That's not inconsistency in the rules, that's inconsistency in what being the mayor means. In Sheffield it means you show up wearing funny clothes every so often, in Greater Manchester it means you have a full-time job, a large budget, and actual responsibilities.
For our American brethren, it's like the difference between being the Mayor of NYC vs the Macy’s Thanksgiving Day Parade King.
It's actually the role of Police and Crime Commissioner that prevents them from being an MP simultaneously. In Greater Manchester (and London) the PCC role is combined with that of Mayor, but it isn't in most other city regions.
There's not much actual difference in the mayoral aspect of the roles - Jarvis was the Mayor of the South Yorkshire Combined Authority, not simply the mayor of Sheffield City Council.
After the Nazis opened the Ark, Jones was able to tell the Americans where to pick it up from. Otherwise when the Nazis sent a crew to look for the missing men they’d have just found and taken the Ark again.
> we hope we’ll win in getting existing ones overturned and new ones prevented.
All the momentum is in the other direction and not slowing down. There are valid privacy concerns, but, buried in this very article, the EFF admit that it’s possible to do age-gating in a privacy-preserving way:
> it’s possible to only reveal your age information when you use a digital ID. If you’re given that choice, it can be a good privacy-preserving option
If they want to take a realistic approach to age-gating they should be campaigning to make this approach only option.
The fight is not just about privacy, it is about freedom. Age-gating websites violates the freedom of people who are under a certain age. Young people have the same rights to free expression and information access as anyone else.
Economics is usually optimising for a narrow utility function, usually something to do with price discovery, but that doesn’t normally align with more human societal goals. Take, say, surge pricing. Maybe without surge pricing you pay $60 for a taxi but have to wait 30 mins when it’s busy. With surge pricing at busy times it’s $120, so people who can afford $120 wait 0 minutes but people who can only afford $60 have to wait 2 hours for surge pricing to end. “Economists generally” would say surge pricing was better, but voters and politicians are considering the wider trade off of whether it’s fair some people get to jump the queue and some people have to wait longer. There’s also usually a bait-and-switch where the people having to wait 2hrs are told that the $120 will generate more in taxes so if they vote for surge pricing they’d actually be better off, then the $120 is spent lobbying to ensure the taxes never materialise.
Then they scrape together their pocket money and walk into a pawn shop and hand over the cash for a second hand smartphone. Plenty of free WiFi around.
Reminds me of a line by John Maynard Keynes from 1919 about life before WW1 —
“The inhabitant of London could order by telephone, sipping his morning tea in bed, the various products of the whole earth, in such quantity as he might see fit, and reasonably expect their early delivery upon his doorstep”
This works both ways though, ie there’s no point opposing the laws on the grounds that they might be abused in future because the future sovereign parliament could just pass the same abusable laws.
By this logic, governments shouldn't legislate anything or have any kind of policy. Child benefit? Scrap it in case King Herod takes over and has an ready made hit list.
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