(NB: I am firmly opposed to any of this. The solution for parents concerned about their kids is parenting and parental controls, not giving authoritarians of all stripes the means to snoop and ban whatever they decide is obscene or troubling.)

Yes, it is surely that young people are just wusses and not that they're also much poorer than previous generations, which forces them to postpone things like marriage, child-rearing, and purchasing a home.

As a gay man, I am profoundly uncomfortable with the idea of one or more private companies having a durable record of the content I look at, for what I would hope are obvious historical reasons. Additionally, age-gate laws will inevitably be used for oppressive purposes - remember, a substantial number of conservatives view ANY mention of the mere existence of LGBT people or families as inherently pornographic, sexual, or obscene, and those people would absolutely seek to have all LGBT content age-gated. Hell, even without such laws we see this in libraries and schools. The harm that would be averted from age verification online is not proportional to the evils it would give rise to, plain and simple.

The only form of age verification I would ever be OK with would be on the same basis as being carded in RL - something like, at a corner store I could buy a tag with an ID number on it that would count as proof of age for as long as I had it, for online purposes. The clerk would verify my age and then give me a tag in a sealed box with a random number, thus preserving my anonymity from both angles: the clerk would not know what number he sold me, and the state would not know who bought the number, only that the retailer averred that I had had my age verified.

There's a delightful irony in the fact that such a page would absolutely have murdered a browser from its era. Nevertheless, these remind me of a different internet and scratch one heck of a nostalgia zone.

Mandarin, Cantonese, Hakka, Hokkien, Wu, etc are spoken languages (or dialects, or varieties), but the writing system is common to all of them, albeit in two major forms -- Simplified and Traditional. If I write 恭喜发财, a Mandarin speaker will read that aloud as gongxi facai, a Cantonese speaker as gung hei faat coi, and a Hokkien speaker as kiong-hi hoat-chai, though I left off tone markings even though they're important. In that sense, unless something's romanized, written materials are pretty much just written in 'Chinese', and not any particular variety.

Learning Chinese is funny that way: the spoken language has very simple, regular grammar, but then you also need to learn how to read, write, and pronounce ~3,000 characters to read a newspaper, with a well-educated reader in the language typically recognizing between 8 and 15 thousand characters of the 80,000-100,000 or so that have ever existed (including obscure characters, obsolete characters, regional characters, and variant characters).

It's similar to how if you show a Frenchman, an Englishman, a German and a Pole '456', they'll all know the meaning even if the Englishman thinks "four-hundred fifty-six", and the Frenchman thinks quatre cent cinquante-six.

There's several of them, but it really depends on the value of the device more than the cost. A lot of what Northridgefix repairs is valuable for the data being recovered more than anything, where the value proposition isn't clear. That said, if someone's paid $2000 for a GPU, I can understand their willingness to pay $300 to get someone to painstakingly microsolder some components back on.

It reminds me of the studies they've done in Canada and the US about how natives (American Indians) die a lot of the time in the ER because they're immediately written off as alcoholics or drug-addicts, and so their complaints are evaluated through the lens of "this person just wants opiates."