While I dislike social media, this ban is as stupid as Australia's laws enforcing bicycle helmets.
Will this mean I will have to register as my real name on Hacker News? Not a chance
How is a bicycle helmet a bad idea? Many countries have that for minors. And obviously most(?) western countries have seatbelt laws and motorcycle helmet laws.
It's also a natural effect of having publicly funded healthcare I guess.
> Will this mean I will have to register as my real name on Hacker News?
First of all, age verification shouldn't mean the social media provider gets true identities. They shouldn't be trusted with that info. There needs to be services that allows verifying your age against one service, and the media service just getting the receipt of that verification. Whether such a service exists already or not shouldn't matter. The law should be written so that social media companies are restricted in what they can do when they can be sure someone isn't a minor, and when they are sure. For extra safety, perhaps it should say they can't be allowed to see for example physical ID:s. Because otherwise you'd risk privacy issues.
Second, I think it's better to formulate these laws the way the new york draft did: that specific features are restricted for minors. Such as: enless media feeds based on past behavior (such as any video "shorts" feeds in all the major platforms today).
As sibling comments seem to have missed the point: laws mandating helmets reduce the general rates of cycling, as people without helmets don't cycle at all. Cycling is so good for your health that the risks associated with not cycling are actually greater than those that go along with cycling without a helmet.
Enforcing bicycle helmets is a good idea. It's about protecting your health and reducing the burden on the public health system.
I've fallen off a bike before and my helmet definitely saved me from a serious head injury. Would I have worn one if it was not compulsory and drilled into me as a child that's what you do when you ride one? Maybe not.
It saved me that day and I expect it saves many people in this country every day too.
> Would I have worn one if it was not compulsory and drilled into me as a child that's what you do when you ride one?
Yes. Because this is a false dichotomy. The latter does not depend upon the former. I can say that with certainty because I received the message growing up in a country with a cycling proficiency programme in schools instead of mandatory helmet laws.
Everyone should wear a helmet when riding, but criminalising noncompliance is an inefficient, reductive, expensive, heavy-handed, unnecessarily punitive, and ultimately counter-productive approach to achieving it.
In Australia this is not just for minors, you can be fined as an adult for cycling without a helmet which is even more absurd when you look at the lack of cycling infrastructure in Australian cities and the general cultural distain towards cyclists.
An active society reduces the burden on public health care, take a look at the obesity rates in Australia, especially childhood obesity, shouldn't we also regulate lifestyle choices that contribute to this? How about the explosion of massive 4WDs in Australia? Are you not also subsidising the health care burden those? If you want to keep cyclists safe then build more bike lanes.
It is an excellent defense, because similar logic is often resisted when it comes to regulating lifestyle and food consumption - even though complications from obesity impose a much greater, and growing, financial burden on public healthcare systems.
Are you planning to ban all snowsports? Horse riding? They produce similar or higher levels of injury and disability even with helmets.
>it's not fair for your selfish actions to have a negative effect on everyone else.
If negative externalities are the metric we're evaluating what is and isn't allowed in our society, you're really going to take a pass at cyclist helmets instead of cars? Do you know what the leading cause of child death in Australia is? It's cars
>Obviously we also have tracking numbers to prove that literally every succeeded payment from account 1 have received their products, and we have submitted this to Stripe as well.
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So does this mean that any of your customers complained that they have not received what they paid for?
Realistically the main thing OP has to worry about is this somehow getting his Google account flagged and locked by some buggy algorithm at a later date. Nothing involving a human would ever come about this, but it's Google we're talking about.
I moved once and got a $10 final gas bill sent to the old address that I never knew about. The company was scummy and added a $10 late fee after 30 days. Then another $10 late fee after 30 days, etc, until it was around $120 and then they put it on my credit report and sent it to a collector.
This was like 20 years ago, but scummy fly-by-night companies will do this.
This happened to me with employment insurance just a month ago. Invoice went to the old address. I paid the invoice 4 days after the due date, but not the €10 late fee that i didn't know about. So they put the €10 late fee to debt collection and i had to pay €40.
What enraged me most was that that the insurance company supposedly didn't know my new address, although they are my landlord at the new address...
The debt collection of course had no problem finding out my new address.
This is fairly common practice with utility companies and banks. I don't think Google have latched on to this scam yet but I'm sure they will eventually.
AFAIK (in the UK, at least), for an account to affect your credit record, without it actually going to court, would need for you to have signed a credit agreement at the outset.
> AFAIK (in the UK, at least), for an account to affect your credit record, without it actually going to court, would need for you to have signed a credit agreement at the outset
I don't believe that's correct as scummy telecoms use the threat of ruining your credit to keep people paying even if they delivery no/subpar service.
> These prices are fairy tales. It's a figure next to no one will actually ever pay. Insurers pay less. If you ask for a discount you will pay less.
Columns H through AI represent the negotiated insurance rates or agreed schedules. AJ represents the lowest negotiated charge for that service across all providers.
Interesting reading, really. Aetna largely seems to pay retail, whereas others like Cigna and Emblem are getting "decent" discounts. Also provides a good basis for negotiation if you're a cash payer. "I can pay your minimum negotiated charge for this, or I can dispute it during collection"
But even still, these prices are ridiculous even after negotiation and are indicative of a broken system. For what it's worth, hospitals aren't charging these fees because they're profiting; many of them are struggling to stay in the black.
(I used to run appsec at a healthcare best practice and advisory firm. A lot of my background on this was absorbed through osmosis, though I can't say I'm an expert)
