361–370 of 385 posts
Earlier quoted context omitted.
Alternative for Germany (Alternativ für Deutschland, AfD) is a party that wants to revoke citizenship of brown people and expel them from the country. There are very good reasons they should be banned. Their opposition to chat control is completely incidental.
Belgium can revoke citizenship of dual nationals on certain ground. What off it?
Earlier quoted context omitted.
I suspect most cases are like mine, not misunderstanding so much as encountering an exception to the default "safe" set of assumptions. When someone maligns a political party or institution it is usually partisan, emotional, and unfair. When encountering this, in the vast majority of cases the official position will be quite close to the "real" one. AfD secretly harboring a significant number of actual bonafide nazis…
I think ideally, one would nip those fascist movements in the bud before they become big enough to be problematic. There's a phrase in German antifascism - "Wehret den Anfängen!", translating to "resist the beginnings". The Nazi movement itself also became really difficult to stop once it had some serious traction, one has to really stop these movements from becoming this big in the first place. Problem is, the Germa…
Earlier quoted context omitted.
Your comment seems to frame this as a "two sides issue" as if it was a see-saw and you can only move back and forth between one side and the other with no room for nuance or alternate directions. Governments can do a lot of things that hurt you, this is a consequence of having power. Giant Corporations can also hurt you because they also have power. In general I would agree that say, walmart, is mostly interested in…
> if I dislike what e.g. the department of labour is doing with information it's collecting, I can vote for various representatives up and down the hierarchy of power How has that been going? Did you manage to elect someone, who made a positive change? Let's be charitable - you can pick an example from your life that goes back up to 50 years.
Is it the best most perfect law ever passed in the history of humanity? Obviously not. Is it substantially better than what came before? YES. It's hard to explain just how screwed you were if you started getting hit by the "pre-existing conditions" disqualifier or your health insurance decided that they only needed to spend a million treating your cancer and after that you're on your own.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
Yeah 'cause we've never had private corporations like Coca Cola or Chiquita Bananas hire paramilitary forces in South America before. Both large gov't and large corpo are horrible and both should be equally avoided.
So your position is that, because Coca Cola once funded paramilitary action in South America...companies are a worse threat to us than governments? You don't seem able to hold two ideas in your head. Yes, companies can abuse their power. Yes, governments can abuse their power. However, the power wielded by governments is on a whole different scale, so the capacity for abuse and atrocity is exponentially larger (gover…
Arguing about who has killed more seems mildly pointless since it relies on a clear cut distinction between "business" and "government" which would be hard to find in a lot of real world situations. Even aside from stuff like the east indies company, Hearst's newspapers helped create a situation where a war was declared, what share of the resulting death toll do they get?
Beyond that, something I've noticed over my years on this planet is that, generally speaking, power cannot be destroyed, only transferred.
What I mean by that is someone is going to have power over all sorts of aspects of your life, in ways that range from what color you can paint your house, where you can buy a house, how much you get paid, whether or not you get paid a salary, how much taxes you pay, etc etc.
I would, in general, prefer that the entity with that power be some kind of democratically elected institution, hopefully with lots of various internal and external safeguards.
As you say, we should be worried about the government collecting and storing our private information. But if we stopped them from doing that, then some other entity would just take over spying on people.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
So your position is that, because Coca Cola once funded paramilitary action in South America...companies are a worse threat to us than governments? You don't seem able to hold two ideas in your head. Yes, companies can abuse their power. Yes, governments can abuse their power. However, the power wielded by governments is on a whole different scale, so the capacity for abuse and atrocity is exponentially larger (gover…
I agree with you on the general principle that we should demand better privacy protection from the government, its agents, and the corporations that claim its citizenship. Arguing about who has killed more seems mildly pointless since it relies on a clear cut distinction between "business" and "government" which would be hard to find in a lot of real world situations. Even aside from stuff like the east indies compan…
I fully agree with this, but that someone doesn't need to be a 3rd party centralized entity (like a government or company), the power can be decentralized onto you.
That's the story of basically all progress in the modern world.
The evolution from Monarchy/Dictatorship -> Representative Democracy was a step down this path (albeit a mild one).
The evolution of knowledge from Church -> Printing Press -> Internet did this, hence why I have to the power to publicly broadcast these words to you.
The evolution of media from Broadcast TV -> Cable -> Youtube -> Tiktok did this.
The evolution of commerce from Department Stores -> Malls -> Shopify/Etsy/etc did this.
And AI is currently enabling the next step of this in many new areas.
> a clear cut distinction between "business" and "government" which would be hard to find in a lot of real world situations
I think you're intentionally muddying the waters here.
In fact it's extremely easy to make the distinction between "business" and "government," given the monopoly on violence granted to government. Proctor & Gamble has never held a gun to my head and imprisoned me for not buying their products.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
Companies fall under the government. So what a company harvests (to sell more toilet bowl cleaner), is accessible to the government it falls under. By that logic, you should fear companies at least as much as their governments when handing them your data. But companies have additional goals: to increase profit. Which can be achieved by selling more toilet bowl cleaner. But also by externalising harm/pollution/costs,…
Governments have a monopoly on violence, companies generally do not. This fact alone makes the comparison you’re trying to make pretty silly. You have far, far more to fear from the country from which you’re a citizen than the company for which you’re a customer. Read more history.
With private security companies, private jails, private utilities, the harm both can and will do, is practically the same. And with the boundaries of "private" and "government" becoming more opaque (like private tech companies deciding who is to be detained and who not; who is allowed to access their money; or do their jobs, etc) the difference is even more theoretic.
A government that has absolute power over a company/sector, can (and will, in my belief) use that power to make the company/sector do it's work. Making this company/sector just as dangerous as the company.
If I get mistreated at an airport (of a democratic country), and the agents doing the mistreating are civil-servants, they (or their chain of command) are democratically held accountable. But if they are employees of Acme-Security Inc, granted the right of violence by the democratic government, there's nothing I can do, no-one to appeal to. Both cases are something I, an individual, cannot do anything against. I am mistreated anyway.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
It is dishonest and unreasonable to demand that a pile of utter nonsense is answered with more energy it took to spew out bs. Go demand that the original poster provides value.
I like to think we might all agree that two "piles of utter nonsense" are worse than one.
Otherwise you're just a defender of bullshit.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
Companies fall under the government. So what a company harvests (to sell more toilet bowl cleaner), is accessible to the government it falls under. By that logic, you should fear companies at least as much as their governments when handing them your data. But companies have additional goals: to increase profit. Which can be achieved by selling more toilet bowl cleaner. But also by externalising harm/pollution/costs,…
This is actually a fantastic example of the blindspot I'm talking about. You fundamentally are unable to judge risk correctly due to your political bias. You're even admitting the risk of companies harvesting data is that it may fall in the hands of governments. Yet you still think a private company lobbying to reduce taxes is a greater threat than your government wielding enough firepower to kill millions of people…
That's a wild accusation. Unless you happen to know me, but I don't think you do.
"Lobbying to reduce taxes" was a part of an example. The big problem is their "lobbying for greater freedom".
Yes, governments should be held in check. Systems strengthened to keep governments afraid of the people (not companies) they govern. So that they can keep those that are stronger than me and use that strength to harm me, amongst wich are companies, in check. We have most of this in place. It can (and should be) improved. But we have very little in place to keep companies in check. Antitrust cannot (or is not) used against monopolies, (so the common free-market mechanisms of peoples free movement between suppliers aren't working anymore). Laws that protect humans against companies abolished or not modernized. Information (on which agents in the free-market must operate) is less and less trustworthy, mostly a result of companies spreading that (mis)information.
And TBC, companies have harmed people, are doing so as we speak, whole cities, whole countries. They have actively destabilized governments. Not just "somewhere in Africa", but in the US, in Europe. That's an undeniable fact. Many companies will then spend a lot of effort (and money and influence) to be not held accountable (that is harder to prove, obviously). Many companies will wield influence to be allowed to wield firepower, in all it's forms and shapes.
I am from a country with one of the worst examples of such a company in human history, the V.O.C. Who had such power that it had private armies, was accountable to no-one, grew so large that no "official government" could force it to do anything, for over a century. It literally enslaved people, killed inefficient workers, over-exploit and deplete entire ecosystems, etc etc. We should actively and strongly work against such companies from ever coming back (if they ever really left)
Read more history.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
I thought this was known as Bonferonni'a principle? Or am I getting mixed up?
Bonferonni correction is relevant when you calculate multiple p-values. Most statistical tests are used with a p-value threshold of 5% to reject the null-hypothesis. But because you are repeatedly testing, the probability for false positives increases and that is why you need to decrease the threshold and make it harder, to obtain a p-value below that threshold to declare a significant result. You typically use the B…
Edit: Yes, in the section 'Statistical Limits of Data Mining' in the book Mining of mMssive Data Sets it's called Bonferroni's principle.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
>"if you want to send private messages then go make your own network" Unironically, we should all move to using TOR. Anyone setup a .onion mirror for HN yet? I'd assume usual HN-mirror-rules, no login or posting but free to view...
Tor is full of honeypots, its good for getting around 3rd party snooping but useless for government level privacy