than carpool/WFH/take public transit.
If I'm driving more specifically because congestion is lower then I would stop driving more once congestion gets bad again and go back to carpool/WFH/public transit.
Love the HOPE scholarship idea. Not sure you can both increase doctors' pay AND peg health care prices to Canadian levels. (I'd love to pay Canadian rates but it will mean doctors get a big paycut -- which I'm fine with, I'm not a doctor)
He is just proposing better pay for residents which shouldn't be that expensive since it's a small number of years and they get paid like $50,000 in residency.
The open borders for English speaking and some Spanish speaking doctors would push down wages.
If Argentine and Mexican doctors were able to take jobs in Miami, it might become a hub for elective procedures, radiology, etc.. Thid would also encourage doctors in developing countries to brush up on their English and greatly increase their wages.
" Open borders for English speaking doctors and Spanish speaking doctors with bona fire job offers. "
And there would be new business opportunities for services trying to figure out the credentials and background check of international physicians, a process which takes months for already US employed physicians.
The biggest problem is what counts as porn is in the eye of the beholder - for example, on Reddit, there's lots of people who post themselves, of their own volition, for free, in various states of undress, doing everything from standing there to various sexual acts. No sob stories of being pressured, but people who just want to show themselves off.
Now, I know, yes, sure, stop the people from posting themselves having sex for free, OK, sure. The other problem is of course, Reddit for the most part doesn't post any porn. It links to various free sites that let you post videos and pictures. Those sites are pretty good at moving to domains where American law doesn't really apply to them, and I'm sure there are incentive-related reasons why even corporations who aren't pro-porn would want to make sure that Reddit isn't on the hook for every link submitted.
But, even getting past that, what's the difference between Olivia posting herself naked in her backyard and a statue of David with his willy hanging out, except time and subjective views of artistic skill? Is a topless woman with a dildo by her inherently sexual? Etc. Etc.
I'd also point out putting restrictions on porn breaks apart the Bro-Feminist Alliance that could be once again w/ Roe being overturned. You think secular conservative dudes in New Hampshire want to input their credit card or DL # everytime they want to jerk off.
Plus, stricter regulations in places like India don't really make teenage boys act better, it just means that anything vaguely sexual on Youtube gets tons of views and lots of odd comments from Indian guys. That doesn't seem like the healthiest thing either.
It's also just wildly, blatantly, stupidly, unfeasible. Pornhub is a thing for the same reason Spotify is a thing, because distributed peer 2 peer networks make it absolutely fucking impossible to stop people sharing music and completely destroyed the old business models. Free porn on Limewire was just a ubiquitous as mp3s. The tube site business model, let alone more recent advances like onlyfans, is way more constrained and ethical than the the free for all days that we'd be heading back to if the Feds decreed that all legitimate porn needs to be behind a paywall.
Pornhub just recently deleted a huge portion of the videos on the site after they got blowback from one Nicholas Kristof column. There didn’t even need to be a law! If there was a law they would dramatically change their model or close down. Yes, there would still be plenty of porn shared on p2p but just that change would hugely cut down on how many young people were seeing porn (my 9-year-old doesn’t know what p2p is and I’m not about to tell her).
"Most people don't speed when they drive" citation needed....
I think if you set a fee high enough that reddit etc don't want to pay it if they host something that's unpaywalled but reasonable enough that they don't go bankrupt if users mess them up, you might get something workable.
Kind of like the speeding tickets you mention. I don't want a ticket, but the rare ticket doesn't ruin me (I haven't gotten one in years, but I have gotten them before and they were annoying and I didn't want them but they didn't shut me down)
But... BigTech isn't wrong that there are real tradeoffs. If the cost were so high that reddit had to validate every video link you posted, it simply wouldn't let you post video links, which would also be a real cost.
I think it's tricky to set it at the correct level, but I agree it's probably not impossible.
He didn’t second-guess his motives. He observed that he is treating this as a highly upsetting proposal and implied that this level of upset is disproportionate. I think that’s all fair game.
You don't think Manchin is concerned about inflation? That would make him pretty unusual among moderate Americans. Heck, I'd say pretty unusual among Americans full stop.
You seem really worked up about advocating for a Chinese-style authoritarian system where everyone's porn viewing habits are centrally tracked via ID by Big Brother. For your own good citizen, of course. I'm sure they'd never leak or get hacked, leading to everyone knowing Bob Jones was watching X Video at Y Time. The government's cybersecurity is well-known to be flawless. I, too, think that totalitarian Big Government solutions are generally the way
I don't get this take. Were we living in a Chinese Style authoritarian system in 1992 before there was massive amounts of freely available porn online? Does the fact that netflix, Hulu, etc. all require submit a CC to pay for content mean we're living in a totalitarian nightmare?
I was in middle school in 1992. Everyone knew where their Dad's Playboys were. Most of the boys at school passed around copies of Hustler, Penthouse etc. (One boy was famously busted by his Mom with a literal duffel bag full of them- the stuff of middle school legend....) Somehow we all survived. As dirty magazines have been a thing for the whole 20th century, I'll take a wager and say that every generation of boys got them illicitly.
I just cannot believe that after Prohibition, the War on Drugs etc., people still can't imagine how the black market will work. Especially on.... the Internet. As 96% of the world's population lives outside the US and isn't subject to its rules, and porn is in Extremely High Demand, there will be countless websites outside the scope of American jurisdiction. And who's the most tech-savvy crowd best positioned to use a VPN and find them? That's right, boys under 18.
I noticed you don't use your full name here, John. But you'd be comfortable with your full name leaking along with a list of all the adult websites you've visited in the last few years, once these websites inevitably get hacked? You're cool with that?
Do you actually see no difference in scale between “some kids know where their dad’s dirty mags are and pass them around to a dozen friends” and “every kid can access a practically infinite number of pornographic videos from the privacy of their room”? You can’t possibly think that “we survived” an era where you could see a Hustler every few months means that there could be no possible adverse effects from the cup-runneth-over situation we have now.
Is something stopping people who pay for porn sites now from having their data hacked and released? The Ashley Madison leak suggests not. But am I failing to account for scale myself? Sincere question.
I don't think that children should be viewing hardcore pornography- I think their parents should monitor their electronic devices and stop it. If your response is 'gee, it's really difficult to monitor what websites they're visiting', I would invite you to consider how difficult that becomes when you scale up to the 73 million children in the US.
I think large-scale government bans that create black markets are in general a terrible solution to any problem. Sometimes they work when the product in question is logistically difficult to get (I dunno, a rocket launcher or something), but man when I look at 'porn on the Internet' or 'websites in general', that sure looks logistically easy to route around restrictions. Like nailing jelly to a wall
I'd be more comfortable with my full name leaking along with the adult websites I've visited than the vast number of silly comments I've made on substacks :)
We're not talking about prohibition - that's just a ridiculous example. We ended prohibition, but would you suggest that we remove all age & ID constraints for alcohol or pot? Some 10 year old kid can roll up and order a coke and rum with a magic brownie to take the edge off a hard day at school?
As for people not following US laws, they are doing this to get paid. Make a system where its easy for them to get paid if they ID, but it costs them money if they don't and 90%+ of them will follow the easy money.
Do sites track that stuff? I guess I can imagine metrics reasons why they would. But if so, isn’t that vulnerable to being hacked and released right now?
In the 90s, we had movies about single teenage boys having intercourse with pies and a way higher rate of teenage pregnancy. Instead of looking at internet porn teen boys got into way worse trouble.
Anyway, people care about internet anonymity, especially with something as incredibly personal, incredibly wound up in shame and sexuality as porn. You also can't just think about it in terms of internet porn either being PornHub (free) or OnlyFans (paywall). Any and every site where users are allowed to host their own content has had a porn community full of people pseudonymously sharing their own NSFW content - Reddit, Twitter, Tumblr, Instagram, Youtube, DeviantArt, WordPress, *chan boards, fanfiction archives - those horses left the barn a long time ago. That would take us into a separate discussion about Section 230 and the expectations of sites making a good faith attempt at keeping order. They do that currently, but not even a company of Youtube's scale can keep copyrighted material off of it, and they get the benefit of having an algorithm that can compare against a massive database of copyrighted material. They know what they're looking for and they can't find it all.
The only way of truly keeping kids away from porn is to de-anonymize the people consuming it, hence the paywall idea. If you went to a shady store and bought a porno in the 90s, you showed them your ID, but they didn't need to make you a store account. You could pay in cash, only one person really needed to know your shameful secret. But that wouldn't be the case with porn now. For good and for ill it would mean that every account could be tied back to a real person. That information would be valuable (and dangerous) in a data breach.
I don't care if Netflix knows that I'm catching up on Better Call Saul, what harm would that do if it was leaked? But while some people just want to watch some naked people of their preferred gender and that information would be pretty minimally embarrassing (although it could possibly end some marriages), some people (like Ted Cruz) enjoy some scandalous fantasy material that could be used to hurt them and some normal, everyday people are into shameful, degenerate things that are completely harmless but immensely embarrassing if they were to become public knowledge (like people sitting in pies and crying, thanks BCS for telling me that exists...).
"If it’s a 10-item list, it can only include so many things."
So narrow-minded. You need to liberate your agenda to become truly transformational.
You are still trying to appeal to the Democrats' traditional base, namely base ten. Granted, in base ten, a 10-item list can include only ten items. But why not hexidecimal? Why not sexigesimal! A 10-item list can include sixty items!
Once you have liberated your mind, you'll see that a 10-item list can include as many things as you like.
But by all means, eschew the traditional binary. A 10-item list with only two items is never going to win elections.
Matt is erasing the lived experience of those of us that spend way too much time in the corporate world, where 10-item lists with more than 10 items are the norm.
Sub-bullets !!
As a programmer, this speaks to me... but it's BS and doesn't compute.
"You know, there is an element of seriousness in what you say."
There is always an element of seriousness in what I say. I'm serious!
I'm sure #4 is popular, but you can take my credit card travel rewards from my cold dead hands.
As for #10, when the inevitable security leak happens and people are able to see who's viewing Internet porn, I wonder if some women would be surprised that that list includes literally every single man. (Researchers in the UK tried to study the effects of porn consumption but had to abandon things when they literally couldn't find a control group.)
Right, the issue with #10 is not that it’s bad on the merits, but that in today’s technological and political climate this amounts to building a database of people’s identifying information alongside exactly what porn they’re watching. We don’t really have a good way of proving age online without handing over a copy of your ID, which contains a lot more information than just that.
In order to create an account on Epic, Sony, Nintendo, etc. for my kids, I had to 'prove' that I was over 18 by doing something that is ostensibly only possible for someone over 18, for example, a one-cent charge to a credit card. I believe the same is true of anyone creating such an account, i.e., my kids couldn't have just lied about their age and created an account.
I'm not saying that is a perfect solution, but it does show that in a space where parents are (rightly) concerned about their children being exposed to strangers online, companies come up with not-so-intrusive, clever-ish ways of proving age without handing over ID or creating a national registry.
#10 is a good idea politically, but it becomes unworkable if you measure its success as all-or-nothing because you'd have to solve piracy first. If implemented, I could imagine a lot of parents (like myself) would be happy to see some positive, bipartisan action, as would a lot of social/religious conservatives who like the idea of banning things they find morally repugnant. It's really hard to imagine, however, a huge constituency willing to protest openly that it's a little more difficult for them to surf porn on the john.
Exactly. A second benefit of the reform Matt is proposing (although not one that I'd trumpet loudly to the religious conservatives) is that forcing pornography behind paywalls could help mitigate some of the worst and most exploitative practices in the industry. Jon Ronson did a mini-podcast series in 2017 on the effects of 'free porn' on the industry, which were predictably terrible: https://www.engadget.com/2018-07-17-the-butterfly-effect-audible-irl.html
In a similar vein, Bari Weiss interviewed a woman who talked about the other side of that issue, where she has built a lucrative career on OnlyFans by building a brand of sorts. I was shocked by how much money one can make charging for what is basically a digital nudie booth. It seems like a much healthier model than PornHub (which I gather was the focus on Ron Jonson's podcast) and it automatically excludes a lot of teenagers because they're typically broke and don't have access to credit cards... or at least cards that their parents can't audit.
https://www.honestlypod.com/podcast/episode/26e0ab75/americas-sex-recession
How do you do that when so many porn companies could just easily be based in a different country. Sure you could put a block on individual sites nationwide, but with VPN, it would be useless.
The existence of VPN and torrenting hasn't put much of a dent in the ability of American media companies to command huge premiums (and market share) for cable television and streaming services. I think in practice, what we see is that most people would rather pay a small fee every month for something that's legal, easy to use, and feels more ethical and safe.
Yes. But teenage boys are exactly the sort of group to not pay small fees and to use VPNs. And that’s the targeted group.
VPNs don't really make media free, they just allow you to get past global walls. E.G. they fool your computer into thinking you're in the U.K. so that the Netflix account you pay for will give you access to British exclusive content they have for that market. As for torrenting, yeah, people would generally rather pay of a streaming service than go though that hassle but that may not be the case with pornography companies, which some people would rather not give their credit card info to.
I don’t have a problem with picking the low hanging fruit and if that’s all the law is written to accomplish I think that’s fine.
I think I’m quite suspicious about the language being narrowly tailored enough to only do that and make a big difference though. I feel like you can either have enforcement with lots of places for collateral damage or you end up making people use relatively easy work arounds.
That's perhaps the point. Its like in the 80s when Tipper Gore held those hearings on effects of music on today's youth. The hearings were farcical to say the least (there's a good "You're Wrong About" podcast about this that showed how the hearings were in part about the Music industry's lobbying efforts against blank tapes. But I digress).
Slapping warning labels on music basically made no difference whatsoever. In fact, it was a probably a net positive branding mechanism considering artists target audience were kids trying to rebel against their parents.
My point is, some sort of similar "ineffective" policy targeting adult websites could serve the same purpose. Actual effects of the policy are negligible, but it's a signal to culturally conservative voters that you're not totally in thrall to far left values.
It's silly, I know. But all you have to do is look at the last guy in charge to see that blustering about various policies but not actually doing anything substantial can be effective politically.
I think this is one of those you need to see the language in the bill things though. Like I could see it being written in a super broad way that made all kinds of things illegal or a narrow way so it was more of a messaging thing.
I mean the last time they tried something I Like this Craig’s list couldn’t have personals anymore. I mean the history of regulations is full of unintended consequences.
I remember reading about how Rhode Island legalized prostitution by accident. But actually served as an example of how legalization could work. But of course it was promptly repealed.
A one-cent charge to your credit card gives the credit card companies a database of who is looking at porn. Any company asking for a one cent charge is actually doing it to reduce friction for your future payments - they often say it’s for age verification to get people to agree, but there’s no such requirement for games.
Credit card companies already know about every purchase you make with a credit card; the OP was worried about a database leaking and others were worried about having to hand over ID and/or the porn sites keeping records (that could also be leaked). I am just pointing out that there are ways of providing reasonable evidence that you are an adult without handing over all of your personal information to a porn site.
As for the game sites, they voluntarily enforce age restrictions to avoid (more) regulation and legislation. They offer other means (that I forget at the moment) that do not involve credit card transactions, that is just the one I picked so it's the one I remember. I watch my kids interactions over their shoulders and games like Roblox and Fortnite really do appear to be keeping the kids shielded from random strangers; they also offer a whole host of parental controls that certainly cost them to develop and maintain. I'm not buying the notion that they are just scamming me for my credit card info.
Maybe just have the site post a question like "who sang 'Billie Jean'?" and give the visitor five seconds to answer so they can't run to ask their big brother.
“What is Jenny’s phone number?”
Dial it on this rotary phone: https://youtu.be/oHNEzndgiFI
I’d really like to like this more than once.
I remember questions about the Mommas and the Papas as age verification for Leisure suit Larry and it was very charming.
I found this sub-thread entertaining - but I am 37. I think we need to remind ourselves that people who turn 18 today are younger than Swift Boat Veterans for Truth.
I don't know who sang Billie Jean, and I'm 40 years old. Your idea would be pretty unfair toward, say, people who immigrated to the U.S. as adults and who don't have a good knowledge of American pop culture references.
Even people in the most far flung of countries knew who Michael Jackson was.
I was asked Michael Jackson's net worth a couple of days ago by the neighbor of an ex-colleague in suburban Kabul.
He also asked me if Michael Jackson was still alive so yes, there are still some limits to how far news can spread. But MJ was pretty famous.
My federal law would have these sites post three questions in succession. If you fail to answer any of the three, then you're locked out of the site for the next 24 hours.
It won't be a perfect solution, but it preserves anonymity and *mostly* cuts out under 18 year olds. And if it unfairly locks someone out, well, there's no sacred right to browse porn sites.
It really is an awesome song; check it out: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Zi_XLOBDo_Y
Is Billie Jean your lover?
Are you the one?
Are you the kid's Dad?
Congratulations! You get to enter the site!
:-)
Fair enough. Thanks for sharing.
Now I'm picturing recent immigrants compiling study guides of common American pop culture references, so that they have the knowledge to be admitted to their favorite adult website :)
American pop culture? Maybe! But I pity the 10 year old hoping to see porn who has to answer the question of "what is the airspeed velocity of an unladen swallow?"
(The only valid response, of course, being, "what do you mean, an African or a European swallow?")
What if we did it the other way around, as an opt-in system? Browsers can tell websites “I’m a minor” and then if the websites show restricted content to them, they are on the hook for it. It would be super easy to check if a website was compliant. And I think Google and Apple would be happy to build that feature into Android and iOS and make it hard to circumvent.
Currently, parental control systems work by maintaining a running list of all questionable content in the universe, which is a never-ending task. Shifting the burden onto the websites without making them solve the problem of who is a minor seems like a good middle ground.
And finally I think an opt-in system is more likely to pass first amendment scrutiny.
Even that doesn't do it. (source: I work in alcohol law, and a big part of the job is dealing with age verification and fake IDs). You can buy essentially perfect copies of American state drivers' license or ID cards online with modified age information on the card. Even if each porn company is forced to query a state database, that only works if each person's unique identifier in the database remains secure and private; there's also a huge market in forged or stolen credentials (Social Security numbers, Driver's License numbers, etc.)
You may appreciate this, though you probably already heard about it given your job.
https://arstechnica.com/information-technology/2022/05/digital-drivers-license-used-by-4m-australians-is-a-snap-to-forge/
Yup; it's a hard problem. Unfortunately state regulators are not terribly sympathetic.
Lots of men, me included, give zero shits about porn. But tbh, take the same tech we use to check ID for online booze and weed purchases, mandate them for porn, and while we’re at it, social media, aka intellectual porn.
Thanks for this; the ferociousness of this line of conversation from some guys here makes me doubt my sanity.
Marie - since you were wondering why the conversation is heated... :)
"An acquaintance of mine is a teacher at an elementary school. One day, in the teacher’s lounge, several female teachers were talking about a student who was 10 or 11. This boy had brought pornography to class (presumably he had printed it off the Internet but I don’t recall).
The female teachers were absolutely convinced that he must have been molested. Ten years old was much too young for a boy to want to look at images of hardcore sex. They started to call social services to figure out who was molesting the boy and how they could get him out of his home.
The male teachers, who until this point had sat around silently, finally exploded. They did an impromptu survey of the age they all took an active interest in sex. The ages ranged from 8 to 12. Were any of them molested? They all said no. Puberty kicked in and it was off to the races.
The women didn’t believe it. This caused a lot of interesting conversations because they were absolutely dumbfounded that boys that young were thinking about sex. The men, on the other hand, basically called the women stupid. How could they not know that? It’s what consumed their entire childhood once their bodies “woke up”."
I believe it. To me it’s a matter of “is” vs “should be.” Should it be easy for a 10 year old boy to access hardcore porn online to print off? No, it should not.
Also, a study that can’t find a man who has NEVER seen porn doesn’t mean that everyone CARES about porn or even regularly accesses it.
Fair enough and I don't know how strict they were about the "never seen porn" thingy.
But one thing I wanted to ask - what do you think you're achieving by depriving male teenagers of access to porn? What's the reason(s) for your position? Or is it purely moralistic/religious or "aesthetic"?
Their brains are still developing and a lot of the hardcore stuff can really mess with you psychologically. Why can’t they use R-rated movies and Victorias Secret catalogs like guys did in the 90s? I also do not think minors should have legal access to booze, cigarettes, gambling or drugs. But, ultimately, this would not have been in my top 10. I’m mostly disturbed by how defensive the SB commentariat is about it.
You talk about depriving male teenagers of access to porn, but mention a 10-11 year old with porn at school in your earlier comment. Do you see an argument for keeping porn away from a 10 year old who wants to access it?
I personally would probably trade strict limits on under 14 access for looking the other way on 14+ but I imagine that would just alienate both sides.
The true "Great Awokening"
The ferociousness comes not from the check itself- if it was still in a traditional store just show the ID would be enough. The problem comes online with storage. Effectively the proposal becomes “de-anonymize” online porn -which is much more provocative.
I can’t recall people being so upset about anything else on this blog. And after just having had the conversation about more diversity of identity being important here…
They were also pretty upset when Milan said that legalized gambling has bad effects. Certain subjects seem to trigger a libertarian response in certain readers.
Because it's one of Matt's worst takes post-2003? "Spoilers are totally fine" and "Ban TikTok" are worse, but it's difficult to think of others.
I could make an argument against TikTok. It is giving a lot of useful info to the Chinese government. Trump wasn't wrong in wanting ByteDance to sell the US component.
Also - TikTok is wonderfully addictive and, just like porn or sales or compounding and interest rates in general, it wouldn't be a bad thing to explain to youngsters/teenagers the psychological mechanisms it is triggering...
“Spoilers are totally fine” is easily worse, “Ban TikTok” is clearly a slatepitch and a great one at that.
The guest post making fun of pro-lifers made people pretty upset
That was more a matter of its tone and quality of argument rather than its content, I think.
It's just motivated reasoning.
Don't want any wrenches thrown into the current system that they like.
So it is just "impossible", or there will just be a black market, or X other reasons.
But I think that this clearly can be done, and probably should be done.
Even though it will be annoying to me as well
Do people just not realize that “the tech we use to check ID for online booze and weed” is a delivery person looking at your ID when they drop it off?
The stuff we use for online booze purchases isn't all that good (source - I wind up defending a lot of the resulting administrative accusations).
Fair, but if you want the stuff for booze to improve, make porn gated behind the same thing. Porn companies are usually the pioneers for making tech more streamlined. I’m convinced porn is why we have YouTube.
So how come researchers cannot find a control group for their porn-is-affecting-us studies?
Are they only asking college students?
Men in their 20s, I think.
https://www.joshuakennon.com/pornography-study-failed-after-researchers-couldnt-find-a-single-man-who-hadnt-viewed-x-rated-material/
but please remember, always : "Pornography Usage Increases With Religious Upbringing and Church Attendance" and "pornography consumption is most heavily concentrated in religious and conservative states".
They are only looking at the very small % of pornography -subscribers-.
People who are so dumb that they pay for porn.
I'd chalk this up to it being less acceptable to talk about porn in these states, and so a greater (though still small overall) % of the male populace doesn't know about the ubiquity of free porn.
Re: a possible leak, you think they don't know now! There's a reason the EU considers your IP address to be private data. They absolutely know who is looking at what. There's just no market for the data (because credit card companies don't like porn), so they aren't using it aggressively. But it's all right there in their logs. Porno ads could follow you around like mattress ads if there was market for it.
They absolutely do sell those data to 'brokers' (in the US) because it reveals demographic information that can be combined with other telemetry to target ads, etc. For example, there is a very high probability that an IP address that accesses porn sites comes from a household with at least one male. Combined with the time of day, amount of time spent, days of the week it is accessed, etc., a broker can sell it to Meta or Google or whomever, who combines it with IMEI or cookie data or whatever and serve ads for razors or ESPN subscriptions or whatever else.
Very true, although I think handing over something with your name or bank account information on it would "feel" less anonymous, even if it really isn't.
With that said, I'm not sure any of this would matter much politically. The modal man is not basing his vote on access to free porn; it's just a non-issue. And a man who did base his vote on that probably would be willing to put up with the minor annoyance/privacy invasion of an identity check, even if he didn't particularly like it.
But I think most adult men would just...watch less porn, which isn't necessarily a bad thing.
That is... a very naïve set of statements. Pornhub gets more traffic per month than Netflix, and it doesn't get that traffic because people don't like it. The party that takes people's access to free and seemingly anonymous porn usage will in fact likely pay a price for it even if people don't necessarily tell pollsters about it specifically. It's something that would affect people's lives much more obviously than 90% of what Washington does.
It's not naive at all. I am well aware of the massive amount of traffic that Pornhub and other sites attract, and I am well aware of the massive number of people (a group that includes virtually all men, and I am a man) who watch porn on the internet.
My argument has nothing whatsoever to do with whether or not people like porn. It's about whether people *value* porn. There is a difference between "thing you do because it is kind of enjoyable and easy" and "thing that you actually value." The vast majority of men like porn, it's true, but they like it in the same way that they like, I don't know, arguing about politics with strangers behind a screen. If MY suddenly instituted a new policy tomorrow where you need to pay an extra $400/year (beyond the base subscription) to access the comments section on Slow Boring, I almost certainly wouldn't do it, even though I *like* commenting here. Ditto for porn.
I do think it would be a strike against Dems for some people, but it would also be a boon for Dems for some people. My guess is that the group that thinks we should make a real effort to prevent kids from seeing porn and cares a substantial amount about that is bigger than the group that wants to maintain seamless porn access for themselves and cares a substantial amount about that (the "and" bit being very important there - parents care a lot about their kids!). And, as I said, the people that really value porn a lot might grumble, but ultimately they'd probably just register or pay some money or whatever and move on.
You say that as if there's some big campaign to limit porn access right now... there isn't. No one in power is even seriously proposing this, not even evangelicals Christians. There's some degree of "concern" about kids having access to porn but most people just see it as a fact of modern life and move on. The sentiment isn't even as strong as it was during the 70s when porn was still relatively hard to access. If there was a popular crusade against porn, then sure, maybe making some sort of compromise for political capital might be worth it but that's not the case at all.
Yes, I know. I was referring to a hypothetical scenario in which item #10 on Matt's agenda were an actual legislative priority, and the political considerations that would come into play in that hypothetical scenario. Which is the subject of many comments on this thread!
To be fair, you are correct that the odds of this happening are pretty much nil.
I assume most men do view porn and it does not bother me at all. What's surprised me in these conversations is how defensive men seem about it and how unwilling they are to accept inconvenience in accessing it.
With regard to security leaks, aren't there paid porn sites and things like OnlyFans that also have credit card information? Do they have security leaks all the time, and if so does anybody give a shit who's on the list? For just basic age verification you could even do a one time $0.01 credit card verification like R C described in another comment, and not store the card information.
I take it you've never been much of a consumer of porn? Things were much more difficult/annoying before streaming video came in. You were pretty much stuck with still images unless you were willing to give your credit card number to various websites that looked like fronts for the Russian Mafia and download a bunch of files you were pretty sure would give your computer viruses. Pornhub is mostly successful because it at least seems much safer and more anonymous and people do NOT want to go back to the old days.
Like, imagine you enjoyed streaming movies through Netflix and suddenly someone decided to pass a law that would force you to go back to getting your movies through cable TV and VHS all to supposedly help some kids you don't know and who will probably just get around the restriction anyway.
As to site security, look up what happened to the site Ashley Madison.
I actually do have first hand experience with both finding porn in the old days and with Pornhub, and I definitely agree that the modern sites are much better and safer than virus-laden websites or shady peer-to-peer files. If anything the success of Pornhub and xTube and whatever else seems like it could make it easier to implement a solution with the bigger trusted sites.
The analogy seems more like if Netflix decided to make me enter a passcode or something before streaming an R-rated movie to make sure it wasn't a minor accessing my profile, and that would be a little annoying but not that big of a deal.
I also don't think a PornHub leak would be as salacious as Ashley Madision, given that the latter was focused on enabling actual real world infidelity.
I'm willing to believe that the technical and privacy challenges are too difficult to implement a workable solution. I just don't get the strong resistance of porn consumers to even consider possible regulation.
Yeah having it be as difficult to access as tobacco seems fine.
Funny thing about Ashley Madison though, while there were plenty of real men on that site looking for sex with someone other than their partner, there were extremely few women. Weren't most of the female profiles bots?
The Ashley Madison leak seemed genuinely humiliating for those affected, since it revealed them as extremely gullible and also lacking enough game to just cheat on Tinder or whatever like a normal person.
You're kind of writing Bernie's and AOC's talking points for them there. "The people who oppose interest rate caps would prefer that poor people struggle against insurmountable financial odds and stay poor forever just so that they can get an upgrade on their international flight to the Maldives."
I hope people can understand that the alternative for poor people paying high interest rates is not paying low interest rates but receiving no credit at all. Maybe that's the goal, but let's be honest with our paternalism.
But yeah I also want to be able to go to the Maldives on points too.
> I hope people can understand that the alternative for poor people paying high interest rates is not paying low interest rates but receiving no credit at all
Research on payday loans suggests this is actually better.
1. As a welfare enhancing policy this makes sense because rates can get so bad that eventually only the financially illiterate take the deal.
2. And politically you can stick it to greedy banks by capping rates.
Yes, for every credit card use or payday loan that turned out well, there are dozens of cases where it turned into a massive financial black hole. I'd be more willing to allow them if bankruptcy was more accessible and easier, but instead we've made that harder to access.
I think Matt specifically addresses that in the post. But sure, the folks who understand that but agree with the policy proposal say it's still a better outcome.
I don't see why the credit card company wouldn't be maximizing revenue per customer. You are getting flights to the Maldives because of vendor fees your vendors are paying. Poor people pay high interest rates to make up for the risk of extending them credit. It's not a cross-subsidy except to the extent the credit card company can't tell which kind of customer you are. But if you're travelling to the Maldives, the credit card company knows.
The consequence of capping interest rates will be that some current customers don't get credit cards, or have to pay fixed annual fees instead.
Or provide security. Some "starter" cards today require a large fraction of credit line to be held by the card in escrow to secure the loan.
I didn't know that - also make sense.
There must be models for programs to build people's credit. Maybe a program to make secured credit cards more easily available.
Is there a discoverability problem? I'd be surprised if these products weren't heavily marketed to the relevant demographics already.
The other dynamic are the transaction fees. Everyone pays the fees today (not everyone carry’s a balance). Ostensively the fees are match the rewards. I wonder if lower interest just generally would mean higher fees.
Travel points are paid for by merchant fees...
They are, in part. They're also paid for by high interest rates from people who carry balances.
There was one place (cant find the reference right now) they made a rule about merchant fees, and when it when into effect the credit card drastically reduced rewards. I suspect the people who are picking cards based on rewards are not the ones paying interest.
This is correct (I work in consumer banking— you’ve heard of my company, you probably have one of our cards. I’m also a woman, for what it’s worth). It depends on the corporate strategy to a certain extent, but generally the better rewards go to the higher FICO scores. If we could wave a magic wand, everyone would use their card all the time and always pay it off. We’d lose the interest but gain the interchange fee and wouldn’t have to write off a bunch of bad debt.
The only way to slow the progression of internet porn is dial-up. Pure and simple. 14Bps
Reject modernity. Embrace tradition.
Obligatory xkcd: https://xkcd.com/598/
Assume in a regime where you mostly have to pay for porn some current consumers would drop off
There is absolutely no way to do this. Technology is a real blind spot for Matty.
Why? There's absolutely no way to make a draconian porn ban that affected everything. But it's totally possible to increase the difficulty of finding porn.
For example, child porn is not widely available like regular porn. I assume it's out there on the dark web somewhere because people get arrested for it, but you don't stumble into it when you do a Google Image search, like regular porn. Even 4chan deletes child porn posts. Why? Because 4chan knows they'd be shut down if they ignored the anti-child porn laws.
If there were laws about regular porn, you'd still be able to find it pretty easily because there's huge demand for it, but it would be marginally harder. The most convenient way to get it for adults would be to just show proof of age instead of figuring how to join a private IRC group or whatever. Teen age boys would still want to look at porn, but they don't have much money, so the market wouldn't cater to them, it would cater to the people with money.
The primary thing that restricts child porn is not really the enforcement regime, which despite its many high-profile hits is still fairly paltry and weak.
What restricts child porn is the overwhelming degree of social sanction against the consumption of that material, a sanction so severe that it effectively amounts to social death for those who receive it. Registries are a policy tool that are on the merits almost useless but have the effect of amplifying and enabling this social sanction.
I personally believe this law idea is good, not because it's going to do much, but because it's time for us as a society to push back on the idea that it's totally normal and okay for "literally every man" to consume video porn, including the vast majority of teen boys. Obviously we don't want a social sanction on the level of CP, but we also don't want a reduction in demand nearly so drastic as that either.
I don't agree but appreciate the rational and coherent case you made, rather than the fuzzy hand-waving matt and other commenters did
I work in criminal defense, and I've worked a lot of child porn cases, and I can tell you child pornography is readily available through regular internet channels. We've never had a "dark web" case that I can think of.
Unrelated to this, but the phrase "I've worked a lot of child porn cases" is something I hope I never can say. It would ruin me.
I can’t even fathom putting my personal feelings aside to pro bono defend someone who consumes child porn because they deserve representation.
That would bleed through and I’d botch the job terribly.
Yes, and it seems like there are many people interpreting the primary goal of #10 to be no teenager ever finds porn. As a parent of an early tween I would be happy if I didn't have to worry as much about him or one of his friends accessing porn out of curiosity. Put it behind the internet equivalent of a brown paper wrapper.
child porn is *absolutely* widely available. yeah google is pretty good at hiding it, other search engines aren't always. and if you are looking for a search engine to find it, you will.
But there are presumably a lot of people who aren’t very motivated to find it who have been prevented from finding it. Same could be true for conventional porn.
there are not a lot of (male) people who aren't motivated to find conventional porn
Online poker is in no way as available to Americans now as it was in 2005. Do Americans still play online poker illegally? Yes, but many fewer play now.
But those sites already had to take payment in some form, which made them easier to regulate.
In fact, I believe it was the credit card companies that successfully applied pressure a couple years ago to the free porn sites to get them to delete about 80% of their content because it was unverified. Now all content comes from production companies that maintain legal records or amateurs who provide verification videos.
I can't imagine it's true that less people play poker online in the US in 2022 than 2005. And if it is true it's because poker was particularly popular in 2005, not because of internet regulation
The numbers fell off a cliff in 2006 with the passage of the Unlawful Internet Gambling Act and never came close to recovering. Poker didn't magically get much less popular in January of 2007.
Not to mention that if it did you could make a pretty convincing case that it did so precisely because the passage of UIGA meant that fewer people could easily access online poker and therefore lost interest in the game generally.
The World Series of Poker gets bigger every year, card rooms have expanded, poker streaming is booming. I don’t think it works to say poker was more popular in 2005 than today.
I don't know how much those other avenues show that poker overall recovered, but there was a huge crash in 2006-2007.
Credit card rewards are also paid for by increasing merchant fees, which is why a lot of merchants are now putting a surcharge on credit use. This seems very inefficient since cards are a lot more efficient/safer than cash generically so essentially it's the bloat of the rewards that is making merchants not want to accept them anymore. I like rewards too but abolishing them would be good.
Yeah, rewards are cool and all, but TBH, would give them up in a hot second if we could just do the transaction and lose the side hustle, and in exchange, lower transaction fees to as close to zero as possible. At the end of the day, it is an odd market distortion.
The rewards won't be abolished. Some merchants will charge more for cards because they are either dumb (don't understand the cost of handling cash) or can't negotiate a good deal with the credit card company. But you don't see Amazon doing this and, in fact, many vendors offer their own cards with even better benefits.
Whenever I see one of those cheapo businesses that get big mad about taking credit card transactions and charges a surcharge, I am always tempted to pay in pennies just to make a point.
The travel rewards are largely funded by the merchant fees, as evidenced by AmEx having both the most generous rewards (see 5x MR on Platinum airfare, 4.5x MR on Everyday Preferred groceries, etc.) and the lowest percentage of revenue being from interest (higher AFs and higher merchant fees). The folks who earn the travel rewards are, across issuers, more likely to always pay-in-full, which is the main reason no one has been able to dethrone the AmEx Platinum (Citi has already given up (Prestige is closed to new applicants and likely to see further benefit erosion) and Chase seems pretty unhappy with the Sapphire Reserve... Cap1 is nibbling but will likely end up in Citi/Chase land and the others are all basically staying away): the interest-dependent model doesn't work in that segment.
Doesn't it seem perverse that the credit card benefits we enjoy are subsidized by lower-income borrowers who pay higher interest rates?
Why do you think the credit card company is taking a loss on you and making it up from lower-income borrowers? I think it's reasonable to assume the credit card company is also making money on your credit card use.
re: Credit Cards, I am not sure you lose the points in a scenario where you have interest caps. Corporate Cards have those programs, and most of those never see interest charges that go to consumers.
I think the list should be more focused on inflation and productivity. It's what people care about, and it's also I think relatively actionable. Matt has said this elsewhere: US policy has been dedicated to "job creation" for 20 years, and that is now getting really harmful. Tariffs, "buy American", union requirements, permitting, environmental review etc.
Porn seems the weakest inclusion on the list.
Real question, are you a parent of a child age 8 or older? Because if you were I think you would find the inclusion of real porn limits to be the most salient issue on this list, possibly tied with universal free school meals.
Absolutely.
Matt's rationale for including it is a good one.
It signals to parents and cultural conservatives that you Democrats don't absolutely hate them and take at least some of their concerns seriously.
I’d much rather they do that by taking popular measures to unfuck the education system than implement a wee bit of the PRC’s real identification verification infrastructure online, thank you kindly.
I am much more concerned about my child’s experience in my city’s public school system in ten years’ time than her accessing porn online.
Many orders of magnitude more concerned.
All of the zeros more concerned.
Agreed.
Though the existence of a bigger problem doesn't mean we shouldn't tackle a smaller one.
It's basically a sop to centrists and conservatives, to try and drag the Dems image back towards the middle, from the current crazy-town it is in.
I understand that, but I think it’s also an objectively terrible idea and should be replaced by something like a national civics education standard that appeals to the mushy middle.
This seems… unrealistic. I think you believe this is more important than everything else and impute that as a major concern to other parents without any real supporting data.
I don’t believe there’s any evidence to suggest this is actually the case.
For example, I am much more confident in my ability to constrain my child from accessing porn than I am in, say, preventing her from being bullied in middle school.
I am also vastly more confident that I as a parent can play a constructive role in teaching her about sex and how to preserve her safety and fulfill her emotional and physical needs than that I can do the same regarding basic academic matters.
Put succinctly, I’m way more concerned about the quality of my area’s public schools than about whether she sees porn and I have to sit her down and explain its lack of realism to her.
I don't disagree that the quality of my child's school is more important, but it doesn't feel like something the federal government is going to solve AND it feels a lot harder to get a coalition to agree on what "quality public schools" means.
I mean, a federal “mushy middle” civics curriculum to rein in both DeSantis and my city’s woke-ass school board would be an immensely reassuring start, much more important than any of this.
I think it's hard to design a "mushy middle" civics curriculum that will be more popular than "No Child Left Behind" or Common Core.
I suppose any bill for a "mushy middle" civics curriculum would create some sort of panel of historians and leading civic individuals that would devise its contents, but something makes me think that Republicans would still seize on the debate over the curriculum's contents to try to embarrass Democrats. For one, it would be characterized by the extreme right fringe as "federal government brain washing" and interference in local education, a "federal power grab" of sorts. Secondly, conservatives would likely attack it for not being sufficiently patriotic about America and its history, even if it was pretty rah-rah-America-is-great--look at how they relentlessly attacked Obama on this front, despite his patriotic narrative about how great America's ideals are and how it has grown closer through time at living up to them. Third, the curriculum would unleash a lot of extremely toxic takes from leftists wanting to inject all sorts of 'critical' ideas into it--the left would also likely characterize the curriculum as brain washing, and would try to tar Dem politicians for supporting it. Wonder what Dems' allies in the teachers' unions would think about having to teach a new "federal mandate"... Just could imagine this being a giant mess.
NCLB had majority support when passed, no?
I think a lot of parents wouldn’t be happy with a “mushy middle” plan except insofar as it prevents the other side from dictating to them, which I have to imagine would mean a lot to rural parents in NY or CA, or urban ones in TX or FL.
That said, an issue not being federal hasn't stopped candidates from trying.
Yes! If you are a parent with kids number 10 is an issue. It’s also a serious issue for the left that when you post about it a thousand liberal people come after you claiming you are essentially Hitler and you are advocating some new holocaust. It’s just porn folks, it’s a suggestion of sensible regulation of a well known vice.
Liberals would rather concoct a fantasy nightmare about some privacy issue that seems like it comes from the deranged ramblings of one of those libertarian dudes who forced the census to start anonymizing information than admit that their primary issue is that they, personally, would rather not have to deal with any additional inconvenience when accessing porn.
Which, you know, too bad, I don't really care.
I think that is part of it, but I don't want automatically to assume bad faith on the part of people making these arguments against regulation. I think there is a legitimate privacy and security concern. However, to not even want to approach a way to reform the system isn't going to be sustainable. My guess is that Republicans are going to massively overreach when they take congress but some of that overreach may not poll as poorly as liberals hope. If the Republicans are the only ones for regulation, then a lot of middle of the road folks will be like "Well they are overdoing it, but the left wants to practically hand a laptop loaded with furry porn to my 6 year old". That situation will be much worse for security and privacy because Republicans will use it as a tool of discrimination and marginalization against the groups they don't like as soon as they have the power.
"if you were I think you would find the inclusion of real porn limits to be the most salient issue on this list"
I'm sure that this is an issue of concern to parents --- just as violent video games were a concern to parents 15 years ago. They were so much of a concern, that Hillary Clinton campaigned to limit children's access to violent video games back in 2008 (and before). This was popular and common sense. Exposing kids to violence would of course make them more violent, right? There were academic studies that backed up this common sense too. Well, it turned out that common sense and academic studies got it wrong. Violent media (including video games) doesn't increase violence. If anything, it does the opposite [1,2] (both by Matthew Yglesias).
So, yeah, I'm sure that a lot of parents today are concerned that porn will harm their kid. And I'm sure that campaigning to limit access to porn is popular. I'd also bet dollars to donuts that porn is no more harmful to kids than violent video games. The academic studies that say otherwise won't replicate (psychology articles rarely do) --- just as the violent video game studies didn't replicate.
The most salient issue for parents should be an actual problem --- not a repackaged video game panic.
[1] https://www.vox.com/2019/8/5/20754769/trump-video-games-mass-shooting-el-paso-toledo
[2] https://twitter.com/mattyglesias/status/1529908549547085833
Idk man, video games are cool though.
Personally, I'm the parents of two children over the age of 8 (11 and 9) and I'd put # 6 and # 8 at the top.
Most readers of this blog are rich enough to afford school meals and educated enough to know how to configure adult content filters, so they don't care about those.
I’m not a parent. What I meant is this seems like an issue you could easily legislate. Republicans wouldn’t oppose it. So its electoral value is likely to be limited.
If it's broadly popular and you could get republican support, doesn't that mean it's an even better idea to include in the list? You're trying to win over voters, so popular things are a good idea, and if you're saying something that even appeals to conservatives then you're more likely to persuade voters to support you. Not to mention that you create a bit of a bind for the opposition- either come out against it (which would be unpopular) or come out and say (GASP!) your opponent's idea is a good one that you support. All of these seem like good outcomes, and far better than the endless smashing our faces into walls advocating for unpopular ideas that have no hope of ever becoming law.
No. You want to push popular ideas your opponents oppose. If there'd broad agreement and you hold the White House and both chambers of Congress, you should just do it.
Having said that. I've been shocked by the amount of disagreement with Matt's porn proposal in this comments section. I thought it was weak because it was a no-brainer, but clearly that's not the case, so I stand corrected on that.
You're talking about what to do when you're already in power. The point of this exercise is to focus on what you should run on to get into office in the first place. There's a huge difference between "we have the votes to do this, so should we do it?" and "I'm hoping to get you to support me for office, so here's what I want to talk about".
They're not talking about it, and even if it's bipartisanly popular there's value in leading on a bipartisan issue. I think it's a good call.
That was my thoughts. He’s trying to cater to main stream Democrats win what he needs to do is cater to Main stream Democrats and moderates.
Actionable, sure, but try running on a "don't buy American" or "environmental reviews are too costly" platform and see where that gets you.
The whole purpose of the exercise is to have good ideas that are also politically popular and feasible. There are better policy ideas out there, but they're less popular, more technocratic, less likely to successfully pass Congress, etc.. All the things you're talking about are things that need to be done quietly to avoid a public backlash, which makes them things you absolutely don't want to be loudly proclaiming your support for as a politician.
I agree with you that inflation should be a target but I’m having trouble coming up with policies that would do that. I’m all for killing the Jones act, but that’s going to piss off labor, and I’m not sure it’s worth it. Do you have other thoughts?
I feel like the Jones Act might actually be a viable target if only because as a share of the electorate the interests it's pissing off are, AIUI, vanishingly small. The countervailing narrative that "you're paying too much for everything for no reason and the U.S. doesn't even have a competitive merchant marine to show for it!" is a reasonable bread-and-butter sales pitch.
I'm trying to imagine a world in which the Jones Act is an attention-grabbing issue in an election.
That's what this exercise is, by the way.
Force longshoremen's and dock workers' unions to accept automation at seaports, and force railroad unions to accept more automation on cargo rail. I know this is a very sacred cow for the Democratic Party, but it would actually have some noticeable effect on prices. American seaports, especially LA/Long Beach, are very inefficient compared European and Asian seaports, and that is reflected in the price of goods.
What are the odds that the democrats can do anything about inflation between now and November that would actually make a significant dent in inflation numbers? My amateur guess is roughly 100,000/1. If the focus is ONLY on inflation then the democrats are setting themselves up to debate solely on a losing issue for them. They absolutely want to campaign on doing something about inflation, but talking solely about a policy that makes you look terrible is not a good way to win an election. It would be like Giannis arguing that the MVP voting should be solely focused on free throw shooting percentage. The democrats need to try and steer the discussion towards subjects that they can make compelling appeals to voters on. One should be coming up with inflation messaging that deflects republican attacks. But they need to bring up other things after that deflection occurs or else we're going to see lots of republicans essentially saying "look at gas prices. Look at grocery prices. That's after the Dems have been in control for 2 years. On election day, look at those two things, and it will be clear who you should vote for." And they'll win easily if that's what the discussion is solely focused on.
I think “we did something and it will start working in a year, sit tight” is at least better than “there’s nothing we can do.”
Worse than that, it's not just 'between now and November', it's extremely difficult for Congress to have meaningful control of inflation in any case. Firstly, Congress does not control the Federal Reserve, who set their own decisions on whether they're more bothered about inflation or growth or unemployment or whatever.* Secondly, inflation is driven by many factors, many of which are beyond Congress's control. Congress cannot prevent failed grain harvests in Canada, cannot prevent the Ever Given from blocking the Suez Canal or Vladimir Putin from blockading Ukraine's Black Sea ports, cannot have any impact on China's zero covid policy and the closure of factories in Shanghai, and while they did have some control over pandemic stimulus measures, they also had no way to accurately predict the course of the pandemic or the speed with which red state governors and electorates would get tired of restrictions, or what proportions of covid relief would be necessary or wasted, would be spent on bills or new jetskis or on state tax cuts.
It's a commonplace to say that Presidents are given both too much credit and too much blame for the state of the economy, and it's no different for Congress. A Congressional 100% effort on reducing the effects of inflation might have some minor impact at the edges but it probably wouldn't be noticeable for the average voter who is paying no attention. There's not a 'reverse inflation' button that they're just perversely neglecting to press.
My * was meant to be a footnote that personally I dislike central bank independence and wish parties would end it, but I accept that opinion is outside the Overton Window for now.
"First trimester abortions and abortions with bona fide life or health of the mother reasons constitute the overwhelming majority of actual abortions" The other substantial sympathetic group of second and third trimester abortions is where the fetus has no or little chance of survival (or is likely to be massively disabled, like "in a coma for the rest of its life" disabled).
The case that particularly comes to mind is of a friend who had a 34-week abortion of an anencephalic fetus. For those with some Greek, that's not literally "no head", it's the absence of most of the brain and skull. It has enough brain for the minimal life-preserving requirements (maintaining heartbeat), though it requires a ventilator and to be fed through a tube. But it has no chance of long-term survival; a few weeks after birth is the most it can expect, and there is no ability to respond to stimulus. It's effectively born into a persistent vegetative state.
Anencephaly is normally diagnosed earlier, but they missed it for my friend and she ended up having a very late abortion of a fetus that had zero chance of developing into a baby. Could she have continued until birth? Sure, but why the heck should she?
I'd also want to look at making sure that women can afford early abortions. Even if that's just a government-guaranteed repayment plan so no-one ever has to save up for an abortion and so delay it.
That is so tragic :(
Agree that exceptions are also required for fetuses that cannot survive outside the womb. Matt tweeted an example from Louisiana last week where a woman's water broke at 16 weeks and the pregnancy could no longer continue, and rather than have a sad but quick, humane abortion (which was what she initially chose), she had to go through hours-long labor and delivery of her doomed fetus. Heartbreaking.
Yeah, it was 20 years ago and I was a terrible friend to her at the time and, unsurprisingly, we drifted away after that. I like to think that I'm a better and more caring person now, and I do raise her story because I hope it will help someone else in that situation.
Agree that abortion is justified in these cases but they are exactly the edge cases that Matt points out as causing things to get tied up. We're talking about a federal law that stops states from prohibiting abortion in certain circumstances. These edge cases can be taken up at the state level. Will some states insist on Draconian laws that don't allow abortion in these cases? Sure but trying to prevent that makes the perfect the enemy of the good
If my choices are “protect first trimester open access and immediate threat to mothers life” or “nothing,” I choose the first. But if my choices are “argue to protect access in just the specific edge cases we mostly agree on” or “argue for open second and third trimester access bc of edge cases”, I’m going with the first.
The argument for the second is that there's very close to 100% overlap between those two sets (to first order, nobody carries a pregnancy for 30-weeks without intending to bring it to term) so enumerating edge cases or assessing them just introduces bureaucratic overheard and possibly-incomplete enumeration into what are almost definitionally already heartbreaking 'edge cases' for all involved. Thus there's not really any tangible gain for those who are amenable to option (1) in the first place but significant overhead and frictional losses relative to just adopting option (2).
The problem is that arguing for abortion on demand through the third trimester forces you to argue full-term fetuses aren’t human beings, which is pretty disgusting to most people. If you say “we only want to allow the cases that are basically compassionate euthanasia” you win back the moderates and you actually help people in really awful scenarios.
Make travel costs for abortion something free via a refundable tax credit could work too.
My 10 point plan:
1) energy dominance: Matt’s plan plus air conditioning and heating subsidies for low income households during hot or cold months
2) housing abundance, use the commerce clause to impose Texas style land use policies on blue states. Villainize high income urbanites who prioritize their home values over affordability.
3) A national HOPE scholarship. In Georgia, college tuition is very cheap for students who maintain good grades and almost free for those with excellent grades. Make this national. Impose stiff taxes on college administrative costs to reduce bloat and DEI bullshit.
4) First trimester abortion on demand, guaranteed access when two doctors say there is a serious risk to the health of the mother.
5) Legal marijuana.
6) Health care abundance. Open borders for English speaking doctors and Spanish speaking doctors with bona fire job offers. Federally chartered medical schools. Better pay and working conditions for medical residents. You shouldn’t have to amputate your twenties to become a doctor. Drug prices pegged to Canadian levels.
7) Tax capital gains at the same rate as labor income and use the proceeds to fund child allowances.
8) More roads and bridges for stressed out commuters. Federal laws to prevent NIMBYS from litigating construction projects. Streamlined environmental impact reviews
9) Free contraceptives for anyone who wants them.
10) Humane prisons for low level offenders. Murderers, rapists and child molestors should go to to traditional prisons. Young offenders who stole stuff or got into a fight or sold drugs should go to something like a CCC camp where they can sleep in dorms, engage in healthy outdoor labor, and mix with the opposite gender on weekends as long as they avoid drugs and liquor and follow program rules. The purpose of these camps would be more to teach clean living than to impose pain. Those who break the rules go to traditional prisons.
Basically, I take successful red state programs and nationalize them, I offer young people cheaper college and legal pot, I offer women free contraceptives and early term abortions, and I go hard on material benefits for the 10th to 90th percentiles of the income distribution.
I think this is a great list and it personally demonstrates the value of list making to me. I think #8 is a terrible idea, because I'm an urban transit rider who drives only on vacation, and some of these others wouldn't be my top priorities, but they're really good, popular ideas and I'd feel comfortable advocating for them to a wide range of the population.
I could nitpick here and there, but overall I like your list better than MattY's and I think it would have a more positive impact on average Americans' lives. You out-Matted MattY! Kudos! I especially like your point #10.
Put it this way: If a wizard let me borrow his wand and wave it just once, and I had a choice to magically make either your #10 or MattY's #10 come true, I would pick yours.
I agree with Tabitha below that I don't really like your #8, because of induced demand. "If you build it, they will come" and your new road will be just as crowded as your old one was, now with extra CO2 emissions.
"Better pay and working conditions for medical residents" = as the wife of a former medical resident, I approve.
Can you explain the induced demand concept? Wouldn't this also apply to, say, housing?
"Induced demand" is the idea that traffic expands to fill the available space. If you add an extra lane to a road, more people will drive there. I don't have exact references on hand, but multiple studies have show this. I don't know whether it applies to housing.
right and if you build more housing, more people will move there and things will get expensive right? How is that logic any different?
It's different for housing and cars. Everyone has to live somewhere, and once you move into a house/apartment/any kind of building, that building is going to stay in place regardless of how much or little time you spend in it.
With cars, you are much more free to choose what to do on a daily basis (of course, your choices are constrained by things like the necessity to get to work or school). Depending on your life circumstances, on any given day you can drive your car, carpool, work from home, take a taxi/Uber, take public transit, or ride your bicycle. The level of congestion on your local road is one of the factors that affect your choice. Wider road = less congestion = more likely to drive your car rather than carpool/WFH/take public transit.
you get how that's wrong though, right?
If I'm driving more specifically because congestion is lower then I would stop driving more once congestion gets bad again and go back to carpool/WFH/public transit.
housing is not free
On 6, instead of federal med schools, strangle the AMA and Medicare cartel on residencies. That will greatly increase the number of physicians.
Love the HOPE scholarship idea. Not sure you can both increase doctors' pay AND peg health care prices to Canadian levels. (I'd love to pay Canadian rates but it will mean doctors get a big paycut -- which I'm fine with, I'm not a doctor)
He is just proposing better pay for residents which shouldn't be that expensive since it's a small number of years and they get paid like $50,000 in residency.
The open borders for English speaking and some Spanish speaking doctors would push down wages.
If Argentine and Mexican doctors were able to take jobs in Miami, it might become a hub for elective procedures, radiology, etc.. Thid would also encourage doctors in developing countries to brush up on their English and greatly increase their wages.
Ah, my mistake. Yeah I'd have no issue with residents making more and established MDs making less -- seems completely reasonable.
" Open borders for English speaking doctors and Spanish speaking doctors with bona fire job offers. "
And there would be new business opportunities for services trying to figure out the credentials and background check of international physicians, a process which takes months for already US employed physicians.
What part of a process which already takes months for US employed doctors were you having trouble with?
Bring back the old HOPE scholarship, too!
The biggest problem is what counts as porn is in the eye of the beholder - for example, on Reddit, there's lots of people who post themselves, of their own volition, for free, in various states of undress, doing everything from standing there to various sexual acts. No sob stories of being pressured, but people who just want to show themselves off.
Now, I know, yes, sure, stop the people from posting themselves having sex for free, OK, sure. The other problem is of course, Reddit for the most part doesn't post any porn. It links to various free sites that let you post videos and pictures. Those sites are pretty good at moving to domains where American law doesn't really apply to them, and I'm sure there are incentive-related reasons why even corporations who aren't pro-porn would want to make sure that Reddit isn't on the hook for every link submitted.
But, even getting past that, what's the difference between Olivia posting herself naked in her backyard and a statue of David with his willy hanging out, except time and subjective views of artistic skill? Is a topless woman with a dildo by her inherently sexual? Etc. Etc.
I'd also point out putting restrictions on porn breaks apart the Bro-Feminist Alliance that could be once again w/ Roe being overturned. You think secular conservative dudes in New Hampshire want to input their credit card or DL # everytime they want to jerk off.
Plus, stricter regulations in places like India don't really make teenage boys act better, it just means that anything vaguely sexual on Youtube gets tons of views and lots of odd comments from Indian guys. That doesn't seem like the healthiest thing either.
It's also just wildly, blatantly, stupidly, unfeasible. Pornhub is a thing for the same reason Spotify is a thing, because distributed peer 2 peer networks make it absolutely fucking impossible to stop people sharing music and completely destroyed the old business models. Free porn on Limewire was just a ubiquitous as mp3s. The tube site business model, let alone more recent advances like onlyfans, is way more constrained and ethical than the the free for all days that we'd be heading back to if the Feds decreed that all legitimate porn needs to be behind a paywall.
Pornhub just recently deleted a huge portion of the videos on the site after they got blowback from one Nicholas Kristof column. There didn’t even need to be a law! If there was a law they would dramatically change their model or close down. Yes, there would still be plenty of porn shared on p2p but just that change would hugely cut down on how many young people were seeing porn (my 9-year-old doesn’t know what p2p is and I’m not about to tell her).
Right and it’s not like people don’t try posting porn to YouTube; it just gets shut down instantly. Same could happen for YouTube.
"Most people don't speed when they drive" citation needed....
I think if you set a fee high enough that reddit etc don't want to pay it if they host something that's unpaywalled but reasonable enough that they don't go bankrupt if users mess them up, you might get something workable.
Kind of like the speeding tickets you mention. I don't want a ticket, but the rare ticket doesn't ruin me (I haven't gotten one in years, but I have gotten them before and they were annoying and I didn't want them but they didn't shut me down)
But... BigTech isn't wrong that there are real tradeoffs. If the cost were so high that reddit had to validate every video link you posted, it simply wouldn't let you post video links, which would also be a real cost.
I think it's tricky to set it at the correct level, but I agree it's probably not impossible.
You seem really worked up about maintaining free access to porn.
This comment feels out of line. I don't think it's great for comment sections to be second-guessing motives like this.
I think everyone here has access to Twitter, which is the space that God created for imputing motive.
Jack Dorsey thinks he's God now?
...
Yeah, that tracks.
He didn’t second-guess his motives. He observed that he is treating this as a highly upsetting proposal and implied that this level of upset is disproportionate. I think that’s all fair game.
Once you can identify motivated reasoning, it's actually usually advantageous to identify someone's motivations.
It makes for better negotiation, and fewer gish gallops.
Unless you think Manchin is actually concerned about inflation, and that's why climate legislation and tax reform is untenable.
You don't think Manchin is concerned about inflation? That would make him pretty unusual among moderate Americans. Heck, I'd say pretty unusual among Americans full stop.
Most people who acquire wealth by asset appreciation don't really care about inflation.
I spend lots of time with such people (i.e. hedge fund and PE people) and can assure you that is not the case.
Also, most people care about more than their own bottom line in any event, and I don't see why Machin would be different.
You seem really worked up about advocating for a Chinese-style authoritarian system where everyone's porn viewing habits are centrally tracked via ID by Big Brother. For your own good citizen, of course. I'm sure they'd never leak or get hacked, leading to everyone knowing Bob Jones was watching X Video at Y Time. The government's cybersecurity is well-known to be flawless. I, too, think that totalitarian Big Government solutions are generally the way
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Office_of_Personnel_Management_data_breach
I don't get this take. Were we living in a Chinese Style authoritarian system in 1992 before there was massive amounts of freely available porn online? Does the fact that netflix, Hulu, etc. all require submit a CC to pay for content mean we're living in a totalitarian nightmare?
I was in middle school in 1992. Everyone knew where their Dad's Playboys were. Most of the boys at school passed around copies of Hustler, Penthouse etc. (One boy was famously busted by his Mom with a literal duffel bag full of them- the stuff of middle school legend....) Somehow we all survived. As dirty magazines have been a thing for the whole 20th century, I'll take a wager and say that every generation of boys got them illicitly.
I just cannot believe that after Prohibition, the War on Drugs etc., people still can't imagine how the black market will work. Especially on.... the Internet. As 96% of the world's population lives outside the US and isn't subject to its rules, and porn is in Extremely High Demand, there will be countless websites outside the scope of American jurisdiction. And who's the most tech-savvy crowd best positioned to use a VPN and find them? That's right, boys under 18.
I noticed you don't use your full name here, John. But you'd be comfortable with your full name leaking along with a list of all the adult websites you've visited in the last few years, once these websites inevitably get hacked? You're cool with that?
Do you actually see no difference in scale between “some kids know where their dad’s dirty mags are and pass them around to a dozen friends” and “every kid can access a practically infinite number of pornographic videos from the privacy of their room”? You can’t possibly think that “we survived” an era where you could see a Hustler every few months means that there could be no possible adverse effects from the cup-runneth-over situation we have now.
Is something stopping people who pay for porn sites now from having their data hacked and released? The Ashley Madison leak suggests not. But am I failing to account for scale myself? Sincere question.
I don't think that children should be viewing hardcore pornography- I think their parents should monitor their electronic devices and stop it. If your response is 'gee, it's really difficult to monitor what websites they're visiting', I would invite you to consider how difficult that becomes when you scale up to the 73 million children in the US.
I think large-scale government bans that create black markets are in general a terrible solution to any problem. Sometimes they work when the product in question is logistically difficult to get (I dunno, a rocket launcher or something), but man when I look at 'porn on the Internet' or 'websites in general', that sure looks logistically easy to route around restrictions. Like nailing jelly to a wall
I'd be more comfortable with my full name leaking along with the adult websites I've visited than the vast number of silly comments I've made on substacks :)
We're not talking about prohibition - that's just a ridiculous example. We ended prohibition, but would you suggest that we remove all age & ID constraints for alcohol or pot? Some 10 year old kid can roll up and order a coke and rum with a magic brownie to take the edge off a hard day at school?
As for people not following US laws, they are doing this to get paid. Make a system where its easy for them to get paid if they ID, but it costs them money if they don't and 90%+ of them will follow the easy money.
Not to mention all the viewing data, e.g., which videos watched, for how long, etc.
Do sites track that stuff? I guess I can imagine metrics reasons why they would. But if so, isn’t that vulnerable to being hacked and released right now?
In the 90s, we had movies about single teenage boys having intercourse with pies and a way higher rate of teenage pregnancy. Instead of looking at internet porn teen boys got into way worse trouble.
Anyway, people care about internet anonymity, especially with something as incredibly personal, incredibly wound up in shame and sexuality as porn. You also can't just think about it in terms of internet porn either being PornHub (free) or OnlyFans (paywall). Any and every site where users are allowed to host their own content has had a porn community full of people pseudonymously sharing their own NSFW content - Reddit, Twitter, Tumblr, Instagram, Youtube, DeviantArt, WordPress, *chan boards, fanfiction archives - those horses left the barn a long time ago. That would take us into a separate discussion about Section 230 and the expectations of sites making a good faith attempt at keeping order. They do that currently, but not even a company of Youtube's scale can keep copyrighted material off of it, and they get the benefit of having an algorithm that can compare against a massive database of copyrighted material. They know what they're looking for and they can't find it all.
The only way of truly keeping kids away from porn is to de-anonymize the people consuming it, hence the paywall idea. If you went to a shady store and bought a porno in the 90s, you showed them your ID, but they didn't need to make you a store account. You could pay in cash, only one person really needed to know your shameful secret. But that wouldn't be the case with porn now. For good and for ill it would mean that every account could be tied back to a real person. That information would be valuable (and dangerous) in a data breach.
I don't care if Netflix knows that I'm catching up on Better Call Saul, what harm would that do if it was leaked? But while some people just want to watch some naked people of their preferred gender and that information would be pretty minimally embarrassing (although it could possibly end some marriages), some people (like Ted Cruz) enjoy some scandalous fantasy material that could be used to hurt them and some normal, everyday people are into shameful, degenerate things that are completely harmless but immensely embarrassing if they were to become public knowledge (like people sitting in pies and crying, thanks BCS for telling me that exists...).
It's just a bad idea.