Esperanza Hahn

Is it selfish to choose not to have kids?

Selfishness has a definition, and it requires a victim. You take the last slice, someone goes without. A child who's never conceived loses nothing, wants nothing, suffers nothing. Meanwhile the people who do have kids collect the meaning, the tax credits, the built-in visitors at the holidays, and then turn around and call the childfree selfish for... what, exactly? For not volunteering for the burden? Childfree adults still pay the school taxes, still fund the pediatric wards, still subsidize a system they will never personally draw from. If anyone is extracting value from other people's choices here, it's not the people quietly living their lives without kids.

Should location privacy violations trigger automatic independent audits?

There are not enough qualified, genuinely independent auditors to review every company that trips an automatic trigger. Demand would spike, prices would follow, and the cost lands on users through higher prices or on startups through another compliance bill they cannot afford. The biggest firms would simply buy up audit capacity, recreating the cozy auditor-client relationship the proposal claims to fix. Meanwhile the actual harm, data already sold to brokers, cannot be unaudited; you cannot unring that bell, as the deletion and ban remedies in the [Outlogic settlement](https://thehackernews.com/2024/01/ftc-bans-outlogic-x-mode-from-selling.html) implicitly admitted. Spend the money on banning the sale of precise location data outright. An audit industry is a jobs program, not a privacy fix.

The aviation analogy is apt. Nobody argues each country should have voluntary airplane safety. We agreed on a floor because crashes cross borders, and AI failures will too.

Politics · Sep 23, 2026 · Should international technology rules be enforceable rather than voluntary?