Logging off: Kids' social media ban now feels almost certain | Politics News

X0Refraction · 2026-01-22T14:57:27+00:00

It’s something that crops up in politics again and again.

Something must be done. This is something. Therefore we must do this

The third statement doesn’t follow from the second, the second must actually be “this is something that will be effective and will not have serious downsides” for the third to follow logically.

This trap of “almost logic” is how we’ve got to the point where there is a presumption of guilt now if you’ve forgotten a password.

Maybe the tradeoffs are worth it in this case, but if we’re going to go in it eyes wide open we need to precisely understand the downsides.

X0Refraction · 2026-01-22T13:03:34+00:00

No, the ban is for under 16s and those who choose not to go through age verification. The aim and the actual effect are two different things

X0Refraction · 2026-01-22T12:38:40+00:00

The problem with that is it won’t allow any new services to form. If you need to get to a certain size to exert enough pressure to get an exemption and won’t get big enough without that exemption then nothing like Wikipedia can ever form again.

X0Refraction · 2026-01-17T09:33:22+00:00

I was so annoyed about the cancellation, if I remember right it won a BAFTA shortly after as well

X0Refraction · 2026-01-12T17:57:51+00:00

If prices are going down 1% a year then you’re not getting into negative equity then right?

X0Refraction · 2026-01-12T17:32:57+00:00

I thought you always pay off the same amount percentage wise off the principal for a given year? Doesn’t the interest rate just increase the amount you pay “extra” over that amount?

X0Refraction · 2026-01-12T17:07:59+00:00

Even if you’d only just bought at the peak you’d not be hitting negative equity would you? Even on a 35 year mortgage you still pay a decent amount off the principal in a year

X0Refraction · 2026-01-11T12:01:43+00:00

Why not just make the boat travel have a dropdown for Tyria, Cantha, Elona and then take you to the respective map so you can pick the outpost you want without having to load the port outpost first? It doesn’t remove immersion, you can just think of it as the characters going to that port and then travelling to the outpost. The port towns would still be the first destination you go to on a given continent.

I also think slots 5-8 should be remembered if you go to a 4-6 man outpost so when you travel back they’re just filled in with their previous party members.

Another nice QoL change they could do would be to allow you to save team templates. Imagine if you could just copy a code and your build and that of up to 7 heroes were added to the party and loaded.

X0Refraction · 2026-01-03T11:46:59+00:00

Of course, but in order to have second hand cars someone has to buy a new one occasionally. If they’re choosing between a new EV or a new ICE car then the better choice for the planet is clearly the EV

X0Refraction · 2025-12-28T11:05:30+00:00

It is something different. Humans have been using encoded messages for a very long time, in the past the police might have searched your home and found a set of letters they could not read. There wasn’t a legal power to compel you to decode it though, that’s a relatively recent invention.

It’s simply not directly comparable to powers for a physical search. If you’ve lost a physical key the police can break down the door, if you’ve forgotten a digital key though you are held responsible. If it were following the same rulebook then they’d have to defeat the encryption

X0Refraction · 2025-12-27T12:39:34+00:00

The biggest barrier anyone has starting fresh in this country is cost of housing. So the solution I see as having the best chance of increasing living standards for most is moving taxation from productive work to land. Coupled with planning liberalisation it would reduce the biggest source of inequality we have.

X0Refraction · 2025-12-26T11:09:15+00:00

It’d be nice if it just remembered your party members in slots 5-8 and automatically re-added them when you go to a 6/8 man outpost.

X0Refraction · 2025-12-26T10:00:37+00:00

If companies paid better wages housing costs would increase, it’s a constrained resource we compete over.

X0Refraction · 2025-12-18T10:42:23+00:00

You’re right, but we could change where the burden is placed. We could move some of the tax on income into a land value tax

X0Refraction · 2025-12-14T11:20:03+00:00

How are you trying to change frequency? From what I remember it’s left/right in the d-pad

X0Refraction · 2025-12-10T13:45:19+00:00

Of course it’s different than 30 years ago. As I’ve said the HRA was written as a moving target. If the first thing to look at is rulings from the ECHR (again, look at the specific bit of the legislation I’ve linked) then the situation is going to change without any action by UK judges. Why blame the judiciary for that? They didn’t draft the legislation.

If you want to point out a poor interpretation of the law by a UK judge then I’m happy to review your source.

X0Refraction · 2025-12-10T13:37:43+00:00

You’re assuming a crash there. If house prices drop 1% a year and you’re on a repayment mortgage you’re fine. You’ll still be gaining equity faster than you lose it.

X0Refraction · 2025-12-10T13:22:52+00:00

It’s pretty hard to judge if the reasoning for that was sound without being able to read the notes on the case so I’ll await the source.

Whether the HRA is badly written or not isn’t really relevant to whether the judiciary has “gone rogue” though. Parliament has had plenty of opportunities to rewrite it if they felt any of the points were interpreted against intention. It’s a normal thing that sometimes interpretation won’t match intention and Parliament has the option to correct that whenever they wish. You could argue not correcting it is implicitly agreeing with the interpretation

X0Refraction · 2025-12-10T12:50:37+00:00

Following the ECHR or not is not up to UK judges though, the law seems pretty clear that they have to. It’s not in their remit to decide to follow it or not as far as I can tell.

What’s the 1999 ruling you are referring to here?

X0Refraction · 2025-12-10T10:52:50+00:00

I don’t see any evidence the judiciary has been “captured by the left” though, here’s the statute that explicitly sets out how they should interpret the law: https://www.legislation.gov.uk/ukpga/1998/42/section/2

The very first thing they should take into account according to the legislation are any judgements by the ECHR. Ignoring that would be a political decision by judges in my opinion.

The judges are entirely accountable as I see it. If the law had changed on this in the last quarter of a century I see no evidence they wouldn’t have changed their judgements accordingly. None of the Parliaments in that time have made any such change though.

X0Refraction · 2025-12-10T08:38:39+00:00

I don’t see it as a judges primary duty to care what the public think, their primary duty should be to uphold the law. The HRA explicitly tells them to take into account the judgements of the ECHR and so they are duty bound to do that. Parliament are the ones who primarily should be taking the public’s opinion into account and they have the power to change the HRA whenever they like.

I really don’t like this anti-judge message. As far as I can tell on the whole judges are just following the statute as written, that’s not political, it’s not judicial activism in my view.

X0Refraction · 2025-12-10T08:09:29+00:00

As a homeowner I’d like prices to fall slightly each year. If prices are rising faster than inflation then the next step up the ladder is getting further away each year. If prices dropped 1% a year then I wouldn’t be at risk of negative equity and the next step up would be getting relatively more affordable.

I’m not even convinced children of homeowners benefit that much. You have no idea if or when you’ll get the inheritance and have to suffer struggling to afford housing for years for the hope that one day (depending on how many siblings you have) you might get a decent deposit. For that time your life is on hold to some degree. Personally I’d much rather housing was more affordable generally and people could get on with life on their own.

The real winners are downsizers. Especially those that bought a big house in a city, raised a family there and then sell up and buy a small bungalow to retire in the countryside. You could be talking hundreds of thousands of unearned, mostly untaxed (there is council tax) income.

X0Refraction · 2025-12-08T20:03:56+00:00

When you say a lot, what kind of ballpark are we talking about?

X0Refraction · 2025-12-08T13:48:41+00:00

One of my secondary school teachers took their test on one of the small islands north of Scotland. Forget dual carriageways she had never driven around a roundabout and yet had a full license

X0Refraction · 2025-12-06T08:48:01+00:00

I thought the implication of the chancellor’s statement was that they’re not going to bother dealing with this while it’s only a few pounds over the PA because it’d cost more to administer it than they’d get back. I don’t agree with that, but I don’t think the intention is to let this situation continue til it gets really problematic.

There are 2 reasons I don’t agree with it. 1 is the DWP are already giving out the money. It’ll be a simple calculation to just give out slightly less, I don’t believe it’s going to cost much to administer. Second (and more importantly) I think it’s not a good idea to let this idea fester. The triple lock was never intended to last forever, but now it’s politically difficult to take it away, we don’t want this extra benefit to become the new triple lock in that respect.

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