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Amazon's Ring and Google's Nest reveal the severity of U.S. surveillance state

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Re: Amazon's Ring and Google's Nest reveal the severity of U.S. surveillance state

#401
post #327

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I would like it a lot better without the mention to the "West", which, as usual, is a code word for: "I want to pretend my point extend outside the USA but I have absolutely no knowledge of how true that is. I don't intend to do any research because that would demand efforts from me so bear with my casual imperialism". Queue the purely American historical lesson following.

Universal human rights is a very widespread belief and concept, extending to all continents and many, many cultures. It's not hard to understand why.

If you'd said "isn't just a western thing" I would have definitely agreed, but this claim seems a bit unlikely.

Re: Amazon's Ring and Google's Nest reveal the severity of U.S. surveillance state

#402

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Its a nice outrage wave, but I have very hard time believing this will be a major topic in 2 weeks. People simply don't give a fuck en masse. Accept that many folks are built differently than you and me and stuff like actual freedom you may be willing to lay your life for may be meaningless fart for others, especially when its not hurting them now . For example US folks voted current admin willingly second time and e…

The Epstein stuff is a distraction. The previous admin had 4 years to do literally anything about it and they did nothing.

My personal take is that everything is a distraction, nothing is real ( except conspiracy theories -- naturally ). Also, please subscribe to my totally organic podcast.

Re: Amazon's Ring and Google's Nest reveal the severity of U.S. surveillance state

#403

I know it seems hard, but just stop using Google, Amazon, Meta products. Tell everyone you know to stop using their products. They have all been acquiring and amassing surveillance for years through their products and now they're just double dipping with AI training to sell you more of it. The more you can get people to realize and disconnect the better. I wish more people would use AI to build alternatives with a cl…

I'm not sure its necessarily that simple. For example, because of the job market for software engineers I have moved to new cities multiple times during my adult life. As a result, my social network is highly fragmented and without Facebook it would be incredibly difficult for me to manage. So for me "stop using Facebook" sound similar to saying "burn all of your family photos and throw away your ability to talk to m…

> So for me "stop using Facebook" sound similar to saying "burn all of your family photos and throw away your ability to talk to many of the people who are important to you."

You just aren't looking for obvious alternatives that would still allow you to do all that privately. Keep your family photos offline on your own hardware. Create a contacts list on your phone (ideally de-Appled and de-Googled) and text people on Signal and/or create group chats. Tell people you are leaving Facebook because it is an evil surveillance machine, and that you can be reached on Signal, email (self-hosted) or phone.

Re: Amazon's Ring and Google's Nest reveal the severity of U.S. surveillance state

#404
post #327

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Universal human rights is a very widespread belief and concept, extending to all continents and many, many cultures. It's not hard to understand why.

No it's not. There are no human rights for the lowest castes in Hinduism, there are no human rights for polytheists in Islam, there were nothing like the modern idea of human rights in Japan or China before they westernized. That's why the west was able to leapfrog other nations economically (and hence militarily), because it was the first place where people had enough rights for something resembling a modern economy…

I mean, nobody knows why "the west" (whatever that is) leapfrogged anyone, and this is a fairly small period in terms of total human history.

Re: Amazon's Ring and Google's Nest reveal the severity of U.S. surveillance state

#405

Earlier quoted context omitted.

You can start by creating a email at tuta or proton. It does not have to be 100% overnight

Tuta is just horrible, often rejecting account creation altogether. AtomicMail.io is a nice free alternative to Proton.

Thanks for your perspective. I've been using tuta since a year now. Nothing to report

Re: Amazon's Ring and Google's Nest reveal the severity of U.S. surveillance state

#406

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Perhaps we can work on what is called "media literacy" where we understand text based on its context and authorship and other such clues.

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=47025768 You have the roles and responsibilities exactly backwards.

Well, my comments got more upvotes than yours did, and this is a democracy, so I guess I win?

Re: Amazon's Ring and Google's Nest reveal the severity of U.S. surveillance state

#407
post #311

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Get money out of politics (reverse citizens united) and enact term/age limits for all public offices. These problems will be solved. Most Americans agree on most things. Don't let the politicians who benefit off of dividing us fool you. An agenda that focuses on reform outside of the usual finger pointing game of partisan politics and promises to enact these reforms without fear or favor will win. Any such agenda mus…

> Get money out of politics If you also mean make it so Congress doesn't have a $4T slush fund to buy favors and influence every year, then I'm on board. If you think reducing the paltry sums spent on campaign contributions is going to take the money out of politics, you're bad at math.

Weird way to agree with someone, end with an insult just because you're not sure whether or not you should take the least charitable interpretation. You would think the rest of my post would have been a clue.

Moving past that, yes we are in agreement. In fact you bring up an excellent point, which is that political parties themselves make corrupt use of campaign finance lawlessness to get in the way of their own voters and rig their own primary systems. None of these entities, whether the DNC or a right wing corporate interest group should be able to buy and sell American elections.

Individual campaign contributions are a non issue, also because regular people are capped at relatively low and long established FEC limits these various slush funds/pacs are designed to circumvent. As you said, the math is clear. I'm confident if this issue were ever put straightly to the American people, the result would be overwhelmingly in favor of campaign finance reform. The real issue isn't anyone's ability to do math, but what you hinted at earlier. The political parties themselves enjoy and benefit from this corruption. Therefore they are incentivized to ensure such a vote never takes place.

The current moment offers an opportunity to overpower such entrenched powers that be, if we can collectively move beyond partisan finger pointing that will only alienate those fellow Americans we need to agree with us to make such a broad based reform possible.

Re: Amazon's Ring and Google's Nest reveal the severity of U.S. surveillance state

#408
post #311

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Get money out of politics (reverse citizens united) and enact term/age limits for all public offices. These problems will be solved. Most Americans agree on most things. Don't let the politicians who benefit off of dividing us fool you. An agenda that focuses on reform outside of the usual finger pointing game of partisan politics and promises to enact these reforms without fear or favor will win. Any such agenda mus…

And we can get there with ranked-choice voting. We really need to press hard until we get it.

Approval, not ranked-choice.

Ranked-choice reduces transparency and understanding of the vote-counting process, disenfranchises an alarming percentage of lower-income voters, obstructs risk-limiting audits (which are essential for security), and is non-monotonic (increasing voter support for a candidate can make them lose). Further, ranked-choice doesn't actually fix the spoiler problem and won't eliminate two-party dominance.

Approval voting is cheap and easy to implement, dead simple to explain, count, and audit. Not only does it eliminate the spoiler problem, it is easy to see why it does so: your ability to vote for any candidate is independent of your ability to vote for any other.

Re: Amazon's Ring and Google's Nest reveal the severity of U.S. surveillance state

#409

Earlier quoted context omitted.

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=47025768 You have the roles and responsibilities exactly backwards.

Well, my comments got more upvotes than yours did, and this is a democracy, so I guess I win?

You can't see others' upvotes (at least, for net positive scores), so there's no way to know.

Re: Amazon's Ring and Google's Nest reveal the severity of U.S. surveillance state

#410

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Remember when Apple PR spent a bunch of time putting Tim Cook alongside images of RFK? Civil rights hero! That campaign wouldn’t land these days.

Rfk the brainworms guy?

In this case, the same-named father of the brainworms guy
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