For example, in many countries that legalized Marijuana the number of addicts did not significantly rose. Further the police now have even less to do, as they do not need to control these people if they are taking this drug.

Agreed.

One thing I like to ask ... compared to EU and Germany Australia has already a very strict (from our point of view) system for immigration. What is then the point of One Nation? Since you are already so demanding in what a foreign has to bring with them, like education, money, not being to old. What else do they really want?

Australia and Germany itself are not a match to the US or China. This is why we have to unite to larger organisations like the EU. And from my perspective Australia SHOULD fill the UK void. I liked the Australians always more than the British ;).

The next problems about the billionaire's is that they lobby very long and institutions are very slow. For example this Google Lawsuit took over 10 years ... we can not wait this long when we are talking about controlling social media. Yeah I think in general we agree on the overall topic, but have a bit different ideas how to achieve it.

>Might be a bit different system, but

I specifically said that we have different systems. However, the overall process does not differ so significantly that we would not be able to vote people out of power if we want to, which was your original point where you argued about systems.

>that Germans are stupid and easily led by media?

Not everyone, but enough are such that similar to the americans we start to vote for right-wing politicans which promise much, but will not solve the problems. From what I heard you Australians have the same issue with "One Nation".

>who are we, in Germany and Australia, to tell a US billionaire

For what are we having a goverment if they are not impose laws that are binding for companies? A US Billionaire can do whatever they want in a country as long as its legal. The EU recently ruled that Google has to pay 1 billion since they seem to favor their own apps and thus creating a monopoly. In the end Google will comply as the EU market is large enough.

However, now we are talking about something different and this is also something I can support much more. Algorithmic boosts and these slot machine like systems are a problem, which I highly agree. Then a ban of all of these systems would be something you would rather advocate then advocate for selective bans. For example, yeah social media can continue to exist but only a very simple algorithm can be used where a user can subscribe to topics he/she chooses. No recommendation, no trending stuff.

Nope, German. Would I be American I would probably phantasize of taking up arms to overthrow the dictatorship, without the realization that I probably just would die since the military is much better equipped than me.

However, smartphone usage and also the use of social media can have positive impact and is not inheritly damaging. Which is why I argue that a ban seems like the wrong direction.

Especially that once rights are taken they are much harder to get back.

In countries like the US the first Season of The Walking Dead was aired with an age rating of TV-14. At the same time the same in Germany this season was rated with an Rating of 18 (Germany uses 0,6,12,18 as ages for rating). So I am somewhat puzzled. Similar when a movie shows a pair of boobs or at least implies some sexual elements the US tend to rate the movie often with their MA-rating. However, in Germany thats different. It seems we have different children in both countries. As the ones in the US are more okay with violence and it does not affect them, where the childs in Germany are more okay with sexual elements.

This was just an example how stupid many rating systems are, their are very dependent on the country and the society you live in. So there is no inherent universalism to what a 12 or a 14 or a 16 year old should see or not.

My point, and I tried to argue this multiple times in this post, is that a goverment should not simply impose more and more bans and restrictions. This seems like the easy way out, but has always drawbacks. One is already described in the article, namely that the parents already start loosing awareness that the internet might be a dangerous place. Since they think: Yeah, there is a ban so its solved!

We should rather give the parents the time such that they can communicate often enough with their child to understand what problems its facing. In what kind of world the child lives and what they are consuming. If both parents are working 40 hours+ each week, they are not able to do this. Someone also mentioned in this thread "why is obesity not first fixed.", it might be a different issue, but the solution is the same. More time for parents mean that they can cook more healthy meals and do not rely on garbage food because they are stressed out.

If you prefer living without a smartphone its completly up to you and I would always stand for your right to not have one, but on the other side I am also standing for the right to have one if someone desires one.

Technology is in most of the cases not bad, and their use can enrich lives.

>You think of something new and express it - through a prompt, through code, through a product - it enters the system. Your novel idea becomes training data. The sheer act of thinking outside the box makes the box bigger.

This was the same before, if you had a novel idea and make a product out of it others follow. Especially for LLMs, they are not (till now) learning on the fly. Claude Opus 4.6 knowledge cut off was August 2025, so every idea you type in after this date is in the training data but not available, so you only have to be fast enough. Especially LLMs/AI-Agents like Claude enable this speed you need for bringing out something new.

The next thing is that we also have open source and open weight models that everyone of use with a decent consumer GPU can fine-tune and adapt, so its not only in the hands of a few companies.

>We will again build and innovate in private, hide, not share knowledge, mistakes, ideas.

Why should this happen? The moment you make your idea public, anyone can build it. This leads to greater proliferation than before, when the artificial barrier of having to learn to code prevented people from getting what they wanted or what they wanted to create.

There are many problems and unresolved issues right now. However, we are getting closer. In my opinion, we do not know what we have unleashed.