On the other hand, I know several "home-schooled" people [0] who literally can't even read and later married people more than twice their age or had other serious deficiencies in their life potential. The government can probably step in a little more here and there.

[0] I also know home-schooled people whose parents are far better than any teacher I've ever had and whose education and achievements reflect that obvious fact. Home-schooling itself isn't the issue, and I'd prefer that it remain possible.

Public education is extremely different from age checks in apps. Yes, homeschooled people are generally really dumb because humans are not born with the knowledge of the world or how to teach it. This is different from California telling Debian to ask for user ages.

You have that backward.

The home-educated typically score 15 to 25 percentile points above public-school students on standardized academic achievement tests.

-- https://nheri.org/research-facts-on-homeschooling/#Academic

Site: National Homeschool Education Research Institute

First independent search result:

> The US-based NHERI describes itself as a leading research institute in the field of homeschooling. However, its neutrality is often questioned.

I read one of those papers. Only between 10% and 25% of homeschool families completed the test. And that's of families that could be located because they had previously interacted with major homeschool testing companies; there isn't a national list of homeschooled kids and many parents homeschool precisely to avoid standardized testing. Plus in many cases the parents were the proctors. This is hardly a robust finding.

Thanks for investigating deeper than I did. I don't know where else to look. However, unlike the post I originally replied to, every homeschooled adult I know is doing better than average, but anecdote vs anecdote isn't helping.

I follow some homeschooling communities as a way to learn how to supplement my kids' schooling. There are many interwoven communities: * religious families who don't want their kids exposed to the secular world * families who don't trust adults to watch their kids and wouldn't ever consider public school, summer camp, sleepovers etc. * families whose kids aren't being served by the public school system.

In all three scenarios (but especially in the first two) there is a sizeable population of parents who know their kid is several years behind grade level, but they tolerate it because they think kids learn at different paces. Or that it's fine for a kid to love one particular thing (cooking, machine repair, art) at the expense of a well-rounded education. And that's not even getting into the 'unschoolers' who treat never opening a textbook as a point of pride.

If you're well-educated and run in circles of people like you then you'll find the homeschoolers who also value education. But if you expose yourself to a wider variety of people your conclusions may change.

Asking NHERI to evaluate the effects of homeschooling is like asking Focus on the Family whether children do worse when raised by gay couples.

Aside from the horribly biased source, standardized testing scores are a terrible metric for judging education levels.

> On the other hand, I know several "home-schooled" people [0] who literally can't even read and later married people more than twice their age or had other serious deficiencies in their life potential. The government can probably step in a little more here and there.

Anecdotes like this don't help the case much when government schools in a lot of places "graduate" large proportions of their pupils who are functionally illiterate and innumerate. Then you get misconduct, bullying, abuse that goes on in government schools. Who should "step in" on the government?

Home schooled people do fine, statistically.

> On the other hand, I know several "home-schooled" people [0] who literally can't even read and later married people more than twice their age or had other serious deficiencies in their life potential. The government can probably step in a little more here and there.

Back on the first hard, I'd argue that most of those people might have benefited from having more access to the internet, as it sounds like at least part of the problem was that they had severely limited experience for how to navigate the world outside of small amount their parents allowed them to be exposed to. I'm on board with the government being involved in ways that are beneficial, but "make anyone using an internet-connected device plug in their ID first" just feels like an absurd overreach for what it's trying to solve.

Earlier today there was a large thread on HN about the golden age of child rearing, from time immemorial to about two decades ago, when children started getting sent home and parents got a stern talking to from the police, just for owning a pocket knife or biking home alone.

We really can't have it both ways, that every failure of the child is blamed on the parent for lapsing in their almost totalitarian oversight, while also idealizing the idea that children must make their own mistakes and gradually growing into responsibilities and self-governance. Except having access to the Internet, apparently.

Taking a step back, this all smells like madeleines and a yearning for the good old days when everyone rode bikes and nobody owned smartphones. That's not really a productive stance on anything.

(If you would ask me, and I'm sure nobody would, I would think that there is a sort of trade-off here but with a clear answer: Make clear restrictions about buying cigarettes, alcohol, abusive content and extreme porn. But these restrictions aren't meant to be technically perfect. It's ok that some kids will learn to lift the limits and explore what is forbidden. At least then they would know that there is some reason society collectively considers these things off-limits, and that they soon will be in a mistake of their own making.)

But it seems that many parents do not bother to do anything to raise their children properly, including setting up parental controls.

Let me be very explicit so we're not dancing around the topic:

The potentially all-powerful government shouldn't know:

- what vices a person has

- what religion a person has or doesn't have

- what porn you watch

- what alcohol and drugs you buy

PERIOD.

All of these things can be exploited. To control jobs, to control finances, to extort influence, to shape ideology, etc.

The government shouldn't be able to catalog those things in a database for later misuse.

The government shouldn't be able to install friction or barriers that make it easy to cordon off and kill these things at a later time.

The "think of the kids" argument can go to straight to hell. Nobody's having children anyway.

This is a very real (not logically fallacious) slippery slope right into the pages of 1984.

It's not about kids. It's about control over society as a whole. They're going to force you to use your ID to access the internet, force you to use an approved device, and the minute you step outside of allowed behavior, you'll be punished.

Shackles and telescreens are coming, and they're using this argument to build it.

Nobody here disagrees. What should be the case is that sites are broadly required to flag what kind of content they serve so parents can choose to exercise their own level of desired control.

Surely parents can look at the sites and decide for themselves whether or not they are suitable.

I am certain that with even two minutes of thought you can understand why this makes zero sense.

I thought for more than two minutes before replying, so I guess not. What makes it difficult for someone who cares about what their child looks at online to determine for themselves what sites are suitable?

What constitutes an all-powerful government? It seems rife for a no-true-scotsman argument.

Would it be acceptable for a private company to own this information? Perhaps sell it to others?

To me an all powerful government is one that has all the information the user just listed, because governments are by definition the most powerful force in our countries.

Private companies should also be regulated with regards to data sales of private information, yes.

Should a government control the porn a child can walk into a shop and buy? The alcohol and drugs they can work into a shop and buy?

Are you suggesting we remove current laws making it illegal for children to purchase these things?

If I recall correctly, in Pennsylvania the government does own the shops that sell liquor, and most states run lotteries, so there's certainly precedent for governments being the ones in the vice business.

That's besides the point though because this legislation doesn't check people's IDs when they're trying to purchase porn or alcohol, but as soon as they walk out the door, and if they refuse to show it, they have someone following then around even if they just go to the ATM and to the doctor.

A store doesn't photocopy your ID. Some states even allow retailers to skip the ID check if the patron looks old enough.

With online services, there's no way to ensure your information isn't permanently stored and associated with the transaction for later misuse.

Okay, but no kids live in my house, so why should there be a law requiring my ID to be checked even without knowing what I'm going to on my device? I don't get carded at the grocery store when I walk in because there's a chance I might buy alcohol.

I am sick of these "government bad" takes. They lack constructive suggestions, like your "sink it" nugget, they lack decent problem descriptions, as if anything after the sinking (likely private governance, aka feudalism) is immune to the ills of big-gov, and on top perpetuate reductivist arguments as if any kind of restrictions of freedom is by definition bad.

This broad rejection without good reasons is borderline sociopathic. ... and parental control is not the gov raising anyone.

I dunno, "government bad" seems like a pretty reasonable default. Governments typically have a high amount of corruption and are generally unhealthy organizations. It doesn't make sense to delegate more responsibility to an entity with such structural issues.

Friend, we have a fair amount of suggestions ( including constructive ones! ). Do you know why? Because we mostly know how to make education decent for individual students like:

- keeping class sizes small - keeping class within similar development range ( AP with AP. short bus with short bus )

None of it is a secret, but government can't (edit:or won't) make it happen. Hence regular people just doing the best they can within the system at their disposal.

I know people who will adamantly insist that keeping classes within similar development ranges is harmful and will vociferously reject any such proposal, up to and including things such as "gifted" schools and the like.

It's why some schools in (iirc) California did away with higher maths like calculus entirely.

Sadly, it seems there's nothing actually common about common wisdom.

I will admit that I never heard a serious argument from anyone that did not rely on issues not related to individual student's education. If you have any materials on those, I would love to read some of it.

Montessori advocates for mixed age classes where more advanced help teach the less advanced, as the teaching itself solidifies it in the more advanced student's mind. Not sure if it is valid. But it is something with studies and meta studies that may have been done well or poorly, not just an aesthetic choice. I think Vulcan style training pods driven by AI like khanmigo will end up being better education than the vast majority of students will ever have access to in person. Or consider it the realization of "a young lady's primer" from diamond age.

Montessori does advocate that, but mixed ages is not mixed intelligence.

Yes, that is an issue. There isn't much separation until age 11 or 12 and even then it is usually at the same physical facility. Is there good data on how to handle that? Don't want to make irrevocable decisions too early, seen lots of people good at arithmetic that can't do math and the reverse almost as often. Then is it bad to have socialization absent between different intelligence levels? Most public schools in the us seem to intentionally leave no time for critical thinking or actual history lessons (as opposed to propaganda).

There is separation, at least here in the US, where basically all Montessori schools are private and can choose who to take, so the extreme lows aren't present. The other aspect is kids' abilities are masked by how fast kids grow and change; I'd guess a 20th percentile 4-year-old will be better at things than a 95th percentile kid 365 days younger, so the mixed ages still helps both, because teaching helps someone learn and the younger hasn't learned the thing yet. Where when you get to teens, the more capable student in, say, grade 9 will be able to learn calculus so much faster than a less capable student in grade 12, either you make the former waste most of the class repeating concepts they already solidly understand, or you end up leaving behind the slow learner. You're hurting one, the other, or both by mixing them. But that's doesn't mean they can't both be in art class, or band, or shop together.

Socialization doesn't have to solely occur in an academic classroom.

I am categorically not a "government bad" person. There are things that only government can do to help society and it's an important institution. However government shouldn't take over things in your household. I feel for the government to do a thing it should have to demonstrate that the state has an defensible interest. Gay marriage? Gov't has no business in marriage. Gov't demanding age checks in apps or in electronics? No, gov't doesn't need that.

> like your "sink it" nugget, they lack decent problem descriptions

Let me be clearer then: The legislation has passed but it is 100% possible to repeal that law. And it should be repealed, and we need to not let up pressure on California until it is rescinded. It was a bad law that was not thought out at all and fails to solve any problems.

I'm not worries about corporate feudalism and app age checks.

I'm not sociopathic, you're just making broad assumptions.

And I am sick of people constantly wanting every single aspect of life regulated by the government. You guys need to understand that government isn't static and society changes. The rules you come up with today are going to get in the way in unexpected ways tomorrow. Regulations should only happen if you can demonstrate that it substantially improves things in a measurable way.

Eg "if you ban cellphones in schools then average test scores (on tests like PISA) will substantially improve". Or something else like that.

>This broad rejection without good reasons is borderline sociopathic.

It's sociopathic to not want the people in control to constantly make up new arbitrary rules? I guess we just need a few more Patriot Acts and Snoopers Charters.

"And I am sick of people constantly wanting every single aspect of life regulated by the government." We're carting that strawman out again? What folks mostly want is for private industry to collectively display something approximating business ethics and maybe self-regulate away from objectively harmful/predatory behavior. The last few decades have very clearly demonstrated that there is literally no bottom to private industry depravity unless one is literally forced in place by legislation.

The current form of government and the last administrations have allowed this environment to exist. We don't have antitrust regulation being enforced and citizens united is still in effect.

This is only going to cause things you describe to get worse and the U.S. government is complicit in this because we have a two party system that works directly or indirectly for the establishment.

I'm not sure if you are encouraging more government intervention, but its clear this is not working. Its like going to a criminal gang and asking for security while they ransack your community and charge you for it.

That's a problem with the politicians folks have chosen to elect, not an issue with the concept of governance. And while I agree with your analysis proposing we all wait patiently for "market forces" to resolve whatever ludicrously unethical bullshit industry is up to at any given time is also clearly a non-starter. So now what?

It's more than just politicians we elect. There is a systemic problem that needs to be adressed before we can elect candidates that represent our wishes. Citizens United needs to be abolished. Money needs to be removed from politics and we need enforcement of anti-trust laws.

Governance only works when it represents the people, that is not what this government does right now and no amount of electing the right candidates is going to fix that until we have those two issues addressed.

Enabling government spying under the guise of "protecting children" doesn't put private industry in check one bit.

It's like saying we should install Flock cameras everywhere so that we can protect consumers from buying harmful products. Corruption and mass-violation of human rights is all that's ever going to come out of it.

If the goal is to stop predatory companies, why not do so? Oh right, because that was never the goal.

Do you really believe that your computer asking you if you're over 18 is government spying? I don't believe that you really believe that.

And how exactly do you validate your age? Government-issued IDs. Attaching government-issued IDs to every digital activity is the surveillance apparatus's wet dream, and it's not like these motives are hidden. So between this and equating opponents of this policy with cryptobros in your other comment, I have a hard time believing your accusation of bad faith as anything other than good old DARVO.

It's also the tired old argument that's constantly raised by encryption ban/backdoor proponents too. How many times do they have to be debunked, ugh.

If you're against the EFF on these kind of issues, it's typically a good time to reevaluate your position.

https://www.eff.org/issues/age-verification

... You don't. Did you actually read the law you're complaining about? It says the OS shall ask the person who creates an account what is the age bracket for that account. No verification is required. In fact the same law makes it illegal to verify this.

Even if true, that's an obvious farce. There's zero chance that these people will be satisfied at just asking for personal information and not checking. Next time, the rhetoric will be "we've already agreed to mandate age verification, why aren't we actually verifying?"

Furthermore, age verification is being pushed at multiple jurisdictions across the globe. They're trying multiple approaches to get this through and seeing what sticks.

Please don't engage in political/ideological battle on HN. The guidelines make it clear we're trying for something better here. https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html

Please don't fulminate on HN. The guidelines make it clear we're trying for something better here. https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html

What's really wild is 9 times out of 10 when you back a crypto-libertarian into a rhetorical corner far enough to get them to drop their pretenses what you're left with is "OMG YOU ARENT MY DAD" is, at least in their mind, a cogent political philosophy.

Your post says far more about you than libertarians. Remember, every time you give the government a power, you are creating an avenue for corruption and by design putting someone who probably isn't qualified in charge of decisions they lack the experience to make reliably. There you go, a simple argument that increasing government power has a drawback that you never consider. And that's why you post says more about you than anything. Such an extreme position is impossible to defend and anytime you try either a) the person you are debating isn't very skilled at debating or b) you are just being stubborn and ignoring facts and arguments you don't like. I suspect its B.

And every time you remove legislation you open up entire new vistas of corporate depravity and as the last 40 years have comprehensively demonstrated, "market forces" are not a viable replacement for legislation. Increasing government power is a liability only and solely when folks make a habit of electing incompetents and the corrupt. Governance as a concept is fine, what you're actually arguing for is better politicians.

Having the government burrow into your Linux install like North Korea is totally fine as long as the people doing it are competent and not corrupt!

telling Debian it should ask you during setup whether you're over 18 (which you're allowed to lie about) is the same as North Korea now?

"telling" is a really curious euphemism for forcing volunteer Debian developers at gun point or they'll get thrown in jail. People in recent history seem to have forgotten that this is how governments enforce laws. If it was not, why would anyone bother obeying the laws if they didn't like them?

Governments are dangerous monopolies on force and the use of that force shouldn't be casually tossed out like candy at a parade on crap like this. If it doesn't matter if you lie, what's the point of even doing this, to prove that we're insane? Or is it the pretext for requiring a remote server id carding service in the future under that guise? Keep driving down this road and you end up with an end game that looks a lot more like North Korea than a free society with limited government.

The law defines it as a product quality issue. Meaning you can return it for a refund and a company that keeps selling broken products may be ordered to recall them or to stop selling them until they're fixed. You can't go to jail for selling broken products, and this doesn't apply to free software since it's free and has no warranty (which is only allowed because of the fact that it's free.).

Do you think the rule that children's toys can't contain lead is equivalent to living in North Korea? That's the same kind of law as this one.

You also have a lot more flexibility to negotiate on product quality. If you have a good reason why you can't meet normal product quality standards because your product is sufficiently different from the normal products in that category, you can usually put a prominent warning label on it to cover your ass and then you're fine.

> The law defines it as a product quality issue. Meaning you can return it for a refund and a company that keeps selling broken products may be ordered to recall them or to stop selling them until they're fixed.

And if they refuse to do all of this and resist, what happens to them? If you want a sample, stop paying your taxes, stuff your money under your mattress and see what ultimately happens. Just because our government is slow, stupid and incompetent doesn't mean that they don't use the same mechanism of action.

I would love to get into why looking at porno is not even in the same universe of danger as lead poisoning, but I've spent weeks trying to explain harm comparison to people that genuinely think high schoolers using social media is the same thing as them using cigarettes and heroin and I'm just exhausted.

idk, what happens to someone who keeps giving away lead-painted toys for free?

Apparently he/she gets equivocated as a porn star by authoritarians on hacker news arguing against their own self interest.

I'm not a libertarian; I just don't get why I should have to prove my age on every device I own regardless of what I access online when I don't have kids. Parental controls already exist on devices, so that's not really what this is legislation is proposing. I don't have a concrete solution because I don't even agree that "theoretically we don't know for sure that this device couldn't be used by a child to access pornography" is a problem that it's my job to solve as someone with no kids and plenty of mundane uses of the internet like paying bills, contacting medical providers, filing taxes, etc.