I know because I still remember a time when there were women programmers around who started out on keypunch machines.
Picture yourself spending all day typing COBOL programs into a keypunch machine. Back in the 60s and 70s that's pretty much tantamount to picturing yourself as a woman. Don't you think you'd figure that programming thing out, particularly if you were a smart girl?
Another thing you don't remember, there was a time when being able to type carried a professional stigma. Men didn't type. If you were a woman applying for a job you'd automatically be given a typing test. This was true as late as the 70s, when my wife (a physics undergrad student) was looking for summer jobs in science. She had to pass a typing test, but ended up writing Fortran programs which helped design what became the Chandra X-Ray observatory.
The remarkable thing about people is how flexible our behavior is. That's the product of our massive human brain. Indistinguishable pints of bean soup generate both Shaker barn raisings and witch hunts; soup kitchens and genocide; puritanism and porn addiction, Shakespeare and pop music.
The potential for all that is there so it's meaningless to hold up just one possible result of many as "human nature". Human nature is contradictory.
One possible of social media might be a kind of mass symposium in which user minds are expanded; views of the world made more cosmopolitan; assumptions challenged. It's possible for humans to build communities like that. The problem is that it's not profitable. Time you spend on a site reflecting on what you find there is not time spent in behaviors that can be measured and aggregated into an "engagement metric" justifying a higher advertising fee.
So despite what it could be, what social media actually is is a kind of operant conditioning machine that trains you to be a conformist asshole. It rewards you for expressing conventional ideas in provocative ways because that's what produces large volumes of valuable responses.
Yes, when you focus on what you intend to happen, issues seem so clear, don't they? But all this lack of responsiveness to your demands arises from attempts to contain potential unintended consequences.
I have a pet peeve, which is people who rank "crash" or "hang" bugs at the apex of the failure scale, above data corruption and faulty outputs. Think of an automated trading system that enters an abnormal state and starts generating random buy and sell orders for example. Or a system which is supposed to authorize access sensitive data. This is why operating systems are designed to crash when unexpected states are encountered. It's also why they're designed to restrict or alter powerful operations like unmounting a drive.
Now I'm with you -- a system should be responsive to what the operator demands, even if it is a potentially bad idea. I think computers (smartphones especially) should have genuine power buttons that cut off the power supply from the system. But just because getting the computer to do what I *intend* is simpler doesn't mean that the operation itself is simple; the operator has to be prepared for the complex consequences of his action.
Which illustrates why "solidarity" was a principle of the labor movement, back when there was one in this country. It was also the name of the labor union in Poland that broke the power of the Communist Party.
That is how do you deal with the fact you're too politically insignificant and an indivdidual to do anything about being screwed. Get together with enough other insignificant people that you're not insignificant. It's mind boggling to me that people react with stories of people being treated like shit by claiming they get treated even shittier, as if that were something to be proud of.
Probably because building a railroad is uneconomical for the quantity of coal they're planning to move. Not because the *track* is expensive, but obtaining the land for 50 km of railroad could be pretty expensive in some places compared to building what is in effect a very *tiny* bulk carrier that operates on the existing river channels.
Also because the operation of this particular ship is a step toward gaining the experience they need to build more capable vessels. State supported Chinese industries often take a longer term view of projects like this than western pure private enterprises would.
Well the point of kite sails and Flettner Rotors isn't to replace traditional propulsion, but to harness free assist to traditional propulsion to reduce fuel consumption -- physically savings of 15-20% seem feasible.
The problem is that there isn't a lot of practical experience with such systems, and fuel prices have been too low for private companies to gamble on unproven tech.
Well, I'm old enough to have met a number of these women, so I can clear a few things up.
First of all, in the very earliest electronic computers there wasn't really such a strong division between operating a computer and programming it. You had to rewire the computers for each new problem. Second, there wasn't always such a strong division between operations and programming even in stored program computers; that division was sharper in business data processing than it was in scientific and technical computing. Third, yes, there were lots and lots of women who absolutely were what we'd consider "programmers" today.
You have to understand a few things. First, computers really took off in WW2, and a shortage of men on the homefront opened up a lot of jobs for women. I knew a woman (passed away now) who got a degree in math from an Ivy League university; her expected career path was marriage, but instead she went to work programming on a number of early computers, from Harvard's Mark 1 (1944) through MIT's Whirlwind (early to mid 50s). However interesting these jobs were, they were always viewed as temporary. At first it was only until the soldier came back from the war, and then she was expected to marry at any time and retire. Since the pay was low and there were no other jobs for math geek women other than school teacher, that's what she ended up doing.
I remember as late as the late 70s there were still many data processing departments with almost entirely female staff and a male supervisor (i.e., no career advancement path). In the early 80s my wife was a member of the first class in her graduate school to be half female; yet the data processing department was staffed with young women who were expected to marry and retire. In addition to operations they did many of the programming tasks you'd give to a student these days, since back then even graduate students wouldn't have had much computer experience). The faculty called the information processing staff -- and I am NOT making this up -- "data dollies".
There was another path to programming that would be surprising to younger people. Most men before 1980 didn't know how to operate a keyboard. Rather than *learn* how, it was customary to hand off handwritten programs to a low-paid typist or (in the case of punch cards) a keypuncher, who was invariably a woman. Naturally the clever one figured this programming thing out, and in the 80s it was still common to meet women who'd learned programming this way. Their role in computing was largely as cheap temporary labor, but by then some of them were starting to be viewed as career women.
What you say is absolutely true, but changing cultural norms also play a role in the "epidemic" behavior we're seeing.
I'm a horology geek, so I recently pulled up the movie Thunderball on Netflix to check out the exact details of the famous (among watch geeks) "Bond strap". Rather than search through the movie I decided to simply watch the whole thing. Now I grew up in the 60s, and I've seen this movie several times, but it's been maybe 30 years since the last time. Watching this time, all I could think was, "holy cow, Bond is rape-y."
The thing is it wasn't so long ago that unchaperoned young women were tacitly assumed to be looking for or at least open to sex. That assumption was never so strict here in the US as in places like Italy, which is why so many American women travelling there were surprised to be mobbed on the street by grabbing men. But even here every woman was taught by her mother never to be alone with a man, and if she did she had to be prepared to slap him, which was usually effective but sometimes a dangerous escalation.
The reason that Bond's behavior when he forces himself on his physiotherapist wasn't immediately perceived by audiences as reprehensible was because as a woman in a job that sometimes required working with men she'd have been perceived as fair game for aggressive sexual overtures when she was alone with one.
That doesn't work when half the women in the workforce are women. If every occasion a man and a woman had to work together was sexually charged it'd be chaos. So the norms (which were never very kind to working women) had to change. The thing is with change is that we're all in different places in that change depending on how old we are, where we live, and the kinds of organizations we've worked for.
In a sense there is no such thing as a "natural disaster" -- natural disasters are always the interaction of natural forces with human development. If there's an avalanche in an uninhabited mountain valley, it's just something that happens, it's not a disater.
And there's no doubt that as population and development increases, our exposure to natural events increases. That said, it's extremely important to note that technology is a powerful counterbalancing force to that exposure. Take the familiar Saffir-Simpson scale for hurricanes; it is defined in terms of the degree of damage to *typical* houses of 1971. The 130-156 range for Category 4 was chosen because it causes catastrophic damage to a well built house of 1971. The eyewall of Irma passed over Cudjoe Key as a Cat 4; I have relative with a house there and it suffered literally *no* damage because it was built after 2000. Older houses suffered catastrophic damage.
The same goes for casualties. When the Hurrricane of '38 made landfall at 2PM on Long Island, people were out going about their business because nobody knew it was coming. Forecasters suspected Hurricane Sandy was going to hit New York eight days in advance, and were confident enough to put the world out four days in advance.
So it's a complicated situation. We're presenting an ever larger target to "natural" disasters, but a much tougher and agile target.
The news keeps coming because news keeps happening. It may *feel* like the same news over and over to you, but the magnitude, speed, and precise distribution of change are all open scientific questions, and having precise answers to those questions is extremely valuable. These are things a scientifically literate populace needs to continue to be aware of.
Can you, as an isolated individual, stop the tide of change or mitigate the cost to society? No. But that's begging the question: you're not an isolated individual, you're a citizen. And as a group, an informed citizenry is extremely powerful, both in the sum of its individual actions (e.g. conservation), and its influence on public policy and business practice.
Can you, as an isolated individual, mitigate the impact of climate change on yourself? Absolutely. You say "moving" as if it were some kind of ridiculous idea, but if you are in a floodplain moving a few hundred yards as the crow flies could make a huge difference -- or if not, you can take steps to mitigate the impact of increased flooding on your property. You can review your investments to determine your financial exposure to change. You can steer your kids towards education and careers that will enable them to benefit from the adaptations society will have to make to climate change, rather than ones where they'll be vulnerable.
You are not helpless. But there are those who want you to feel helpless, because then you won't use the power you do have.
The purpose is to determine what is likely to happen and how fast; not to make you feel bad. Doom and gloom is just one of many responses you can choose to the information.
but if the projections hold up, there's no physical way that we can end up avoiding the consequences
Correct. But it is definitely feasible to prepare ourselves for consequences, and it might even be possible to slow the rate at which they arrive. Those things are a very big deal.
You seem to be arguing we don't need to know how big or fast change is coming; if that's our play, then we have large, expensive, and disruptive attempts at last-minute adaptation in store for us. We will get blindsided by each manifestation of change as if it came out of the blue. That means we'll throw a lot of money at futile responses to things we could have prepared for, e.g. multiple rebuilding of properties in floodplains as if what the risk maps say are "100 year floods" still only come every 100 years.
Knowing how fast and how large change is coming, we can take steps to preserve things; jobs, industries, wealth, our ways of life. Pretending that nothing is going on will only make preserving those things prohibitively expensive for most of us.
Remember "peace with honor" and Kissinger's secret Vietnam peace plan? Of course not. You obviously aren't old enough to remember Nixon.
The anti-war stuff didn't empower Nixon, they constrained him to do things in secret like bomb Cambodia. No doubt anti-war protests inflamed his base to the point where they'd approve of that, but Nixon had to keep it secret because he was expanding the war at a time he was forced to tell the public he was scaling it back.
I said I was a non-absolutist, didn't I? This necessarily means being willing to draw a line between cases where there is not a great deal of difference.
I don't necessarily draw a *single* line. I think it's probably better to have several, non-overlapping. Plus you have different lines for people playing different roles (e.g. the police, vs. an advertising manager deciding where to spend his dollars).
I do not favor banning ISIS propaganda because it is propaganda per se. However insofar as it commits a crime (e.g. constitutes what a reasonable third party would consider a threat; is part of a conspiracy that commits actual crimes like murder) it can be criminalized, which is not necessarily the same thing as banning it (e.g. third parties could still distribute for study).
It's a common play for leaders to develop parallel, privately controlled security and even military apparatuses where institutional or national loyalties may outweigh personal loyalty to the leader (Hitler's Waffen-SS), or where legalities restrain the leader prompting him to find ways to exercise power covertly and without restriction (Nixon's Plumbers).
Well, the concept of a "state within a state" or a "military-industrial complex" didn't originate with the conspiracy theorists, they just picked it up and applied it selectively to state officials they don't agree with.
Apply logic and you'll see your objection is meaningless. Let "B" be free speech absolutism, "C" be anything that follows from that, and "A" be your justification for believing in free speech absolutism. A->B and B->C means A->C; however not(A->B) and B->C does not mean not (A->C).
In other words free speech absolutism is not logically necessary to make any argument that follows from free speech absolutism, unless you take free speech absolutism to be axiomatic (e.g. allow A to be null). Absolutism is a logical over-constraint and probably overly broad; however it may have value as a heuristic. When in doubt suspect speech restrictions, but allow they might be reasonable in certain circumstances. That does not necessarily alter your convictions in any specific case.
Personally, I don't like to associate myself with absolutists because they usually don't understand things like privacy intrusion and libel.
As for free speech being an ideology, I have no objection to you calling it that; it has no bearing on whether it is correct, or whether people who consider themselves as subscribing to it actually believe the same things (they don't).
As for the Supreme Court of Canada; their job is to interpret Canadian law, and Canadian law is neither here nor there with respect to the question I asked. Does anyone *here* really believe that the readers of the Daily Stormer will become less radicalized as a result of that site going dark?
And if they did upload all that data, who would *analyze* it? Data collection is pointless in itself, it's the analytical products that you want. The cost of *manually* going through that data would astronomical for the value obtained. They'd have to have centralized computers comb through that uploaded data to find whatever it is they were looking for.
Now if the thing sitting in your kitchen or TV room actually had a computer inside it that could listen to and classify speech, you'd have a genuine cause for concern [note generous use of sarcasm and ironic understatement].
There's no doubt these things exist to spy on you, but even knowledge about you is just a means to the end; nobody really cares that much about you. The vendors' goal is to shape your behavior -- specifically your purchasing behavior. But once that capability is widely enough accepted and deployed it could easily be re-purposed to control other kinds of behaviors.
What Amazon and Google are building is the most powerful and intrusive general purpose network for the monitoring and control of human behavior ever conceived. It doesn't really matter that that's not what their intention is, once the network is sufficiently ubiquitous there will be reasons to use it for other things, reasons that some people will find compelling. That may come in the form of a legally enforceable government demand in the wake of a moral panic over drugs or terrorism. Or it might be hacking by (heretofore) non-state actors. The network will be there, all that is waiting is the will and means to exploit it.
Slashdot Mirror
I know because I still remember a time when there were women programmers around who started out on keypunch machines.
Picture yourself spending all day typing COBOL programs into a keypunch machine. Back in the 60s and 70s that's pretty much tantamount to picturing yourself as a woman. Don't you think you'd figure that programming thing out, particularly if you were a smart girl?
Another thing you don't remember, there was a time when being able to type carried a professional stigma. Men didn't type. If you were a woman applying for a job you'd automatically be given a typing test. This was true as late as the 70s, when my wife (a physics undergrad student) was looking for summer jobs in science. She had to pass a typing test, but ended up writing Fortran programs which helped design what became the Chandra X-Ray observatory.
The remarkable thing about people is how flexible our behavior is. That's the product of our massive human brain. Indistinguishable pints of bean soup generate both Shaker barn raisings and witch hunts; soup kitchens and genocide; puritanism and porn addiction, Shakespeare and pop music.
The potential for all that is there so it's meaningless to hold up just one possible result of many as "human nature". Human nature is contradictory.
One possible of social media might be a kind of mass symposium in which user minds are expanded; views of the world made more cosmopolitan; assumptions challenged. It's possible for humans to build communities like that. The problem is that it's not profitable. Time you spend on a site reflecting on what you find there is not time spent in behaviors that can be measured and aggregated into an "engagement metric" justifying a higher advertising fee.
So despite what it could be, what social media actually is is a kind of operant conditioning machine that trains you to be a conformist asshole. It rewards you for expressing conventional ideas in provocative ways because that's what produces large volumes of valuable responses.
Yes, when you focus on what you intend to happen, issues seem so clear, don't they? But all this lack of responsiveness to your demands arises from attempts to contain potential unintended consequences.
I have a pet peeve, which is people who rank "crash" or "hang" bugs at the apex of the failure scale, above data corruption and faulty outputs. Think of an automated trading system that enters an abnormal state and starts generating random buy and sell orders for example. Or a system which is supposed to authorize access sensitive data. This is why operating systems are designed to crash when unexpected states are encountered. It's also why they're designed to restrict or alter powerful operations like unmounting a drive.
Now I'm with you -- a system should be responsive to what the operator demands, even if it is a potentially bad idea. I think computers (smartphones especially) should have genuine power buttons that cut off the power supply from the system. But just because getting the computer to do what I *intend* is simpler doesn't mean that the operation itself is simple; the operator has to be prepared for the complex consequences of his action.
Which illustrates why "solidarity" was a principle of the labor movement, back when there was one in this country. It was also the name of the labor union in Poland that broke the power of the Communist Party.
That is how do you deal with the fact you're too politically insignificant and an indivdidual to do anything about being screwed. Get together with enough other insignificant people that you're not insignificant. It's mind boggling to me that people react with stories of people being treated like shit by claiming they get treated even shittier, as if that were something to be proud of.
And when it's you're turn, everyone will return the favor to you.
Took several years off because one of my kids was sick. Right decision, but it killed my career.
Try being 50. They won't hire you even if you're willing to work for what somebody with no experience is willing to take.
Probably because building a railroad is uneconomical for the quantity of coal they're planning to move. Not because the *track* is expensive, but obtaining the land for 50 km of railroad could be pretty expensive in some places compared to building what is in effect a very *tiny* bulk carrier that operates on the existing river channels.
Also because the operation of this particular ship is a step toward gaining the experience they need to build more capable vessels. State supported Chinese industries often take a longer term view of projects like this than western pure private enterprises would.
Well the point of kite sails and Flettner Rotors isn't to replace traditional propulsion, but to harness free assist to traditional propulsion to reduce fuel consumption -- physically savings of 15-20% seem feasible.
The problem is that there isn't a lot of practical experience with such systems, and fuel prices have been too low for private companies to gamble on unproven tech.
Assuming "comic con" is trademarkable and not generic, like "tomato soup".
Or to be entirely fair, men.
Well, I'm old enough to have met a number of these women, so I can clear a few things up.
First of all, in the very earliest electronic computers there wasn't really such a strong division between operating a computer and programming it. You had to rewire the computers for each new problem. Second, there wasn't always such a strong division between operations and programming even in stored program computers; that division was sharper in business data processing than it was in scientific and technical computing. Third, yes, there were lots and lots of women who absolutely were what we'd consider "programmers" today.
You have to understand a few things. First, computers really took off in WW2, and a shortage of men on the homefront opened up a lot of jobs for women. I knew a woman (passed away now) who got a degree in math from an Ivy League university; her expected career path was marriage, but instead she went to work programming on a number of early computers, from Harvard's Mark 1 (1944) through MIT's Whirlwind (early to mid 50s). However interesting these jobs were, they were always viewed as temporary. At first it was only until the soldier came back from the war, and then she was expected to marry at any time and retire. Since the pay was low and there were no other jobs for math geek women other than school teacher, that's what she ended up doing.
I remember as late as the late 70s there were still many data processing departments with almost entirely female staff and a male supervisor (i.e., no career advancement path). In the early 80s my wife was a member of the first class in her graduate school to be half female; yet the data processing department was staffed with young women who were expected to marry and retire. In addition to operations they did many of the programming tasks you'd give to a student these days, since back then even graduate students wouldn't have had much computer experience). The faculty called the information processing staff -- and I am NOT making this up -- "data dollies".
There was another path to programming that would be surprising to younger people. Most men before 1980 didn't know how to operate a keyboard. Rather than *learn* how, it was customary to hand off handwritten programs to a low-paid typist or (in the case of punch cards) a keypuncher, who was invariably a woman. Naturally the clever one figured this programming thing out, and in the 80s it was still common to meet women who'd learned programming this way. Their role in computing was largely as cheap temporary labor, but by then some of them were starting to be viewed as career women.
What you say is absolutely true, but changing cultural norms also play a role in the "epidemic" behavior we're seeing.
I'm a horology geek, so I recently pulled up the movie Thunderball on Netflix to check out the exact details of the famous (among watch geeks) "Bond strap". Rather than search through the movie I decided to simply watch the whole thing. Now I grew up in the 60s, and I've seen this movie several times, but it's been maybe 30 years since the last time. Watching this time, all I could think was, "holy cow, Bond is rape-y."
The thing is it wasn't so long ago that unchaperoned young women were tacitly assumed to be looking for or at least open to sex. That assumption was never so strict here in the US as in places like Italy, which is why so many American women travelling there were surprised to be mobbed on the street by grabbing men. But even here every woman was taught by her mother never to be alone with a man, and if she did she had to be prepared to slap him, which was usually effective but sometimes a dangerous escalation.
The reason that Bond's behavior when he forces himself on his physiotherapist wasn't immediately perceived by audiences as reprehensible was because as a woman in a job that sometimes required working with men she'd have been perceived as fair game for aggressive sexual overtures when she was alone with one.
That doesn't work when half the women in the workforce are women. If every occasion a man and a woman had to work together was sexually charged it'd be chaos. So the norms (which were never very kind to working women) had to change. The thing is with change is that we're all in different places in that change depending on how old we are, where we live, and the kinds of organizations we've worked for.
It's nice we have caps to go with our breeches now.
If they used NiCd a Model S would weigh 8 tonnes.
On the plus side, it could qualify as a moving Superfund site.
In a sense there is no such thing as a "natural disaster" -- natural disasters are always the interaction of natural forces with human development. If there's an avalanche in an uninhabited mountain valley, it's just something that happens, it's not a disater.
And there's no doubt that as population and development increases, our exposure to natural events increases. That said, it's extremely important to note that technology is a powerful counterbalancing force to that exposure. Take the familiar Saffir-Simpson scale for hurricanes; it is defined in terms of the degree of damage to *typical* houses of 1971. The 130-156 range for Category 4 was chosen because it causes catastrophic damage to a well built house of 1971. The eyewall of Irma passed over Cudjoe Key as a Cat 4; I have relative with a house there and it suffered literally *no* damage because it was built after 2000. Older houses suffered catastrophic damage.
The same goes for casualties. When the Hurrricane of '38 made landfall at 2PM on Long Island, people were out going about their business because nobody knew it was coming. Forecasters suspected Hurricane Sandy was going to hit New York eight days in advance, and were confident enough to put the world out four days in advance.
So it's a complicated situation. We're presenting an ever larger target to "natural" disasters, but a much tougher and agile target.
The news keeps coming because news keeps happening. It may *feel* like the same news over and over to you, but the magnitude, speed, and precise distribution of change are all open scientific questions, and having precise answers to those questions is extremely valuable. These are things a scientifically literate populace needs to continue to be aware of.
Can you, as an isolated individual, stop the tide of change or mitigate the cost to society? No. But that's begging the question: you're not an isolated individual, you're a citizen. And as a group, an informed citizenry is extremely powerful, both in the sum of its individual actions (e.g. conservation), and its influence on public policy and business practice.
Can you, as an isolated individual, mitigate the impact of climate change on yourself? Absolutely. You say "moving" as if it were some kind of ridiculous idea, but if you are in a floodplain moving a few hundred yards as the crow flies could make a huge difference -- or if not, you can take steps to mitigate the impact of increased flooding on your property. You can review your investments to determine your financial exposure to change. You can steer your kids towards education and careers that will enable them to benefit from the adaptations society will have to make to climate change, rather than ones where they'll be vulnerable.
You are not helpless. But there are those who want you to feel helpless, because then you won't use the power you do have.
The purpose is to determine what is likely to happen and how fast; not to make you feel bad. Doom and gloom is just one of many responses you can choose to the information.
but if the projections hold up, there's no physical way that we can end up avoiding the consequences
Correct. But it is definitely feasible to prepare ourselves for consequences, and it might even be possible to slow the rate at which they arrive. Those things are a very big deal.
You seem to be arguing we don't need to know how big or fast change is coming; if that's our play, then we have large, expensive, and disruptive attempts at last-minute adaptation in store for us. We will get blindsided by each manifestation of change as if it came out of the blue. That means we'll throw a lot of money at futile responses to things we could have prepared for, e.g. multiple rebuilding of properties in floodplains as if what the risk maps say are "100 year floods" still only come every 100 years.
Knowing how fast and how large change is coming, we can take steps to preserve things; jobs, industries, wealth, our ways of life. Pretending that nothing is going on will only make preserving those things prohibitively expensive for most of us.
Remember "peace with honor" and Kissinger's secret Vietnam peace plan? Of course not. You obviously aren't old enough to remember Nixon.
The anti-war stuff didn't empower Nixon, they constrained him to do things in secret like bomb Cambodia. No doubt anti-war protests inflamed his base to the point where they'd approve of that, but Nixon had to keep it secret because he was expanding the war at a time he was forced to tell the public he was scaling it back.
I said I was a non-absolutist, didn't I? This necessarily means being willing to draw a line between cases where there is not a great deal of difference.
I don't necessarily draw a *single* line. I think it's probably better to have several, non-overlapping. Plus you have different lines for people playing different roles (e.g. the police, vs. an advertising manager deciding where to spend his dollars).
I do not favor banning ISIS propaganda because it is propaganda per se. However insofar as it commits a crime (e.g. constitutes what a reasonable third party would consider a threat; is part of a conspiracy that commits actual crimes like murder) it can be criminalized, which is not necessarily the same thing as banning it (e.g. third parties could still distribute for study).
It's a common play for leaders to develop parallel, privately controlled security and even military apparatuses where institutional or national loyalties may outweigh personal loyalty to the leader (Hitler's Waffen-SS), or where legalities restrain the leader prompting him to find ways to exercise power covertly and without restriction (Nixon's Plumbers).
It's not dumb, it's treacherous.
Well, the concept of a "state within a state" or a "military-industrial complex" didn't originate with the conspiracy theorists, they just picked it up and applied it selectively to state officials they don't agree with.
What you are looking at is the emergence of a politically dominant hereditary aristocracy.
Apply logic and you'll see your objection is meaningless. Let "B" be free speech absolutism, "C" be anything that follows from that, and "A" be your justification for believing in free speech absolutism. A->B and B->C means A->C; however not(A->B) and B->C does not mean not (A->C).
In other words free speech absolutism is not logically necessary to make any argument that follows from free speech absolutism, unless you take free speech absolutism to be axiomatic (e.g. allow A to be null). Absolutism is a logical over-constraint and probably overly broad; however it may have value as a heuristic. When in doubt suspect speech restrictions, but allow they might be reasonable in certain circumstances. That does not necessarily alter your convictions in any specific case.
Personally, I don't like to associate myself with absolutists because they usually don't understand things like privacy intrusion and libel.
As for free speech being an ideology, I have no objection to you calling it that; it has no bearing on whether it is correct, or whether people who consider themselves as subscribing to it actually believe the same things (they don't).
As for the Supreme Court of Canada; their job is to interpret Canadian law, and Canadian law is neither here nor there with respect to the question I asked. Does anyone *here* really believe that the readers of the Daily Stormer will become less radicalized as a result of that site going dark?
And if they did upload all that data, who would *analyze* it? Data collection is pointless in itself, it's the analytical products that you want. The cost of *manually* going through that data would astronomical for the value obtained. They'd have to have centralized computers comb through that uploaded data to find whatever it is they were looking for.
Now if the thing sitting in your kitchen or TV room actually had a computer inside it that could listen to and classify speech, you'd have a genuine cause for concern [note generous use of sarcasm and ironic understatement].
There's no doubt these things exist to spy on you, but even knowledge about you is just a means to the end; nobody really cares that much about you. The vendors' goal is to shape your behavior -- specifically your purchasing behavior. But once that capability is widely enough accepted and deployed it could easily be re-purposed to control other kinds of behaviors.
What Amazon and Google are building is the most powerful and intrusive general purpose network for the monitoring and control of human behavior ever conceived. It doesn't really matter that that's not what their intention is, once the network is sufficiently ubiquitous there will be reasons to use it for other things, reasons that some people will find compelling. That may come in the form of a legally enforceable government demand in the wake of a moral panic over drugs or terrorism. Or it might be hacking by (heretofore) non-state actors. The network will be there, all that is waiting is the will and means to exploit it.