Don't forget teenagers can be extremely skilled technically. Plus they have a lot of time!
But you're on the right track.
I think of a solution like:
1. Browser does one-time age verification through 3rd party service, without disclosing any details about which sites you'll access.
2. Browser stores your age, signed by that service.
3. When a site requests it the browser passes that signed age over. The site simply has to check if it has a valid signature by a trusted authority's public key.
The browser could even use Palantir in this example - but they would never get any data about what users are accessing.
It'd be best to create a standard for this using wallet apps. You can obtain an age certificate from any trusted provider (decentralized chain-of-trust similar to TLS CAs), which you can then load into any wallet app of your choice on any OS, and use it with any online service which supports the standard. This should use anonymous, unlinkable(!) proofs, with the only certified data being `is_over_age`.
Though I'd prefer the way proposed by Mark Camilleri Gambin (EU politician). Have parents enable Child Mode during device setup, then expose `isMinor = true` to all websites and apps, require a parental control PIN to disable. This is a much better and cleaner solution. Requiring age verification of all adults gets it backwards.
Wouldn't the age verification provider then be able to retain logs of what exact credentials it signed and for whom? And if the certificates are identical for every user, couldn't everyone change the presented certificate for the universal correct one?
The US is the largest market for most US companies, so if consumer buying power is erased (e.g. through a treasury default or inflating our way out of the debt) those companies will drop substantially in value.
Potentially that will be the case in actual terms. Likely that will be the case in terms of their growth rate. But (for most) that certainly won't be the case in relative terms - the large US corporations would ride through such a decline taking an even bigger slice of the global pie.
I'll sometimes ask Siri to take me to a local address, and it'll instead pick some random address in a city 2500+ miles away and start routing me there like that's obviously what i wanted
1. They've been in Growth mode, where it's common for companies to prioritize capturing the market over being profitable.
2. They've had no problems with money since proving their effectiveness. They can raise capital at favorable valuations (and hold secondary sales) whenever they want. It has been one of the hottest private stocks that people clamor to own.
3. As a private company whose dominant shareholder is the CEO, nobody can pressure them to raise prices. This typically changes after an IPO.
4. Previous government administrations would likely have resisted paying them much more than they charge the private sector or other governments. The new administration has proven they will do favors for companies that are friendly to them.
5. For awhile it seemed they might soon have viable competition for manned space flight (e.g. Starliner) but only in 2024 did we see how bad those are.
6. The low cost is a point of pride for Musk who liked to prove how much more efficiently he could do spaceflight than NASA.
I think they had no choice but to release that AI before it was ready for prime time. Their search traffic started dropping after ChatGPT came out, and they risked not looking like a serious player in AI.
Even the ridiculous 1019 hp Taycan Turbo GT Weissach edition (a 4-door car with no rear seats, such are the compromises made for the track) at best achieved 7:07.55 around the Nurburgring.
A gas 911 GT3 RS with less than half the horsepower laps it in 6:49.3.
The 911 by most measures is the slower car (10.9s 1/4 mile vs 9.2s for the Taycan, 184mph top speed vs 190 etc). The difference is the 911s superior handling and braking and that mostly comes down to the difference in weight.
I don’t think most automotive folks or enthusiasts (apart from the track crowd) would agree that car handling and chassis tuning can be expressed in a lap time, even if it is nordschleife.
Good handling is certainly somewhat subjective (along the lines of "fun, communicative, begging to be pushed to its limits"). But even when its not about pure numbers, I still haven't seen the Taycan voted best-handling among enthusiast reviewers (except when qualified with "for an EV"). I'm curious what criteria you might be referring to? The "most fun" handling cars still seem to go to the lightweights like the Miata.
It's a great reminder of how good this feature is that we take for granted. I think this outage has actually improved my appreciation for Gmail (a service I normally only complain about).
Seriously. I didn't even realize this was a wide issue, but I couldn't find a school enrolment email I was looking for this morning, and found it in the spam folder. The fact that I basically never have to do this is actually amazing.
I wonder about difference in experience that different people have with gmail’s spam filter. In my case, the majority of emails that go to my gmail spam folder are legitimate. I don’t actually receive much spam, a single-digit number of emails per month (in the past 30 days, 2 emails), so any time I see anything in my spam folder I have to check so that I can rescue the email if legitimate.
This is my experience also. Closely guarded email, haven't received _any_ spam to it to date, but a large volume of false positives. This, among other reasons, actually led to my setting up my own email server again. Gmail is a great product if you don't know what you're doing or have avaliable to you. It's like a McDonalds burger. Not inpressive, not good, bot bad either, and certainly won't offend anyone while being accessible --- but calling it good is a bit out of touch with what good looks like.
I kinda expect there are a lot of false positives that people just never notice because they've got also thousands of unread (non-spam) emails in their inbox and never check their spam to see if there's anything legitimate there.
I have run my own mail server for years and I rarely see spam. I'm running a classic Bayesian filter as outlined in the legendary PG post "A Plan For Spam" and it works very well. I don't really get all the fuss about this issue. When I do see a piece of unclassified spam I simply classify it and continue. For me this is a far better tradeoff than having all my most private mail on some bigcorp server where any nerd can rifle through it.
> For me this is a far better tradeoff than having all my most private mail on some bigcorp server where any nerd can rifle through it.
You've functionally given yourself very little extra privacy because the vast majority of emails you send or receive will still cross through BigCorp servers (whether Google, Microsoft, Intuit, or other).
You can do the work to run your own mail server, but so few other people do that one end of the conversation is still almost always feeding a corporation's data lake.
I agree with you but I still run my own mail server. If people like me stopped doing that, we would cede the entire email landscape to BigCorp. A sad fate to happen to one of the true decentralized protocols. It's like if we all just went back to AOL
It's more expensive and difficult to hack or get a warrant to access multiple bigcorp servers with a variety of privacy stances and jurisdictions, than it is to get access to a single one. Security is about making attacks expensive.
No single BigCorp employee can go through all my mail.
If you're not convinced, no problem, please continue to enjoy your BigCorp email service.
And yet, if you're communicating with someone else who does the same (or uses a niche hosted provider), that entire conversation is outside their "data lake".
As someone who's run my own email for 25 years or so (I'm really getting old...) my biggest problem is not that I receive spam (spamassassin mostly takes care of it) but that my sent emails get marked as spam by big email providers. Yahoo is the worst offender and seems to do so at some base despite my best efforts (spf, dkim, arc, and jumping through their registration hoops)
I'm running my own mail server for longer than I'd like to admit, but not for my critical/key email addresses. Looking at the spam filtering I get in Gmail and knowing my endless fights with spamassassin and DSBLs I know I could never achieve that.
The only upside of having an actual mail server is the ability to say "this is incorrect, no one ever tried to send an email to this address/from this IP" or custom 55x messages.
International Bond ETFs are normally dollar-hedged.
There are some unhedged ones that are in the local currencies and better at tracking foreign exchange rates. e.g. BWX is an unhedged international treasury fund.
I wanted to replace my gas Macan with the new EV one. After a test drive I decided to just keep the gas one.
As an EV it is excellent. But Porsche is known for engaging driver's cars, and without the visceral sounds and vibrations of an engine it is bland and boring. The flaws in a gas engine's power curve give it character. Letting the driver manage that power curve is fun. A perfectly linear sub-3s 0-60 with fake electric sport sound played through the speakers does nothing for me.
I'd have probably bought it at $75K, but at $125K it needs to be more special. Especially considering the rate at which they depreciate. Its not a surprise to me that their EVs aren't selling as well as hoped. The Taycan sure is pretty though.
Prosche specifically is facing huge losses, and with this strategy is doomed to die. There are already rumors of potential bancrupcy.
EVs grew 20% globally in 2025, with developing markets surging 40%+.
When EVs under $100,000 can hit sub-2.5-second 0–60 mph (0–100 km/h), all this fake "benefit" talk about exhaust notes and luxury engine refinement sounds exactly like people cheering for Vertu golden buttons at the dawn of the iPhone era.
EVs are growing incredibly fast—despite the West's biggest EV supplier deciding to commit marketing harakiri by alienating half its customer base.
New battery tech has made EVs affordable, and that's why adoption will keep accelerating in China, the EU, and the rest of the world. There'll be some irrelevant fluctuations in the US, but those will eventually even out regardless—because the rest of the world and technological progress will move on with or without them.
we are on the edge of go-to-market of billions of dollars of investments into battery development. It will deliver both much cheaper where needed and more capable batteries on the market. Guess what it will do with legacy cars.
EVs as a whole are growing. Porsche however is struggling because of their "sports car" identity. Taycan sales dropped 22% year-over-year [0], and their 2025 EV sales only rose because the Macan EV is new and they discontinued the gas one in the EU. (Even then: Half of all Macan buyers worldwide went for the 11-year-old gas design over the EV.)
The market for EV sports cars is soft. The Rimac Nevera R broke 24 performance world records and yet nobody wants to buy it [1]. Even the CEO of Rimac has said people want an engine sound. Meanwhile Ferrari can launch an even more expensive gas car and it sells out before its officially announced [2].
I'm pro-EV and my partner owns one. They are practical appliances that are perfect for the 90% of people who just want to get from A to B. But the stats show that it's not just my personal preferences. The average sports car buyer wants an engine and exhaust.
My theory is that people buy mass-market Porsche cars because the 718/911 guys tell everyone how cool these cars are, but not everyone wants or needs a kidney-busting two-seater, so they compromise with a Panamera or Macan.
If there's no electric 718/911 version to hype them up, there’s not going to be any demand. There's also the issue that they're known for their small sporty cars, yet they're trying to sell 5m-long sedans and 'soccer mom' SUVs and failing at it.
The "soccer mom" SUVs are their best sellers and literally saved the company. I beg you to test-drive a Cayenne Turbo GT if you think they can't deliver a sports-car-like experience in a large SUV. Or a Macan GTS (which is only 7" longer than a 911 btw.)
The Taycan is pretty close to being an electric 911. There's a 718 EV coming out soon but Porsche realized there was not enough demand so now they're retrofitting a gas engine into the design.
The lack of demand for the 718 EV boils down to EVs being heavy, and therefore less chuckable than the gas one, and the lack of soul & engagement in cars without an engine. Solid state batteries will eventually solve the first problem. I'm not sure how we can solve the second one. Perhaps kids of today will grow up caring less about mechanical sounds.
> But Porsche is known for engaging driver's cars, and without the visceral sounds and vibrations of an engine it is bland and boring. The flaws in a gas engine's power curve give it character
Personally I experienced this the strongest in my friend's restored mk3 Ford Escort. I recall it as a feeling of not actually being inside a car due to the wind and engine noise.
Meanwhile the BMW 5 Series I rented a while ago didn't provide any of those feelings. Granted, it was a diesel automatic, but when I floored it, it just went and the engine noise was barely noticeable - at least compared to my poorly noise insulated daily Toyota.
The best thing about that car was that I could take my family on a 400km trip, the last 100km of which were mountain roads and not even break a sweat.
Who says it's supposed to boring? It's supposed to be safe and you're supposed to drive with the consideration of others, but I don't think it's supposed to be either fun or boring, that's up to you.
I'm having a blast rolling down the highway in the middle of the night blasting music and singing, am I not allowed to do this because driving is supposed to not be fun?
You can have plenty of fun without putting other drivers in danger. I used to drive a NA Miata that took 9 seconds to get to 60 mph and it was the most fun car I've ever owned. But I'm a slow-car-fast person.
Most people can safely wring out their cars in 1st and 2nd on a highway on-ramp, or from a traffic light on an empty 55 mph country road. I own a fun weekend car that I take out at dawn on a Saturday to carve up a mountain pass - which is fun even at the speed limit. In a lightweight sports car with excellent brakes, I am safer than all the trucks I see on these roads.
I agree with this for the most part, though there are times and with specific cars that you can have a blast. I can have a lot of fun in an old M Coupe, or Miata.
I used to have a GT3...it was a dream car of mine and I finally got it. The sad reality was that in order to have fun with it on public roads I was either going to kill myself/someone else, or go to jail. The only way to really experience that car in a responsible way was to go to the track. Which I just flat out didn't have the time to do with young kids.
Things were very different 20-30 years ago. Roads were less crowded and people were much more respectful on the road. Now, especially where I live, it's a free for all Mad Max cosplay.
But you're on the right track.
I think of a solution like:
1. Browser does one-time age verification through 3rd party service, without disclosing any details about which sites you'll access.
2. Browser stores your age, signed by that service.
3. When a site requests it the browser passes that signed age over. The site simply has to check if it has a valid signature by a trusted authority's public key.
The browser could even use Palantir in this example - but they would never get any data about what users are accessing.
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