361–369 of 369 posts
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They lower prices how you get free email from Google, seemingly a good deal. When in reality email costs as low as 1 EUR/mo to be a long-term viable business.
Email is free if you already have a domain name and a public IP.
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Gravel in the shoes, like Cory Doctorow foretold...
There's a lot of wisdom in those books, I really like 'em.
His books are awesome, I really love the blend of plot and technical bits he drops in. I read almost all his books right after reading Little Brother and enjoyed every single one.
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Insurance companies DO buy data like this. It is not perhaps. They buy data about you that they do not use to your advantage. They have no interest in lowering your premiums and every interest in raising them. One other example is the 2016 election and cambridge analytica. Not going to make a political case on the politicians, but the political parties (and foreign govs with interest in the outcome) bought data on el…
> They have no interest in lowering your premiums and every interest in raising them. Which is wholly understandable because to price the risk accurately they need to see the full risk profile. If insurers couldn't price accurately then insurance as a business couldn't exist.
Or they can totally stop pricing people reasonably at all. Insurance is predicated on sharing the risk. If "risky" people get priced out of driving (especially based on things they can't reasonably control!) then its probably bad for society.
This is even more true for medical insurance (although laws are probably stronger here). That said, i personally think the government (in us) should be handling medical costs on some level so maybe my opinion on controlling capitalism w/r/t medical insurance isn't the market-driven.
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Is this a post-COVID thing? I've been on about a dozen cruises, most on Royal Caribbean ships, and they have always taken a photo at check in. I've never submitted one in advance.
Cruises are international travel, so I'm surprised anyone would be surprised by ID checks.
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But then don't I become that guy from the xkcd comic whose license plate is all 1s and Is?
Don't drive. You have to register your vehicle with the state and your current address.
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> The amount of privacy a rich man will get by paying $1000, a poor man can get it for $1 No, privacy is not autographs. Thats not how this works. The rich man is paying a private shopper to use the PS's face in the facial recognition system and card tracking system. the PS gets the ads, but not the rich man. The rich man's habits are still tracked (by proxy, assuming PS doesn't shop personally at same store). At bes…
It's called price segmentation. Make the same product available at multiple price tiers, but make the lower prices more time consuming and difficult to get. Clip a coupon, file a rebate, join a club. Then you get the best of both worlds, you extract a maximum price from well to do shoppers but have an optional price that still attracts the bargain hunters.
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Others have mentioned specific reasons, but another aspect to consider is that once you've given up any kind of data, it's out of your hands. Maybe you can't think of a reason why that's bad today, but will that be true tomorrow, or next year? By making the decision that it's fine today, you're also deciding that it's always going to be fine in the future.
This doesn't strike me as a very strong argument. If i'm understanding correctly: I shouldn't share that I do X because in the future X might come under scrutiny. This sort of argument can be deployed to stop you from doing anything. It's also very apocalyptic because you are only assuming downsides. What happens if sharing X actually helps me in the future?
Does being able to deploy this argument in more situations suggest that it's a bad argument?
As for what happens if sharing X actually helps you in the future, you always have that option. Not sharing initially doesn't stop you from sharing later. Sharing initially does stop you from not-sharing later, if that makes sense.
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Is this a post-COVID thing? I've been on about a dozen cruises, most on Royal Caribbean ships, and they have always taken a photo at check in. I've never submitted one in advance.
Cruises are international travel, so I'm surprised anyone would be surprised by ID checks.
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> the doors of the store just not opening for shoplifters (or at all, while shoplifters continue to be present — to prevent shoplifters from sneaking in ahead/behind a non-blacklisted customer.) This is illegal in my state. And, I'm guessing, in most other US states as well.
Do you mean that denying entry is illegal, or denying exit is? Because these unmanned stores do let you leave ; they just have separate entry and exit doors, which have mutual-exclusion locking (like an airlock) such that nobody can enter the store through the exit door by getting someone inside the store to open the inner door. (You could slip into the little individual exit hall through the outer exit door; but the…