The problem that is created by a person’s private data being collected against their will is primarily a philosophical one similar to the “principle of least privilege”, which you may be familiar with. The idea is that those collecting the data have no reasonable need for access to it in order to provide the services they’re providing, so their collection of that information can only be for something other than the user’s benefit, but the user gets nothing in exchange for it. The user is paying for the product/service they get, so the personal data is just a bonus freebie that the vendor is making off with. If the personal data is worthless, then there is no need to collect it, and if it does have worth, they are taking something of value without paying for it, which one might call stealing, or at least piracy. To many, this is already enough to cry foul, but we haven’t even gotten into the content and use of the collected data yet.

There is a vibrant marketplace among those in the advertising business for this personal data. There are brokers and aggregators of this data with the goal of correlating every data point they have gotten from every device and app they can find with a specific person. Even if no one individual detail or set of details presents a risk or identifies who the specific person is, they use computer algorithms to analyze all the data, narrowing it down to exactly one individual, similar to the way the game “20 questions” works to guess what object the player is thinking of–they can pick literally any object or concept in the whole world, and in 20 questions or less, the other player can often guess it. If you imagine the advertisers doing this, imagine how successful they would be at guessing who a person is if they can ask unlimited questions forever until there can be no doubt; that is exactly what the algorithm reading the collected data can do.

There was an infamous example of Target (the retailer) determining a young girl was pregnant before she told anyone or even knew herself, and created a disastrous home situation for her by sending her targeted maternity marketing materials to her house, which was seen by her abusive family.

These companies build what many find to be disturbingly invasive dossiers on individuals, including their private health information, intimacy preferences, and private personal habits, among other things. The EFF did a write-up many years ago with creepy examples of basic metadata collection that I found helpful to my understanding of the problem here:

https://www.eff.org/deeplinks/2013/06/why-metadata-matters?rss=1

Companies have little to no obligation to treat you fairly or even do business with, allowing them to potentially create a downright exile situation for you if they have decided you belong on some “naughty list” because of an indicator given to them by an algorithm that analyzed your info. They can also take advantage of widely known weaknesses in human psychology to influence you in ways that you don’t even realize, but are undeniably unethical and coercive. Also, it creates loopholes for bad actors in government to exploit. For example, in my country (USA), the police are forbidden from investigating me if I am not suspected of a crime, but they can pay a data broker $30 for a breakdown of everything I like, everything I do, and everywhere I’ve been. If it was sound government policy to allow arbitrary investigation of anyone regardless of suspicion, then ask yourself why every non-authoritarian government forbids it.

I know that’s a lot; it is a complicated topic that is hard to understand the implications of. Unfortunately, everyone that could most effectively work to educate everyone on those risks is instead exploiting their ignorance for a wide variety of purposes. Some of those purposes are innocuous, but others are ethically dubious, and many more are just objectively nefarious. To be clear, the reason for the laws against blanket investigations was to prevent the dubious and nefarious uses, because once that data is collected, it isn’t feasible to ensure it will stay in the right hands. The determination was that potential net good of this kind of data collection is far outweighed by the potential net negatives.

I hope that helps!

I believe that events like these capture the public interest much more than the countless other likely lawless actions, because the legalities of those other actions and the reasons they are that way can be complex and philosophical.

In the case of firing on this shipwreck, it is a very simple event with a very straight line you can draw from “this is the law” to “this is why there’s this law” to “here’s an ever-increasing cavalcade of evidence indicating clear and knowing violation of that law”. The situation is simple, it involves very little philosophy beyond “murdering the helpless is a dick move”, and everyone pretty much gets it. A story that simplistic is also tenaciously resistant to media spin; about all they can do is try the “dick moves make you a badass” gambit, which mostly only works on those that are anti-intellectual, provincial, and insecure, so it is only getting traction with the constituencies that would already have followed their leader off a cliff anyway.

OnePlus 5 here! There is a sucking void attached internally where the battery used to be.

There are definitely examples of US military boondoggle projects that didn’t result in high end military equipment getting made, but I think it is safe to say there are quite a few individual military tools and vehicles, supply chain notwithstanding, that are amazing triumphs of technology that have no equal.

You can definitely make the case that the volume and overall scale of our military production are excessive in the extreme, but I think to remain intellectually honest, we must admit that they are good at what they do, even though what they do is not always good.

They’re going to have to walk a tightrope to pull that off. There is so much choice in the video game market now that its like drinking from a fire hose, so if some games start to not work due to sabotage, while many others don’t, that could backfire on them.

Especially since Valve is one of the only large companies with a positive public image, while Microsoft and its countless subsidiaries are basically regarded as Voldemort, its not hard to imagine a public pissing match not going their way.

That monkey better not dare curl one of his fingers up for that “wish”! Nothing was changed. 😂

I don’t think the poster meant that a Russian civil war will be nice for his online experience.

There is substantial belief in the western world that Russia is using these “troll farms” to destabilize foreign governments. If true, that would be considered by many to be an act of aggression that he and many others would welcome the end of. The fact that a period of strife in Russia is what caused would be unfortunate, but the fact remains.

That wasn’t anyone’s cat, though. It was a denizen of the neighborhood with no owner. The point you’re trying to make has no target.

If it doesn’t do anything useful, I don’t think any amount of shoving in front of people is going to amount to much uptake beyond some cursory fiddling to determine its uselessness.

People hand out flyers to every passerby too, and nearly all of those end up in the nearest trash bin.

I can’t tell if that was a joke, which makes it even funnier.

I think that Microsoft will continue in some form regardless of what happens with this bubble because they have huge amounts of physical assets and cash on hand.

That said, their market position in any given sector they’re in might not be as invincible as it seems. There are corporations that were titans of their industries, including technology, that either don’t exist or are ghosts of their former selves all in far less than a lifetime.

Kodak, Xerox, Bell Labs, IBM, and Yahoo all looked like unstoppable juggernauts when I was a kid, and my own kids haven’t even heard of some of them.

If they’re still using the computer then they’re still paying with their data, just like if you subscribe to Netflix, you’re still a customer. The fact the you already conceded to paying doesn’t negate your ongoing payments.

I can’t speak for a company of 30,000, but I know tons of companies with a couple thousand employees or less that could, without a doubt, write their own tools in house to do the bits and pieces of SalesForce they actually are using for far less than they are spending on SalesForce. As they grow, their SalesForce costs grow linearly or worse, while an in-house tool’s grow at a decreasing rate.

Any company that size or larger already has some kind of technology division that can be grown to accommodate the development.

For those really big companies, I imagine their SalesForce bill is so high they might have potential alternative options I can’t even imagine at those prices.

At first I was concerned about these huge tech companies stealing all of human knowledge and using it to make a fortune and drive everyone that created the knowledge into poverty.

Now I see that they are stealing all of human knowledge to make LLMs, giant digital babbling talkers. It can’t work how they want the way they’re doing it, so it doesn’t matter what data they consume. They seem to lose money on every LLM query, even if you’re paying for the highest tier.

When they stop subsidizing the cost to cash in, the already lukewarm interest in LLMs will cool further as costs rise.

Shower response: I don’t like that they’re gobbling my data, but at least they’re choking on it.

Nothing more.

You are buying it with your personal data and granting them access to your computer. Even if you don’t think that’s not worth much, it is still not free. You’re just paying with something other than money.

There are billions of us. We can do many things at once.

This may not matter as much as nuclear disarmament, but it matters to everyone that owns one of these cars.

Its true that there’s no way to enforce a law like that directly, and I don’t think that I agree with the requirement to carry documents at all times, same as you.

There is some use for laws that are not directly enforceable, though, just not in this case. For example, a government may reasonably want to limit citizens’ ability to operate a vehicle carrying a hazardous chemical. They may not be able to justly stop him and check for things with no reason, but if that is discovered because he got in a wreck, they can then punish the illegal transport crime.

I know its often repressive or at least unhelpful to make laws that aren’t directly enforceable, but there is some room for them. It is important to disallow legal overreach of law enforcement trampling civil liberties trying to enforce those laws like you pointed out, though. That’s something that my country (USA) unfortunately has a checkered history with, as have a lot of others.

ETA: To be clear, making it illegal for a person to not physically have something at all times seems patently absurd, regardless of how loosely enforced. All of the reasonable requirements of being a legal resident are met by simply being registered with the government of the country you are visiting.

I can understand why some would think that, as I once did.

Physical therapy is similar in that it matters very little why you have pain. You can improve or eliminate the symptom by appropriately exercising the affected areas.

Similarly, the behavioral treatments can take advantage of all humans’ natural adaptability to teach them to model and normalize more socially healthy behaviors.

I’m totally out of my depth in these fields but I have been convinced through firsthand experience via physical therapy. I’m sure it is not a catch all solution to just attack the symptoms, but it does have positive observable results and it therefore seems at least noteworthy.

I like it even better than “kiss my ass”! It often strongly insinuates that the writer thinks that all the respect that is due is none.