Parents of children affected by the ban shared a spectrum of views on the policy. One parent told the Guardian their 15-year-old daughter was “very distressed” because “all her 14 to 15-year-old friends have been age verified as 18 by Snapchat”. Since she had been identified as under 16, they feared “her friends will keep using Snapchat to talk and organise social events and she will be left out”.

Okay, that’s really bad. On the one hand, this is like “they don’t even card me at the bar”, which is opening up a whole can of worms. Either they’re passing for older, or they’re faking it. As for the kids left behind, it’s also “you look too much like a kid to hang” or they simply get left out for not breaking the rules. All this kind of shit used to happen before, only now it’s technologically accelerated.

And here I was naively thinking this was going to make everyone stampede back to SMS instead.

Oh, fuck that.

However long that took to get shut down, it wasn’t fast enough.

Thanks for the explanation.

I’m almost certain Musk has 120mil in loose change, hiding in his couch.

Okay, I’ll ask since I can’t be the only one: the fuck is a jubilee?

While true, there’s a little more nuance to it than this.

Unchecked capitalism has one key tennant: exploit everything.

This doesn’t stop with equating work to worth. It’s more like “create an environment where people have no recourse but to surrender their time.” Compensation is merely a necessity brought on by so many potential employers competing in the labor market this creates. Beyond that, your every other resource and basic need is also under target for exploitation; both the need of a thing and for merely having it.

NGL, I was hesitating on building a MAME cabinet, but having one with the art and build of a legendary fake game? Sounds perfect.

A couple of extra things about this.

The episode was co-authored by William Gibson of all people. The fact that one of the key authors that gave us cyberpunk as a genre, went on to write a painfully mediocre TV episode about virtual reality, still leaves me kind of stunned.

WRT to “live-action standing-in for VR”, it can be done artfully. Avalon does a great job of using practical effects and creative set locations to portray cyberspace. Also: there’s a lot of run-and-gun here, and nobody stands around. Which is to say: they really whiffed hard on the x-files episode, as there’s clearly a better way to do this.