8 ms·

These are government regulations regarding kids. Nothing new here, we’ve been regulating what you can market to kids for decades. I’m not buying a slippery slop

by rapind 10mo ago

These are government regulations regarding kids. Nothing new here, we’ve been regulating what you can market to kids for decades. I’m not buying a slippery slope argument. As a parent myself, it definitely helps when you can collectively avoid having your kids on these platforms. I can’t express how much easier it is to restrict it and not seem like a kook when authorities are also on board.

jaimex2 10mo ago
The government isn't helping you, they just pushed every child in Australia to un-moderated and decentralised social networks. Complete free for alls. 4chan, Mastedon, BlueSky, PeerTube, Pixelfed They have millions of users. They're about to get more. No, you can't block these. No, you can't order these to do anything.
- nostrebored 10mo ago
  This idea that regulation fails to destroy industries is farcical. Most examples of “failed regulation” like American prohibition were runaway successes as public policy. Whether it is good or desirable is a different question. The idea that someone is going to make an engaging experience on a “decentralized” network is honestly a bit silly to me. The market potential of this business is low. Decentralized networks with much larger incentives have failed to capture critical mass. There will be side effects, but social media has been so ridiculously corrosive to the welfare of teenagers that I can’t imagine a ban would be worse.
  - johnnyanmac 10mo ago
    >Most examples of “failed regulation” like American prohibition were runaway successes as public policy. You pick one of the worst examples? Prohibition drove a black market for spirits . the 21st amendment repealed it because the government missed out on hundreds of thousands in taxes. The reason to make the law and repeal it were both awful. The lessons learned were all wrong. It's just awful all around (and I speak as someone that doesn't really drink much).
    - nostrebored 10mo ago
      Yeah, this is absolutely one post hoc interpretation of it. The black market for spirits absolutely pales in comparison to public health and legal data, which conclusively show that second order effects of drinking like liver disease, public intoxication, and domestic violence plummeted. This prohibition era retcon is a way to justify the fact that people like to drink and there were many people who stood to make money on re-legalization. Which is why I said the question of it being a good thing is different. I encourage you to look at the data, as someone who also enjoys to drink. Government bans are surprisingly effective in most developed countries.
      - johnnyanmac 10mo ago
        "success" can be viewed in different lenses. In your lens of "did it make America healthier", sure. I wouldn't be surprised. My lens is "did America actually learn anything valuable from this period?". And all I see is "We The Government are fine poisoning our citizens as long as we profit from it". A lesson that passed on to cigarettes, then hard drugs, then fast food (which persists to this day), and now with social media. Then The Government wonders why no one trusts them to do the right thing. In that lens, I'd say prohibition and its downstream effects on how to regulate in general was absolutely awful and damning.
        nostrebored 10mo ago
        That’s a fair interpretation! I meant in terms of the stated goals of the Prohibitionist movement. I imagine they would agree with both of us (and be very angry about it)
        JoshTriplett 10mo ago
        > poisoning our citizens *allowing our citizens to make their own choices about what they consume
        komali2 10mo ago
        Is that what happened with cigarettes? Remember how pervasive cigarette ads used to be? Human behavior is variable and can be influenced, even against our best interest. At what point do we acknowledge advertising as a form of psychological attack that causes people to do harmful things they wouldn't otherwise do? The government's role in this imo shouldn't be to allow corporations to try to convince people to hurt themselves and then to sell them things to hurt themselves with, but then turn around and restrict people's rights to slow down the self harm. Rather I believe the government should seek to annihilate corporations that try to harm the population. Is not the implicit relationship between corporations, people, and government, such that corporations want to be allowed to exploit a population for profit in return for some nominal good, and the government allows that only so long as the good outweighs the harm? Why not?
  - AnthonyMouse 10mo ago
    > The idea that someone is going to make an engaging experience on a “decentralized” network is honestly a bit silly to me. The market potential of this business is low. Decentralized networks with much larger incentives have failed to capture critical mass. When decentralized networks win, they often win so big that they become invisible. AOL is dead, the web isn't. Email, the global telephone network, the internet itself, these are all decentralized networks. The hardest part of doing this for social media is actually discovery. It's easier to show people an "engaging" feed when your algorithm has access to the full firehose to select from. But that doesn't mean doing it in a decentralized way is impossible, and if you pass a law that drives people away from centralized services, the incentive to do it goes up.
  - api 10mo ago
    The “engaging experience” is the entire problem. The fact that it’s harder to do addiction engineering on a decentralized network is a feature.
  - mx7zysuj4xew 10mo ago
    Aaannd then the mask came off, proving you were a moralistic authoritarian. I suppose you support cartels destabilizing entire nation-states with billions of criminal funds too
- ryan_lane 10mo ago
  What social networks are these? If they aren't complying with the law, they can (and should be) blocked. You're also missing what folks keep saying: the network effect isn't there. It needs to be popular enough that there's social pressure to be there. If it's that large, it's going to be large enough to be on the radar and then be under enforcement. Slippery-slope arguments, for the most part, exist to fear monger folks away from change, even when the argument itself is non-sensical.
  - johnnyanmac 10mo ago
    >What social networks are these? well for one: I find it humorous how this law has an exception for Roblox. That really speaks to how up to date lawmakers are on the situation (or worse: how easy it was for Roblox to pay them off). I don't see how it's a slippery slope when the corruption is before our very eyes.
    - iamnothere 10mo ago
      Roblox AND DISCORD. Somehow YouTube is considered “dangerous” though.
      - Popeyes 10mo ago
        YouTube is just a content hose though and it does not care what it shows you, you can go down some dark routes with YouTube just by letting it play.
      - anakaine 10mo ago
        YouTube didn’t make it through because of how it actively pushes alpha male crap at teenage boys. The Tate brothers and others who push the whole toxic masculinity, man are superior, men must protect women even from themselves, to be a man you must be able to fight, men are owed a position of power and women should be subservient, etc. It was a very strong feature in the early debate, and something educators put in as part of their submission as being an extremely noticeable shift for young men, and those same young men quite consistently stating the same content they viewed. YouTube’s tendency to push extreme rabbit holes and funnel towards extremism and conservatism in young men is what led to them being included.
- stackghost 10mo ago
  As others have mentioned it's the critical mass and the algorithmically-addicting dopamine treadmills that are the problem this law seeks to address.
dizlexic 10mo ago
And if the government regulates your children join an after school program where they learn outdoor survival skills, exercise, and learn the popular political parties glee club. There would be nothing new here? The argument is that kids being online isn’t the governments business one way or the other. The slippery slope argument is always secondary, but how often has government regulation not grown in size and scope? Combine that with how norms shift and the type of large scale identity infrastructure put in place to support this, can you honestly say this isn’t going to grow? All of that also ignores the possibility (read inevitability) that a bad actor/authoritarian would exploit this access further without popular support.
- raw_anon_1111 10mo ago
  And we already see what India is trying to do - force phone manufacturers to have an always on GPS feature where the government can track you and disable the phone’s feature where it notifies you if something is using your location. And they tie your SIM card with your ID.
  - 31337Logic 10mo ago
    This got rejected in the end, btw.
    - raw_anon_1111 10mo ago
      Only because Apple refused. I’m not saying Apple is a good guy. If Trump had asked, Cook would have hired people from DOGE to implement the feature.
raw_anon_1111 10mo ago
So it “helps” so you don’t have to be the bad guy to your kids and instead now everyone needs to give the government a method to tie your online presence and speech to you.
madeofpalk 10mo ago
The problem is that it's a government regulation regarding everyone, because now everyone must prove that they're not a subject of this new law. Do you think there should there be police on every corner you must submit your ID to to prove you're not an illegal immigrant?
- mrcode007 10mo ago
  Imagine having to show your ID demonstrating you’re not subject to the law punishing you for driving a car without a driving license.
  - heavyset_go 10mo ago
    I don't have to scan my face, upload my ID and share my biometric data with multiple 3rd parties, who will then lose and leak my private data, every time I drive a car. This law isn't letting anyone use social media freely until they're suspected of not being an adult, at which point they have to age verify. It requires everyone to identify themselves whenever they want to view, interact, reply or share content on the internet.
    - ntSean 10mo ago
      This is not true. Its users suspected to be underage which will be asked. Additionally, the law makes no judgement on the technology used to identify age, just that social media companies need to make an effort. I suspect that companies will not want to deal with the data security issues (very illegal to share pictures of underage people without consent), and will not be "sharing" with 3rd parties.
      - heavyset_go 10mo ago
        To comply with the law, platforms are gatekeeping content they deem controversial/NSFW/inappropriate/inconvenient behind age verification walls. Everyone who wants to view, interact with or share that content has to verify their age to do so. > I suspect that companies will not want to deal with the data security issues (very illegal to share pictures of underage people without consent), and will not be "sharing" with 3rd parties. There are countless instances of exactly this happening, over and over again, not to mention that it's the way age verification's implemented now nearly everywhere lol
dragonwriter 10mo ago
> These are government regulations regarding kids. No, they aren't just that, because they are government regulations requiring everyone wanting access to something that cannot be marketed to children under the rules to prove that they are not a child, which is not inherently essential to a regulation of what can be marketed to children. There is a difference between regulating what can be marketed to children and mandating that vendors secure proof that every user is not a child. (Just as there is a difference between prohibiting knowingly supplying terrorists and requiring every seller to conduct a detailed background check of every customer to assure that they are not a terrorist.)
- ulbu 10mo ago
  alcohol, cigarettes?..
  - notpushkin 10mo ago
    Yes, but those are in the physical world. [1] In digital realm, having to verify your ID has way more consequences. My passport has been leaked and I have a “quick cash loan” in my name as a result of that. --- [1]: Tangentially, those are trivially circumvented in many countries. When I was a teenager in St. Petersburg, we’ve used a “duty free delivery service”, which (I suppose) just stocked liquor at the duty free shop on the border with Finland, and then sold it. Not sure how legal was the core premise (probably not), but we used it because their couriers didn’t even pretend they need to check our passports (definitely illegal). In many countries, alcohol is available in grocery delivery services. Couriers happily leave your order at the doorstep even though they are supposed to check your ID. In many other countries, even buying in-store is possible (e.g. Japan, where in any konbini you can just press a button on screen saying “yes, I’m 21”).
    - SoftTalker 10mo ago
      So stupid. An image of an ID should never be a replacement for the actual ID for future use. I hope that loan was easy to dispute.
heavyset_go 10mo ago
We're literally at the point where we have KYC laws just to post on the internet. The slippery slope is long behind us, we're already at the bottom.
- kill_nate_kill 10mo ago
  Oh, we can go bottomer.
- hexasquid 10mo ago
  First they came for the people who worry about slippery slopes. I didn't speak out because I don't worry about slippery slopes. And that's that.
- ptek 10mo ago
  I thought you had to use your real name when posting on USENET back in the day before spoofing.
  - salawat 10mo ago
    No. What is this revisionist nonsense? Where the hell did you think the meme of "On the Internet, no one knows you're a dog" came from? Conventional wisdom was alias up, or maintain a well-known handle. Do not use or share personal info. Ever.
- rawbot 10mo ago
  Once you hit rock-bottom, it's time to bring out the jackhammer.
lII1lIlI11ll 10mo ago
> As a parent myself, it definitely helps when you can collectively avoid having your kids on these platforms. I can’t express how much easier it is to restrict it and not seem like a kook when authorities are also on board. This pattern of thought is exactly the issue. Stop offloading parenting of your children to government! That won't end well for neither children nor adults.
- arrrg 10mo ago
  It takes a village to raise a kid. You cannot parent in isolation and outside of society. How society is structured has an huge impact on parenting. It is delusional to think of parenting as some kind of thing that exists in isolation separate from and not influenced by the rest of society. Parents often can only have little influence themselves. This is a value neutral description. Though I do think total parental autonomy in parenting is not a worthwhile goal and also not at all realistic. As parents you have to deal with society. What does that mean for social media bans? To me mostly: network effects are wicked strong and fighting against them as an individual parent is basically impossible. This can lead to parents only having bad choices available to them (ban social media use and exclude them from their friends, allow social media use and fry their brains). Are bans that right solution? Don’t know. I’m really not sure. But I do know that it‘s not as simple as „parent better“.
  - lII1lIlI11ll 10mo ago
    In discussions similar to this I often see parents expressing their happiness with a state taking the role of a "bad cop" so that the parents can just wash their hands off telling their children it is state's fault they can no longer use TikTok ("I can’t express how much easier it is to restrict it and not seem like a kook when authorities are also on board." from OP) instead of having a proper conversation about harms of social media with the children. This is literally a cop out for them from a proper parenting. From my point of view I'm already paying for their brats with higher taxes, now I will also have to gradually give my documents to random web sites more and more just to reduce the "burden" of parenting on lazy parents...
carimura 10mo ago
Personally I'll take "kook" (or worse) as a trade off for safety and sanity of my children any day of the week.

by rapind 10mo ago

jaimex2 10mo ago

The government isn't helping you, they just pushed every child in Australia to un-moderated and decentralised social networks. Complete free for alls. 4chan, Mastedon, BlueSky, PeerTube, Pixelfed They have millions of users. They're about to get more. No, you can't block these. No, you can't order these to do anything.

nostrebored 10mo ago
This idea that regulation fails to destroy industries is farcical. Most examples of “failed regulation” like American prohibition were runaway successes as public policy. Whether it is good or desirable is a different question. The idea that someone is going to make an engaging experience on a “decentralized” network is honestly a bit silly to me. The market potential of this business is low. Decentralized networks with much larger incentives have failed to capture critical mass. There will be side effects, but social media has been so ridiculously corrosive to the welfare of teenagers that I can’t imagine a ban would be worse.
- johnnyanmac 10mo ago
  >Most examples of “failed regulation” like American prohibition were runaway successes as public policy. You pick one of the worst examples? Prohibition drove a black market for spirits . the 21st amendment repealed it because the government missed out on hundreds of thousands in taxes. The reason to make the law and repeal it were both awful. The lessons learned were all wrong. It's just awful all around (and I speak as someone that doesn't really drink much).
  - nostrebored 10mo ago
    Yeah, this is absolutely one post hoc interpretation of it. The black market for spirits absolutely pales in comparison to public health and legal data, which conclusively show that second order effects of drinking like liver disease, public intoxication, and domestic violence plummeted. This prohibition era retcon is a way to justify the fact that people like to drink and there were many people who stood to make money on re-legalization. Which is why I said the question of it being a good thing is different. I encourage you to look at the data, as someone who also enjoys to drink. Government bans are surprisingly effective in most developed countries.
    - johnnyanmac 10mo ago
      "success" can be viewed in different lenses. In your lens of "did it make America healthier", sure. I wouldn't be surprised. My lens is "did America actually learn anything valuable from this period?". And all I see is "We The Government are fine poisoning our citizens as long as we profit from it". A lesson that passed on to cigarettes, then hard drugs, then fast food (which persists to this day), and now with social media. Then The Government wonders why no one trusts them to do the right thing. In that lens, I'd say prohibition and its downstream effects on how to regulate in general was absolutely awful and damning.
      - nostrebored 10mo ago
        That’s a fair interpretation! I meant in terms of the stated goals of the Prohibitionist movement. I imagine they would agree with both of us (and be very angry about it)
      - JoshTriplett 10mo ago
        > poisoning our citizens *allowing our citizens to make their own choices about what they consume
        komali2 10mo ago
        Is that what happened with cigarettes? Remember how pervasive cigarette ads used to be? Human behavior is variable and can be influenced, even against our best interest. At what point do we acknowledge advertising as a form of psychological attack that causes people to do harmful things they wouldn't otherwise do? The government's role in this imo shouldn't be to allow corporations to try to convince people to hurt themselves and then to sell them things to hurt themselves with, but then turn around and restrict people's rights to slow down the self harm. Rather I believe the government should seek to annihilate corporations that try to harm the population. Is not the implicit relationship between corporations, people, and government, such that corporations want to be allowed to exploit a population for profit in return for some nominal good, and the government allows that only so long as the good outweighs the harm? Why not?
- AnthonyMouse 10mo ago
  > The idea that someone is going to make an engaging experience on a “decentralized” network is honestly a bit silly to me. The market potential of this business is low. Decentralized networks with much larger incentives have failed to capture critical mass. When decentralized networks win, they often win so big that they become invisible. AOL is dead, the web isn't. Email, the global telephone network, the internet itself, these are all decentralized networks. The hardest part of doing this for social media is actually discovery. It's easier to show people an "engaging" feed when your algorithm has access to the full firehose to select from. But that doesn't mean doing it in a decentralized way is impossible, and if you pass a law that drives people away from centralized services, the incentive to do it goes up.
- api 10mo ago
  The “engaging experience” is the entire problem. The fact that it’s harder to do addiction engineering on a decentralized network is a feature.
- mx7zysuj4xew 10mo ago
  Aaannd then the mask came off, proving you were a moralistic authoritarian. I suppose you support cartels destabilizing entire nation-states with billions of criminal funds too
ryan_lane 10mo ago
What social networks are these? If they aren't complying with the law, they can (and should be) blocked. You're also missing what folks keep saying: the network effect isn't there. It needs to be popular enough that there's social pressure to be there. If it's that large, it's going to be large enough to be on the radar and then be under enforcement. Slippery-slope arguments, for the most part, exist to fear monger folks away from change, even when the argument itself is non-sensical.
- johnnyanmac 10mo ago
  >What social networks are these? well for one: I find it humorous how this law has an exception for Roblox. That really speaks to how up to date lawmakers are on the situation (or worse: how easy it was for Roblox to pay them off). I don't see how it's a slippery slope when the corruption is before our very eyes.
  - iamnothere 10mo ago
    Roblox AND DISCORD. Somehow YouTube is considered “dangerous” though.
    - Popeyes 10mo ago
      YouTube is just a content hose though and it does not care what it shows you, you can go down some dark routes with YouTube just by letting it play.
    - anakaine 10mo ago
      YouTube didn’t make it through because of how it actively pushes alpha male crap at teenage boys. The Tate brothers and others who push the whole toxic masculinity, man are superior, men must protect women even from themselves, to be a man you must be able to fight, men are owed a position of power and women should be subservient, etc. It was a very strong feature in the early debate, and something educators put in as part of their submission as being an extremely noticeable shift for young men, and those same young men quite consistently stating the same content they viewed. YouTube’s tendency to push extreme rabbit holes and funnel towards extremism and conservatism in young men is what led to them being included.
stackghost 10mo ago
As others have mentioned it's the critical mass and the algorithmically-addicting dopamine treadmills that are the problem this law seeks to address.

dizlexic 10mo ago

And if the government regulates your children join an after school program where they learn outdoor survival skills, exercise, and learn the popular political parties glee club. There would be nothing new here? The argument is that kids being online isn’t the governments business one way or the other. The slippery slope argument is always secondary, but how often has government regulation not grown in size and scope? Combine that with how norms shift and the type of large scale identity infrastructure put in place to support this, can you honestly say this isn’t going to grow? All of that also ignores the possibility (read inevitability) that a bad actor/authoritarian would exploit this access further without popular support.

raw_anon_1111 10mo ago
And we already see what India is trying to do - force phone manufacturers to have an always on GPS feature where the government can track you and disable the phone’s feature where it notifies you if something is using your location. And they tie your SIM card with your ID.
- 31337Logic 10mo ago
  This got rejected in the end, btw.
  - raw_anon_1111 10mo ago
    Only because Apple refused. I’m not saying Apple is a good guy. If Trump had asked, Cook would have hired people from DOGE to implement the feature.

raw_anon_1111 10mo ago

So it “helps” so you don’t have to be the bad guy to your kids and instead now everyone needs to give the government a method to tie your online presence and speech to you.

madeofpalk 10mo ago

The problem is that it's a government regulation regarding everyone, because now everyone must prove that they're not a subject of this new law. Do you think there should there be police on every corner you must submit your ID to to prove you're not an illegal immigrant?

mrcode007 10mo ago
Imagine having to show your ID demonstrating you’re not subject to the law punishing you for driving a car without a driving license.
- heavyset_go 10mo ago
  I don't have to scan my face, upload my ID and share my biometric data with multiple 3rd parties, who will then lose and leak my private data, every time I drive a car. This law isn't letting anyone use social media freely until they're suspected of not being an adult, at which point they have to age verify. It requires everyone to identify themselves whenever they want to view, interact, reply or share content on the internet.
  - ntSean 10mo ago
    This is not true. Its users suspected to be underage which will be asked. Additionally, the law makes no judgement on the technology used to identify age, just that social media companies need to make an effort. I suspect that companies will not want to deal with the data security issues (very illegal to share pictures of underage people without consent), and will not be "sharing" with 3rd parties.
    - heavyset_go 10mo ago
      To comply with the law, platforms are gatekeeping content they deem controversial/NSFW/inappropriate/inconvenient behind age verification walls. Everyone who wants to view, interact with or share that content has to verify their age to do so. > I suspect that companies will not want to deal with the data security issues (very illegal to share pictures of underage people without consent), and will not be "sharing" with 3rd parties. There are countless instances of exactly this happening, over and over again, not to mention that it's the way age verification's implemented now nearly everywhere lol

dragonwriter 10mo ago

> These are government regulations regarding kids. No, they aren't just that, because they are government regulations requiring everyone wanting access to something that cannot be marketed to children under the rules to prove that they are not a child, which is not inherently essential to a regulation of what can be marketed to children. There is a difference between regulating what can be marketed to children and mandating that vendors secure proof that every user is not a child. (Just as there is a difference between prohibiting knowingly supplying terrorists and requiring every seller to conduct a detailed background check of every customer to assure that they are not a terrorist.)

ulbu 10mo ago
alcohol, cigarettes?..
- notpushkin 10mo ago
  Yes, but those are in the physical world. [1] In digital realm, having to verify your ID has way more consequences. My passport has been leaked and I have a “quick cash loan” in my name as a result of that. --- [1]: Tangentially, those are trivially circumvented in many countries. When I was a teenager in St. Petersburg, we’ve used a “duty free delivery service”, which (I suppose) just stocked liquor at the duty free shop on the border with Finland, and then sold it. Not sure how legal was the core premise (probably not), but we used it because their couriers didn’t even pretend they need to check our passports (definitely illegal). In many countries, alcohol is available in grocery delivery services. Couriers happily leave your order at the doorstep even though they are supposed to check your ID. In many other countries, even buying in-store is possible (e.g. Japan, where in any konbini you can just press a button on screen saying “yes, I’m 21”).
  - SoftTalker 10mo ago
    So stupid. An image of an ID should never be a replacement for the actual ID for future use. I hope that loan was easy to dispute.

heavyset_go 10mo ago

We're literally at the point where we have KYC laws just to post on the internet. The slippery slope is long behind us, we're already at the bottom.

kill_nate_kill 10mo ago
Oh, we can go bottomer.
hexasquid 10mo ago
First they came for the people who worry about slippery slopes. I didn't speak out because I don't worry about slippery slopes. And that's that.
ptek 10mo ago
I thought you had to use your real name when posting on USENET back in the day before spoofing.
- salawat 10mo ago
  No. What is this revisionist nonsense? Where the hell did you think the meme of "On the Internet, no one knows you're a dog" came from? Conventional wisdom was alias up, or maintain a well-known handle. Do not use or share personal info. Ever.
rawbot 10mo ago
Once you hit rock-bottom, it's time to bring out the jackhammer.

lII1lIlI11ll 10mo ago

> As a parent myself, it definitely helps when you can collectively avoid having your kids on these platforms. I can’t express how much easier it is to restrict it and not seem like a kook when authorities are also on board. This pattern of thought is exactly the issue. Stop offloading parenting of your children to government! That won't end well for neither children nor adults.

arrrg 10mo ago
It takes a village to raise a kid. You cannot parent in isolation and outside of society. How society is structured has an huge impact on parenting. It is delusional to think of parenting as some kind of thing that exists in isolation separate from and not influenced by the rest of society. Parents often can only have little influence themselves. This is a value neutral description. Though I do think total parental autonomy in parenting is not a worthwhile goal and also not at all realistic. As parents you have to deal with society. What does that mean for social media bans? To me mostly: network effects are wicked strong and fighting against them as an individual parent is basically impossible. This can lead to parents only having bad choices available to them (ban social media use and exclude them from their friends, allow social media use and fry their brains). Are bans that right solution? Don’t know. I’m really not sure. But I do know that it‘s not as simple as „parent better“.
- lII1lIlI11ll 10mo ago
  In discussions similar to this I often see parents expressing their happiness with a state taking the role of a "bad cop" so that the parents can just wash their hands off telling their children it is state's fault they can no longer use TikTok ("I can’t express how much easier it is to restrict it and not seem like a kook when authorities are also on board." from OP) instead of having a proper conversation about harms of social media with the children. This is literally a cop out for them from a proper parenting. From my point of view I'm already paying for their brats with higher taxes, now I will also have to gradually give my documents to random web sites more and more just to reduce the "burden" of parenting on lazy parents...

carimura 10mo ago

Personally I'll take "kook" (or worse) as a trade off for safety and sanity of my children any day of the week.