I wish those parents would just setup controls on their kids' smartphones and block social media apps for them instead of forcing everyone else to give their ID.

When I was a kid, a common refrain was adults couldn't figure out how to stop VCRs flashing 12:00.

While the details changed, this rhymes with more recent research: https://www.oecd.org/en/publications/skills-matter_1f029d8f-...

Would be nice if everyone was competent at everything, but we have to specialise, and that means a lot of people simply don't have time to re-learn how to do that every time Apple, Google, and Microsoft change their UIs. Same deal as https://xkcd.com/2501/

Me, I had to turn on parental controls… to stop my parents from accidentally removing apps from the dock.

I think this is an unhealthy and unhelpful attitude. While I oppose the government banning it, I still believe children should be kept off of social media until they are mature enough, which can vary from child to child. There are plenty of dangers of social media: addiction, AI-generated propaganda, and bullying being a few.

It's your kids though so it's your decision. Just giving my take.

See my response to the adjacent comment:)

I wonder if a ban on YouTube means a ban on kids watching YouTube or just having an account.

If it's the former, then many schools use YouTube for educational purposes and set their kids homework that involves watching it. My old school sent us YouTube videos to watch on WW2 during the lockdown.

If it's the latter, what happens when YouTube flags your IP as suspicious and demands you "sign in to confirm you're not a bot"?

The truth is the vast majority of British citizens (70%+) support this. Actually, support for the Online Safety Act went up in the year after it was implemented. People you talk to online are not representative of public opinion as a whole. British society is very pro-"protecting children", which is what this is advertised as.

A lot of old people think a social media ban will bring back the good old days of their childhood where kids went outside. A lot of parents don't want to tell their kids "no" to social media because of "peer pressure", instead of just telling their kids to find better friends.

Only a small proportion of the population recognises this is about control. No major political party will speak out against this as they know being against it is a vote loser.

> Babylon Bee forces you to accept cookies to use their site. Worth avoiding.

Use uBlock and block javascript by default with NoScript. I saw nothing about cookies and just got the article.

As with all silly internet block BS, simply reload the site and hit escape before the cookie banner loads.

> reload the site and hit escape

What exactly does that do? Which web browser?

I’m on mobile right now, so can’t test.

I'm on Firefox and it did nothing for me. The popup came up so fast between me refreshing and hitting escape.

Alternatively, you can disable JavaScript on the website. That lets me view it.

I would suppose it interrupts the page load after streaming the HTML and before loading and/or executing the cookie banner‘s javascript, meaning the content is there but the cookie banner will never open.

On Chrome on desktop it stops the (slow) javascript running which is what actually loads the blocker. You need a fast finger.

Or just inspect element + press delete. In some cases you also need to then delete an extra gray overlay and re-enable scroll on the base html tag, but takes 30s

Seems like a lot of work to browse a site that makes a good joke once every month or so.

I shut that site down as soon as I saw that. Gross.

Shows a lot of people haven't read the article and just made assumptions based on the headline.

Can you explain for the non-terminally online?

They want to say that non-whites are naturally dumber than whites. There will be varying degrees of subtlety but that's what the dog whistlers are on about.

You can take a look at the charts in the linked article and see that the scores for Asians are consistently higher than the scores for whites which are consistently higher than the scores for blacks and Hispanics. This was true in 2012 and it's true today.

If these numbers are at all meaningful for determining how much a student has learned as a result of going through schooling, then thye show that white people are consistently better than blacks and Hispanics at school and are consistently worse than Asians.

Depending on what variety of racist you get, they'll either just ignore that sort of data, or they openly state they prefer Asian immigrants.

Alternatively, maybe they became [more] racist after looking at the data.

Here's another way to say it: when you import the third world, you become the third world.

Screen time and social media definitely have an impact on attention spans, but it's worth pointing out for Mathematics, 2023's average is higher than pre-1990, and reading averages seem to have always been in the 255-265 range.