Nearly no one is buying things online anonymously with crypto currencies. ID verification is simply a non issue in a world where you actually pay for things. So start making the advertising model illegal (which it should be for its price dumping market distorting effects anyway).

That said I generally think the take that it's somehow privileged to find school interesting to be sad. Over the last couple decades one could do pretty well with pretty much any STEM degree. Is the majority feeling among people studying engineering that they just have no interest in any facet of how the world around them works? They have no desire to understand how to create (and alter to their liking) the things they see? No interest in the fundamentals of how the universe works? How different materials come to act the way they do? How living beings work? Nothing?

If you're 14, and go to a porn site, you'll be told to go away or prove you're 18+, which you can't do because you're not. If you try to submit ID (which you likely don't even have), you'll still be told to go away, so why would you do it?

This is not about collecting children's info. It's about not providing service to them.

Additionally, nothing in these laws (well, from the red states. The new ones out of e.g. California are much worse) says you can't e.g. establish physical verification at adult stores to get an access card or something, giving the same properties we have for other age restricted purchases.

Just like "log in with Google", you should be able to do "log in with OAuth", you type your email or domain (or your browser fills it), and it triggers a redirect flow for login. Then people can use GitHub or Google or Apple or their own provider, just like email. Every email provider could also be an OAuth provider.

At IBM, vim was specifically banned by legal because of reputational risk because the license asks you to consider donating to children in Africa, and IBM didn't want to be called out for not doing so. Guess which editor pretty much everyone in my org used? We also weren't allowed to move furniture because of some union agreement, but guess how many people cared when furniture mysteriously moved from an empty office room into ours? None.

At the startup, people in our satellite office in Arizona openly mocked the California HR harassment training over lunch. It was also an open secret that one of the managers started dating a report. As far as I know many years later they've both moved on to other jobs and they're still together. Nothing bad happened.

Breaking some policies will absolutely get you fired, but that's mostly around doing things you shouldn't be doing, and even then usually only matters if someone else that has some power might themselves get in trouble/have more work/lose something because of what you did. Others no one will care about. Again, part of growing up is figuring out which policies have a purpose and which came from some busybody.

I also already gave the entire AI industry as an example. We know for a fact that Meta trained on pirated material, and it's pretty obvious that everyone else does too. It's blatant industry wide flouting the law. The realpolitik answer here is everyone knows that enforcing the law here would be the final nail in the coffin for China superceding the West, so it's not going to happen.

Of course I presume it's also not a strawman because it's not in any way some unique thing to lawyers.

Like the entire AI industry could only work by completely ignoring copyright law. Basically no software could be written if developers were concientious enough to check for and avoid patents first. Tradesmen ignore safety policies. Doctors ignore limits on hours. People do work on their homes with no permits.

Part of being an adult is exactly knowing which rules are important and which you ignore.

[0] https://fred.stlouisfed.org/series/MSPUS

Frankly it's a perspective that I've only developed as I got older and realized that such excuses are poor, and that the real world has quite a few people in it who don't really care about the outcomes of what they're doing, or even understand why they're there. To me it feels adjacent to the adolescent view I often see on this site/reddit around "why is the company laying people off when they're making lots of money?" It's because those people aren't needed for anything, and those jobs aren't a form of charity. They exist for a purpose. If they no longer have a purpose, why would you keep paying that person?

If people are going to exist as obstructions to the purpose of the institution we're trying to serve, then they are useless. It's like a computer security worker saying the best way to be secure is to unplug everything, and push for policies that no one shall use computers for anything. Completely missing the point.

Finding ways to follow the law in the most risk-free way to the detriment of everyone is exactly missing their purpose in the world, and everyone should rightly call such a person incompetent and useless. It's casual acceptance of this kind of incompetence culture that slowly leads to societal decline. It's the same kind of thing as when Berkeley took down their lectures because of the ADA. How about the same state that ignores federal immigration and drug law say that actually they're going to keep giving away their free educational materials because they want universal education, and giving those lectures away is strictly better than not doing that, and if the feds want it made accessible, they can fund a project to do so?

> Firefox usage share grew to a peak of 32.21% in November 2009, with Firefox 3.5 overtaking Internet Explorer 7, although not all versions of Internet Explorer as a whole;

Firefox was the browser that embraced open standards and was unseating IE. And ActiveX was used for corporate stuff, not general web sites, so the main reason it died was that Microsoft gave up.

Refusing to give a student their own data because of a privacy law that's meant to give the student control over their data is them failing. Full stop. There's no room for excuses for government funded entities to act in the exact opposite way that they are supposed to to avoid their fear of government imposed penalties from a deliberate misinterpretation of what the entire thing is about. That's incompetence by everyone involved. It is people going out of their way to make the world a worse place to act important. Absolutely unacceptable.

It's like if teachers aren't teaching the kids to read or add, the details about all the compliance stuff they need to worry about and how the school "can't" remove disruptive kids from a class or whatever is missing the point; the schools can't sacrifice actually doing their job at the alter of compliance, or we should just shut them down since all they do is waste resources. The compliance people should be figuring out how to shield the actual workers/create plausible deniability if the law is supposedly that stupid.