It's funny .. earlier today there was a front page HN post about the federal government mandating safer circular saws. It seemed like the majority of users in the thread were in favor of the federal government mandating technology changes to prevent harm from being done to the population.
Now for this issue, there's harm being done to children, and the majority of users in the thread seem to be against government intervention; you say: "well if you don't like it, if you think it's negative, just don't use it, don't let your kids use it".
Kind of a random parallel to draw between the two stories, but it's funny the same logic doesn't seem to apply in both cases. Why wasn't for circular saws the response "if you think they're dangerous, don't use them" or "just keep your kids away from them"?
Because people don't think the government should always prioritize protection over freedom, nor do people think the government should always prioritize freedom over protection.
It's like asking, if people are okay with the government restricting the sale of bombs to private citizens, why aren't they okay with restricting steak knives? They're also dangerous weapons.
People judge the cost and benefit of each situation.
This is a silly comparison. The table saw was not designed to be addictive, turn its users into a highly lucrative commodity, or push algorithmically driven agendas. Social media was. The dangers being compared here are very different.
You mean to say, with a saw the intent is for it to be a useful tool and the danger is an unintended side effect, while for social media the danger is the intent and it being a useful tool is an unintended side effect.
The reason I am against government intervention is the fact that governments seem to not be competent enough to solve problems like this and they would use content controls for their own purposes. It is vastly different and more complex than regulating saws. The comparison falls short by a huge margin and a false conclusion that any federal legislation would be desirable just because it is the case for saws.
Some suggest it would be the "hate" on the net that is causing the issues and we see legislation that penalizes some content already, but I heavily doubt it to be the source of any problem.
Might be something similar, perhaps the strong indignations some statements on the net seem to get to some people, although these can be as politely stated as any frivolous statement can be. And the resulting expectations on opinions you are allowed to harbor.
Irrespective of where people fall on this particular issue, I find it odd how the people who are so distrustful of government would allow things that are overtly dangerous, as long as it prevents government from...governing.
It's like we have this generation of people who believe government overreach is a) inevitably the outcome in every scenario; b) present in every situation; c) always the worst possible thing that could happen. As in, literally worse than mass sickness and death.
Not only that, but they assume that corporations, free of government regulation, will simply act in everyone’s best interest, with responsibility and accountability.
At least in theory, my government representatives are accountable to me. To whom is Facebook accountable?
Exactly. People who want to disempower democratic government are just disempowering themselves. But, they seem to think the power held by the government would simply evaporate.
They don't realize it's really a question of who will rule over them, and whether there's any chance it will be themselves.
Sure, our democracy has been crippled, but the solution is to fix it, not dismantle it.
And ironically the people who are crippling it (Citizens United, lobbying, regulatory capture, etc) are the same who would rule over us if it were completely abolished. That is, essentially, their project.
They feel that the government is a singular hivemind whereas FB/TikTok/Instagram/Reddit/etc offers the illusion of choice. (And how wonderful it is to feel some control! You can pick the content you want, who to follow, vote on content, comment, post! The friendly algorithm is just recommending things, it's helping!)
The government is never a passive actor. So non-intervention is also active policy. You can only choose what the policy is. The active policy for the last 15 years has been to consolidate a social media oligopoly with very few restrictions. Users are being tracked, advertisement laws are being skirted and are less restrictive than in other mediums, data is being sold, dark patterns are used to keep people from making their own choices. The algorithms are actively promoting bad content because the social media companies are not held liable for their part in promoting false content.
Depending on where you live it is not true that there are no restrictions on false advertising and accountability for commercial content.
That said, a government can be passive and not regulate a field and non-intervention stays non-intervention, be it conscious or not. But that is besides the point. A government that tries to regulate all aspects of life is usually connected to totalitarianism, an that isn't only a libertarian position.
It was about table saws, not circular saws. There’s a big difference between the two. Table saw accidents often result in losing fingers and it’s not that difficult to mess up while using one.
There’s a well known, proven, easy solution to table saw accidents called SawStop. It’s basically as obvious to use as a seat belt is if you want to be safe. The only problem is those table saws are very expensive.
Social media doesn’t have an existing and obvious solution (besides not using it).
Isn't SawStop patent encumbered? AFAIK the three point seat belt design's patent was made open by Volvo at the time, so the patent didn't hold back adoption.
Yes - in fact the whole company was started by a patent attorney.
SawStop says they'll release one patent (which is about to expire anyway) but they've got a huge portfolio of other ones, and companies like Grizzly say that SawStop is unwilling to engage with them in good faith on licensing their technology.
Bosch released a saw with similar tech, except unlike SawStop it didn't use overpriced consumables every time it triggered. SawStop sued the product off of the market.
The company founder also serves as an expert witness when people shove their hands into moving saw blades, then sue the saw makers - testifying that the makers should be held liable because they haven't licensed his invention.
Of course, I'm sure for SawStop getting all their competitors banned will be a highly profitable decision; it's no surprise they're lobbying for it.
Sawstop did sue Bosch, but then changed their mind and gave them a free license immediately after the case was won. It was boschs decision not to release their product in the US for whatever reason.
I think this could be aptly summarized as "you can't accidentally slip and become depressed" using social media. You can absolutely slip and lose one or several fingers or your entire hand using a table saw.
The more pertinent comparison would be alcohol IMO: none of the people who want "something" done about social media seem to have a problem with the widespread, massive use of alcohol within society and the incredible amounts of continuous and ongoing damage it does.
No you can't. You can, through usage over a long period of time, and by ignoring a lot of good advice, create problems for yourself just like anything else.
If a table saw could only remove your hand after years of dedicated usage, then sawstop wouldn't be the obviously good idea it is.
Hence why the comparison to alcohol is much more apt, and yet, mysteriously - absent in the discussion.
Damage from social media use is gradual and insidious. Additionally, it's designed to be addictive, slowly pulling users in. There is no threshold that announces itself when users are addicted or have begun to "ignore a lot of good advice".
There's also no absence of discussion around the dangers of alcohol or drugs. And, there are actual laws regulating or outright banning their use.
But, even if it was absent from the discussion, that would not absolve social media. Is every world issue rendered illegitimate if we don't also mention the dangers of alcohol with equal fervor? It seems a random, meaningless requirement.
I think every issue is due consideration in the context of "do I personally not care about the thing I want to regulate about everyone else?"
Alcohol is a useful yardstick, because it was banned (to considerable disaster), almost everyone likes it, the misusers tend to not realise it till considerably later, and we've got studies which look dire on the cost to society of it in fiscal terms.
If what you're calling for would seem ridiculous if it were applied to alcohol, then maybe it's just going be ineffective or you just don't have any "skin in the game" so to speak: after all, both serve a considerably important social cohesion function as well.
Which to loop it back around is why trying to compare social media regulation to something like mandating sawstop is especially disingenuous.
People need mental healthcare too. Done. Solved. Treat it like any addiction.
Of course the trick is that social media access doesn't require folks to pay an upfront cost, so it's harder to slap the cost of this additional service on the transaction. But of course as financial regulation makes banks do KYC and file SARs (suspicious activity report) social media regulations could do something similar. (Hurray more surveillance saves the day!)
I see. Just seems a bit circular, as the original question implies creating solutions.
Also, seems like an odd gating criteria for whether or not people support the idea of regulating social media (i.e. per the specific thrust of the original question).
Regulating a physical product being sold within the country, like a circular saw, is obviously materially different from enforcing age restrictions or other regulations to a website probably owned by a multinational company.
Personally, I don't have much of an opinion around circular saws, but I don't want my government to build a framework where they can choose to hide certain parts of the Internet. I also think the issue isn't social media, per se, but algorithms that promote negative content, personal data harvesting, etc. Banning tiktok et al isn't going to solve those problems. They'll still exist because other types of sites are implementing them.
While both paternalism. Requiring safety features on a saw does not restrict free speech. It's more akin to seatbelt laws. It's also made to protect everyone who uses a table saw and not just children.
Imo, I do think social media needs to be reeled in by policy. But I can see why it makes people uncomfortable and why there is a difference with the saw.
a lot of ppl got reeled into the narrative that social media can democratize (free) publication of conversations and ideas, thou it is dominated by monetary incentives that mandate propaganda/advertising and in turn moderation and censorship.
Not really the same, because the article is not calling for banning any source of social media. How would you even classify social media? We are taking about ad infested hellholes with no incentives other than maximizing revenue, regardless of the content pushed.
The proper analogy would be banning books with certain content, which we already do. You can't distribute a book calling for a specific person to be killed or doxxing them. Doing this on social media in Ethiopia is encouraged, as it drives engagement and has lead to actual deaths of people I know. They have a policy not to moderate this content despite having the resources. Just like they have a policy to make the apps as addictive as possible.
More importantly, Facebook is not a "printed book", it is the printing press. It owns the internet. It's not remotely comparable. And that's why it is a threat to free speech
How is access to a wholly privately owned walled garden in any way relate to printing books? Private networks are by definition not public domain and thus are totally irrelevant to any discussion of free speech.
I would agree if it weren't for the complete transition to privately owned communication platforms. The answer to your question is actually quite simple: because communication via privately owned walled gardens is humanity's primary means of mass communication, just as it used to be printed media.
It would be as if printing presses were so complicated and expensive that the barrier to entry was so high as to price out everyone but a few select publishers. I wouldn't try to over-extend that metaphor though.
That folks have opted to interact (or been manipulated into it if we're really honest) with modes of communication that are outside of 1st amendment protections doesn't change either the spirit or the letter of the law. That would be like saying that if folks suddenly decided to communicate over transcontinental distances via morse code utilizing geophones and large explosions as the transmission mechanism so now the first amendment demands semtex should be broadly accessible to the public.
It restricts free speech in the most direct, literal sense - by... restricting your ability to freely speak.
The historical existence is simply irrelevant. Just like existence of pre-TV/newspaper speech is not a relevant factor in determining whether banning all TV/newspapers in 1950 restricts free speech
Making publication easy on social media has certainly had an impact on public speech, but private platforms do not offer free speech by design.
Naomi Klein went into this in No Logo with shopping malls replacing public spaces where you also don’t have a right to free speech and can be evicted arbitrarily at the owners discretion.
You’ll find virtually all of social media platforms have moderation, usage policies and user banning practices that go well beyond allowing the fully legally protected free speech you are afforded in a public space (in many countries).
If all spaces that attract the majority of people are private and have homogenous terms of use, then free speech ends in all ways except on this technicality.
This is a telling argument. Newspapers and television broadcasts, while geared towards broad public consumption, were never wholly democratized platforms and that didn't run afoul of the first amendment. It stands to reason that management of content on social media platforms or outright banning the same wouldn't either.
And this whole conversation is about laws mandating something and the resulting prosecution with comparisons to safety standards in saws, not your made up megaphone
Which of Haidt's 4 suggestions restricts free speech? Is free speech (for adolescents) more important than the well-being of those same adolescents? Has American jurisprudence aligned on the notion that adolescents have an inviolable right to free speech?
Seatbelts are brought up so often precisely because they are an intervention with a huge benefit-to-cost ratio. Seatbelt laws were made long after the fact - seat belts for cars started to appear in the 1950s, with the common three-point variant in 1955; the first seatbelt law appeared in 1970 (in Australia). The US started introducing seatbelt laws for cars in the 1980s (though as far as I know, some organizations/insurers required them earlier for employees driving for business).
Yeah funny as a one-legged rabbit hopping in neat little circles. If I were still on social media I wouldn't want to take a long look at the quality of my interactions or the costs associated with them either.
hes actually trying to say, "that's stupid". HN and reddit would be so much easier if negative posting were allowed.
your argument is dumb too, it doesn't even deserve acknowledgment, but we are little babies here and have to politely explain to everyone why they're wrong, to the point that the insane people just always win and get their dumb ideas into law because nobody cares anymore and are tired of explaining common sense over and over. having safety controls on hardware is not anything remotely equivalent to the hypothetical problem the article pitches. there is not any world where regulating social media makes sense, and i say this as someone who has never used social media in my life. the entire issue at hand here is like a bear shitting in the woods and someone happens to step on it once in a thousand years, almost none of these so called people who get addicted to social media would have any better off chance at life without it, they would just get addicted to one of the millions of other things one can get addicted to. the remaining one in a million people who actually had their life ruined by social media is like the bear shitting in the woods, its just life.
Because it is the parents responsibility to set boundaries for their children. It can be complicated at times, granted. But that doesn't make it less of their job. Heck, I got my first CD player with 14. Yes, I felt left out at school, but... guess what, I didn't die. Children need to learn that there are rules, and someone else dictates them. Throwing tantrums is a typical reaction that needs to be weeded out as a part of growing up.
Besides, the "somebody has to think about the children" meme is slowly but surely getting old and tiresome. Not somebody... Their PARENTS. If you dont feel like setting boundaries for your children, please, with sugar on top, dont have any.
You can say it should be on the parents here and reason why, but for a lot of things it is not just on the parents (children are not allowed to vote, drive a car, buy guns, go to bar and drink alcohol, gamble, ... - it is a long list).
Such bans are not clear and are contentious, and often leave room for parental discretion.
In most countries whether children drink alcohol at home is up to their parents. In some countries an adult can buy teenagers a drink (in the UK they increased the required age from 14 to 16 - and I think its a bad thing).
There are people who think 16 year olds should be allowed to vote.
Kids cannot buy guns, but can use them. I did a bit of rife shooting at school.
Is it really contentious if 10 year old children cannot on their own buy liquor or guns, for example? I would not have put that high on the list of contentious issues.
There is a difference in being granted unsupervised abilities vs supervised ones.
As is pointed out in the article, a huge factor is the collective action trap. An individual set of parents can do very little to deal with mental health if they are the only ones.
Tell us you don't have kids without telling us you don't have kids. Short of totally unplugging your children from broader society via homeschooling, joining a commune, or similar extremes, children are exposed to whatever other children's parents permit through nothing more complicated than their interactions with other kids. An example from pre-digital times would be that one kid who's dad kept a stash of nudie mags unsecured which invariably lead to hushed giggling in the back of the bus.
I was that kid (I mean one with boundaries set, with parents that acted against all of this, just to be clear) and now a father, with my second kid on her way. Still very young, so I can't claim to have much experience. But I am getting ready to stand against all of this, and I do intend to delay their exposure to social networks, mass information, etc. as much as possible.
At least until their character is formed and they have developed essential human traits like being able to read a book, being able to be patient, being able to communicate in person, and to hand-write. You know, that sort of ancient wisdom.
Brace yourself for the day your kid comes home armed will rickrolls and starts muttering "deez nuts" under their breath. It's coming way WAY sooner than you think. ;)
As we make parenting harder and harder in lots of creative and sadistic ways, more and more people are taking your advice. That’s got its own problems, it turns out.
> The recent proliferation of studies examining cross-national variation in the association between parenthood and happiness reveal accumulating evidence of lower levels of happiness among parents than nonparents in most advanced industrialized societies.
I never saw myself as capable of withstanding the stress of parenting and so I never even really thought about having kids. I thought I was a far outlier, but, given trends in fertility, I think I may have just been early in realizing this.
The federal government's responsibilities is literally to collect taxes to maintain a standing army, and to coordinate cross-state issues that the states themselves for some reason aren't able to regulate themselves. That's what its scope is supposed to be. Are states not able to pass the table saw regulations they feel is appropriate for their citizens? I feel like they are. Why does the federal government need to step in and mandate .. table saw laws for our states? For me it's just another small step in the long line of steps towards having one overarching federal government that controls everything, like other countries have, which the US is not supposed to have.
I've never understood this nonsensical fear of federal oversight. Didn't we learn federalism doesn't work when the states fought each other over pandemic supplies. I recall some saying, this stuff is ours, get your own. And why does it make sense for some backwater state to decide to dumb down their residents with a crap education system. Isn't that a race to the bottom if a state is left alone to elect inferior education, which is a real issue in the American South? Some states will choose to be dominant intellectually and others will choose conspiracies as history. That makes no sense to me at all. I also recall a certain French prime minister say it gave him great comfort to know each child in France was learning poetry.
It is hard to say if something works or not without defining a goal.
Federalism would probably work fine for the country in general. Lots of human suffering would occur in states that elect dumbasses, but the high-productivity parts of the country would continue along just fine, and probably actually benefit without the need to keep sending money.
In some case, voters might change their tune as they actually have to face the consequences of electing unhinged ideologues.
But, it would also involve lots of pain and suffering falling on vulnerable people, so it isn’t worth it.
> Didn't we learn federalism doesn't work when the states fought each other over pandemic supplies.
The US learned between 1776 and 1789, under the Articles of Confederation. That's why they made a new constitution with a stronger centeral government.
And yet still with limited powers. (Though I have to admit that table saws probably fall under interstate commerce, certainly more so than the subject of other cases that were decided to be: https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gonzales_v._Raich )
I'm curious if countries like China, India, and Russia, have similar lawsuits and similar initiatives to reduce their emissions. I can't recall ever seeing a single story.
Russia is one thing but China might be on the way to pull one giant success here, despite being one of the worse offenders up until recently. They actually built giant infrastructure projects like high speed rail and become the leading country in automobile electrification(at least we can say that it BYD is the top dog when it comes to electric cars, not Tesla or some established company like VW).
I have never been to China but recently I've been seeing reports on how China has actually leaped ahead in some areas like automation, electrification and environmentalism. I'm really not fan of their style of government but if a change is going to happen, it has to happen with Chine due to their insane population and industrial base. Therefore, it seems like China might be on the right track there.
China is building six times more new coal plants than other countries, report finds [1]
China continues coal spree despite climate goals [2]
Two "progressive" outlets report on how China is approving new coal power projects at the equivalent of two plants every week. No matter how much you may want to root for China's right to grow its economy this does not seem like a "giant success" when seen through a "climate" lens.
These are not really contradicting positions. You can improve the efficiency of your infrastructure when building coal plants and the improved efficiency of your infrastructure will still be a step in the right direction. Also, China doing some things right is not the same as China being the best, let's not look at the world in black & white.
Sure, China can improve "efficiency" by building more green energy plants at the same time as coal plants, if the proportion of new coal plants is lower than existing plants.
Russia is in full scale climate denial. China is building a lot of solar, wind, and nuclear but still also building coal. Don’t know about India but it seems the answer is mostly no.
I’ve always argued that if we can’t make non carbon emitting sources cheaper than coal and gas (full load leveled cost) and dispatchable (batteries) we have no hope of cutting emissions and everything else is theater.
Right now it seems that burning fossil fuel is still the cheapest way to generate energy without any regulations, taxes, or subsidies. Yes that includes nuclear.
There is a big tragedy in the west - we have no understanding of other countries. Despite having millions of immigrants from those other countries.
Could we maybe interview some of them to find out what’s going on?
For example - we’ve been in Afghanistan for 20 years. Britain has thousands of refugees from Afghanistan.
When the time came to evacuate people from Afghanistan, the British team that was in charge of planning, selecting and prioritising evacuees had zero people from Afghanistan, zero people who’ve been to Afghanistan and zero knowledge of how things work there!
In case of Russia on climate change, it’s a laggard-follower of European technology and practices. Vodka is produced and bottled with Italian machinery, artillery for war in ukraine is still produced on German CNC machines, Russian tanks had French thermal scopes, and cool dudes drive a BMW.
When all European countries go renewable, after a few years lag, Russia will do the same. The cool dude will buy an electric BMW when all BMWs are electric, etc.
Given that Russia has massive resources and farmland locked away in permafrost, they have been dealt a good hand if climate change is not addressed. So they have no urgency to act, but they are not a malicious actor on this specific issue.
Last year, China built roughly 4 times more renewables than coal. They argue that they build coal because renewables are unreliable, but surprisingly it was hydro what was unreliable (thanks to droughts brought by climate change), not solar and wind, as people are led to believe. Personally, I think China still building coal is organizational inertia more than anything.
Anyway, there was an article here that also claimed 80% energy investments in the U.S. are renewables. Isn't this 4:1 ratio interesting? Doesn't this tell you that (despite the noise), both China and US are on a very similar path?
China has installed more renewables than the rest of the world combined. They will have zero emissions grid before US or even Western European countries like Britain. Most nuclear reactors in the world are being built in China as well.
What will we do when China produces all the world’s batteries, solar panels and electric cars? Will we slide into irrelevance?
Why am I asking, we already know what we will do! EU has moved to introduce tariffs on Chinese electric cars because they are too cheap! Our course of action is economically suicidal
>What will we do when China produces all the world’s batteries, solar panels and electric cars? Will we slide into irrelevance?
We'll just be selling wealthy Chinese our real estate and tourist packages to visit our 500 year old buildings, because those will be the only profitable industries left in Europe.
1) Just switching to the new thing because any forum of communication that's been around long enough and becomes big enough becomes corrupted and infiltrated and ruined and HN seems to be at that tipping point.
2) 50-75% of the stuff on HN now is just political/social propaganda (posts about Musk, Boeing, Taxes, Unions, Homelessness, Trump, etc etc etc) and there's no way to filter it out, I just want to read tech stuff.
What's the name for this logical fallacy? The last few months the trend has been that every single problem that affected a Boeing plane in any way, 99.9% of which are maintenance issues, are blasted far and wide all over HN, Reddit, mainstream media, everywhere, and every single one of them is taken as some condemnation of the company and their planes as a whole. Now, we get an article pointing out worrying maintenance patterns and the response is "so what? don't look at that, why do we care about maintenance issues?". Tomorrow some mechanic will forget to tighten down an engine cowling and it'll come loose in flight and the video will be front page on HN and the comments will be about how horrible Boeing is. So yes, I do care about maintenance issues and their causes.
1) Throughout most of high school, college, and years after college I smoked weed. I thought it was great, it made me feel good. I'd emphasise with posts on Reddit and such about how the "evil man was keeping us down", "it's just a plant man", "it's not harming anyone", etc. etc. Now that I'm older and I look back at that time, and man what a waste. I wasted so many years just getting high and accomplishing nothing. Yeah it didn't hurt anyone else. Yeah I felt good at the time. But looking back at my life do I get any satisfaction that during those years I felt good getting high and watching a movie and eating food, rather than actually moving forwards in my life? No, no I do not. It didn't get me anything other than fleeting good feelings, it's just being a drug addict. I haven't smoked in well over a decade now and I don't miss it for a second.
2) Along the same line, and counter to multiple other posters in this thread, I spent years on the whole atheist train. I thought people who believed in religion were just morons. I saved (cringe worthy) images about how it was superior to be atheist and various logical arguments for atheism, etc. Looking back on it, it's just another social hate cult. In that cult the enemy is the religious and they spend their time and effort just pouring out hate towards them. Just another hate echo chamber. It accomplishes nothing good. The older I get the more I see that traditional religion at least (for the most part) instilled good morals in people. It built solid communities. It accomplished good things. I'm old enough to have first hand memories of what communities used to be like, before the complete obliteration of religion in the west in the last 20-30 years, and I want it back. I'd rather be around those type of people than card carrying hate-based atheists. (Of course not all atheists are hate filled, but the people that make it part of their identity usually are.)
I believe it's essentially a major filter, as it requires a certain (relatively low) level of intelligence to develop the internet / mass communication, but requires a much higher level of intelligence to actually survive it without it ripping apart your civilizations.
Is it intentional that so many people are confusing/conflating teams in India labeling data for input to a machine learning algorithm vs. teams in India watching you shop in real time? It's the former. That's how machine learning works. You need labeled training data as input. The article clearly states it's only a small minority of all customers that had to be corrected in real time by actual people.
I wonder how much they paid Tom Brady to be their spokesperson. They decided to market their EVs by just having a celebrity act cool/funny. Not by, you know, telling the customer why it's a good value, or why to choose their vehicles/service, or any positive aspects of their business. No, their strategy was to just push out commercials where Tom Brady would do something stupid/funny like have a power cable plugged into him, to promote EVs. It's so baffling to me that that is the strategy of a multi-billion dollar corporation. It's also depressing to think that it probably does work on at least some portion of the population. But apparently not nearly enough.
I don't necessarily see a link to the advertising and the borkedness of this rollout.
After all, commercials are very often just like this. Sadly, a vast majority of people have no interest in real information, and to be fair, the main purpose of a commercial is to stick the brand in mind.
And as memory is amplified by emotion, humour helps.
The real problem is range anxiety I think. PHEV is what we need now, as a transition path. With one, people can plug in for almost all uses, and still be OK if surprise usage means they won't have charge.
Other comments in this thread highlight this. Primary, because when traveling you have no idea about the local infra.
Where can you charge? What companies are cost effective? What hotels support charging, and for real, not just saying so on their website.. but only having one or two of them?
When you travel, all the knowledge which makes EV usage at home easier, are gone.
Do you know why there aren't any PHEVs with a more reasonable electric range? Something like a 100 mile range with backup gas tank would let my family do most of our driving on the electric battery while still being a usable car for roadtrips. But nothing like that seems to exist.
To put numbers to it, according to google there's a gravity strength max discrepancy of 0.7% between the places with the lowest and highest gravity on the planet. Assuming using ~17g of beans for a coffee, that comes out to an error of up to 0.12g. Seems kind of dumb to correct for 0.12 grams, in the absolute most extreme case. If they just manufacturer calibrated the machine for "average" gravity then there'd be a max of +-0.35% difference in gravity, for a maximum error of +-0.06g for a 17g brew.
Now for this issue, there's harm being done to children, and the majority of users in the thread seem to be against government intervention; you say: "well if you don't like it, if you think it's negative, just don't use it, don't let your kids use it".
Kind of a random parallel to draw between the two stories, but it's funny the same logic doesn't seem to apply in both cases. Why wasn't for circular saws the response "if you think they're dangerous, don't use them" or "just keep your kids away from them"?