201–210 of 264 posts
When I place a sticker over my laptop's camera, people think I am freak or acting like a hacker. In fact, I just want to protect my freedom. However, society doesn't care freedom. They care just their popularity and don't want to be alienated. I think this is where problems come from.
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The comparison that Bruce Schneider makes is not correct. Governments are likely to control food pathogens and airline risks because they need living, productive, happy voters. But governments have also a fundamental distrust for all individuals and therefore want as much surveillance as possible. By allowing big companies to collect that, they have access as well. Therefore I think governments are not motivated to i…
Governments care about food pathogens because ultimately they are held accountable by the people. They are not a malignant force, parasitic on society. Governments solve collective action problems by getting everybody to play by one set of rules and punishing people who don't. I know what you say is popular in certain political circles, but it's a false idea about government. Worse, it's a cynical meme that corrupts…
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I do not share your faith in democracy :-) At best, the government represents the will of a voting majority and imposes it upon the rest of the population. So what you really have is minority rule. Look at public funding for science, NASA budget, etc to see the "will of the people" in action on technical topics. > consumers aren't all that educated or rational Be that as it may, I would rather make decisions for myse…
Have you lobbied? Testified? Met with any of your legislators, representatives, councilmembers? Other forms of participation? Voting is the smallest part of democracy.
Less, even; since the latter at least get you free paperweights.
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Besides which, arguing for them means you've effectively bought into class based discrimination, as many working poor wouldn't be able to afford anything but an email or letter. And if you think those form a reliable bedrock of democracy I'll stop humoring you as having anything useful to contribute to this discussion.
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People downvoting you are probably taking your statement as normative, whereas it's purely positive. It's not about what the govt should do. It is what it does. For example, the police, the IRS, DHS etc etc. (and hence the state) WILL be helped in their jobs by increasing surveillance, and so will always be trying to increase its scope. Whether it's _worth_ the loss of privacy is of course a valid debate.
People downvoting you are probably taking your statement as normative A bit meta but I wish more up/downvoters on HN could tell the difference between normative and descriptive speech.
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I think we've all seen the story over and over: populist politician gets in power and forgets everything. They start to sacrifice principles in return for staying in power in order to ostensibly do the right thing later. But later never comes. So, maybe theoretically we can influence, but understanding the nature of what a self-interested, pragmatic government beaurocrat values is incredibly important. I think the pa…
Elect the parliament by lottery. 4 years of service if you get drafted, replace 25% of seats per year. Would be far more representative of the people than current way and less susceptible to populism. People often think I'm joking when I propose this but I haven't heard a good argument against it yet.
1) By taking the average, you are risking compounding educational decreases in the populace.
Bad public education policy is enacted, chosen politicians become less educated, worse public policy is enacted, etc etc.
2) By using less experienced politians, you lessen the efficiency of the entire political process.
3) By not having the possibility of re-election, you remove any responsibility of the elected after they're elected.
Mobile has certainly made things worse. I recently kicked off every google app from my phone. The dark UX pattern of shared logins (login to google express = login to gmaps etc) was too annoying to deal with. It's not that I've stopped using their services, but instead switched to their web version. Same with Twitter et al. Even Uber has very serviceable web versions of their app. As a bonus I get better battery life…
I totally agree! It's easy and convenient to run a PC on FOSS, but it's a real pain to do the same with a smart phone. I just tried to run a FOS OS on my phone. I gave up because in order to flash the OS image I had to install non-reproducible binaries from some website and there was no sane way around.
"Opting out doesn’t work. It’s nonsense to tell people not to carry a credit card or not to have an email address. And “buyer beware” is putting too much onus on the individual. People don’t test their food for pathogens or their airlines for safety." This is a brilliant line and it works so well because he is absolutely right: it should not be on the burden of the consumer to make sure their products are safe, be it…
> Perhaps we need to see what Google and Facebook actually have on us... What do you have in mind?
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That's an explanation of how this is happening, not an argument that it should happen. What governments do is not some mysterious black-box that we can't influence.
I think we've all seen the story over and over: populist politician gets in power and forgets everything. They start to sacrifice principles in return for staying in power in order to ostensibly do the right thing later. But later never comes. So, maybe theoretically we can influence, but understanding the nature of what a self-interested, pragmatic government beaurocrat values is incredibly important. I think the pa…
There are more than "politician corrupted by power" stories, there are also many politician does a good thing and fades into the background, or politician leads well for a long time stories too. These are less exciting and usually receive far less press, because they are remarkable in their unremarkable outcomes.
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Governments care about food pathogens because ultimately they are held accountable by the people. They are not a malignant force, parasitic on society. Governments solve collective action problems by getting everybody to play by one set of rules and punishing people who don't. I know what you say is popular in certain political circles, but it's a false idea about government. Worse, it's a cynical meme that corrupts…
Revelant, see effect of Upton Sinclair's The Jungle on food safety laws, which through popular sentiment forced the US government to create the FDA. https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Jungle
http://articles.chicagotribune.com/2006-05-21/features/06052...
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How old are you / the women in the demographic you are talking about, if you do not mind me asking?
If I'm not willing to give my personal information to Tinder, why would I post it on HN?