Solution: Fine them for random stuff for a lot of money.
This isn't random stuff. Just because the US doesn't know what proper consumer protection and privacy laws are doesn't mean it isn't important.
Indeed. It's interesting that a lot of Americans respond to stories like this mostly with "zomg taxes!" It's almost as if you can't even imagine there is really an aspect of consumer protection involved. That says something about what you guys expect from government, methinks.
Conversely I think this goes some way to explaining why a lot of Europeans don't actually mind taxes, certainly not as reflexively and dogmatically as many Americans seem to oppose them: they believe that these payments, or at least a part of them, will be spent toward their wellbeing.
Clearly I'm not getting my point across adequately, my bad. The ballpark remark was about the number of people who self-identify as fundamentalist.
That the qualitative extremes of its effects are vastly different in different places and different religions is fairly obvious, which I suppose might be why I glossed over the distinction in my original post.
But in that sense, I do believe it is accurate to say the US are more like the places you might usually think of theocracies then what you might think of as your peers and allies. I am pretty sure the kind of policy we're discussing here would not even be proposed in any other "western" nation.
And this is true for the amount of state-sanctioned violence too, actually, albeit due less to religious motives and (therefore?) involving less ritualistic or ceremonial excess.
I guess it's a matter of opinion, but denying a whole generation of Texan kids a proper education seems to me to be a pretty awful thing to do. Worse than beheading women for no good reason? Of course not, and that's not what I meant. What I did mean is that the fraction of people who self-identify as fundamentalist in the USA is in the same ballpark.
In fact, IIRC, the term "fundamentalism" was coined by Christians in the US.
I am not an expert on tantalum, but others seem to be saying that there are other, morally less offensive, sources for the stuff. But even if that weren't the case, I personally don't feel that a marginal loss of luxury and convenience on the demand side of this market is too high a price to pay for fundamental improvements to people's lives on the supply side.
Everyone is free to make their own balance for such issues, of course. But for many people the balance changes when they learn of the misery that others must endure to shave 2 mils off their gadget's thickness, say, which is why I think it's a good thing we're having this discussion.
You're making an extraordinary claim there; Namely, that customers care that their data is safe.
I made no such claim, but it is obvious that some executives believe this. Certainly this one does, which is why
Farley later realized how his statement sounded, and added, "We do not track our customers in their cars without their approval or consent."
I'm not sure why you feel the need to turn this into a debate, if not for the sake of debating. I don't think we're in any significant disagreement here, just emphasizing different aspects of this story. What am I missing?
I just wanted to point out that even when they would prefer not to hand over the data -
What incentive, exactly, do you think they have for such a preference?
Well, you're answering your own question, aren't you? They believe, or at least this one guy does, they should convince their customers that this data is safe with them, in order to maximize the shareholder profits.
I don't have any illusions about their altruism, if that's what you were getting at. But given some of the stories we've seen over the last couple months, I can see why they might think it would be in their best interest to seem to care about privacy. That they really don't is both obvious and beside the point.
Um, I never said you were incorrect about that EULA. I just wanted to point out that even when they would prefer not to hand over the data -- which is what this exec is saying, whether or not their license would formally allow them to -- there are cases in which 1) they don't have a choice in the matter and 2) the rest of us can't expect to find out about it.
True, but I don't see how that is an argument against being informed about it. The quality of life we stand to lose for having suboptimal capacitors is trivial, even embarassing, compared to the potential gain in quality of life for some of the people at the other end. And my main point was, I think this labelling is a good idea because then at least we can't claim ignorance.
Tactlessly phrased or not, this AC has pretty much expressed what most of us feel - Who gives the least damn about "conflict metals" vs the price of their new tablet?
I'm not saying you're wrong -- perhaps most of us do gladly suffer other people's misery if it knocks a few bucks off our retail price.
But I wonder if this would still be true if more of us were educated about the facts on the ground. It's easy to not care about distant people whom you've never met, or just absentmindedly heard about in the news.
To some extent this strategy of simply labeling, as in differentiating regular from "conflict" or "blood" sources, sort of worked out ok for diamonds. Not completely, of course, but it absolutely helps.
Majority or not, the complacent are a huge part of the problem.
Thanks for taking the time, it is certainly a very considered and eloquent piece.
There are many countries where substance abusers are considered similar to alcoholics, which is to say as having a condition (a complex of psychological and physiological factors) which one can hope to alleviate by professional, targeted treatment -- instead of locking them up together with actual criminals (I mean the kind that leave victims).
I live in one such country, the Netherlands, and while it is of course only a single anecdotal observation, I don't believe we have a noticeably larger fraction of our population on welfare due to drug-use than the US, or any other tough-on-drugs nation I am aware of. We do however have a whole lot less people in jail, per capita.
I'm not sure how widely this fact is known, but the US rather stands out when it comes to incarceration. With 5% of the world population, it holds 25% of the world's prisoners.
You can't seriously be suggesting that the criminal proceeds of the illegal drug trade be laundered by spending it on food markets and opening a restaurant. It doesn't scale to the billions, you see.
Which is why the AC above s right: yes, supposedly bona fide banks are up to their necks in this business, and yes they get off with a slap on the wrist when this is proven in courts.
Clearly drugs can be dangerous, to users in particular. But most of the downsides for society in general that you mention seem due to the illegality of anything remotely drug related, more than it seems due to the compounds themselves. Not easy to get objectively educated about them, much less get help when problems arise as you are basically turning yourself in as a criminal.
The money currently spent on investigation and prosecution would go a long, long way toward treatment of the more tragic cases. If the war on drugs ended, and the market made legal and subject to regulation and inspection, there would be less criminal profits by the billions.
The major source of income of barbaric gangs would dry up, which murder one another in unbelievable numbers for a taste from that source -- as well as anyone else who gets in the way. You don't nearly have the worst of it within the US.
Users would likely forego the really nasty stuff like meth, for obvious reasons, if the good stuff were reliably available minus the cartel markup.
The war on drugs is more detrimental to public health and safety, in the totality of its effects, than it is beneficial, IMHO. Moreover, I believe the people responsible for sustaining this war on drugs, all the way back to Nixon when it became official, understand this too and therefore I can't believe that public health and safety is actually among their motives for not ending it.
Yes, which is why the reverse is equally true: the cartels will only exist as long as the war on drugs exists.
You've got to wonder why the folks on the right who care so deeply about individual freedom of choice and despise government intrusion in personal affairs are such big fans of the war on drugs.
If it were about protecting the people from harm (which drugs can undoubtedly do to its users) or about reducing crime, the exact opposite approach would make much more sense.
I believe there might be a hint in the fact that sentencing in cases involving cheap drugs is so much harsher than cases involving expensive drugs.
Combined with the infamous two-tier justice system, and the various ways in which ex-convicts are reduced to subhuman status well after they formally did their time, it is effectively a war on the poor, and their vote.
A trap.. Well I totally fell for it! I still don't really understand, but that's probably because I tend to prefer discussions with folks who don't agree with me. I'm guessing I'm not the first who misunderstood your sig, though, but glad that it's not the slavery bit that makes you admire the guy.
Well, okay, to each his own. I just remembered the name vaguely from a history lesson, and I can't really comment on how tangential the slavery issue was for this Booth character. Wikipedia does say this in the first paragraph:
He was also a Confederate sympathizer, vehement in his denunciation of Lincoln, and strongly opposed the abolition of slavery in the United States.
Either way, still seems a bit odd to me that someone would decide whether or not anyone is worth conversing with on any topic based on just this one snippet of ancient history. Maybe that's just me though.
Rhetorical question? As is obvious from all the "of course it was" answers like yours.
About your.sig, do you mean John Wilkes Booth? If so, well then you won't care what I have to say since I am not a big fan of slavery. If not, I am probably not the first to be confused.
I think you will find lots of European countries are currently governed by rightwing coalitions (relative to the local spectrum, of course). Your observation that the continent as a whole is "socialist" is understandable, inasmuch as the US is from our point of view considerably to the right. And in the US it seems that left == socialism, which I suppose is an unfortunate remnant of the cold war (unfortunate because it blurs the distinction between quite different schools of thought on the left).
So while I agree that, on average, most European parties are to the left of what you have in the US, I don't think it's fair to say the spectrum is narrower. That's just very unlikely given the number of parties. In fact the extremes on the right are almost as rightwing as the GOP (you know, roughly estimating an average of their positions) but the extremes on the left don't really compare to anything in the US, as far as I can tell. The Dems would, by my reckoning, considered a classical rightwing party here in Europe (what we call "liberal" but that word doesn't mean the same here as it does in the US).
Slashdot Mirror
Solution: Fine them for random stuff for a lot of money.
This isn't random stuff.
Just because the US doesn't know what proper consumer protection and privacy laws are doesn't mean it isn't important.
Indeed. It's interesting that a lot of Americans respond to stories like this mostly with "zomg taxes!" It's almost as if you can't even imagine there is really an aspect of consumer protection involved. That says something about what you guys expect from government, methinks.
Conversely I think this goes some way to explaining why a lot of Europeans don't actually mind taxes, certainly not as reflexively and dogmatically as many Americans seem to oppose them: they believe that these payments, or at least a part of them, will be spent toward their wellbeing.
Clearly I'm not getting my point across adequately, my bad. The ballpark remark was about the number of people who self-identify as fundamentalist.
That the qualitative extremes of its effects are vastly different in different places and different religions is fairly obvious, which I suppose might be why I glossed over the distinction in my original post.
But in that sense, I do believe it is accurate to say the US are more like the places you might usually think of theocracies then what you might think of as your peers and allies. I am pretty sure the kind of policy we're discussing here would not even be proposed in any other "western" nation.
And this is true for the amount of state-sanctioned violence too, actually, albeit due less to religious motives and (therefore?) involving less ritualistic or ceremonial excess.
I guess it's a matter of opinion, but denying a whole generation of Texan kids a proper education seems to me to be a pretty awful thing to do. Worse than beheading women for no good reason? Of course not, and that's not what I meant. What I did mean is that the fraction of people who self-identify as fundamentalist in the USA is in the same ballpark.
In fact, IIRC, the term "fundamentalism" was coined by Christians in the US.
I don't believe that is exclusively an American problem.
Hate to break it to you, but when it comes to religious extremism the USA is right up there with Iran and Saudi Arabia.
So Feinstein
urged senators to move swiftly to create "strong, binding enforceable privacy policies that govern drone operations before the technology is upon us.
This is such undiluted hypocrisy, given her reaction to the Snowden saga. It would be funny, if it was not so very sad.
I am not an expert on tantalum, but others seem to be saying that there are other, morally less offensive, sources for the stuff. But even if that weren't the case, I personally don't feel that a marginal loss of luxury and convenience on the demand side of this market is too high a price to pay for fundamental improvements to people's lives on the supply side.
Everyone is free to make their own balance for such issues, of course. But for many people the balance changes when they learn of the misery that others must endure to shave 2 mils off their gadget's thickness, say, which is why I think it's a good thing we're having this discussion.
You're making an extraordinary claim there; Namely, that customers care that their data is safe.
I made no such claim, but it is obvious that some executives believe this. Certainly this one does, which is why
Farley later realized how his statement sounded, and added, "We do not track our customers in their cars without their approval or consent."
I'm not sure why you feel the need to turn this into a debate, if not for the sake of debating. I don't think we're in any significant disagreement here, just emphasizing different aspects of this story. What am I missing?
I just wanted to point out that even when they would prefer not to hand over the data -
What incentive, exactly, do you think they have for such a preference?
Well, you're answering your own question, aren't you? They believe, or at least this one guy does, they should convince their customers that this data is safe with them, in order to maximize the shareholder profits.
I don't have any illusions about their altruism, if that's what you were getting at. But given some of the stories we've seen over the last couple months, I can see why they might think it would be in their best interest to seem to care about privacy. That they really don't is both obvious and beside the point.
Um, I never said you were incorrect about that EULA. I just wanted to point out that even when they would prefer not to hand over the data -- which is what this exec is saying, whether or not their license would formally allow them to -- there are cases in which 1) they don't have a choice in the matter and 2) the rest of us can't expect to find out about it.
True, but I don't see how that is an argument against being informed about it. The quality of life we stand to lose for having suboptimal capacitors is trivial, even embarassing, compared to the potential gain in quality of life for some of the people at the other end. And my main point was, I think this labelling is a good idea because then at least we can't claim ignorance.
By the way, we don't supply that data to anyone,' he told attendees.
Well, until they show up with an NSL, in which case we'll supply the data forthwith. But don't worry, we'll still have to maintain we really don't.
I guess I might have meant "indifferent" rather than "complacent". Oh well, who gives a fsck.
Tactlessly phrased or not, this AC has pretty much expressed what most of us feel - Who gives the least damn about "conflict metals" vs the price of their new tablet?
I'm not saying you're wrong -- perhaps most of us do gladly suffer other people's misery if it knocks a few bucks off our retail price.
But I wonder if this would still be true if more of us were educated about the facts on the ground. It's easy to not care about distant people whom you've never met, or just absentmindedly heard about in the news.
To some extent this strategy of simply labeling, as in differentiating regular from "conflict" or "blood" sources, sort of worked out ok for diamonds. Not completely, of course, but it absolutely helps.
Majority or not, the complacent are a huge part of the problem.
Thanks for taking the time, it is certainly a very considered and eloquent piece.
There are many countries where substance abusers are considered similar to alcoholics, which is to say as having a condition (a complex of psychological and physiological factors) which one can hope to alleviate by professional, targeted treatment -- instead of locking them up together with actual criminals (I mean the kind that leave victims).
I live in one such country, the Netherlands, and while it is of course only a single anecdotal observation, I don't believe we have a noticeably larger fraction of our population on welfare due to drug-use than the US, or any other tough-on-drugs nation I am aware of. We do however have a whole lot less people in jail, per capita.
I'm not sure how widely this fact is known, but the US rather stands out when it comes to incarceration. With 5% of the world population, it holds 25% of the world's prisoners.
You can't seriously be suggesting that the criminal proceeds of the illegal drug trade be laundered by spending it on food markets and opening a restaurant. It doesn't scale to the billions, you see.
Which is why the AC above s right: yes, supposedly bona fide banks are up to their necks in this business, and yes they get off with a slap on the wrist when this is proven in courts.
See this article for a pretty shocking example.
Clearly drugs can be dangerous, to users in particular. But most of the downsides for society in general that you mention seem due to the illegality of anything remotely drug related, more than it seems due to the compounds themselves. Not easy to get objectively educated about them, much less get help when problems arise as you are basically turning yourself in as a criminal.
The money currently spent on investigation and prosecution would go a long, long way toward treatment of the more tragic cases. If the war on drugs ended, and the market made legal and subject to regulation and inspection, there would be less criminal profits by the billions.
The major source of income of barbaric gangs would dry up, which murder one another in unbelievable numbers for a taste from that source -- as well as anyone else who gets in the way. You don't nearly have the worst of it within the US.
Users would likely forego the really nasty stuff like meth, for obvious reasons, if the good stuff were reliably available minus the cartel markup.
The war on drugs is more detrimental to public health and safety, in the totality of its effects, than it is beneficial, IMHO. Moreover, I believe the people responsible for sustaining this war on drugs, all the way back to Nixon when it became official, understand this too and therefore I can't believe that public health and safety is actually among their motives for not ending it.
Yes, which is why the reverse is equally true: the cartels will only exist as long as the war on drugs exists.
You've got to wonder why the folks on the right who care so deeply about individual freedom of choice and despise government intrusion in personal affairs are such big fans of the war on drugs.
If it were about protecting the people from harm (which drugs can undoubtedly do to its users) or about reducing crime, the exact opposite approach would make much more sense.
I believe there might be a hint in the fact that sentencing in cases involving cheap drugs is so much harsher than cases involving expensive drugs.
Combined with the infamous two-tier justice system, and the various ways in which ex-convicts are reduced to subhuman status well after they formally did their time, it is effectively a war on the poor, and their vote.
A trap.. Well I totally fell for it! I still don't really understand, but that's probably because I tend to prefer discussions with folks who don't agree with me. I'm guessing I'm not the first who misunderstood your sig, though, but glad that it's not the slavery bit that makes you admire the guy.
Well, okay, to each his own. I just remembered the name vaguely from a history lesson, and I can't really comment on how tangential the slavery issue was for this Booth character. Wikipedia does say this in the first paragraph:
He was also a Confederate sympathizer, vehement in his denunciation of Lincoln, and strongly opposed the abolition of slavery in the United States.
source
Either way, still seems a bit odd to me that someone would decide whether or not anyone is worth conversing with on any topic based on just this one snippet of ancient history. Maybe that's just me though.
Rhetorical question? As is obvious from all the "of course it was" answers like yours.
About your .sig, do you mean John Wilkes Booth? If so, well then you won't care what I have to say since I am not a big fan of slavery. If not, I am probably not the first to be confused.
That sounds like a more effective strategy, thanks. I will look into it just as soon as the effects of your previous suggestion wear off.
Glad to hear you've formulated a plan. Cheers!
Thanks, I did not know that. Must be because I've only ever heard it referred to as the "porn filter".
Yes. Next question?
What are we -- well, the Brits in this case -- going to do to prevent that?
I think you will find lots of European countries are currently governed by rightwing coalitions (relative to the local spectrum, of course). Your observation that the continent as a whole is "socialist" is understandable, inasmuch as the US is from our point of view considerably to the right. And in the US it seems that left == socialism, which I suppose is an unfortunate remnant of the cold war (unfortunate because it blurs the distinction between quite different schools of thought on the left).
So while I agree that, on average, most European parties are to the left of what you have in the US, I don't think it's fair to say the spectrum is narrower. That's just very unlikely given the number of parties. In fact the extremes on the right are almost as rightwing as the GOP (you know, roughly estimating an average of their positions) but the extremes on the left don't really compare to anything in the US, as far as I can tell. The Dems would, by my reckoning, considered a classical rightwing party here in Europe (what we call "liberal" but that word doesn't mean the same here as it does in the US).