If any of that is government owned, it's on the chopping board.

I imagine they think it that can be provided by private weather corporations turned defense contractors and selling the information to the government.

A huge amount of stuff that the US government used to do in-house was outsourced over the decades, first to a broad range of small independent defense contractors, then to monopolies as those consolidated, thus now costing ten times as much as it should. There's no reason weather forecasting cannot become another monopoly defense contracting service charging the government an arm and a leg, and a mere kidney from private citizens in need of advanced hurricane alerts.

Project 2025 has, among is many, many goals, removing from government anything and everything that competes with private corporations. This includes weather forecasting. AccuWeather's CEO, in particular, has been a strong proponent of the US government simply stopping all of it, so he can charge more from people for his company's services as the free competition goes away.

What part of "or take advantage of the free public API" wasn't clear?

Interestingly, no such company exists here in Brazil. The reason is that our government has been offering full tax filling apps for free since I remember filling taxes (about 25 years). It's written in Java and runs on Windows, Linux and Mac without any problem. And for people who a normal salary, without investments or anything complicated, there's also free simplified tax filling apps for Android and iOS.

If the person has extra-complex stuff going on with their earnings, they can hire an accountant to fill the taxes for them. That accountant, in turn, will use the same app on their end, or take advantage of the free public API.

And if one's extra fancy, one can sign their submission with a publicly available encrypted token. This one is paid for, but it's also fully optional, and only people who do LOTS of stuff involving governmental systems get one, as it makes signing into those services faster and easier. So if one already has one for other uses, using it to sign their tax submission is a no-brainer.

Anonymity is eliminated. In countries adopting these policies one cannot watch YouTube content targeted at adults without signing into a Google account and having their face or ID scanned into a database they have no control over. Additionally, hundreds of smaller sites are closing because their operators cannot afford the intrusive ID tech, including text games that have existed since the early 2000s, as well as online forums that existed since the 1990s, where children hardly went. Slashdot itself, were it hosted in the UK, which is slightly ahead of the curve on these matters, would have likely closed too. In fact, in the UK Wikipedia is being threatened, and there are plans there to force VPN providers to start preventing citizens from sidestepping all of that.

Additionally, payment processors are taking part of the censorship efforts. Steam and Itchio were forced to remove thousands of adult games that are completely legal due to pressure from Visa and Mastercard, both of which have also forced physical and online stores to either remove legal adult content or close -- and some had no choice but to close. All that adult material, which, again, is fully legal, is now almost impossible to acquire legally.

TL;DR: anonymity, privacy, and free exchange of legal adult content.

As I said, I have no interest in your antisemitism. Bye.

Sorry, I have a grand total of zero interest in antisemitic nonsense.

And before you say unhinged, I oppose the genocide of the Palestinians by Israel's government, while supporting the sane side of Israeli politics, which alas is currently powerless and incapable of stopping the madness.

That's the excuse used. "Think of the children" is always extremely effective at curbing the rights of adults, while doing little for actual children.

The impression I have, from the seemingly coordinated global effort on age verification and anti-sex censorship, is that we're seeing preparations for war. Three weak quasi-evidences for it:

First, these age verification systems are effectively nation-wide, systemic, government-supervised information access control systems. Right now they only control for age and have only two buckets: children and adults. But nothing prevents expanding the buckets and the control parameters via changes to the laws once they're all in place. It doesn't mean something like this will happen, but the potential for it is there.

Second, this is being implemented by three of the Five Eyes intelligence alliance plus the EU plus the major network payments, simultaneously. Sure, this may be a coincidence, or a sign of the times, or a cultural shift, or whatever. But the time coincidence is suspicious.

Third, war requires strict information control to keep up support for war, population morale, and also contain avoid enemy psyops and disinformation campaigns, but the control cannot be so much that it interferes with production. In the past this was easy to do, all a government need do was enable emergency powers and have publishers and broadcasters censored. But the Internet requires much wider and more fine-tuned mechanisms, that is, high granularity in access control, which these systems provide.

Considering the US is pushing hard for everyone but the kitchen sink to see China as The Enemy, to the point of having that as a core aspect of its enforced global trade accords; that this view of China is bipartisan, both Republicans and Democrats sharing it; and that one of the bills proposing similar controls in the US also has extensive bipartisan support, it'd at the very least make sense that all these governments are preparing for extensive information control in case the dispute with China turns hot in a few years. And for that to be possible, the infrastructure needs to be in place ahead of time, well tested, and well debugged.

That's incorrect. Visa has been pulling the same shit in Japan, forcing manga and anime stores to drop adult content or get de-credit-card'ed. This included a store owned by an elected national representative. It's gotten so bad the Japanese government has recently started an anti-trust investigation against Visa.

Did you learn of figures of speech during your English Literature classes?

Then you have dedicated little time to the topic and are basing your view on stereotypes.

For which I stand corrected and, as I said before, I apologize.

Indeed. That's what Jesus intended, yes. Too bad there's little agreement among Christians on what, precisely, showing love means.

I reserve the right to write using figures of speech such as hyperbole. It's part of the toolset of the language, and the fact it doesn't imply absolute assertions is a baseline presumed knowledge of anyone who went through high school.

Those numbers don't say much. The organizations I refer to aren't supported exclusively by GOP-aligned Christians. And, more importantly, they aren't fought against by most Christians who dislike their lying but agree with their end goals. There are Christians who do actively, strongly oppose them, and kudos to them. Most are at best indifferent.

To make an analogy, this is roughly the same distinction as that that between merely not being racist, vs actively being anti-racist. It's extremely easy not to be racist. It's hard and it takes effort to be anti-racist.

Well, the way I read your comments before our conversation on this /. post's comments section was thus: that you defend the tactic of an organization that uses mass pressure upon payment processors so they in turn use pressure upon companies to forcefully remove content you religiously disagree with, justified by the fact children will find a way to access that content irrespective of parental restrictions, which makes it legit for third parties to forcefully prevent not only children but also adults from having access to it -- in short, that you approve of cancellation.

Try and search for your name, then read your own comments in order, and you'll notice the above is a verisimilar inference from your first 11 comments.

If that's not the case, and you in fact oppose such cancellation tactics, then I deeply apologize for having reached that incorrect conclusion and criticized you for something you absolutely didn't do.

I've stated several times along this thread that what I'm saying doesn't apply to the few exceptions that don't fit the mold. Either you didn't read in full, or didn't pay attention when reading.

To recap: I refer to the liars plus those who enable the liars by actively supporting them, or through inaction. These three (liars, supporters, indifferent) form the majority. The minority that is none of those isn't the target of anything I'm saying.

Going back to the original point: you yourself are not in the minority. You support the lie that it's a duty of Christians to power intervene in society to force it to conform to Christian notions of decency. What Jesus said is for Christians to be role models so non-Christians will see their saintly life, feel inspired by what they see, and voluntarily follow their example, in turn becoming role models themselves. He also said that if Christians are persecuted because of living saintly lives, they're allowed to flee to somewhere else safe. That's it -- nothing more.

That's irrelevant. I could make my text more accurate and less readable by adding at every step quantitative qualifiers. The point I'm making would still stand, and that one you're actively not addressing.

This is a problem in understanding self-focused people tend to have. One talks about a problem most in group A suffer due to something many in group B do (e.g. A = women, B = men, so a woman says, "All men are X because Y!"). An individual P who is a member of group B feels negatively by the situation between A and B having been stated concisely, and so P goes and hijacks the topic by making it about P, rather than about A (e.g., guy hearing and interjecting "Hey! Not all men! I am not X as I never Y!"). Meanwhile the issue A is suffering falls into the background, so P was successful in aiding the bad elements of B to the detriment of A (e.g., the conversation is now about the guy, not about the problems those women face and wanted to discuss).