Most people think that using YouTube costs them nothing. Because YouTube was first to the party, and because they offered a treasure trove for 'free', many people adopted it very quickly, and there was virtually no opportunity for competition to develop before the monopoly was established.
I think ANY monopoly is bad - but this kind of monopoly is really insidious, because it's hard to fight. People pay for it with intangibles - namely their privacy and their consumption of advertising - so they don't think they're paying for it at all. That means that most folks never even think of YT as a monopoly. And many of those who DO think of it, don't see it as harmful, because after all, 'nobody who uses it is paying for it'. But there's a huge opportunity for more variety, innovation, flexibility, specialization, accountability, resilience - the list goes on and on - that's not being realized because there's no competition to spur it on.
Funny how I don't seem have any of these installed, or in my library. Maybe minimal app selection hygiene is important if one cares about privacy?
Agreed. I'm very careful about what apps I install, plus, (as you mentioned above) My phone is rooted, and I have AFWall installed. I also turn off both data and WiFi unless I'm explicitly using them.
Having said that, we shouldn't have to jump through hoops like this to guard our privacy. Privacy should be a basic right, and it should be the default state of all our devices, OS's, and applications / programs. Privacy should NOT be the exclusive province of a) the rich and b) vigilant, technically informed people like us. As at least one other poster has said, corporate privacy violations ought to be against the law, and penalties ought to be severe - TOS be damned. That privacy invasion is not just the norm, but a common business model, is proof of how far civilization has declined. What we now call democracy is simply a bread-and-circuses cover story for the corporatocracy that in fact prevails everywhere.
Somebody downmodded you and I just spent all my mod points, so I'm quoting your post here because I think it's something more people need to consider.
Yesterday, we learned that China will be publicly shaming j-walkers using facial recognition. NPR asked if this was the beginning of an era where no transgression against the law would go unnoticed and unpunished. Now we see a country with a huge citizenry demanding access to (effectively) all personal information without protection of privacy. This is one of today's announcements in an unending chain of events ratcheting up tyranny around the globe.
What made, and to the extent we still have it, Makes America Great, is and always has been a promise of true liberty and freedom, however well fulfilled, to be your own person, to think your own private thoughts, to fulfill your own dreams, to seek happiness. This dream brings people to our nation who are beaten on suspicion of thinking thoughts deemed improper. When America champions this idea around the world, it gives ALL people (who can hear it) hope that one day they will live in a place that allows them to express themselves personally as they really are.
Every time I read about technology enabling oppression, suppression, tyranny, and conformity.. a forced way to think, with tools to root out all transgressions to the prescribed ways, as this policy in India does - I am fearful for the future of liberty, and even just democracy.
We should be looking at these actions as examples of what NOT to do.. and yet they are increasingly harbingers of what our leadership WILL do here in America. We watch what happens abroad with horror, and then watch while people embrace and defend these horrors at home. I am baffled.
On the other hand, a "secure", cloud based backup/restore service that leaves no trace on a "rental" laptop except the latest blank OS, would seem to be a great investment opportunity.
"Citizen, you are under arrest for the crime of encryption. Your ISP detected the transfer of encrypted files passing through your Internet connection on three separate occasions last month. Kneel and put your hands behind your back, please."
If you think this won't happen - well, I think you're naive, but I sincerely hope you're right. Personally, I think we'll see it sooner rather than later, even in what we (sometimes ironically) call the free world.
Yes, participating in active wars that do not help is bad just as leaving a power vacuum for ISIS to fill is bad.
But don't you think ISIS was formed largely as a response to American imperialism? At the very least ISIS received a lot of support from locals whom the US had pissed of with their meddling. The US helped create ISIS by sticking their nose in the Middle East's business, then effectively handed power over to ISIS by bailing out when the cost became too high and the war they were waging became too unpopular back home. A "mistake"? Well, I might concede that point, if the US military presence in the Middle East wasn't ultimately motivated, not by human rights and dignity, but by corporate profits. Can't classify that as a mistake though - it's simply hubristic, psychopathic, imperialistic greed.
Every development plan that consists of "we're talking away features from your IoT device" needs to have "defending the class action lawsuit" in the budget summary.
Not to mention a line item in that budget to cover cleaning up the mess after hackers take them down hard as payback for their shitty attitude.
I wouldn't be sorry to see that happen, as long as none of the folks who got stuck with Logitech paperweights gets hurt in the process. I've been anti-Logitech since one of their mouse driver disks installed spyware on my computer many, many years ago. I don't forgive that kind of thing, and I sincerely hope that everyone who's been burned by them follows suit.
In an ideal world the end-user wouldn't use the back button from navigating in a web-application; but you can't easily prevent them.
Sure you can - just not the first time. Put your own nav buttons in your UI, and warn about using the browser's Back button. If they hit the latter and lose a half-hour's worth of whatever they're doing, then the next time they'll heed the directions. Don't break my experience because some people won't follow instructions.
BTW, over the years I've experienced MANY warnings about not using the Back button, so it's not as though I just pulled the idea out of my ass.
Or those who aren't web developers don't know the internals well enough to make an informed opinion.
Car analogy here. If automakers suddenly swapped the brake and the gas, or made the power switch on your radio change the station instead, (but only sometimes), 'because internals' - would you just accept that, or would you tell them to sod off and restore them to the behaviour you've come to expect? I use the Web a lot - I'm technical, but I don't 'know the internals' of the Web or of browsers. I don't need to, because I've used them for long enough that I know the conventions and understand the behaviour. And I'm pretty confident that there is NO good reason to be dicking with the Back button's traditional functionality. If you need custom Back button functionality, add a button to your UI - don't make the one in my browser do unexpected things.
And then in that case, you take control of the back button so it doesn't break the experience.
No, in that case you provide a clearly marked Back button or link as part of YOUR interface. If necessary, you add a brief explanation as to why YOUR back button is better in the current context than the browser's Back button. Don't be messing with MY interface - Home, Forward, Back, and Stop buttons. When you screw with those, you've 'broken the experience' by definition, you've created non-standard behaviour, and you've pissed me off to the extent that your site is on my shitlist and I won't be visiting it again.
Microsoft stomped on so many competitors that I cannot feel sorry for them.
You are TOTALLY missing the point. This isn't about feeling sorry for one grasping, domineering, monopoly-seeking corporate behemoth or another. It's about preventing ANY of them from controlling the web and/or the Internet.
... factual statements from some conservative populists (e.g., Ann Coulter)...
Ann Coulter made factual statements in public? I'd like to see the video. How big an ocean of lies and strategically convenient omissions were those little factual statements floating in?
However was this discovered? Who actually uses Bing? I'll bet even Microsoft employees use Google when they can get away with it. I hate Google as a company, and I often use other search engines, but I don't think I've used Bing more than three or four times, ever.
Oh crap - I just realized how Linux-centric I've become. I totally forgot about IE and Edge and default search engines until just now. Never mind...
It's the other other whitemeat. And I want to eat what I be.
I suspect you're trolling, but you raise an interesting point. First, what you're talking about might well be the core of a 'slippery slope' argument that religious leaders could make against lab-grown meat. Second, human cannibalism is about as much of a taboo as pedophilia; I foresee the kind of response to lab-grown 'long pig' that we've already had toward small sex dolls made to look like children. But as with the sex dolls, you just know that at some point somebody will culture human muscle tissue for human consumption, and there will be a market for it.
Those are pretty much my sentiments on the matter. I would add that cultured meat will probably result in a huge reduction in greenhouse gases. Not only because there won't be huge herds of cattle farting methane, but also because transporting lab-grown meat will probably be much more fuel-efficient. Not to mention the decrease in deforestation rates when cattle farms are no longer required.
I'm also guessing that vat-grown meat won't be a vector for prion diseases. Escherichia coli and salmonella outbreaks will probably be drastically reduced. And there might be a chance to eat 'fortified' meat, making my veg-deficient diet less of a liability. So yes, by all means, bring on the artificial meat. I see a lot of benefits in it, and very few drawbacks.
Why not discuss real problems instead of spending time discussing how the invisible master in the sky may think about artificial meat?
More to the point, why did editors and moderators feel this qualifies as "news for nerds" or "stuff that matters"? Oh yeah, that's no longer on Slashdot's banner. Still, why would people who are nominally scientifically minded and technologically sophisticated care about kashruth, halal, and the like?
Then again, given the extent to which science and technology have been impeded through the ages by superstition and religious dogma, perhaps this discussion DOES belong here. Then again, (again), perhaps it's good to have some countervailing force in society to check the (sometimes heedless and dangerous) headlong rush of scientific and technological advancement.
Slashdot - the place where I can argue with myself in public and not be bothered by the police or the psychiatrists...
Isn't the nature of the screen time tantamount? If the kid spends his screen time reading books, watching lectures, and discussing thought provoking content, isn't that obviously going to have a very different effect compared to scrolling through instagram all day?
Ultimately, from the social point of view, I'm not sure this matters. Yes, the question needs to be answered for the science to be complete. But let's not pretend that if we find out the content IS the culprit, we'll be able to put the toothpaste back into the tube. Kids will probably keep on spending large amounts of time consuming games, TV, movies, and social media on their devices, regardless of the cognitive effects. It will be very difficult to reverse this trend - people are addicted to their devices, and advertisers definitely don't want the population-at-large spending less time drinking the corporate Kool-Aid.
I believe it's possible to develop a set of basic ideals that we can all agree on
Really? Been binge-watching Hallmark Christmas movies, have you?
There are huge, powerful actors all over the world stage whose express plans for the Web are all about putting themselves at an advantage while putting those they consider their enemies / opponents / marks at a disadvantage. How the hell are they going to agree on 'basic ideals' when their fondest wishes are to subjugate and/or annihilate each other? Can you really see the Chinese government and the American government agreeing on any 'basic ideals' beyond those that give them more control over their respective populations?
You say "If we want a web that works for us, we must work for the web’s future." I say "If we want a web that works for us, we must work to curb corporate power and arrogance, and we must bring our own governments to heel by making them fear us, instead of us fearing them". Web woes are merely a symptom - it's the disease we need to be fighting.
I'm a Canadian, and I'm sick and tired of my government rolling over and being America's bitch. First the recent 'NAFTA' re-negotiations, and now this. Sure, Huawei probably bakes report-to-Chinese-goverment functionality into everything they make. And sure, America, and everyone else, has a right to be pissed off. But this arrest comes dangerously close to being an act of war - the US should never have done it, and my government sure as fuck should never have let it happen on Canadian soil. It's necessary to take China's plans for world domination seriously, and to make plans to counter them. But being irresponsible butthurt fucktards isn't the way to go about it.
I try and stay away from the so-called "smart" replies. It feels insincere to have an algorithm write my response for me.
I automatically and effortlessly stay away from "smart" replies. I simply don't, and won't, use Gmail. I encourage everybody to follow suit. It's cheap to buy your own domain and set up your own email address.
Do you really feel you 'need' all that fancy integration that Gmail supplies? Then by all means, keep feeding your addiction and selling off bits of your soul to the Big G. Just keep in mind that in the future you may not be able to turn off the 'features' that filter everything you read and write through an advertising company's soulless algorithms. When that happens, you'll be living in Stoogeville, whether you like it or not. Is that really what you want?
detect and highlight pedestrians wearing "exceptional" outfits
If the 'highlighting' included displaying a photo or video of the person wearing that outfit, wouldn't that be unauthorized for-profit use of that person's image?
... individuals flagged by the system will be offered interventions, such as counseling, to avert potential criminal behavior.
How long before 'offered' morphs into 'required to undergo'? When that happens - and it will, sooner or later - then authorities will have a convenient, streamlined mechanism for punishing people whose actions they merely dislike. Peaceful demonstrators - along with anybody else who is publicly critical of those in power - can expect to be forced into a 're-education' program that will waste their time, harm their reputations, and discourage them from speaking out.
This whole scheme sounds like a roundabout way of doing what the Chinese government is doing openly with their appalling and disgusting 'social credit' regime. The world is becoming a very, very scary place.
well, they have it down to some number that they think makes it a science. If it was really a science, the banks wouldn't have a bailout due to poor risk management
The problem wasn't with the science, it was with the banks, which blatantly ignored the science and lent money to lots of people who were demonstrably poor credit risks. It's even likely that a lot of those people didn't know they were poor credit risks - they weren't financially clued in, and assumed that if the banks lent them money then said banks thought the borrowers would be able to pay it back. Many of the borrowers who brought on the crisis weren't your typical deadbeats - they got in over their heads by listening to poor advice from banksters who were only to happy to take short term gain at the expense of imposing long term pain on the entire country.
We've already seen what happens when credit scores and the like are ignored and money is just lent out to anyone regardless of their ability to ever pay it back... just because "it's the right thing to do."
Nope. Banks lent money to people they shouldn't have in order to resell those loans to other banks as AAA first class debts. It was a scam run by thieves that we are all still paying for. Well, everyone except the bankers are still paying for it.
IIRC, banks didn't merely lend money to such people, they actively encouraged them to borrow. Weren't there even incentives for bank personnel to lend as much as possible?
Slashdot Mirror
Most people think that using YouTube costs them nothing. Because YouTube was first to the party, and because they offered a treasure trove for 'free', many people adopted it very quickly, and there was virtually no opportunity for competition to develop before the monopoly was established.
I think ANY monopoly is bad - but this kind of monopoly is really insidious, because it's hard to fight. People pay for it with intangibles - namely their privacy and their consumption of advertising - so they don't think they're paying for it at all. That means that most folks never even think of YT as a monopoly. And many of those who DO think of it, don't see it as harmful, because after all, 'nobody who uses it is paying for it'. But there's a huge opportunity for more variety, innovation, flexibility, specialization, accountability, resilience - the list goes on and on - that's not being realized because there's no competition to spur it on.
Funny how I don't seem have any of these installed, or in my library. Maybe minimal app selection hygiene is important if one cares about privacy?
Agreed. I'm very careful about what apps I install, plus, (as you mentioned above) My phone is rooted, and I have AFWall installed. I also turn off both data and WiFi unless I'm explicitly using them.
Having said that, we shouldn't have to jump through hoops like this to guard our privacy. Privacy should be a basic right, and it should be the default state of all our devices, OS's, and applications / programs. Privacy should NOT be the exclusive province of a) the rich and b) vigilant, technically informed people like us. As at least one other poster has said, corporate privacy violations ought to be against the law, and penalties ought to be severe - TOS be damned. That privacy invasion is not just the norm, but a common business model, is proof of how far civilization has declined. What we now call democracy is simply a bread-and-circuses cover story for the corporatocracy that in fact prevails everywhere.
Somebody downmodded you and I just spent all my mod points, so I'm quoting your post here because I think it's something more people need to consider.
Yesterday, we learned that China will be publicly shaming j-walkers using facial recognition. NPR asked if this was the beginning of an era where no transgression against the law would go unnoticed and unpunished. Now we see a country with a huge citizenry demanding access to (effectively) all personal information without protection of privacy. This is one of today's announcements in an unending chain of events ratcheting up tyranny around the globe.
What made, and to the extent we still have it, Makes America Great, is and always has been a promise of true liberty and freedom, however well fulfilled, to be your own person, to think your own private thoughts, to fulfill your own dreams, to seek happiness. This dream brings people to our nation who are beaten on suspicion of thinking thoughts deemed improper. When America champions this idea around the world, it gives ALL people (who can hear it) hope that one day they will live in a place that allows them to express themselves personally as they really are.
Every time I read about technology enabling oppression, suppression, tyranny, and conformity .. a forced way to think, with tools to root out all transgressions to the prescribed ways, as this policy in India does - I am fearful for the future of liberty, and even just democracy.
We should be looking at these actions as examples of what NOT to do.. and yet they are increasingly harbingers of what our leadership WILL do here in America. We watch what happens abroad with horror, and then watch while people embrace and defend these horrors at home. I am baffled.
Troll On! my people.
On the other hand, a "secure", cloud based backup/restore service that leaves no trace on a "rental" laptop except the latest blank OS, would seem to be a great investment opportunity.
"Citizen, you are under arrest for the crime of encryption. Your ISP detected the transfer of encrypted files passing through your Internet connection on three separate occasions last month. Kneel and put your hands behind your back, please."
If you think this won't happen - well, I think you're naive, but I sincerely hope you're right. Personally, I think we'll see it sooner rather than later, even in what we (sometimes ironically) call the free world.
Yes, participating in active wars that do not help is bad just as leaving a power vacuum for ISIS to fill is bad.
But don't you think ISIS was formed largely as a response to American imperialism? At the very least ISIS received a lot of support from locals whom the US had pissed of with their meddling. The US helped create ISIS by sticking their nose in the Middle East's business, then effectively handed power over to ISIS by bailing out when the cost became too high and the war they were waging became too unpopular back home. A "mistake"? Well, I might concede that point, if the US military presence in the Middle East wasn't ultimately motivated, not by human rights and dignity, but by corporate profits. Can't classify that as a mistake though - it's simply hubristic, psychopathic, imperialistic greed.
^ Absolutely right on - I'd mod you up if I hadn't already commented.
Every development plan that consists of "we're talking away features from your IoT device" needs to have "defending the class action lawsuit" in the budget summary.
Not to mention a line item in that budget to cover cleaning up the mess after hackers take them down hard as payback for their shitty attitude.
I wouldn't be sorry to see that happen, as long as none of the folks who got stuck with Logitech paperweights gets hurt in the process. I've been anti-Logitech since one of their mouse driver disks installed spyware on my computer many, many years ago. I don't forgive that kind of thing, and I sincerely hope that everyone who's been burned by them follows suit.
In an ideal world the end-user wouldn't use the back button from navigating in a web-application; but you can't easily prevent them.
Sure you can - just not the first time. Put your own nav buttons in your UI, and warn about using the browser's Back button. If they hit the latter and lose a half-hour's worth of whatever they're doing, then the next time they'll heed the directions. Don't break my experience because some people won't follow instructions.
BTW, over the years I've experienced MANY warnings about not using the Back button, so it's not as though I just pulled the idea out of my ass.
Or those who aren't web developers don't know the internals well enough to make an informed opinion.
Car analogy here. If automakers suddenly swapped the brake and the gas, or made the power switch on your radio change the station instead, (but only sometimes), 'because internals' - would you just accept that, or would you tell them to sod off and restore them to the behaviour you've come to expect? I use the Web a lot - I'm technical, but I don't 'know the internals' of the Web or of browsers. I don't need to, because I've used them for long enough that I know the conventions and understand the behaviour. And I'm pretty confident that there is NO good reason to be dicking with the Back button's traditional functionality. If you need custom Back button functionality, add a button to your UI - don't make the one in my browser do unexpected things.
And then in that case, you take control of the back button so it doesn't break the experience.
No, in that case you provide a clearly marked Back button or link as part of YOUR interface. If necessary, you add a brief explanation as to why YOUR back button is better in the current context than the browser's Back button. Don't be messing with MY interface - Home, Forward, Back, and Stop buttons. When you screw with those, you've 'broken the experience' by definition, you've created non-standard behaviour, and you've pissed me off to the extent that your site is on my shitlist and I won't be visiting it again.
There is only one problem with your claim. The idea that anyone has "handed the internet over to Google" is preposterous.
"Handed it over" or "stood watching and did nothing while they rolled it up and took it". To-MAY-to, To-MAH-to.
Microsoft stomped on so many competitors that I cannot feel sorry for them.
You are TOTALLY missing the point. This isn't about feeling sorry for one grasping, domineering, monopoly-seeking corporate behemoth or another. It's about preventing ANY of them from controlling the web and/or the Internet.
... factual statements from some conservative populists (e.g., Ann Coulter) ...
Ann Coulter made factual statements in public? I'd like to see the video. How big an ocean of lies and strategically convenient omissions were those little factual statements floating in?
However was this discovered? Who actually uses Bing? I'll bet even Microsoft employees use Google when they can get away with it. I hate Google as a company, and I often use other search engines, but I don't think I've used Bing more than three or four times, ever.
Oh crap - I just realized how Linux-centric I've become. I totally forgot about IE and Edge and default search engines until just now. Never mind...
It's the other other whitemeat. And I want to eat what I be.
I suspect you're trolling, but you raise an interesting point. First, what you're talking about might well be the core of a 'slippery slope' argument that religious leaders could make against lab-grown meat. Second, human cannibalism is about as much of a taboo as pedophilia; I foresee the kind of response to lab-grown 'long pig' that we've already had toward small sex dolls made to look like children. But as with the sex dolls, you just know that at some point somebody will culture human muscle tissue for human consumption, and there will be a market for it.
Those are pretty much my sentiments on the matter. I would add that cultured meat will probably result in a huge reduction in greenhouse gases. Not only because there won't be huge herds of cattle farting methane, but also because transporting lab-grown meat will probably be much more fuel-efficient. Not to mention the decrease in deforestation rates when cattle farms are no longer required.
I'm also guessing that vat-grown meat won't be a vector for prion diseases. Escherichia coli and salmonella outbreaks will probably be drastically reduced. And there might be a chance to eat 'fortified' meat, making my veg-deficient diet less of a liability. So yes, by all means, bring on the artificial meat. I see a lot of benefits in it, and very few drawbacks.
Why not discuss real problems instead of spending time discussing how the invisible master in the sky may think about artificial meat?
More to the point, why did editors and moderators feel this qualifies as "news for nerds" or "stuff that matters"? Oh yeah, that's no longer on Slashdot's banner. Still, why would people who are nominally scientifically minded and technologically sophisticated care about kashruth, halal, and the like?
Then again, given the extent to which science and technology have been impeded through the ages by superstition and religious dogma, perhaps this discussion DOES belong here. Then again, (again), perhaps it's good to have some countervailing force in society to check the (sometimes heedless and dangerous) headlong rush of scientific and technological advancement.
Slashdot - the place where I can argue with myself in public and not be bothered by the police or the psychiatrists...
Isn't the nature of the screen time tantamount? If the kid spends his screen time reading books, watching lectures, and discussing thought provoking content, isn't that obviously going to have a very different effect compared to scrolling through instagram all day?
Ultimately, from the social point of view, I'm not sure this matters. Yes, the question needs to be answered for the science to be complete. But let's not pretend that if we find out the content IS the culprit, we'll be able to put the toothpaste back into the tube. Kids will probably keep on spending large amounts of time consuming games, TV, movies, and social media on their devices, regardless of the cognitive effects. It will be very difficult to reverse this trend - people are addicted to their devices, and advertisers definitely don't want the population-at-large spending less time drinking the corporate Kool-Aid.
I believe it's possible to develop a set of basic ideals that we can all agree on
Really? Been binge-watching Hallmark Christmas movies, have you?
There are huge, powerful actors all over the world stage whose express plans for the Web are all about putting themselves at an advantage while putting those they consider their enemies / opponents / marks at a disadvantage. How the hell are they going to agree on 'basic ideals' when their fondest wishes are to subjugate and/or annihilate each other? Can you really see the Chinese government and the American government agreeing on any 'basic ideals' beyond those that give them more control over their respective populations?
You say "If we want a web that works for us, we must work for the web’s future." I say "If we want a web that works for us, we must work to curb corporate power and arrogance, and we must bring our own governments to heel by making them fear us, instead of us fearing them". Web woes are merely a symptom - it's the disease we need to be fighting.
I'm a Canadian, and I'm sick and tired of my government rolling over and being America's bitch. First the recent 'NAFTA' re-negotiations, and now this. Sure, Huawei probably bakes report-to-Chinese-goverment functionality into everything they make. And sure, America, and everyone else, has a right to be pissed off. But this arrest comes dangerously close to being an act of war - the US should never have done it, and my government sure as fuck should never have let it happen on Canadian soil. It's necessary to take China's plans for world domination seriously, and to make plans to counter them. But being irresponsible butthurt fucktards isn't the way to go about it.
I try and stay away from the so-called "smart" replies. It feels insincere to have an algorithm write my response for me.
I automatically and effortlessly stay away from "smart" replies. I simply don't, and won't, use Gmail. I encourage everybody to follow suit. It's cheap to buy your own domain and set up your own email address.
Do you really feel you 'need' all that fancy integration that Gmail supplies? Then by all means, keep feeding your addiction and selling off bits of your soul to the Big G. Just keep in mind that in the future you may not be able to turn off the 'features' that filter everything you read and write through an advertising company's soulless algorithms. When that happens, you'll be living in Stoogeville, whether you like it or not. Is that really what you want?
detect and highlight pedestrians wearing "exceptional" outfits
If the 'highlighting' included displaying a photo or video of the person wearing that outfit, wouldn't that be unauthorized for-profit use of that person's image?
... individuals flagged by the system will be offered interventions, such as counseling, to avert potential criminal behavior.
How long before 'offered' morphs into 'required to undergo'? When that happens - and it will, sooner or later - then authorities will have a convenient, streamlined mechanism for punishing people whose actions they merely dislike. Peaceful demonstrators - along with anybody else who is publicly critical of those in power - can expect to be forced into a 're-education' program that will waste their time, harm their reputations, and discourage them from speaking out.
This whole scheme sounds like a roundabout way of doing what the Chinese government is doing openly with their appalling and disgusting 'social credit' regime. The world is becoming a very, very scary place.
well, they have it down to some number that they think makes it a science. If it was really a science, the banks wouldn't have a bailout due to poor risk management
The problem wasn't with the science, it was with the banks, which blatantly ignored the science and lent money to lots of people who were demonstrably poor credit risks. It's even likely that a lot of those people didn't know they were poor credit risks - they weren't financially clued in, and assumed that if the banks lent them money then said banks thought the borrowers would be able to pay it back. Many of the borrowers who brought on the crisis weren't your typical deadbeats - they got in over their heads by listening to poor advice from banksters who were only to happy to take short term gain at the expense of imposing long term pain on the entire country.
We've already seen what happens when credit scores and the like are ignored and money is just lent out to anyone regardless of their ability to ever pay it back... just because "it's the right thing to do."
Nope. Banks lent money to people they shouldn't have in order to resell those loans to other banks as AAA first class debts. It was a scam run by thieves that we are all still paying for. Well, everyone except the bankers are still paying for it.
IIRC, banks didn't merely lend money to such people, they actively encouraged them to borrow. Weren't there even incentives for bank personnel to lend as much as possible?