1) Not true. The burden is on the seller to verify age. Sure, they can try to do it visually but if they fail they are still liable.

2) Even if true, nothing changes in a legal sense if they lose the ability to informally verify age because thats not a legal right of the consumer. It's just an incidental feature of buying in store which some people value. There may be a difference there, but its not a legal one.

3) Texas law didn't mandate age verification by ID specifically.

The claim made by some is that its illegal to require porn companies to do age verification due to the first amendment. It's really the only legal theory I've seen that supports the claim that the Texas law and others are unconstitutional. The rest just amounts to "it's bad so they should rule against Texas and others."

If his comment was based on some different understanding lets state it so we can clarify, but I think I already have. Of course its not illegal to ask someone's age on the internet. Is that truly what you believed I was saying?

Note that this is not what I said. You overgeneralized it - I will assume without bad intention. The question is if it's illegal to require porn companies to verify the age of their users.

> Can you let us know what your source is?

The Free Speech Coalition and Kagan, Sotomayor, and Jackson of the Supreme Court, to start. That was their minority opinion in the suit filed against Texas for requiring online porn companies to verify the age of users. The plaintiff argued it was a violation of the first amendment - it is a common argument.

https://www.scotusblog.com/2025/06/court-allows-texas-law-on...

The argument against the legality of these laws has always been highly suspect. There is a common sentiment that these laws are not good - but when pressed to explain why they aren't legal you get crazy arguments like this, that it violates the first amendment.

Isn't that basically what's happening? Service providers, such as Discord recently for example, are asking for identification to prove users are of a certain age. If you punish service providers for providing services to minors then they will need to do age verification.

In addition there are more services, such as social media, becoming age-gated.

The enforcement hurts the sensibilities of people like us on hackernews but it's common sense to a lot of people. We live in very polarizing times, but as you've noted, it has bipartisan support. The easiest explanation is the hackernews-friendly take of lack of enforcement mechanisms is the more radical one.

Personally I think it's a bit sad but inevitable. The laws are just catching up. And there will absolutely be some good coming from it, such as holding companies liable for breaking the law.

What is your subscription page now?

I just checked mine and its just an ordered list of videos from channels I subscribe to ordered by most recent.

I mean, i know why it does that. Engagement. But I mean what governs it? Just a percent chance? If you havent watched any shorts in a while?

Definitely another example of the shit UI/UX you speak of.

> The last time I tried YTs search field was when I was trying to find an older video in my history. Nothing, even if I typed down the exact keywords. Nothing. Luckily, I found it through myactivity.google.com.

I have had a similar experience but it seems ridiculous to propose removing the search. It's not like its returning random results. It does generally work, even with the major failure points you describe.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Normal_science

You lost me at"We need less cars everywhere period." Not everywhere is a dense city.

>It's very different from modern games, where each player looks like the fantasy version of a Marvel super hero

But isn't this true for most games?

>UO was the only game that I've ever played where you had "commoner" players. A lot of players failed to scale up, or to obtain top notch equipment.

I guess the main example I'm thinking of is Path of Exile. There is such a massive difference between your average player and the top tier. Or even not the top tier but enthusiasts.

I mean almost by definition most people wont have top notch equipment?