Name one thing that the US government has “banned” that people wanted where it has been effective?

And why would you want government control over what you can see and say?

> Name one thing that the US government has “banned” that people wanted where it has been effective?

The world is more than the US.

> And why would you want government control over what you can see and say?

Because this is not just about me, it's about society as a whole.

And humans can be horrible:

https://www.theverge.com/2019/2/25/18229714/cognizant-facebo...

The war on drugs have done much more harm than good - at least in the “inner city”. When drug use started spiking in “rural America” - despite laws that make it damn near impossible for me to get enough psuedophredrine for my family - it started being treated “as a disease”.

So because of the GDPR Europeans privacy is better protected and the effect wasn’t just to see a lot of cookie pop ups?

Yes, it is, lawsuits and fines have already started happening.

Let's just agree to disagree on fundamental philosophical differences here and call it a day.

Yep, I’m sure that’s going to solve the problem. It’s been the last for five years and the situation has gotten worse.

You're right, you win. Congratulations!

“Effective”, or “perfect”? Because almost everything every government does, good and ill, is not the second but it is the first. Totally ineffective bans certainly exist, but they are much rarer — even in the case of drugs, unless your pharmacy is currently selling cocaine 'Toothache Drops', or heroin or morphine cough syrup.

Almost everything the government does is “effective”? Have you been paying attention to the government? I can’t find it right now, but there was a survey done that no matter which side is in power, the policies that the government want is rarely aligned to the policies that most people want.

“Effective” is a separate axis to “what J. Average wants”.

For example, a government may want to circumvent encryption: if they tried to do this by requiring the SQL tables to be mauve “because that has the most RAM”, that would be ineffective; conversely if they passed a law requiring backdoors in everything, while this would be bad for many reasons, it would definitely have an effect.