One of the most informative, worldview changing books I have ever read was Voltaire's Bastards. It took the author 10 years of research to write it. While very well written it took me much longer than normal to read it as the book is not only information dense but you really have to give your brain a while to digest the information almost like learning math; there is no speed reading a math textbook, unless you already know the material.
So I would argue that speed reading might be possible where the author has done the classic: why use one word where twenty will do. But for any real information or learning I don't think it will be of much help.
Yes, what is it about these "high achievers" that they can just keep going from screwup to screwup and somehow people look back at their long history of screwups and say, "Wow, they have done so much in their life.".
To me it all boils down to a strange little incident in my old highschool. A guy I knew was running for school president and encouraged everyone to make posters that made fun of him. The school was suddenly filled with posters, except that most were complementary. His win was assured. Then the principal disqualified him and bluntly told him that the guy who the principal supported had all his older siblings be school president and that the other guy was going places and would need school president on his resume when applying to top universities.
The other guy ended up being the CFO of a company that later was mired in scandal as a somewhat ponzi scheme that somehow never resulted in prison. Just as everyone expected. This was after a single term in politics.
This woman will spend the rest of her life on boards of directors, working for some private equity firm, and generally gliding through life in positions where she may ore may not actually contribute anything that can be measured. Yet the more "accomplishments" she pads onto her resume the more she will use that resume to clime some other ladder.
But her real contribution will be to sour the milk for any company that wants to actually do what she pretended to be doing. They will go to raise money for a valid, real, not fraudulent product, and their requests will be filed beside cold fusion and madoff investments.
I keep hearing about the various governments being out this number of billions or that number of billions. But where I see the big problem is competition. How can local companies compete with these non-tax paying companies when they are forced to pay taxes.
Capitalism is quite simply the reinvestment in the means of production. With tech companies this can be a complicated relationship with both reinvesting in the actual product, and having the cash available to go around buying out similar companies. Another layer in that involves both issuing new shares to buy companies, and issuing shares to attract investors.
As an example, if a local UK company wants to compete with Google in the ad space in the UK, they will end up paying full taxes on any profits; while google won't. Thus google will be able to return a higher profit to their investors, have more cash to buy out competitors, and will be able to issue more valuable shares as part of those buyouts. The UK company will simply have much of its value continuously eroded by taxes that are annually removed from its balance.
Obviously using google as a comparison to some little ad company is a bit unbalanced, but the same applies to any homegrown company that legally exists only in the European country. Cutting edge drones, robotics, 3D printing, or pretty much anything along those lines will not be able to match the growth curve of a company paying a tiny fraction in taxes.
Those sort of companies that could otherwise become international players are what drives a country's economy. To allow certain countries to always have the upper hand is just going to be a long term bad plan.
So I wouldn't be so much worrying about the handful of missing billions but the long term missing trillions.
So quite simply, make sure that these international companies are under the exact same tax burden as a local company when it involves any business within Europe.
So if a local company were to make an apple priced smart phone and would end up paying $80 in taxes. Make sure that Apple selling the same phone is paying $80 in taxes regardless of what paper shenanigans they try.
I keep reading breathless articles about the Bolt being a Tesla killer. What? It's a chevy. When I rent, chevy's are some of the crappiest cars available. That ignition thing was not a one off. It is a cultural problem. Then there are the layers of old car company problems. I really really want to go to a Tesla store. I regularly walk by chevy dealership and I cringe at what I see. Sort of broken men in cheap suits, fleecing harried looking buyers.
I know someone who bought a Tesla. The bulk of the transaction was their being handed an iPad, filling out some details, and.... Done. There were a few other signatures needed purely related to title and other government paperwork. It took something like 15 minutes.
You say that every car will then be compared to it. But worse it will cause people who can't quite afford a Tesla to resent the Chevy or Nissan they do buy.
Plus once those stores really start to spread, the resentment will only grow. People will realize that many of these are things the old car companies could have changed decades ago. They could have used their political/lobbying clout to destroy the dealership system. It is entirely crazy that we have this commodity product where the price you pay is how much the dealer can sucker out of you.
Will Tesla be perfect, nope. Will it be way better, I suspect so on so many levels.
You have hit upon a horrible horrible truth, and it has some horrible sauce. There is a huge demographic bulge called the boomers that is still fed by old media, and they are hard core voters. Hopefully with the legalization of marijuana they will chill a bit.
I don't think it will hurt them. If anything such an attempt will end up blowing up in the old companies and big media's faces. But I stand by my prediction that they will try.
There was at least one. This tool stole one and while screaming down a street managed to cut the car in two on a telephone pole. There were sparking batteries all over the place.
There have to have been a few others that managed something equally stupid. But these aren't a typical GM product that only builds to the test with no actual consideration toward passenger safety. So I suspect the number is shockingly low.
In the late 90s I was hired to be part of this trend. I built some software that fed the machine. Interestingly enough I think that they were just newspapery enough and had unions that kept the few journalists under control, in that they were paid to stick around and vaguely be journalists. But now they are being laid off in droves, papers are closing, and with various payment options out there, the real journalists, as in the ones who will state the truth and do more than a google search for investigations, are suddenly out and independent.
In a very strange way, I think that we are about to begin a new golden age of journalism. Thus we are about to enter a new dark age of libel laws as the powerful shut this down.
It will happen, it will come out, and a maybe few fines will be paid. It has, happened, it is happening, and in the past, I don't remember even any fines. Newspapers came forward and said that dealerships were coming to them with this very threat.
Telsa's happy days with the media will soon be coming to an end. Traditional car manufacturers are some of the biggest advertisers in pretty all forms of traditional media. They will soon do what Toyota did with the acceleration problem. They told the various outlets, keep blaming our shit software and we will stop advertising in your publication.
Now that Tesla is competing with products such as the Ford Fusion mid level products they aren't going to let Tesla continue with the free press. There will come a day when pretty much every old media article we read will be about a Tesla battery fire, or Telsa recall, or anyone killed in a Tesla will somehow be national news.
The good thing is that old media doesn't really matter as much anymore. The average age of a newspaper reader is advancing nearly 5 years for every year of real time. That is huge, 5 years is a massive demographic who just downed their newspapers.
This assumed ability they think they have to warp public perception won't change all the 20-30 somethings who are going to be driving their Teslas in 2 years.
One other thing. This guy has made me a whole hell of a lot of money. Every publicly traded company that he ever worked for since his departure I have made unholy large bets against. If their share price was $100 I would buy way out of the money options a year or so in the future betting that it would crack $50. I am not joking when I say that he has never let me down. Blackberry hired him early 2007, I bet a huge chunk of my portfolio on that with about a year until expiry. There isn't a whole lot of volume that far out so I was buying day after day, week after week. The whole time Blackberries stock climbed to crazy new heights, he got a promotion, and I kept buying. The stock tanked hard, so I checked to see if they had laid him off. I then kept buying and buying. Finally they laid him off so I stopped and waited until it was time and then turned my options into a huge profit. My only regret was to not have borrowed money to really make that bet.
I have another douche who I use who worked at Nortel and he made me a nice pile. The timing couldn't have been better. I heard through the grapevine he was hired there and I jumped on the options. The company tanked so fast that they gave him a severance before he had even moved there.
My theory is that when companies are so screwed up that they hire either of these two (among 4 others I watch on LinkedIn) that it categorically proves that the companies are rotten to the core. Any minor background check will show that people consider them to be gigantic useless tools. People who are actually anti-productive. I am little disappointed in that none of them are working for a public company for the last couple of years.
These guys aren't being hired into executive positions, so I don't attribute the companies tanking to their behaviour, but the fact that if they are hired, so must be so many other lumps of dung.
As your second comment points out this mostly applies to elite students at elite institutions. Yet I see the same problem at both the elite and third rate CS universities.
My long standing experience is that most of the students who are fantastic programmers were fantastic programmers before they went to school while everyone else is learning about a linked list they are working on their own OS. Or have just submitted their umpteenth contribution to the Linux Kernel. Then they leave the university(potentially before graduating) and end up doing something really strange. Creating some crazy massively parallel processor design for a company that makes fibre optic comm gear. Or you read about them as one of the first employees at some company just bought out by Google for 8 zillion dollars.
Where I used to live had a 2nd rate university that had a PhD CS program. I knew one of the professors and he would often introduce me to graduate students. I would ask them what they were working on and after they would tell me I would either think (I always kept my mouth closed) "that sounds completely useless", or even more often, "I think I have downloaded that module to play with once."
It was things like getting a neural net to examine sonar data and find the optimal routing for underwater cables. Or it was totally abstract and was pretty much just really really hard discrete math that would poke some theoretical hole in bitcoin, a hole that I think was already known such as the 50% problem.
I was deliberately handing out rope at a lynching party. This sort of crap had been an ongoing problem. It allowed me to boot him off the team and get an excellent replacement.
Keep in mind that most CS programs tend to be run with a bit of a revulsion to practical things. They argue that practical is the realm of CE not CS. Thus there will be classes in database design, as in how the guts of a data store will work, but nothing much on practical database usage. The theory (and not terribly wrong) is that by learning the guts it should be easy to learn the practical, if needed.
For me I would rather learn both as then the guts of the matter have some practical knowledge that might help it stick.
So it is no surprise that few teach practical cybersecurity, they probably do cover crypto courses where Diffie Hellman is examined in great detail.
My simple complaint is that few recent CS grads that I have met really can deliver useful code in quantity. When managing them I often find them reinventing the wheel. I will point to a python library that I want them to use in what should be a 40 line bit of code to do some very straightforward thing and a week later I find them beavering away in Haskell building a "state-machine". They will then argue that Python is too slow where I point out that my estimate is that the code will run every Friday at 3 am, will probably take 20 seconds and yet only needs to be done by opening on Monday. So even if I were to be wrong by a factor of 100 all is still good.
The code then runs in 8 seconds.
So while I am not at all shocked by no cybersecurity training, I do wish that minimally the schools would be a bit more practical so as to allow some of the abstract material have something to latch on to.
I have a pretty damn capable computer. The android emulator is pretty much unusable. I will be very interested to see if faster translates to fast enough to actually use.
In my present development setup, the only way I test on android is to test on an actual android. The only time I use the emulator is to see if it is going any faster.
Bingo. This goes beyond even that. Credit profiling companies are even going in directions such as modifying your score based upon those in your friends lists in social media. How's your derpy friend's credit score? Then more and more companies are using credit profiles to make choices outside of financial things, such as jobs.
I am a firm believer that privacy needs to be solidly enshrined in the constitution. Basically no organization should be able to gather data on people unless their is a consenting and specific purpose. For instance the whole, "Trusted third parties" needs to just be gone. I think that pretty much all record storage needs to be on par with or in excess of the various laws on medical records. This way most companies would simply stop collecting records as their accidental release would be so painful. For instance, your mobile company can easily monitor your data usage, your text usage, your position, and of course phone calls. What is preventing them from selling those records to demographic data companies? I can certainly say that the telcos in Canada are scumbags all. They would sell that data in a heartbeat.
Back to the credit score thing. If I go to a store that is downwardly demographic such as a dollar store or walmart, I use cash. I don't want those records mined in a negative way.
There is this whole offshore banking leak thing going on. But quite simply, if I were rich enough to afford that I would not do it to avoid taxes, but to avoid monitoring. With some real money I would also take some pretty extreme measures to simply vanish electronically. Yet that in and of itself is probably a red flag that gets you special attention.
I know people who are Pakistani. I know people who have family in Libya. With all the Syrians moving to my area, I suspect that I will soon know a Syrian. What scares the crap out of me is that just through the classic six degrees of separation they will be "in contact" with an associate of a known terrorist. This then puts me in contact with someone in contact with an associate of a known terrorist. Then some poorly written ML algorithm will see that I have this situation but through to two separate terrorist organizations. Then boom, I have somehow become one of the strongest links connecting the three. Basically a Canadian terrorist nexus. Add to that that I have visited LiveLeak where terrorist videos regularly get posted, and suddenly I am being pulled aside at airports, or cops have a big red blinking light show up on their computer when they pull me over for running a stop sign, and come out all guns drawn.
It is not only the invasion of privacy that worries me but the complete and certified morons who then interpret this data.
I just think of the hard partying British couple who's tweet, "I'm going to destroy America and dig up Marilyn Monroe" got them arrested for planning to commit crimes. Context you stupid morons.
Plus in 99% of this sort of stuff the only advantage is to find out that terrorist A who blew himself to bits was actually in contact with terrorist B who blew himself to bits. It doesn't prevent squat, it just makes the paper pushers happy to have a better trail to confirm whatever obvious facts they started with.
Here is the horrible thing about all this. Everyone knows exactly which country on this planet funds the bulk of modern ISIS terrorism. Officials won't say it, and they certainly won't do anything about it. So instead they just want to rape our rights to prove that they are doing something.
I wince when some eager future programmer asks me about one of these strip mall schools. I have met many an excellent programmer who got their start in one. This would be more a situation where the person was very smart, got a piece of paper, got a job with that paper, and began accumulating experience. I don't give the schools any credit much beyond the piece of paper fooling some HR person into giving the person a chance.
I would say that the average person who goes to one of these will primarily learn the hard lesson that there are predators out there who will rob them blind. For those who succeed after these places, in most cases a community collage should have been available to offer them a handful of courses that are often (on paper) better offered at these scam factories.
Slashdot Mirror
One of the most informative, worldview changing books I have ever read was Voltaire's Bastards. It took the author 10 years of research to write it. While very well written it took me much longer than normal to read it as the book is not only information dense but you really have to give your brain a while to digest the information almost like learning math; there is no speed reading a math textbook, unless you already know the material.
So I would argue that speed reading might be possible where the author has done the classic: why use one word where twenty will do. But for any real information or learning I don't think it will be of much help.
Yes, what is it about these "high achievers" that they can just keep going from screwup to screwup and somehow people look back at their long history of screwups and say, "Wow, they have done so much in their life.".
To me it all boils down to a strange little incident in my old highschool. A guy I knew was running for school president and encouraged everyone to make posters that made fun of him. The school was suddenly filled with posters, except that most were complementary. His win was assured. Then the principal disqualified him and bluntly told him that the guy who the principal supported had all his older siblings be school president and that the other guy was going places and would need school president on his resume when applying to top universities.
The other guy ended up being the CFO of a company that later was mired in scandal as a somewhat ponzi scheme that somehow never resulted in prison. Just as everyone expected. This was after a single term in politics.
Yuck
This woman will spend the rest of her life on boards of directors, working for some private equity firm, and generally gliding through life in positions where she may ore may not actually contribute anything that can be measured. Yet the more "accomplishments" she pads onto her resume the more she will use that resume to clime some other ladder.
But her real contribution will be to sour the milk for any company that wants to actually do what she pretended to be doing. They will go to raise money for a valid, real, not fraudulent product, and their requests will be filed beside cold fusion and madoff investments.
I keep hearing about the various governments being out this number of billions or that number of billions. But where I see the big problem is competition. How can local companies compete with these non-tax paying companies when they are forced to pay taxes.
Capitalism is quite simply the reinvestment in the means of production. With tech companies this can be a complicated relationship with both reinvesting in the actual product, and having the cash available to go around buying out similar companies. Another layer in that involves both issuing new shares to buy companies, and issuing shares to attract investors.
As an example, if a local UK company wants to compete with Google in the ad space in the UK, they will end up paying full taxes on any profits; while google won't. Thus google will be able to return a higher profit to their investors, have more cash to buy out competitors, and will be able to issue more valuable shares as part of those buyouts. The UK company will simply have much of its value continuously eroded by taxes that are annually removed from its balance.
Obviously using google as a comparison to some little ad company is a bit unbalanced, but the same applies to any homegrown company that legally exists only in the European country. Cutting edge drones, robotics, 3D printing, or pretty much anything along those lines will not be able to match the growth curve of a company paying a tiny fraction in taxes.
Those sort of companies that could otherwise become international players are what drives a country's economy. To allow certain countries to always have the upper hand is just going to be a long term bad plan.
So I wouldn't be so much worrying about the handful of missing billions but the long term missing trillions.
So quite simply, make sure that these international companies are under the exact same tax burden as a local company when it involves any business within Europe.
So if a local company were to make an apple priced smart phone and would end up paying $80 in taxes. Make sure that Apple selling the same phone is paying $80 in taxes regardless of what paper shenanigans they try.
I would be willing to be that he invested money in Vice.
I keep reading breathless articles about the Bolt being a Tesla killer. What? It's a chevy. When I rent, chevy's are some of the crappiest cars available. That ignition thing was not a one off. It is a cultural problem. Then there are the layers of old car company problems. I really really want to go to a Tesla store. I regularly walk by chevy dealership and I cringe at what I see. Sort of broken men in cheap suits, fleecing harried looking buyers.
.... Done. There were a few other signatures needed purely related to title and other government paperwork. It took something like 15 minutes.
I know someone who bought a Tesla. The bulk of the transaction was their being handed an iPad, filling out some details, and
You say that every car will then be compared to it. But worse it will cause people who can't quite afford a Tesla to resent the Chevy or Nissan they do buy.
Plus once those stores really start to spread, the resentment will only grow. People will realize that many of these are things the old car companies could have changed decades ago. They could have used their political/lobbying clout to destroy the dealership system. It is entirely crazy that we have this commodity product where the price you pay is how much the dealer can sucker out of you.
Will Tesla be perfect, nope. Will it be way better, I suspect so on so many levels.
You have hit upon a horrible horrible truth, and it has some horrible sauce. There is a huge demographic bulge called the boomers that is still fed by old media, and they are hard core voters. Hopefully with the legalization of marijuana they will chill a bit.
I don't think it will hurt them. If anything such an attempt will end up blowing up in the old companies and big media's faces. But I stand by my prediction that they will try.
4 Sounds about right for a car that broke the testing machine in the roof crush test.
There was at least one. This tool stole one and while screaming down a street managed to cut the car in two on a telephone pole. There were sparking batteries all over the place.
There have to have been a few others that managed something equally stupid. But these aren't a typical GM product that only builds to the test with no actual consideration toward passenger safety. So I suspect the number is shockingly low.
In the late 90s I was hired to be part of this trend. I built some software that fed the machine. Interestingly enough I think that they were just newspapery enough and had unions that kept the few journalists under control, in that they were paid to stick around and vaguely be journalists. But now they are being laid off in droves, papers are closing, and with various payment options out there, the real journalists, as in the ones who will state the truth and do more than a google search for investigations, are suddenly out and independent.
In a very strange way, I think that we are about to begin a new golden age of journalism. Thus we are about to enter a new dark age of libel laws as the powerful shut this down.
It will happen, it will come out, and a maybe few fines will be paid. It has, happened, it is happening, and in the past, I don't remember even any fines. Newspapers came forward and said that dealerships were coming to them with this very threat.
Telsa's happy days with the media will soon be coming to an end. Traditional car manufacturers are some of the biggest advertisers in pretty all forms of traditional media. They will soon do what Toyota did with the acceleration problem. They told the various outlets, keep blaming our shit software and we will stop advertising in your publication.
Now that Tesla is competing with products such as the Ford Fusion mid level products they aren't going to let Tesla continue with the free press. There will come a day when pretty much every old media article we read will be about a Tesla battery fire, or Telsa recall, or anyone killed in a Tesla will somehow be national news.
The good thing is that old media doesn't really matter as much anymore. The average age of a newspaper reader is advancing nearly 5 years for every year of real time. That is huge, 5 years is a massive demographic who just downed their newspapers.
This assumed ability they think they have to warp public perception won't change all the 20-30 somethings who are going to be driving their Teslas in 2 years.
One other thing. This guy has made me a whole hell of a lot of money. Every publicly traded company that he ever worked for since his departure I have made unholy large bets against. If their share price was $100 I would buy way out of the money options a year or so in the future betting that it would crack $50. I am not joking when I say that he has never let me down. Blackberry hired him early 2007, I bet a huge chunk of my portfolio on that with about a year until expiry. There isn't a whole lot of volume that far out so I was buying day after day, week after week. The whole time Blackberries stock climbed to crazy new heights, he got a promotion, and I kept buying. The stock tanked hard, so I checked to see if they had laid him off. I then kept buying and buying. Finally they laid him off so I stopped and waited until it was time and then turned my options into a huge profit. My only regret was to not have borrowed money to really make that bet.
I have another douche who I use who worked at Nortel and he made me a nice pile. The timing couldn't have been better. I heard through the grapevine he was hired there and I jumped on the options. The company tanked so fast that they gave him a severance before he had even moved there.
My theory is that when companies are so screwed up that they hire either of these two (among 4 others I watch on LinkedIn) that it categorically proves that the companies are rotten to the core. Any minor background check will show that people consider them to be gigantic useless tools. People who are actually anti-productive. I am little disappointed in that none of them are working for a public company for the last couple of years.
These guys aren't being hired into executive positions, so I don't attribute the companies tanking to their behaviour, but the fact that if they are hired, so must be so many other lumps of dung.
If this guy had logged his work it would have read.
Took 2 weeks to not even do 1 day's work. Ignored technical guidance from manager. Work given to co-worker who completed it in 1 day.
Took 2 weeks to not even do 1 day's work. Ignored technical guidance from manager. Work given to co-worker who completed it in 1 day.
Took 2 weeks to not even do 1 day's work. Ignored technical guidance from manager. Work given to co-worker who completed it in 1 day.
Took 2 weeks to not even do 1 day's work. Ignored technical guidance from manager. Work given to co-worker who completed it in 1 day.
Took 2 weeks to not even do 1 day's work. Ignored technical guidance from manager. Work given to co-worker who completed it in 1 day.
Took 2 weeks to not even do 1 day's work. Ignored technical guidance from manager. Work done by manager who did it in 20 minutes.
Kicked off team.
As your second comment points out this mostly applies to elite students at elite institutions. Yet I see the same problem at both the elite and third rate CS universities.
My long standing experience is that most of the students who are fantastic programmers were fantastic programmers before they went to school while everyone else is learning about a linked list they are working on their own OS. Or have just submitted their umpteenth contribution to the Linux Kernel. Then they leave the university(potentially before graduating) and end up doing something really strange. Creating some crazy massively parallel processor design for a company that makes fibre optic comm gear. Or you read about them as one of the first employees at some company just bought out by Google for 8 zillion dollars.
Where I used to live had a 2nd rate university that had a PhD CS program. I knew one of the professors and he would often introduce me to graduate students. I would ask them what they were working on and after they would tell me I would either think (I always kept my mouth closed) "that sounds completely useless", or even more often, "I think I have downloaded that module to play with once."
It was things like getting a neural net to examine sonar data and find the optimal routing for underwater cables. Or it was totally abstract and was pretty much just really really hard discrete math that would poke some theoretical hole in bitcoin, a hole that I think was already known such as the 50% problem.
I was deliberately handing out rope at a lynching party. This sort of crap had been an ongoing problem. It allowed me to boot him off the team and get an excellent replacement.
Keep in mind that most CS programs tend to be run with a bit of a revulsion to practical things. They argue that practical is the realm of CE not CS. Thus there will be classes in database design, as in how the guts of a data store will work, but nothing much on practical database usage. The theory (and not terribly wrong) is that by learning the guts it should be easy to learn the practical, if needed.
For me I would rather learn both as then the guts of the matter have some practical knowledge that might help it stick.
So it is no surprise that few teach practical cybersecurity, they probably do cover crypto courses where Diffie Hellman is examined in great detail.
My simple complaint is that few recent CS grads that I have met really can deliver useful code in quantity. When managing them I often find them reinventing the wheel. I will point to a python library that I want them to use in what should be a 40 line bit of code to do some very straightforward thing and a week later I find them beavering away in Haskell building a "state-machine". They will then argue that Python is too slow where I point out that my estimate is that the code will run every Friday at 3 am, will probably take 20 seconds and yet only needs to be done by opening on Monday. So even if I were to be wrong by a factor of 100 all is still good.
The code then runs in 8 seconds.
So while I am not at all shocked by no cybersecurity training, I do wish that minimally the schools would be a bit more practical so as to allow some of the abstract material have something to latch on to.
I have a pretty damn capable computer. The android emulator is pretty much unusable. I will be very interested to see if faster translates to fast enough to actually use.
In my present development setup, the only way I test on android is to test on an actual android. The only time I use the emulator is to see if it is going any faster.
They also pay for schools and religious centers in Canada. If they are hitting here, they are everywhere.
Bingo. This goes beyond even that. Credit profiling companies are even going in directions such as modifying your score based upon those in your friends lists in social media. How's your derpy friend's credit score? Then more and more companies are using credit profiles to make choices outside of financial things, such as jobs.
I am a firm believer that privacy needs to be solidly enshrined in the constitution. Basically no organization should be able to gather data on people unless their is a consenting and specific purpose. For instance the whole, "Trusted third parties" needs to just be gone. I think that pretty much all record storage needs to be on par with or in excess of the various laws on medical records. This way most companies would simply stop collecting records as their accidental release would be so painful. For instance, your mobile company can easily monitor your data usage, your text usage, your position, and of course phone calls. What is preventing them from selling those records to demographic data companies? I can certainly say that the telcos in Canada are scumbags all. They would sell that data in a heartbeat.
Back to the credit score thing. If I go to a store that is downwardly demographic such as a dollar store or walmart, I use cash. I don't want those records mined in a negative way.
There is this whole offshore banking leak thing going on. But quite simply, if I were rich enough to afford that I would not do it to avoid taxes, but to avoid monitoring. With some real money I would also take some pretty extreme measures to simply vanish electronically. Yet that in and of itself is probably a red flag that gets you special attention.
SA
I know people who are Pakistani. I know people who have family in Libya. With all the Syrians moving to my area, I suspect that I will soon know a Syrian. What scares the crap out of me is that just through the classic six degrees of separation they will be "in contact" with an associate of a known terrorist. This then puts me in contact with someone in contact with an associate of a known terrorist. Then some poorly written ML algorithm will see that I have this situation but through to two separate terrorist organizations. Then boom, I have somehow become one of the strongest links connecting the three. Basically a Canadian terrorist nexus. Add to that that I have visited LiveLeak where terrorist videos regularly get posted, and suddenly I am being pulled aside at airports, or cops have a big red blinking light show up on their computer when they pull me over for running a stop sign, and come out all guns drawn.
It is not only the invasion of privacy that worries me but the complete and certified morons who then interpret this data.
I just think of the hard partying British couple who's tweet, "I'm going to destroy America and dig up Marilyn Monroe" got them arrested for planning to commit crimes. Context you stupid morons.
Plus in 99% of this sort of stuff the only advantage is to find out that terrorist A who blew himself to bits was actually in contact with terrorist B who blew himself to bits. It doesn't prevent squat, it just makes the paper pushers happy to have a better trail to confirm whatever obvious facts they started with.
Here is the horrible thing about all this. Everyone knows exactly which country on this planet funds the bulk of modern ISIS terrorism. Officials won't say it, and they certainly won't do anything about it. So instead they just want to rape our rights to prove that they are doing something.
I wince when some eager future programmer asks me about one of these strip mall schools. I have met many an excellent programmer who got their start in one. This would be more a situation where the person was very smart, got a piece of paper, got a job with that paper, and began accumulating experience. I don't give the schools any credit much beyond the piece of paper fooling some HR person into giving the person a chance.
I would say that the average person who goes to one of these will primarily learn the hard lesson that there are predators out there who will rob them blind. For those who succeed after these places, in most cases a community collage should have been available to offer them a handful of courses that are often (on paper) better offered at these scam factories.