I raise your left wing social science site and see you the California Legislative Analyst Office which claims a loss of 2.5 % of its population in the last 15 years, and growing.
https://lao.ca.gov/laoecontax/article/detail/265
As a matter of fact on line the only source I can find for your contention is the site you mention. Every other source agress California has a negative population growth, even with undocumented counted.
You contention just doesn't seem reasonable. In the case of housing single individuals, particularly one who are secually active often let boyfriends, girlfriends, etc. crash at their house for long periods of time. This would indicate they are defrauding the government if they are receiving money because they are living alone. How often would an unauthorized crasher have to stay at a place before the receiver would have to inform the government and stop taking benefits?
This is a typical problem in the U.S. where someone in public housing lets a boyfriend live there in violation of the requirements.
Certainly if the check being done is comparing addresses in different databases then this would seem to indicate long term defrauding of the system. Can addresses in different databases be incorrect? Surely which is why you do followup when you find them.
I for one have no problem with helping the poor put a roof over their head. Most of the time the best way to do that is to make them self sufficient. For that percentage which will never be self-sufficient social safety nets are important. Bad actors will always try to game the system and it is imperative that they are found and prosecuted, because every cent you waste on them means that some person who needs help might not get it.
If you don't think Google is working on a way to milk useful information from the petabytes of visual information it stores every day then I think you are very naive.
Lets pick out some easy stuff first. How about cataloging any obvious name brands in any of your pictures? It sure would give Google a good idea of which products to pitch to you. How about geolocating? You have a lot of pictures from the beach? Which ones? Does that mean you're open for pitches for vacations in the Bahamas? Hawaii? Carolina's Outer Bank? How about facial recognition? Do you know anybody Google might like more information on? How about anyone the FBI, NSA or some other three letter agency might like to know you know? We won't even talk about why you have one picture with the woman next store and your wife, but she seems to have lots of pictures of the two of you together without your wife.
Really? lawfareblog? Glen Greenwald, not exactly a conservative, has called lawfareblog a tool "serving, venerating and justifying the acts of those in power", in this case the Democrats. It's highly regarded by left wing pundits.
So basically the best you've got is a dossier put together by a British intelligence mercenary for opposition research paid for by the DNC.
The truth is that none of the dossier has been proven true, despite the claims of many left wing media "news" services. Despite the point made that politically motivated "top intelligence officials" pushed it, when Comey was under oath he refused to state the dossier was confirmed. Because it wasn't. What we have here is a bunch of deep state actors who would love for it to be true so that their illegal actions to hamstring the duly elected president of the United States during the period before his inauguration and after could be justified. Former UK ambassador to Russia has stated the dossier is inconsistent with British Intelligence's information. Steele made it up. The DNC paid for it. Bad actors in the intelligence and justice bureaucracy used it to try to illegally overturn the election.
You act like that's Netflix fault. It's not like they went to Disney and said "Go start your own streaming service. We don't want your content." It's not even like Netflix was too cheap to pay for it. They paid $100 million to keep streaming Friends, which while not my cup of tea is hugely popular among certain groups.
Netflix doesn't have first run movies because the studios won't give Netflix streaming rights over them. In most cases those movies aren't available for streaming anywhere but Amazon, where you'll pay a price equivalent to buying the DVD for them, and have no guarantee they won't evaporate eventually.
Exactly. The CTO of a company which keeps a database of individual's private information "Should have known" they were incompetent to fulfill that job with their present knowledge. They "should have known" they needed to hire people competent in the field of security to ensure that data, which contain data harmful to individuals if released, was secure.
The fact that they did nothing makes them culpable for the harm that resulted.
I think you vastly underrate the greed of most people. For the kind of money most C level executives make there would be no problem filling positions at most businesses. They would either work harder to protect people's data or be sneakier in hiding data loss.
Actually in real life the threat of jail time for bad actors in a field doesn't typically deter practitioners. Every medical doctor or engineer knows that should they cause a death through malfeasance that real jail time is on the table. That doesn't stop people from entering those fields. What it does do is make practitioners much more careful about taking shortcuts just to save money.
This is the mindset of people who rail about corporations being people. (They're not they are legal persons, not the same thing.) The fact that a contract with a corporation is legal (which is why they have to be legal persons) does nothing to shield corporate actors (corporate executives or other decision makers) from legal action for breaking the law. What shields them from breaking the law is the government's lack of will in prosecuting them for their illegal actions. A regulatory agency's fine of a company does not prevent officers of that company from being arrested and prosecuted if they break the law. Only the governments unwillingness to do so shields them.
Rotten Tomatoes doesn't work like that. They only count reviews that get more than 2 1/2 stars. So audience reviews basically mean that x % of the people who give a review gave it more than 2 1/2 stars. So for something like Doctor Who 2018 if it has a 26% review 26% of the people who reviewed it gave it greater than a 2 1/2 star review. The rest not. No bell curve there.
Killing people is almost never a military objective. It is a consequence of enemy forces trying to prevent you from achieving you military objective.
No military in the history of the world has done as much to prevent collateral damage (i.e. the killing of innocent bystanders) as the U.S. military. That is just a fact.
Do innocent bystanders sometimes die? Yes, but it's not for want of trying to ensure they are not.
It's also true that war is a political decision. If you don't like the political decisions being made become more involved in politics. Conversely you don't always control when an adversary pushes you into war.
You can disagree about U.S. involvement in Iraq, but you shouldn't pretend Iraq wasn't killing U.S. citizens and supporting terrorism. (And no not being involved in 9/11 doesn't mean Iraq wasn't supporting terrorism. Certainly the Kurds are not unhappy that the U.S. became involved in Iraq.)
I want U.S. soldiers to have the very best equipment available. Because they are real people who I don't want to die because someone who lives under the protective umbrella they provide is living in a fantasy which maintains that disarming the U.S. will make things safer.
85% of all content is garbage. 85% of all books are garbage. 85% of all TV is garbage. 85% of all movies are garbage. YouTube is not better or worse in that regard than any other content source.
But since YouTube has over 7 billion videos that means ther are 1.4 billion videos that are not garbage. Certainly compared the professional media that's way more decent stuff than they put out.
As I understand it this was pushed by a YouTuber who had been demonetized because his content was creepy. His response was to use the following he had to complain to the advertisers about pedophiles commenting in certain videos in an effort to hurt YouTube and successful creators who had not been demonetized.
Not that there wasn't a problem, but YouTube was aware of it and trying to address it without forcing creators to have to moderate content. The stream of complaints caused advertisers to pull their ads causing YouTube to this knee jerk reaction.
Facebook lost young users long before the CA incident. i work with teens and Facebook stopped being used by them in the '00s. Facebook is used by their parents and they don't want anything to do with it.
This has already been weaponized. This was all started by a failed Youtuber (who as I understand it) was posting creepy videos. When his content was demonetized he solicited a sizable number of people to contact advertisers and point out to them a large number of comments which supported pedophilia.
He strangely knew where they were.
YouTube had been actively working to trace down the commentors and either ban them or at least ban the comments. However when this dude and his friends started contacting advertisers YouTube needed a quick response to keep them from running and so they went to this.
Yeah but Sargon is a prime example of the Streisand effect. I never heard of him until Patreon pulled him and then pushed Paypal to try to shut down SubscibeStar
SubscribeStar survived. At the same time while YouTube might have demonetized Sargon and he initially lost revenue, but seems to have recovered enough that he now has actually hired a couple of guys to help with his channel.
Meanwhile a legal team is working on getting the FTC to investigate what happened.
Patreon has also lost a few of it's biggest users over the banning.
People making a living as content creators on YouTube don't count on YouTube to provide an income stream. Initially they did, but demonetization showed them this was a bad idea. A lot of them moved to Patreon, until Patreon started to take sides in the cultural wars. Now many creators solicit funds directly, either via Paypal, crypocurrency or even directly via standard online credit pay processors or through merch stores. It is also possible to do inline ads, something a lot of channels do..
The problem is not a privacy problem. It is an identity problem. They are separate issues. Equifax, Target, Etc. getting compromised is a problem because it can allow someone to steal your identity. That is only a problem because it can screw up your ability to get credit, buy a house , etc. No one that I know of has ever had to pay for stuff bought with a stolen identity. If you notify a bank or credit card company your identity was stolen in the U.S. the most you can be force to pay is $50.
Most decent banks will even return money stolen from your bank account.
This can be fixed by companies not using your SSN as an ID. They don't want to do that because it increases the friction of getting credit, which costs them money. The same goes for better ID and security practices at purchase sites. They won't fix it for the same reason. Higher friction at purchase sites means fewer sales. Until they are convinced that increasing security doesn't reduce credit accounts and purchases they won't change the way they do business.
All this is very different from what Facebook and Google do with personal data. Which is to target ads or in Facebook's case sell data to allow others to target ads. Google does not sell data. Data is their Golden Goose. They sell access to their ability to target data. They sell your data they have nothing.
That's great. So you just killed Google & Facebook. While I will experience no great loss over Facebook dying what do you think will replace all of the stuff people use Google for?
Let me make it clear. No Android, which means either using a flip phone or paying Apple, and believe me if they were a monopoly we'd be paying $2000 for an iphone.
No Google Maps. Which means out of date GPS, such as the auto manufacturers support where you get to pay $150 a year to update your maps.
No gmail. which means you can go back to changing your email every time you move or change ISPs or change jobs.
No YouTube. Can we even quantify how bad it would be not to be able to just look up how to disassemble something or remove siding or install a drain trap or any of the 1000 other things people look up on YouTube to learn how to do. That doesn't even cover the array of fact based news coverage that keeps the right and the left more honest than they would be if left to their own devices. Or the free college lectures available. The documentaries, travel logs, etc. 100% better than paid media.
Translate. Hugely better than anything but an actual person who speaks the language.
I haven't even touched on search. I know some people like other engines because of privacy concerns, but let's be honest, when you are looking for something Google search is way better than any of the other engines. Ads are clearly marked and you can slip into image search, video search, book search, etc. easily.
Pass a law like that and it all goes away and no one will replace most of it. They will only replace some of it and you'll be paying out of pocket for it.
First you have to convince people to stop sharing their data. This did not start with Facebook and Google. Long before they ever came along banks and merchant associations started collecting data on people who were asking for credit. Customers wanted them to share the data, because when they went to get credit from a new store or business the only way they had to prove they were good for it was to point to the other people they did business with and say "Look I paid them back."
The local merchants associations and bank transitioned to the big credit companies and credit card companies. They only collect data on people who gave it up. Not using them is easy. Just don't ask for credit. Pay cash for everything. But people are not willing to do that. They want the convenience of credit cards and cell phones and electricity (they do a credit check on you too) and want to rent a place to live (ditto).
The benefits of letting people collect data on you are too good to pass up. Unless you are willing to live the life of Enemy of the States Brill, and have the money and technical knowledge to do so you will be in the system and open to having your privacy invaded.
In many ways privacy is a modern concept. In olden days people existed on their reputation. Most lived in a village or small town and everybody knew their business. That was why your word was important, so people knew who they could trust. Who it was safe to do business with.
Only modern people think they have a right to privacy.
I hear this all the time, but the fact is that when road conditions are bad people are told to stay off the roads and generally ignore that advice. That's why schools close on snow days and businesses delay opening when the weather is bad.
The fact is that most accidents in bad weather happen because the road conditions are too hazardous for the vehicles out on the roads. A properly programmed self-driving car will simple refuse to go out in weather that is too bad for it to safely drive in. Weather that humans should also not be driving in.
The sensor technology exists that can allow for better vision than any human. A properly programmed car will not drive faster than road conditions allow. Will that slow down traffic? Probably. It will also stop the 50 car pileups which happen way too often because people drive too fast in the fog or on the ice. It will be safer and less convenient.
We're not 1 year away from driverless cars. We're not 5 years away from them. We're not even 50 years away from them. It'll NEVER happen, as long as their are non-driverless cars (or tractors, or anything else) on the road.
Well that's the answer isn't it? And why I believe we'll have driverless vehicles on interstates first, on divided highways next and on regular streets last.
Eventually we'll find that all vehicles will be required to have a system that can talk to other vehicles. There will be a time when if your vehicle doesn't have that system you will not be allowed on the interstate. Next will be the automated system to drive on the interstate. Then the insurance companies will force everyone to have such a system to drive on the interstate.
Towns and cities will isolate certain streets and those will be where the automatic cars are. Eventually only poor sections of town will not have connected systems, and the auto manufacturers will make few cars that will operate on them.
Eventually the tractor driver will need to have a connected system if he wants to take his tractor on the road, to talk to the driverless systems.
Will this take 50 years? I doubt it. There's too much money to be made. Too big an initial killing for the insurance companies. Sure eventually they'll have to get out of the car insurance business, but by then they'll have invested all that profit somewhere else.
Judgement is the wrong term. A computer program will never develop judgement. It will always just process. That is it will select from a group of possible actions based upon the instructions that it has been given.
The real answer is that self-driving vehicles will first be deployed on the interstates, where there is a much more limited set of decisions that have to be made, because there are no bicycles, pedestrians, cross streets, etc.
Ultimately a human may have to be in the vehicle, but not alert, so you have a self-driving vehicle which can operate 24/7 with a human (Teamster Union member, of course) who can intervene if the vehicle detects a problem (like someone on the road) 5 minutes away. This will be possible because vehicles will talk to each other.
Ultimately all that has to happen is for the self-driving vehicles to be better than the average driver. Not a low bar unfortunately. If they are, then total accidents will go down and insurance companies will make more from the drivers who still drive themselves. During this transition period insurance companies will be able to keep fees at the same level while actual risk goes down. eventually they'll be out of business, because as someone said the car/software manufacturers are likely to be on the hook, but meanwhile everyone who is driving their own car still benefits from the lower total accident rate. Well they benefit in their risk of having an accident goes down. It's likely the insurance companies will fight not to have to lower rates so they can keep the profits.
Slashdot Mirror
I raise your left wing social science site and see you the California Legislative Analyst Office which claims a loss of 2.5 % of its population in the last 15 years, and growing.
https://lao.ca.gov/laoecontax/article/detail/265
As a matter of fact on line the only source I can find for your contention is the site you mention. Every other source agress California has a negative population growth, even with undocumented counted.
You contention just doesn't seem reasonable. In the case of housing single individuals, particularly one who are secually active often let boyfriends, girlfriends, etc. crash at their house for long periods of time. This would indicate they are defrauding the government if they are receiving money because they are living alone. How often would an unauthorized crasher have to stay at a place before the receiver would have to inform the government and stop taking benefits?
This is a typical problem in the U.S. where someone in public housing lets a boyfriend live there in violation of the requirements.
Certainly if the check being done is comparing addresses in different databases then this would seem to indicate long term defrauding of the system. Can addresses in different databases be incorrect? Surely which is why you do followup when you find them.
I for one have no problem with helping the poor put a roof over their head. Most of the time the best way to do that is to make them self sufficient. For that percentage which will never be self-sufficient social safety nets are important. Bad actors will always try to game the system and it is imperative that they are found and prosecuted, because every cent you waste on them means that some person who needs help might not get it.
If you don't think Google is working on a way to milk useful information from the petabytes of visual information it stores every day then I think you are very naive.
Lets pick out some easy stuff first. How about cataloging any obvious name brands in any of your pictures? It sure would give Google a good idea of which products to pitch to you. How about geolocating? You have a lot of pictures from the beach? Which ones? Does that mean you're open for pitches for vacations in the Bahamas? Hawaii? Carolina's Outer Bank? How about facial recognition? Do you know anybody Google might like more information on? How about anyone the FBI, NSA or some other three letter agency might like to know you know? We won't even talk about why you have one picture with the woman next store and your wife, but she seems to have lots of pictures of the two of you together without your wife.
You can see where this is going.
Really? lawfareblog? Glen Greenwald, not exactly a conservative, has called lawfareblog a tool "serving, venerating and justifying the acts of those in power", in this case the Democrats. It's highly regarded by left wing pundits.
So basically the best you've got is a dossier put together by a British intelligence mercenary for opposition research paid for by the DNC.
The truth is that none of the dossier has been proven true, despite the claims of many left wing media "news" services. Despite the point made that politically motivated "top intelligence officials" pushed it, when Comey was under oath he refused to state the dossier was confirmed. Because it wasn't. What we have here is a bunch of deep state actors who would love for it to be true so that their illegal actions to hamstring the duly elected president of the United States during the period before his inauguration and after could be justified. Former UK ambassador to Russia has stated the dossier is inconsistent with British Intelligence's information. Steele made it up. The DNC paid for it. Bad actors in the intelligence and justice bureaucracy used it to try to illegally overturn the election.
Oh please. 3.5 floppies were three generations in.
They were preceded by 5 in floppies and the venerable 8 in floppy.
The first personal computer I owned used casset tapes. By the time you got to 3.5 in floppies PCs already had hard drives.
You act like that's Netflix fault. It's not like they went to Disney and said "Go start your own streaming service. We don't want your content." It's not even like Netflix was too cheap to pay for it. They paid $100 million to keep streaming Friends, which while not my cup of tea is hugely popular among certain groups.
Netflix doesn't have first run movies because the studios won't give Netflix streaming rights over them. In most cases those movies aren't available for streaming anywhere but Amazon, where you'll pay a price equivalent to buying the DVD for them, and have no guarantee they won't evaporate eventually.
If you are using a legitimate account that is being paid for, with the permission of the account's owner, it can in no way be called piracy.
So if I and my son are watching Netflix through my account on my TV. Is it piracy?
How about if I and my son are watching Netflix through my account on his TV. Is it piracy?
How about if I am watching Netflix through my account on my son's tablet. Is it piracy?
If he is watching Netflix through my account on my TV is it piracy?
So if I and my son are watching Netflix on his tablet and I go to the bathroom does it become piracy?
To be fair she is a member of congress. That puts her credibility just below the media and use car salesmen.
Exactly. The CTO of a company which keeps a database of individual's private information "Should have known" they were incompetent to fulfill that job with their present knowledge. They "should have known" they needed to hire people competent in the field of security to ensure that data, which contain data harmful to individuals if released, was secure.
The fact that they did nothing makes them culpable for the harm that resulted.
I think you vastly underrate the greed of most people. For the kind of money most C level executives make there would be no problem filling positions at most businesses. They would either work harder to protect people's data or be sneakier in hiding data loss.
Actually in real life the threat of jail time for bad actors in a field doesn't typically deter practitioners. Every medical doctor or engineer knows that should they cause a death through malfeasance that real jail time is on the table. That doesn't stop people from entering those fields. What it does do is make practitioners much more careful about taking shortcuts just to save money.
This is the mindset of people who rail about corporations being people. (They're not they are legal persons, not the same thing.) The fact that a contract with a corporation is legal (which is why they have to be legal persons) does nothing to shield corporate actors (corporate executives or other decision makers) from legal action for breaking the law. What shields them from breaking the law is the government's lack of will in prosecuting them for their illegal actions. A regulatory agency's fine of a company does not prevent officers of that company from being arrested and prosecuted if they break the law. Only the governments unwillingness to do so shields them.
Rotten Tomatoes doesn't work like that. They only count reviews that get more than 2 1/2 stars. So audience reviews basically mean that x % of the people who give a review gave it more than 2 1/2 stars. So for something like Doctor Who 2018 if it has a 26% review 26% of the people who reviewed it gave it greater than a 2 1/2 star review. The rest not. No bell curve there.
Killing people is almost never a military objective. It is a consequence of enemy forces trying to prevent you from achieving you military objective.
No military in the history of the world has done as much to prevent collateral damage (i.e. the killing of innocent bystanders) as the U.S. military. That is just a fact.
Do innocent bystanders sometimes die? Yes, but it's not for want of trying to ensure they are not.
It's also true that war is a political decision. If you don't like the political decisions being made become more involved in politics. Conversely you don't always control when an adversary pushes you into war.
You can disagree about U.S. involvement in Iraq, but you shouldn't pretend Iraq wasn't killing U.S. citizens and supporting terrorism. (And no not being involved in 9/11 doesn't mean Iraq wasn't supporting terrorism. Certainly the Kurds are not unhappy that the U.S. became involved in Iraq.)
I want U.S. soldiers to have the very best equipment available. Because they are real people who I don't want to die because someone who lives under the protective umbrella they provide is living in a fantasy which maintains that disarming the U.S. will make things safer.
Nah.
85% of all content is garbage. 85% of all books are garbage. 85% of all TV is garbage. 85% of all movies are garbage. YouTube is not better or worse in that regard than any other content source.
But since YouTube has over 7 billion videos that means ther are 1.4 billion videos that are not garbage. Certainly compared the professional media that's way more decent stuff than they put out.
As I understand it this was pushed by a YouTuber who had been demonetized because his content was creepy. His response was to use the following he had to complain to the advertisers about pedophiles commenting in certain videos in an effort to hurt YouTube and successful creators who had not been demonetized.
Not that there wasn't a problem, but YouTube was aware of it and trying to address it without forcing creators to have to moderate content. The stream of complaints caused advertisers to pull their ads causing YouTube to this knee jerk reaction.
Facebook lost young users long before the CA incident. i work with teens and Facebook stopped being used by them in the '00s. Facebook is used by their parents and they don't want anything to do with it.
This has already been weaponized. This was all started by a failed Youtuber (who as I understand it) was posting creepy videos. When his content was demonetized he solicited a sizable number of people to contact advertisers and point out to them a large number of comments which supported pedophilia.
He strangely knew where they were.
YouTube had been actively working to trace down the commentors and either ban them or at least ban the comments. However when this dude and his friends started contacting advertisers YouTube needed a quick response to keep them from running and so they went to this.
So weaponization has already happened.
Yeah but Sargon is a prime example of the Streisand effect. I never heard of him until Patreon pulled him and then pushed Paypal to try to shut down SubscibeStar
SubscribeStar survived. At the same time while YouTube might have demonetized Sargon and he initially lost revenue, but seems to have recovered enough that he now has actually hired a couple of guys to help with his channel.
Meanwhile a legal team is working on getting the FTC to investigate what happened.
Patreon has also lost a few of it's biggest users over the banning.
People making a living as content creators on YouTube don't count on YouTube to provide an income stream. Initially they did, but demonetization showed them this was a bad idea. A lot of them moved to Patreon, until Patreon started to take sides in the cultural wars. Now many creators solicit funds directly, either via Paypal, crypocurrency or even directly via standard online credit pay processors or through merch stores. It is also possible to do inline ads, something a lot of channels do..
If your content is your business there are ways.
It's just silly at this point.
Everyone has been compromised.
The problem is not a privacy problem. It is an identity problem. They are separate issues. Equifax, Target, Etc. getting compromised is a problem because it can allow someone to steal your identity. That is only a problem because it can screw up your ability to get credit, buy a house , etc. No one that I know of has ever had to pay for stuff bought with a stolen identity. If you notify a bank or credit card company your identity was stolen in the U.S. the most you can be force to pay is $50.
Most decent banks will even return money stolen from your bank account.
This can be fixed by companies not using your SSN as an ID. They don't want to do that because it increases the friction of getting credit, which costs them money. The same goes for better ID and security practices at purchase sites. They won't fix it for the same reason. Higher friction at purchase sites means fewer sales. Until they are convinced that increasing security doesn't reduce credit accounts and purchases they won't change the way they do business.
All this is very different from what Facebook and Google do with personal data. Which is to target ads or in Facebook's case sell data to allow others to target ads. Google does not sell data. Data is their Golden Goose. They sell access to their ability to target data. They sell your data they have nothing.
That's great. So you just killed Google & Facebook. While I will experience no great loss over Facebook dying what do you think will replace all of the stuff people use Google for?
Let me make it clear. No Android, which means either using a flip phone or paying Apple, and believe me if they were a monopoly we'd be paying $2000 for an iphone.
No Google Maps. Which means out of date GPS, such as the auto manufacturers support where you get to pay $150 a year to update your maps.
No gmail. which means you can go back to changing your email every time you move or change ISPs or change jobs.
No YouTube. Can we even quantify how bad it would be not to be able to just look up how to disassemble something or remove siding or install a drain trap or any of the 1000 other things people look up on YouTube to learn how to do. That doesn't even cover the array of fact based news coverage that keeps the right and the left more honest than they would be if left to their own devices. Or the free college lectures available. The documentaries, travel logs, etc. 100% better than paid media.
Translate. Hugely better than anything but an actual person who speaks the language.
I haven't even touched on search. I know some people like other engines because of privacy concerns, but let's be honest, when you are looking for something Google search is way better than any of the other engines. Ads are clearly marked and you can slip into image search, video search, book search, etc. easily.
Pass a law like that and it all goes away and no one will replace most of it. They will only replace some of it and you'll be paying out of pocket for it.
First you have to convince people to stop sharing their data. This did not start with Facebook and Google. Long before they ever came along banks and merchant associations started collecting data on people who were asking for credit. Customers wanted them to share the data, because when they went to get credit from a new store or business the only way they had to prove they were good for it was to point to the other people they did business with and say "Look I paid them back."
The local merchants associations and bank transitioned to the big credit companies and credit card companies. They only collect data on people who gave it up. Not using them is easy. Just don't ask for credit. Pay cash for everything. But people are not willing to do that. They want the convenience of credit cards and cell phones and electricity (they do a credit check on you too) and want to rent a place to live (ditto).
The benefits of letting people collect data on you are too good to pass up. Unless you are willing to live the life of Enemy of the States Brill, and have the money and technical knowledge to do so you will be in the system and open to having your privacy invaded.
In many ways privacy is a modern concept. In olden days people existed on their reputation. Most lived in a village or small town and everybody knew their business. That was why your word was important, so people knew who they could trust. Who it was safe to do business with.
Only modern people think they have a right to privacy.
I hear this all the time, but the fact is that when road conditions are bad people are told to stay off the roads and generally ignore that advice. That's why schools close on snow days and businesses delay opening when the weather is bad.
The fact is that most accidents in bad weather happen because the road conditions are too hazardous for the vehicles out on the roads. A properly programmed self-driving car will simple refuse to go out in weather that is too bad for it to safely drive in. Weather that humans should also not be driving in.
The sensor technology exists that can allow for better vision than any human. A properly programmed car will not drive faster than road conditions allow. Will that slow down traffic? Probably. It will also stop the 50 car pileups which happen way too often because people drive too fast in the fog or on the ice. It will be safer and less convenient.
We're not 1 year away from driverless cars. We're not 5 years away from them. We're not even 50 years away from them. It'll NEVER happen, as long as their are non-driverless cars (or tractors, or anything else) on the road.
Well that's the answer isn't it? And why I believe we'll have driverless vehicles on interstates first, on divided highways next and on regular streets last.
Eventually we'll find that all vehicles will be required to have a system that can talk to other vehicles. There will be a time when if your vehicle doesn't have that system you will not be allowed on the interstate. Next will be the automated system to drive on the interstate. Then the insurance companies will force everyone to have such a system to drive on the interstate.
Towns and cities will isolate certain streets and those will be where the automatic cars are. Eventually only poor sections of town will not have connected systems, and the auto manufacturers will make few cars that will operate on them.
Eventually the tractor driver will need to have a connected system if he wants to take his tractor on the road, to talk to the driverless systems.
Will this take 50 years? I doubt it. There's too much money to be made. Too big an initial killing for the insurance companies. Sure eventually they'll have to get out of the car insurance business, but by then they'll have invested all that profit somewhere else.
Judgement is the wrong term. A computer program will never develop judgement. It will always just process. That is it will select from a group of possible actions based upon the instructions that it has been given.
The real answer is that self-driving vehicles will first be deployed on the interstates, where there is a much more limited set of decisions that have to be made, because there are no bicycles, pedestrians, cross streets, etc.
Ultimately a human may have to be in the vehicle, but not alert, so you have a self-driving vehicle which can operate 24/7 with a human (Teamster Union member, of course) who can intervene if the vehicle detects a problem (like someone on the road) 5 minutes away. This will be possible because vehicles will talk to each other.
Ultimately all that has to happen is for the self-driving vehicles to be better than the average driver. Not a low bar unfortunately. If they are, then total accidents will go down and insurance companies will make more from the drivers who still drive themselves. During this transition period insurance companies will be able to keep fees at the same level while actual risk goes down. eventually they'll be out of business, because as someone said the car/software manufacturers are likely to be on the hook, but meanwhile everyone who is driving their own car still benefits from the lower total accident rate. Well they benefit in their risk of having an accident goes down. It's likely the insurance companies will fight not to have to lower rates so they can keep the profits.
I'm in the U.S. and if a holiday happens on the weekend the day off is moved to Friday or Monday.
That's almost certainly the standard if any union is involved and for decent companies even without a union.