the only way to separate them, is to abolish both and start from scratch

Ok, well, for those of us who don't think a state of civil war following total collapse of the United States government is a good idea I'm glad there's people like him trying to work out another path forward.

thepiratebay still exists but is regarded as untrustworthy and infested with malware. I'd say knowing you're getting something from a trustworthy source is harder than it used to be.

I guess there are probably a lot of people trading that stuff dumb enough to be networking on facebook and instagram with their real identities

do they need to? I don’t think so.

Why not? How can you be sure that all these laws are going to be about all the same things and not have many tricky edge cases? What would keep them from being like that? Again, these laws give unique rights to residents of their respective states to make particular demands of websites, and they aren't copy pastes of each other. There's no documented 'best practices' that is guaranteed to encompass all of them.

they don’t want this solution, however, but in my understanding instead to force every state to have weaker privacy laws

I can't speak to what they really want privately, but in the industry letter linked in the article, it seems that the explicit request is something like a US equivalent of the GDPR:

A national privacy law that is clear and fair to business and empowering to consumers will foster the digital ecosystem necessary for America to compete.

To me that seems like a pretty sensible thing to be asking for; a centrally codified set of practices to avoid confusion and complexity.

Scientists have concluded that widespread physical distancing and masking practiced during the early days of COVID-19 appear to have pushed B/Yamagata into oblivion.

Too bad these sorts of precautions haven't been normalized, I bet we could have made progress against a lot of diseases.

The listing notes that special operations troops “will use this capability to gather information from public online forums,” with no further explanation of how these artificial internet users will be used.

Any chance that's the real reason and not just a flimsy excuse? What kind of information would you even need a fake identity to gather from a public forum?

In 2022, industry front groups co-signed a letter to Congress arguing that “[a] growing patchwork of state laws are emerging which threaten innovation and create consumer and business confusion.” In 2024, they were at it again this Congress, using the term four times in five paragraphs.

Big Tobacco did the same thing.

Is this really a fair comparison though? A variety of local laws about smoking in restaurants makes sense because restaurants are inherently tied to their physical location. A restaurant would only have to know and follow the rules of their town, state and country, and the town can take the time to ensure that its laws are compatible with the state and country laws.

A website is global. Every local law that can be enforced must be followed, and the burden isn't on legislators to make sure their rules are compatible with all the other rules. Needing to make a subtly different version of a website to serve to every state and country to be in full compliance with all their different rules, and needing to have lawyers check over all of them would create a situation where the difficulty and expense of making and maintaining a website or other online service is prohibitive. That seems like a legitimate reason to want unified standards.

To be fair there are plenty of privacy regulations that this wouldn't apply to, like the example the article gives of San Francisco banning the use of facial recognition tech by police. But the industry complaint linked in the article references laws like https://www.oag.ca.gov/privacy/ccpa and https://leg.colorado.gov/bills/sb21-190 that obligate websites to fulfill particular demands made by residents of those states respectively. Subtle differences in those sorts of laws seems like something that could cause actual problems, unlike differences in smoking laws.

changing how its “block” button works. That option previously allowed users to hide their profile from certain accounts – but will no longer do so.

So I guess all that stuff they did to lock down the ability to see things on Xitter without an account was strictly for evil then

literal sexual assault

The graph in that linked paper is convincing to me. I wonder about the discrepancy in the line for Met in Bar or Restaurant though, the 2010 upward trend in that is totally absent in the OP image.

The pewresearch link in my other comment gives a breakdown of percent having ever used a dating app by age cohort

Ah, right

Right, I get that it doesn't strictly rule it out directly, but it's a surprising discrepancy. That 53% is just for under 30s too:

compared with 37% of those ages 30 to 49, 20% of those 50 to 64 and 13% of those 65 and older.

while the purported figure for people having met their partner through an app is for all demographics. The number of people who are partnered vs single is 70%. If 60% of those met via dating apps, that's 42% of the total. Which seems probably still more than the number of people who have ever tried them, and that would only check out with the absurdly generous assumption that those apps have a near perfect success rate and almost no one who uses them goes back to other methods.

It could be that. I'm noticing now that the study I linked has a note about a sampling error they made:

Self-identified LGB adults were oversampled in HCMST 2017, and therefore remain oversampled in subsequent waves (2020, 2022). the weights (W1_WEIGHT_COMBO, W2_COMBO_WEIGHT, and W3_COMBO_WEIGHT) correct for this oversample.

So another possibility is that the data used for the graph is wrong because of a big correlation between sexual orientation and preference for online dating and it was made before this was corrected.

I don't think the figures are intuitively implausible, mostly I'm just bothered by the apparent lack of any way to confirm the authenticity of the graph and its relationship to the source material, or get an authoritative answer to the question of how prevalent online dating is.

One reason to doubt them though, the other article I linked says that as of 2022

About half of those under 30 (53%) report having ever used a dating site or app

Which is the demographic that uses them the most. So it doesn't make sense that more people would have met their current partner through a dating app than have ever used one.

Unclear what study that is referencing, but it's notable that Michael Rosenfeld is also the first listed principle investigator in the study referenced in the OP, likely part of the same project, since they list updates for every few years (How Couples Meet and Stay Together (HCMST) 2017, 2020, 2022, United States). Also unclear who compiled the graph or where it was originally published. I want to reiterate that this study itself seems to very much not line up with the graph, unless I'm misreading it very badly.

The BBC article is about a book, Modern Romance, and the book makes a claim that 35% of Americans met their spouses online ("respondents who married between 2005 and 2012"). This checks out with the cited source study, which makes an identical claim, though there's reason to be suspicious of it since it was funded by eHarmony. The scope there is a little different than "all couples", but it's still a very different number than what is in either this article's graph, or in the OP graph, which are very different from each other as well (saying the number reached 70% by 2009 vs saying it reached 60% by 2020. I would think that if these graphs are genuinely based on research by Michael Rosenfeld that they would at least check out with each other.

Here's what I think is probably going on here: people working for the marketing departments of dating apps fabricate bogus graphs, falsely attribute their source to real studies, and push them on social media to go viral. Then people writing articles like the one you linked about the subject copy paste those images without checking them, because it's just a fluff piece for a recently published book and they don't have much time to spend on it.

Where did you originally find the OP image?

Edit: Just noticed that the second graph is specifically about same-sex couples.

Fyi your way of doing spoilers isn't showing up for me, here's how they work on my client: ::: spoiler spoiler This is a spoiler :::

I think this graph is fake. The way the data is presented is confusing, but the study they are citing doesn't seem to confirm anywhere close to the 60% figure, it seems to be saying 11.5% instead: https://www.icpsr.umich.edu/web/ICPSR/studies/38873/datasets/0001/variables/W1_Q24_MET_ONLINE?archive=icpsr

This lower figure also seems to line up with other studies: https://www.pewresearch.org/short-reads/2023/02/02/key-findings-about-online-dating-in-the-u-s/

One-in-ten partnered adults – meaning those who are married, living with a partner or in a committed romantic relationship – met their current significant other through a dating site or app.

The graph is branded with the logo of "Marriage Pact", which seems to be a dating app/service targeting college students. Maybe they made it as a form of (deceptive, unethical) advertising? I don't know, reverse image search just shows similarly unsourced social media posts, I can't confirm anything about its origins.

True, and that is an issue, but I guess the main thing I'm getting at is that despite voter registration not being a unified system a majority of people moving between states aren't going to be deterred from registering by a Kafkaesque bureaucratic labyrinth.

I think for most people in the US when you move you have to get a new driver's license, and that process also lets you register to vote as an automatic bonus if you check a box saying you want it

Seems like a good thing, 3 chances one of them will get it right