Australia has been censoring an incredible amount for a long time, for what it's worth. It is one of the worst offenders of this out of all the Western countries. There aren't many restrictions on the government to ban things.
ManOMorphos
I think it's time for a game platform divorced from Visa/Mastercard to rise to the occasion and step in for these platforms. Websites without these processors already exist, so the model is proven to work well enough (it's less convenient for sure).
I wouldn't think the US would be a good country for this hypothetical store though. I think it's only a matter of time until they attack the publishers and studios directly. I'm not counting on the 1st amendment to help anyone.
I know that the name of the fallacy comes from an example, but I don't think I've ever heard a scotsman invoke "No True Scotsman". I've heard countless Americans invoke it though, and one side does it far more than the other.
That paranoia came about when crime documentaries got big on TV (and now internet) rather than a consistent increase in abductions. People are really bad at reasoning with probability and undoing attentional bias from media, so they even think it can be likely kids would be abducted if left alone.
This is why 24/7 location tracking on kid's phones is completely normalized. Sure, it's not a bad thing to take precautions, but tracking your kids like a dog seems a bit much. And I'm sure a lot of parents misuse it for a lot less serious things (eg teens being at the mall unsupervised).
Not to mention, I'm pretty sure if they started debiting accounts arbitrarily and en masse, there would be a nationwide bank run and an apocalyptic economic crash. I'm not sure they'd want to wage nuclear war on the US economy. At least not yet.
In the US, it seems supporting policies that make the elderly retake the driving exam is complete political suicide. There is a good reason for it and it would keep people safe, but there's no chance of it happening while the population that mostly votes is old.
It's never really "infinite" in practice. What it really means is that the amount you can lose isn't bound by the money you put into the trade. If you buy a stock normally, you can only lose up to the amount of money you used to buy it. With shorting, you can lose 5x, 10x, 20x the amount of money if things go wrong for you.
The amount of underpaid/unpaid overtime I've heard of is terrible. At this point I will always ask if someone gets paid 1.5x if they're hourly working overtime, or if they're classed as salary exempt from OT pay. The former is blatantly illegal yet still happens often enough, while the latter can be legal but is usually taken advantage of with no compensated days.
Agreed, the beginning of the end of involuntary-only censorship happened when Tiktok got popular. The older generations try to find the limits of allowable content on platforms (within reason) but the younger ones effectively self-castrate everything they post everywhere. And it's because one app owned by a Chinese company is a bit strict about it. It's disappointing.
In theory it's supposed to be unconstitutional to use FLIR on a house without a warrant to find evidence. In practice though, I'm sure they can easily ruin someone's life for a while based off of "heat signatures". This isn't even mentioning what they could get away with if the Feds are involved. Who even knows anymore?
I truly don't know either way, but it would be laughable of them if the only thing that blocks unregistered users from loading more content is a pop-up. I've gotten through forced pop-ups with uBlock's block element tool in the past.
The problem has been solved to some extent, at least. Unregulated casinos and Polymarket are entirely banned in the US, but citizens here regularly bypass it with VPNs and transferring stablecoin. In the case of obscene games, it's not illegal (yet at least) so the only thing needed would be the infrastructure for accepting and distributing crypto payments.
None of it is without flaws, but many small websites managed to make it work without issues. The main issue would probably be convincing enough people to move to crypto to create a stable user base. I'd imagine some would be "driven" enough to jump through all these hoops though. Personally I'd like to see a platform that is free of this anti-democratic fuckery going on.