Norway to track all supermarket purchases?

There are many ways to interpret what is going on in Russia. I've no idea what's really going on - I'm not there. I suspect its just theatrics, to make us all fearful, decrease the population, to gain even more power from the people. Russians believe their government is defending ethnic Russians who have been under attack by literal nazis since 2013. Who has the truth? CNN?

I don't say I'm going to create my own country and defend it. All I say is government is slavery. You can justify paying taxes, that you love your country, whatever you like. You can say that sending weapons to Ukraine is fine. But this is because you believe what your government tells you - it is not 'free thinking'. Stockholm syndrome perhaps - you have come to love your captor.

They do run the news you know. We actually live in a fascist (government + corporation) state. They don't give you truth, they tell you what is expedient for their aims. And they aim to control what you think. They may have you cheering for infringement of individual people's natural rights - so complete is the way they frame the world to most.

My position is that I am forced to accept their immoral force. Unlike you, I'm not going to call government actions 'right' or 'moral'. I don't individually consent to any of it! (There is no such thing as collective consent - you and your friends cannot justly tell me what to do). The appearance of consent is due to the threat and actual use of force.

> In the end, it turns out that a reasonably-well-governed country is the optimum of freedom, even though nobody is perfectly free.

I know I'm a slave, but you are labouring under the illusion you are free. I'm not sugar-coated the turd - I leave that to others.

Personally I agree we need statistics, data in general, but to be collected with EXTREME care and transparency because yes, we might spot health issues in advance and so save lives, we might anticipate needs and so satisfy them better with better forecasting/planning BUT we might also do nasty things.

Try to imagine if a day resources start to be scarce, a dictatorial government rise supported by most people self-(propaganda)-convinced that that's the sole option to sort the situation out and such government start the old: it's not that bad but some work to make it bad against us, we need to took the down. So a social score born, became spread, with much general data on the population: how easy can be selectively killing or just addressing careers of various people thanks to the mass of data on them, accordingly to dictatorship NOT social needs?

More "lighter" and general example: how can we prevent a cohort of people taking advantage of such big mass of data for their own profits at the expense of another cohort?

It's not just a mere matter of privacy: if we ALL know anything about anyone or nothing about anyone we are on fair and equal conditions, some will take advantage some others not because some will be smarter, just more active etc than others, but overall situation should remain in a normal fair balance. If just very few know very much on almost anyone and most others know next to nothing about those few...

Just imaging simple things like knowing with enough precision what people eat anywhere in a country: those who know can organize "better" (commercially) shelves and gain competitive advantage on competitors to a point perhaps of pushing them to the margins and then abuse the gained position to establish de-fact price policies on pretty anything. Even if data are public and collected only by the public, no one is corrupt etc those who can process such public data at scale can grab competitive advantages against all the rest.

In fairness terms: just imaging you came from a bad health family: you might be drop for many job offer because of such legacy, pay more for some health insurances etc. You might say "hey, that's true but still fair", well, it's not. It's not because potential employers know something about you, you do not equally know something about them up front.

At social scale we need a certain degree of incertitude to let the society evolve by nature instead of by planning because we MUST plan and we might even be good planner BUT nothing beat natural evolution in the long term and as a society we MUST think at the long terms. Individuals have, rightly, to think about their own life, so short an mean terms, but at a society, so State level we must also weight the very long terms. Our individual life is, unfortunately (well, for some at least) a not-that-short/not-that-long timeframe, States, populations can potentially last millennia. Planning even for a single century for us is well... More fantasy than science, and that's why we have to allow nature do it's job with a certain level of "background noise"...