Capitalism isn’t a conspiracy, it’s the current Politico-economic system.

Do you think those debates are for real and not a show that ends with whatever has been decided elsewhere?

If that was the case, then the Lords wouldn’t have blocked the 2016 Disability Bill. You remember the one. I don’t think that was theatre, I think people in the Lords looked at that and went “lol fuck no.” They also wouldn’t have done a lot of shit if it was all planned behind the scenes and some shadowy cabal actually just called the shots.

Here’s the thing: “It’s all planned” is the cornerstone of most conspiracies, from 9/11 to “Covid is a bioweapon” or “Covid isn’t real” to literally every major conspiracy theory. But wanna know something? All of that is a weighted comfort blanket to sooth people, it is soothing to believe that there is someone or something in control and it’s just a case of getting rid of them, and it’s an ego boost to believe that You are part of a club that figured it out. They used to call it being “woke” until the far right took that term as an Alias for “Degenerate” as the Nazis used it.

But the truth is this: There is no man behind the curtain, there is no shadowy cabal who actually control everything. It’s call Capitalism, Sociopaths, and Morons who either want to make money or think they’re doing good.

I have lived through two governments (a Labour one and a Conservative one) that have floated the idea of banning encryption publicly. Both times they quietly dropped the idea when they were told that doing something like that would crash the economy. My parents are both former Civil Servants. My dad watched the Scottish Secretary at the time nearly type “Thatcher is a Bitch” into a Teletype machine that sent out press releases to every major newspaper.

I watched my own MSP (and Leader of the Scottish Lib Dems) address a crowd of mostly transgender mostly leftist people and ask them to applaud Tories who voted for the Gender Recognition Act.

There is shit in Hansard that looks like it came from a bad sitcom. There are people who are in parliament right now who I wouldn’t trust with a fucking Self Scan Checkout, let alone a seat in either of the houses.

Are there scheming bastards, genuinely Machiavellianism Motherfucks in parliament? Yes! Politics attract people who score high in the Dark Triad. Starmer, Streeting, and Farage are all genuinely horrible people. Starmer and Streeting openly want to harm transgender people, Farage wants to fund the fucking Taliban, and if we wanna talk about non-MPs, Boris Johnson stated he’s rather have mass death than another Lockdown and the last government used Covid as a way to Launder Money.

But alongside that, a good chunk of the people in our parliaments are simply fucking morons. They might be good at a collection of specific things, but they are also impressively Moronic on a level that would make the Thick of It and Yes Minister look fucking optimistic. Indeed, some of the more bastardous people I have listed and not listed here are also, weirdly, fucking morons. Look at Trump’s first term for example.

And if you wanna cling to “there’s a puppet master behind all this”, be it Satan or the Illuminati, to save you from the genuinely terrifying thought that the people at the Helm of the ship of state are Francesco Schettino, Yiannis Avranas and Lafayette Ronald Hubbard, fair, but personally, I’m a realist and the only conspiracy I hold is that the “Phillip Killed Diana” conspiracy was invented by the British Press so they wouldn’t face a shitstorm when people realised what the paps did when they got to the crash scene.

If you wanna know what is actually happening here it is:

A Dunfermline based investment firm, charitable trust and think tank (yes you heard) by the name of Carnegie United Kingdom Trust invested money in data collection firms and age verification firms like YOTI, so they lobbied the government and even basically wrote the Online Safety Act. The government sometimes lets outside groups write legislation for them because Corruption, they have other shit to do, and they don’t often know shit about the fucking shite they’re voting for.

Some of those MPs also likely had investments in YOTI and VPNs. When this was presented to the government, some poor sod of a Civil Servant had to sit down the PM/Minister responsible and try convince them that it’s a bad idea, clearly they failed. So, utilising the moral panic around Porn, Extremist Material, Pro-Ana content and the like, they passed this bill, even when a good number of these fucking numbskulls don’t even know what a VPN is, just “we need to do something” and “it’s just common sense™”.

Now not only do they (and future governments, God help us if Reform get in and use this against “woke” content like they’re doing in Kent Libraries) have the ability to age gate literally anything, but the companies they have invested in have got a GOLDMINE of very sensitive Data they can sell to people, be them from the Private, Public or “underground” sectors. Line goes up for the Investment firms, MPs with shares in YOTI and the rest. When it comes down to it, it comes down to Money, Moronity, and Kneejerk reactionism.

That’s already happening, alas, but I suspect things will get very quiet when people realise something like this would affect the bottom line negatively. Look at what happened (twice) with encryption.

1. Government said they wanna ban encryption.
2. Starts planning the legislation.
3. Someone (a civil servant who’s job it is to point out the fucking obvious) points out that Banking and Commerce requires Encryption to function and banning Encryption would crash the Economy.
4. Plans are quietly dropped.

How it will likely go with VPNs.

1. Government says they wanna restrict VPNs.
2. Government Starts planning legistlation (we are here).
3. Someone points out that Banking, Tech Security, The Military, The Foreign Office and others rely on VPNs to function and getting rid of them will fuck the economy and put national security at risk and risk negatively affecting their pay masters corporate donors.
4. Plans are quietly dropped.

One of the main purposes of the OSA is to make money for YOTI and the Data brokers, because you and I both know these are the main corporate sponsors, and the MPs and Lords who passed it likely have investments in said companies. Hoovering up IDs and linking them to web activity doesn’t just help the government fuck us, it makes money for MPs, Lords, and their Friends. But here’s the thing: It’ll bite not just US, but them in the arse. So here’s what’s (hopefully) going to happen.

1. OSA is installed.
2. Someone important enters their info into a fake age check/Someone important gets age verified for something and the service gets hacked.
3. The hack gets made public and a lot of important people get burnt.
4. The Bill gets quietly modified or abolished.

British Politicians are greedy, self serving authoritarian cunts, but they are also remarkably dim. Like sometimes impressively so. Look up this passage in Hansard to see what I mean. It might cause you to have a fucking crisis.

But yes, they do like control, problem is they don’t know what they wish for,

and yet they’re doing a fucking terrible job at it (source, I’m using a VPN, something people in the Lords didn’t even know was a thing until it was too late). It would be funny if it wasn’t my reality.

I live in the UK, and this is something I was saying about the Online Safety Act. It puts all the onus on the websites and not only do some websites not have the money or resources to comply, but with something like Mastodon, it doesn’t really work. Like this bill was written and passed by people who don’t know shit about fuck about tech. Several Lemmy and Mastodon instances have shut down/Geoblocked the UK because of this, and other jurisdictions don’t seem to understand that either.

All of it will be justified with that guy who killed himsefl after talking to ChatGPT.

Yeah, I gathered.

Understandable. I kinda wish the UK would copy the EU’s move for digital sovereignty and invest in FOSS/Self Hosted shit but the OSA has kinda made me a bit worried about that. You could get it past the Flag Shaggers easy though.

The states are the future of Federal law. And all things considered, yeah.

We have the OSA here in the UK which requires age verification. I connected to a VPN server in America and got age gated because the server was in Texas. So much for “land of the free”.

How long is it going to be until America has a great firewall ala China.

Kiwi farms? You mean the website that harrasses people online, Swats people, and basically does shit that is illegal in the UK anyway?

Next you’ll tell me child porn sites are suing the UK. Fuck the Online Safety Act, but yeah, they’re not the people who should be suing the UK over this.

If I had to guess, they don’t care at all about porn and are using this as a pretext to censor sites that talk about LGBTQIA+ people.

Transgender people are in the crosshairs and have been for a couple of years for now.

OK so Trump is going to have to choose whether or not to side with fucking 4chan, you know, the site with regular pedophilia threads.

Jesus christ, that’s even worse.

You know the law must be bad if they block Mississippi due to this, but not the UK.

Hey, remember when people were saying Milei was a “Libertarian” and saying he will show the world what a “Libertarian” Country could look like? Remember that? Remember him dressing up as Captain Anap?

Almost immediately, dare I say the moment he got into power, he fucking went full fascist complete with the suppression of protests and propaganda announcements at railway stations. This is why I hate Right wing “Libertarians” (or as I like to call them, “Fauxbertarians”). They basically want a Corporatocracy. They’ll be like “I want the state out of our lives” one moment, then once with a modicum of power, they use it to increase the power of corporations over our lives and crush any dissent with a vigour the likes of which you only see in North Korea. They want the “government” out the lives of corporations and into the lives of everyday people. It always turns into a corporatocracy with these Children of bitches.

Among his plans to downsize the State, President Milei has been saying that he intends to replace government workers and organizations with AI systems. The first role that he will give to this technology, however, will be an expansion of state agencies: on Monday his government created the Unit of Artificial Intelligence Applied to Security.

LOL how the fuck is mass surveilence of people downsizing the state?

How bad to you think this collapse gonna be? We gonna see a big name collapse into dust or we gonna see something akin to the Great Depression?

Well done you know how sales tax works. Customers pay the business. Business pays the Government. My point.

…and where in this chain is YOTI et al paying the government?

Frankly, you sound like the most odious little turd I have ever met on Lemmy.

A burden on the population.

The population being the people who run self hosted forums with a certain amount of British users. If you are one of those people, yeah, I’m sorry, I hate it too, but the vast majority of the UK don’t run forums with a large amount of British users. Fun fact, the End users (the people giving away their IDs) aren’t actually paying shit to anyone bar their IDs.

Taxes do not all get directly paid to gavernment. Like sales taxes, service tips ect.

VAT (what you call “sales tax”) does go to the Treasury. Like when you buy something, that 20% extra you paid goes off to the government via the Taxes the shop pays. That’s how VAT works.

Services tips aren’t really a thing in the UK, especially not mandatory ones because food service workers in the UK aren’t exempt from the minimum wage.

Are you even from the UK? Are you even in the UK? Because if you were from here, or even if you spent any amount of time here, you would’ve known the following things:

1. The United Kingdom doesn’t have Federal Taxes because we’re not a Federal country. Again, we’re a Unitary Country with Devolution.
2. We don’t use the term “Sales Tax”, we use the term VAT (Value Added Tax). That’s not some special technical term, VAT is common parlance.
3. Service tips are not compulsory nor expected in any way, shape or form because food service workers in the UK are paid minimum wage with no exceptions. Most places here don’t even have the option to give a tip.

Considering these things, I think you’re American. In that case, please, do us a favour, don’t act like you’re a fucking expert on this. I live in the UK, Scotland to be precise. Shit’s bad, The OSA can get tae fuck, but having Yanks who watched videos made by other yanks who don’t know shit about fuck on the ground lecture me about my own fucking country as if it’s just “America with funny accents” not only doesn’t help, it’s just spreading bullshit.

State created the law. That creates a cost to be recovered. How that cost is recovered is irrelevant, it’s s state mandated cost aka tax.

Just because it’s a state mandated cost doesn’t mean it’s a tax. Tax implies the money goes to the government to pay for goods and services. It’s actually worse than that: it’s a levy.

A levy doesn’t go to the government. A levy goes to whatever person provides the good or service. For example: if I tax alcohol based on alcohol content, the amount of money added to the tax goes to the government. If I place a levy based on alcohol content, the amount of money that is added goes to the person/company selling the booze. An example of a levy is the plastic bag levy, which was put in place to reduce plastic pollution. That money you spend on a bag doesn’t go to the government, it goes to the people you got the bag from, and they can do whatever they want with it, keep it, give it to charity, use it to buy Heroin on the deep web, you name it!

What this law has effectively done has made service providers (not just companies, but whoever runs the site) a choice: They can either develop their own age verification system or pay a company (like YOTI) to do it for them. Most service providers do the latter because they do not have the resources to do the latter.

Does the money go to the government? No (except maybe under the table nudge nudge wink wink), it goes straight to the company. What the government has done is force entities to give a private company money.

It’s a tax in the way, let’s say, a hypothetical Right-Libertarian government might tax you, or even an American Homeowners Association might “tax” you: making you give a private company money.