I live in the UK. Please for the love of all that is sweet and holy DO THIS! The only way our politicians will learn is if the public outcry is so fierce it makes them fear for their jobs.
The issue here is that the internet is dominated by large companies that have a huge incentive to use this as a way to ensure regulatory capture of the free internet.
Take Reddit as an example: Reddit became big after Digg fucked up their mainpage and has replaced most hobby forums and discussions on the internet. A competitor to it would have to implement a lot of compliance stuff like age verification and that would be very expensive, making it harder for a competitor to be bootstrapped. That's why Reddit has an incentive to support such regulation, even if it costs them a lot. Once implemented, competition becomes harder and harder.
The large tech companies benefited immensely from relative few regulations in the 2000-2010s. Once they are established, they are happy to comply with regulations which will make it more difficult for competitor to even exist since complying with regulations is often prohibitively expensive for new player.
It is known colloquially as "Pulling up the ladder behind you".
The writing perpetuates the anthropomorphising of these agents. If you view the agent as simply a program that is given a goal to achieve and tools to achieve it with, without any higher order “thought” or “thinking”, then you realise it is simply doing what it is “programmed” to do. No magic, just a drone fixed on an outcome.
How is it different from our genes that "program" us to procreate successfully?
Can you name a single thing that you enjoy doing that's outside your genetic code?
> If you view the human being as simply a program that is given a goal to achieve and tools to achieve it with, without any higher order “thought” or “thinking”, then you realise they are simply doing what they are genetically “programmed” to do.
Absolutely fantastic!! I love Botswana. I spent quite a lot of time in Gaborone for work. Growing up my home town was 80 kilometres from the Botswana border and we regularly visited friends there. I am so happy to see this news. Botswana has a special place in my heart. Well done Botswana! I can’t wait to see what else comes next.
Your observations are spot on. People are different and thus handle temperatures differently. The bit about humidity is absolutely 100% in line with my experience. I could handle -11 degrees C in Germany with clothing that would leave me freezing in the UK at -2 degrees C.
The same goes for handling heat and humidity. I grew up with average temps of 35 degrees C in a dry climate. It was not a problem at all. 28 degrees in high humidity I find unbearable.
That is unfortunately not correct. I grew up in a commonwealth country, have travelled to many others, and now live in the UK. Not a single person I know in either country has even the faintest idea what Fahrenheit numbers mean for temperature. It is never used in any way in these countries.
It is used for cooking in Canada even today. Here’s a UK weather report from 1987 that uses both Celsius and Fahrenheit: https://youtu.be/NnxjZ-aFkjs. Celsius is the default but there are living people in the UK who recall using the Fahrenheit scale. This is much less common outside the commonwealth.
I have no idea where you have been hanging out on mastodon. My experience has been the polar opposite of yours. I have had more thoughtful conversations and interactions on mastodon in two months than what I had in many multiple years on other platforms.
A UK internet blockade might just get this going.