Trying to understand consumer privacy behaviors outside the prevalent social contract that the vast majority of people operate under is bound to missinterpret what is happening and why.
We live in a regulated "supermarket" economy. What surfaces on a screen is entirely analogous to what surfaces on a shelf: People check the price and make their choices based on taste, budget etc. They are not idiots, they operate under a simplifying assumption that makes life in a complex world possible.
The implicit assumption central to this way of organising the economy is that anything legally on sale is "safe". That it has been checked and approved by experts that know what they are doing and have the consumer interest as top priority.
People will not rush back home to their chemistry labs to check what is in their purchased food, whether it corresponds to the label (assuming that such a label even exists) and what might be the short or long term health effects. They dont have the knowledge, resources and time to do that for all the stuff they get exposed to.
What has drifted in the digital economy is not consumer standards, it is regulatory standards. Surfacing digital products with questionable short and long term implications for individuals and society has become a lucrative business, has captured its regulatory environment and will keep exploiting opportunities and blind spots until there is pushback.
Ultimately regulators only derive legitimacy from serving their constituencies, but that feedback loop can be very slow and it gets tangled with myriad other unrelated political issues.
"The implicit assumption central to this way of organising the economy is that anything legally on sale is "safe". That it has been checked and approved by experts that know what they are doing and have the consumer interest as top priority.
People will not rush back home to their chemistry labs to check what is in their purchased food, whether it corresponds to the label (assuming that such a label even exists) and what might be the short or long term health effects. They dont have the knowledge, resources and time to do that for all the stuff they get exposed to."
What you describe is a feature of a high-trust society, where you don't have to double-check every single transaction or interaction you enter into, but can take most statements on trust. This allows people to get on with the fundamental task at hand, rather than dealing with the overhead of checking their food in the chemistry lab, or whatever the equivalent is for the specific transaction.
I have read suggestions that this was a major contributor to the growth of the Western economies, relative to other low-trust societies. If this was the case, we are in for a bumpy ride, as we seem to be rapidly changing from a high-trust to a low-trust society.
Having worked in many low-trust countries, I very much agree with that assertion. And seeing the effects of the trust-decay in our own, and the trajectory it sets, reinforces that view.
"I have read suggestions that this was a major contributor to the growth of the Western economies, relative to other low-trust societies." I'm not sure I follow, what are other low trust societies? Otherwise I'm with you here - living in a cabin in the woods survivalist-mode does nothing to progress a society.
Societies with lots of corruption, adulteration, theft, forgery, counterfeit, etc that goes under-punished. If you are frequently burned by your transactions and interactions with business, government, etc you're going to have low trust.
> living in a cabin in the woods survivalist-mode does nothing to progress a society.
Not everyone's goal is to progress a society though. If one's goal is to live a quiet life and do what makes them happy, what's wrong with living in a cabin in the woods?
That would only be a fundamental problem if everyone owes something to society. That's a much different conversation though, whether everyone is born into a debt that must be paid back to society.
If handiwork and subsistence farming are not what makes you happy, living in a cabin in the woods will not make you happy, because when you cannot outsource them to the rest of society, nearly all your time will be spent doing those things in order to survive.
Even once these basics are sorted, you will only live happily outside society as long as you are lucky enough to stay healthy.
If handiwork and producing or finding your own food is what makes you happy, then why does it matter whether you are outsourcing to society?
The second sounds like a separate goal unto itself. There's absolutely nothing wrong with that goal, or with having multiple goals, but if you start by saying doing X makes you happy then it doesn't really make sense to say doing X won't actually make you happy because you aren't doing Y.
I think the point is more that there are a very limited number of very specific lifestyles that can exist outside of a society. If you happen to thrive in one of those lifestyles, awesome, cabin in the woods works great for you.
But you can't do that if your passion is making music, or mathematics, or computer programming, or electrical tinkering, etc. There just isn't an option to follow the vast majority of pursuits except if you also engage in society.
People don't have the physical or mental ability to live alone. Their version of "alone" is a world where there are institutions that exist to protect their property, guarantee their transactions, and where they are supplied with a massive amount of high-quality manufactured goods. Paying for them doesn't make you somehow independent of society, it's the nature of society. You're trading bits of paper with government promises printed on them.
There's a big difference in living alone versus living in a big city though. Living in a cabin in the woods, as the example here, doesn't mean alone and cut off from everyone else. It likely just means a quieter, more self sufficient life.
Presumably if one is actually living alone in the woods they wouldn't be dependent on the larger societal systems like money, security, manufactured goods, etc. How would the get the money to start with without having a job that interacts with the outside world?
> Not everyone's goal is to progress a society though.
Thank you. That was my initial thought too. Why is progress the goal? Not everything has to "progress" at all times. What progress needs to be made anyway? And towards what end? Who decides that?
There's an inherent good to stopping progress and spending some time in a cabin in the woods.
If we never stop and enjoy now, then why bother with tomorrow?
The really challenge I've had with "progress" as a goal is that it so frequently is missing the context of what we're trying to progress towards.
The idea seems to be that starting with what we have today and taking another step forward is always the right move. Never go backwards, and its okay if we don't define our goals beforehand as long as we keep moving our feet.
Yeah that's a really interesting take. To me, whether it has an end really depends on how you define progress and what the goals are.
In the common sense where progress is little more than moving our feet, there's no end unless civilization collapses.
If one goes at it from the angle of the goal bring "enough", the end really is just getting to a point of maintaining what we already have. Wanting to secure the basics like shelter and reliable access to food and water is met with much less than what we have today. Surely there's some level of convenience and enjoyment that make sense beyond just the basics, but are we not there yet? And if we are, would progress best be focused on the goal of maintaining what we have that gives the most people an enjoyable life while minimizing our impact on the rest of the environment and everything that allowed humans to be here in the first place?
The comment I was replying to was talking about the growth of the economies and society progress. It's not about owing, it's about what is happening - and I think we agree that if the goal of everybody in a society is to live a quiet life, there will be no progress. Maybe we'd even witness the contrary: a regress of said society, to the extent we can call sparse people living by themselves in the woods a "society". If that sounds negative and you feel the need to defend it, it's maybe because you actually agree it's a negative for the society. While being good for the individual, right.
> and I think we agree that if the goal of everybody in a society is to live a quiet life, there will be no progress
That's actually where it gets really interesting though. Progress isn't absolute, it's relational and requires first defining the goal. If one's goal is to live a quiet life where they minimize their dependence on others, living in a cabin in the woods and finding their solution for food and water is progress. That obviously doesn't fit for a larger society where the goal is generally increasing dependence and trust on the larger society, but neither is right or wrong.
If one's goal is to live a quiet life where they minimize their dependence on others, it is incumbent on them to figure out how to keep anybody who wants what they have from just coming in and taking it. That requires a society. Your deed to your land is civilization. Part of societal progress is making it so that deed can be trusted to keep people from just taking your cabin in the woods and throwing you out.
This has to be negotiated with the people who would want to take your cabin in the woods and throw you out.
They're having the same problems with political extremism as the US. To be clear, this is both that political figures are leaning towards the extreme ends of their ideologies, as well as a culture of dogma and isolation that pushes them and their citizens towards extremes.
Henry David Thoreau lived in a cabin for 2 years & that probably had societal impact...
string from Wiki: "Thoreau's philosophy of civil disobedience later influenced the political thoughts and actions of notable figures such as Leo Tolstoy, Mahatma Gandhi, and Martin Luther King Jr."
From what I remember, his reasons for living in the cabin are only explained at the end of the book. I wonder if people forget or are unaware of his intentions and just remember the 'dropping out of society' part.
my memory doesn't recall much beyond his long stretches of describing nature there...
but the point is: maybe going off-grid can be relevant? changes also can also occur in "small bubbles of reality" and their impact can be extensive or narrow, still, they are a change..?
...and then he came back and spread his contributions to the society, notable figures inclusive. Had he stayed in that cabin and only wrote in his diary, we'd had no idea a Thoreau ever lived. So this was not an example.
i live in a cabin in the woods, we have different lifestyles too.
im very technical, my nieghbour 'grizzly annie' is the opposite, but we trade back n forth.
Trust is an indispensable element of successful business strategy. But not all businesses are using this strategy till the end. I mean you can gain trust and sometimes use that trust to make people believe you in any cases.
> Then you go use linux and everyone copy-pastes commands other people wrote straight into the terminal.
This is exactly the same bias in action. When I started using Linux nobody was doing that, and even if somebody gave you a script, its actions were verifiable by reading the relevant man pages.
I still don't run install.sh files I didn't read or at least skimmed, for example.
Do you also audit the sources of the programs installed by that install.sh? Do you make sure the binaries and sources match? If not, why? What makes the shell script so special that it must be audited with care, but the binaries are fine?
I do not use any "install.sh" that installs freestanding binaries. All of the ones I use just sets up repositories, and I make sure that the repositories are the correct/legit ones. If I have to install a freestanding binary, I compile it from source and install.
Since all the repositories are signed there must be a big breach to compromise these packages since the infrastructure is generally distributed. Different servers, keys, etc.
> What makes the shell script so special that it must be audited with care...
Because I need to know what changes I'm incorporating into my system(s), and plan accordingly, or prevent any change which is not in line with my system administration principles.
> ...but the binaries are fine?
They are not fine, but they are signed at multiple levels and checksummed, so they are a lower risk.
Your risk model is kinda perverse. You're saying you trust package maintainers because they sign things. So if I send you a signed script that checksums itself before running will you run that without audit?
It’s trust all the way down and always has been. You just have a different idea of how you formally signal and convey trust than someone else.
I paste commands into the terminal because I can read exactly what they do and they are delivered over a connection where my user agent has verified the TLS certificate of the server. In fact I’m electing to trust directly rather than transitively the source of the software.
The only thing signed files prevents is modification in transit (and at rest on macOS/iOS and Windows, Linux doesn’t do that). Linux is ripe with time of check vs time of use race conditions.
I think I failed to make myself clear. I don't trust the package maintainers, I trust the supply chain and the process.
For example, a well maintained APT repository contains multiple levels of signatures, and these signatures are stored in a keyring. You import the keyring, and it contains public key of every package maintainer, plus the repository manager. So, package maintainers sign their packages, and repository maintainer signs the repository, plus the packages via their checksums. Packages' own signatures and own checksums provides consistency and authenticity checks, and repository maintainer's signature makes sure that nothing in the repository moves after the repository is signed and published.
So, you have to compromise at least two private keys (or two people) to compromise a repository. If you're working with a critical repository, you can use "m of n" scheme for the repository signing keys, so you need to compromise m+1 people to do something nefarious.
> So if I send you a signed script that checksums itself before running will you run that without audit?
Hard no. You don't have a verifiable chain behind that script. Even if you do, scripts are always read and examined. Period.
> I can read exactly what they do and they are delivered over a connection where my user agent has verified the TLS certificate of the server.
Yes, a TLS certificate guarantees that MITM is impossible for now. But it doesn't guarantee that server has not been compromised and the file changed at rest. We have seen that happened in the past.
> The only thing signed files prevents is modification in transit ...
No. Both RPM and APT repositories' signature chains ensure that files are not modified at rest or at transit, plus the files are put into the repositories with an approval of a real human being.
These signatures are tip of a "web of trust" iceberg, and not mere automated signatures.
Moreover, if a software doesn't inspire confidence and doesn't pass the smell test, it doesn't get installed on my system anyway, regardless of its form.
If I have to install it, I install it to an isolated VM, and destroy the VM as soon as my work is done with it.
I think the replies saying how terrible this is are missing it. The Linux community is a high-trust community and has continuously earned that trust over and over again. The times when it's been broken are so few it's newsworthy each time it happens.
Anyone who's like "well I don't copy/paste shell code into my terminal" is just virtue signaling. I'm willing to bet their editor Vim/Emacs/VSCode is overflowing with plug-ins and code written by just some guy on Github. I bet they've ran containers that are written by just some guy too.
It's a really cool feature that you can just download a random binary off Github, run it, and not really have to worry about it.
> everyone copy-pastes commands other people wrote straight into the terminal
I know a lot of people that use Linux and not many of them operate this way. Most care about their software sources. "Everyone" is certainly not the case.
And yet when I complained about `curl | sh` on HN the other day, I got ridiculed. "Everyone" is too much, but even on a purportedly "hacker" website, people find the idea of perusing a shell script before executing it preposterous.
Something that's hard to remember, but helps a little: if you get 3 people saying stupid things, that's only 3 people -- not necessarily representative of the people out there.
But `curl | sh` is no less secure. Download this file and execute it. Functionally the same outcome. Tell me how doing that is materially different than `apt get`. Both employ signing and checksums (just with different PKI). One delegates trust to a package maintainer while the other trusts the author directly. I truly don’t understand the paranoia and consider it tinfoil hat security theater.
It’s worse than that. Find a random blog that gives you shell commands that add random repositories to your apt sources.list, adds the ssl keys, and installs packages from the repo, all through a paste to the command line.
Schneier used to talk about "the Exxon Valdez of privacy", the idea that there would be a single giant spill that had significantly bad effects enough that it would force change.
That has basically not happened. It sometimes seems that the situation has got worse in terms of public debate, due to the usual bad-faith actors. For example, the TikTok discussion is not framed around privacy in general but focuses on "China bad". With the implication that an algorithmic megacorp controlling political sentiment through feeds is completely fine so long as it's Americans doing it. And the voting security discussion: there were questions about voting machines long before 2020, but partisan attacks focused on discrediting valid results.
If a major credit agency leak didn't do it, I doubt anything will... At least in terms of a large scale event. We went through the likes of melissa and "I love you" and several others around Y2K (and even that). In the end, life goes on for the most part. What people don't see, they're oblivious to and have short term memories on top.
The credit leaks weren’t used in a way that was obvious to consumers. I’m sure identity theft went up, but that’s still an abstract concern to most consumers.
I think it will have to be something large-scale and obviously concerning to consumers. Something like voice calls leaking and being used to create a mass deepfake campaign targeting consumers.
I don’t think people will care until it’s a problem on their doorstep, sending them phone calls and notifications and what not. Identity theft is too abstract, and too “something that happens to old and other people, not me”.
> a single giant spill that had significantly bad effects enough that it would force change.
That's the premise of the Brian K Vaughan/Marcos Martin comic "The Private Eye." Unfortunately, the premise is more of an aesthetic than anything else. Still, it's a beautiful aesthetic and a fun read.
Yeah keep in mind that both political parties heavily use private data farms to narrowcast campaign advertising. Facebook is just one of those. Basically there’s a private sector spying industry and the government enjoys the benefits too.
TikTok is messed up for many reasons. One being it’s a waste of everyone’s time. Two, foreign nations getting a treasure trove of video footage on a massive populace in the age of AI. This WILL lead to a faked mass-casualty event using real identities of people to cause political unrest. Just a matter of time—and data.
Going back to the article though, the social media baseline needs to be fixed as well. The OG Facebook platform was actually GOOD—lots of good-natured value in human connections. Then they started cutting in the bad shit reducing its purity.
TikTok took that to a whole new level and put in some home grown Singaporean crack. Ironically, the Chinese and Singapore have hefty penalty’s for drugs—and yet they thrust it onto the western sensibility. After all, it’s the WILD WEST.
> Ironically, the Chinese and Singapore have hefty penalty’s for drugs—and yet they thrust it onto the western sensibility. After all, it’s the WILD WEST.
Not really… per the article the baseline of privacy is being reduced. I’m illustrating a parallel with social media where the baseline good human connections is now how to make the most addictive attention-getting experience.
How is this not relevant to the base post? A shifting baseline toward the worse.
You chose an analogy close to my heart! I have managed to convince myself that most "food" in the supermarket is inedible poison!
It's exhausting and a real nuisance to my quality of life but I equally refuse to knowingly consume excess additives unless completely in a pinch.
Needless to say I'm also very suspicious of online businesses. Although I'm actually getting a bit fatigued/defeatist by privacy issues. We're all so overwhelmingly in this ship that I don't know what I really stand to gain by constantly hamstringing myself digitally...
If we wake up in the worst case scenario, I'm sure I have enough of a footprint I wouldn't be able to meaningfully hide much from a determined bad actor...
<< I don't know what I really stand to gain by constantly hamstringing myself digitally...
I hear that and I will admit that lately it does seem to get in the way a lot more often than expected ( my bank in my recent interaction removed branch connection for a specific application and moved everything to an online process, to which direct link is an ad tracker ). Still, wife now has gotten used to no ads ( almost ) anywhere and is starting to see what the benefits can be.
<< determined bad actor
Sadly, if I am targeted, there is no escape. I am privacy conscious, but I also have a family and try to live in a society in a sufficiently comfortable manner. It is a tough balancing act. In a sense, it is not that different from guerrilla warfare. There is no defense against sufficiently motivated entity that is not exhausting. My only solace is that I am a low value target so it does not seem that likely. Still, what are the odds of me pissing off someone sufficiently important? Non-zero for certain.
> I have managed to convince myself that most "food" in the supermarket is inedible poison!
> It's exhausting and a real nuisance to my quality of life but I equally refuse to knowingly consume excess additives unless completely in a pinch.
But why do you _want_ to live forever? Frozen Pizza tastes good every once in a while.
Ugh I haven't eaten one in a while but do have a soft spot for Dr Oetker pizzas.
Don't mistake me for someone who doesn't enjoy food or eating. My lifestyle is impractical and annoying but it also pushes me to do things like cook properly and I've really discovered the joy of eating high quality fresh produce.
Also my guilty pleasure is a good old fashioned beef frank and it's going to be a struggle getting one of those free of additives...
> It's exhausting and a real nuisance to my quality of life but I equally refuse to knowingly consume excess additives unless completely in a pinch.
Why not? Unless you have severe allergies the excess additives will probably do very little to your health. And the quality of life and exhaustion wins probably make it a net win for you. Is it a principled stand?
Mostly principles. I enjoy cooking a lot and I also am very strangely enthusiastic about fresh produce so the search for high quality ingredients is a bit of a hobby. But it's a damn lot harder to do in a place like Singapore where we don't really produce anything locally.
When I lived in London I quite enjoyed hunting down niche grocery stores that would serve fresh British produce
Not sure that regulatory capture explains the poor quality of digital
goods and how people value them. I think it's that cargo cults (what
we have) are antithetical to true technological societies (which is
what we say we want)
A fault I see in Bruce Schneier's article, and the general hypothesis
of "frame/baseline shifting" - it's not that people have been
conditioned or forgotten the value of privacy, but that we're looking
at the world through ever smaller lenses. The story in the article is
that science is guilty of that too. The decline has been around
education and perspective in general, not just attitudes to a small
issue like "privacy". We thought the internet would widen our
scope. It narrowed it.
In the UK we have a great travel and culture show by Romesh
Ranganathan. (I highly recommend it, so get on your VPN to watch BBC
or find it on the torrents). It will cheer you up [0]. He's a funny
guy. But also the cultural vista is breath-taking. Looking at life in
central Africa it's great to be reminded of the diversity of
humankind. Watch for the little things - like a whole bus queue of
people, none of whom are on mobile phones.
What the Internet promised - the great "conversation of mankind" -
never emerged. Instead we got cat memes and social control media that
forced people into ever smaller parochial silos. HN is no different.
Here it's cool to have a bleak outlook on humanity and technology.
"Oh it's too late... we're doomed... oh woe is me!" C'mon
hackers... what happened to the joy of shaping the world? :)
Bruce Schneier appeals to a macro systems theory metaphor, and
mentions Daniel Pauly [1]. But he neglects some of the more profound
lessons that Forrester, Meadows and actually Norbert Weiner gave us
about feedback and the empty dream of cybernetic governance. Nothing
as big as humanity will fit in bottle that small unless you're willing
to destroy it in the process. And what you're destroying is the very
innovative base that gave you the technology in the first place. This
is why they should teach history, geography and other cultures in
schools.
> We thought the internet would widen our scope. It narrowed it.
> What the Internet promised - the great "conversation of mankind" - never emerged. Instead we got cat memes and social control media that forced people into ever smaller parochial silos.
The internet economy enabled browsing on a global scale and, because no kind of agency could keep up with its development speed, pushed everything into an "on demand" culture - what evolved with it is the higher responsibility for consumers. I feel the state of economy before the internet was on a scale of "everything is possible" (in the western hemisphere at least), only to discover years later that "our greed has consequences we just couldn't see before". Our cognitive load feels higher than ever to just cover the basics of survival and not get screwed over, or screw someone else over, constantly.
> This is why they should teach history, geography and other cultures in schools.
I think system thinking should become a thing in schools early on too. Every defined system is a mere conceptual view with artificial boundaries - a system without boundaries isn't a system, but a universe. It's good to enable new resources to think about new systems, or rethink existing systems, but we also should discuss the boundaries required for its concept to make any sense. I feel that this understanding gets sometimes lost, and its naivety gets regretfully relabeled as "innovation".
In a MBA-led economy anything which doesn't create immediate monetary value gets pushed aside - humanities and education in general, for instance. And before somebody jumps: we did have innovation before this just as well.
> we also should discuss the boundaries required for its concept to
make any sense. I feel that this understanding gets sometimes lost,
and its naivety gets regretfully relabeled as "innovation".
Good observation. It gets blamed on globalism, liberalism,
post-modernism, capitalism, and a bunch of other things, but somehow
we got the wrong idea that all boundaries are bad. Boundaries must be
broken!
I think that came from the language of science and technology. We made
"Smashing barriers!" a synonym for progress. But it is a childish,
iconoclastic and directionless notion of "progress", for its own sake.
Psychologically at least, a lack of boundaries is a kind of madness,
it's disinhibited, intrusive, lacking self-control - and to the extent
there's a political theory of mind it leads to wars and internal
unrest.
We raised "connectedness" to supernatural hoodoo, but connectedness for
it's own sake is a catastrophe to systems. It violates the principles
of modularity, decoupling and appropriate cohesion.
We were vastly outnumbered and overwhelmed by sociopaths who exploited the tools to make our lives better by capturing everything of value in the market, and subsequently enshittifying it. Our cynicism has been well earned and deserved.
> The implicit assumption central to this way of organising the economy is that anything legally on sale is "safe". That it has been checked and approved by experts
This applies to certain producs only and even in the EU where these laws are more strict some products are regularly withdrawn from sale (these are mostly quality issues, not intentional actions), even as far as drugs are concerned. It's one of the reasons I tend to buy fresh products and from bio shops mostly - to increase my chances.
There are a lot of products. Mistakes are a statical certainty at this scale, and regular recalls are a sign the system is working, at least to an extent (I'd say it works quite well, safety-wise).
Interesting choice wrt. bio foods. I'm the opposite: I don't trust organic/bio food at all. There is a lot of vanity products clearly meant to pay more to make yourself feel you're choosing a healthier alternative. Plus, I trust the established industrial processes more - they're thoroughly regulated and tested. A devil I know. Bio/organic stuff, who knows what they're doing - and what poisons they're spraying on their produce, that let you keep "organic" label but are otherwise more toxic than industrial pesticides.
I like the way you put it "to increase my chances" because I've heard more than once from adepts of bio products promoting as it would be the holy grail. Bio producers can make mistakes too, they can be neglecting or even nasty too, it's just, chances are higher with them to get better quality produce. If you can afford it, that is.
All of these systems you mentioned have already failed. We are simply very slow to accept it.
Even in the (almost) mainstream media with shows like John Oliver, you can see just how deep the degradation of all our regulatory entities really is.
In today's world, almost everything we purchase is pure garbage. The food is overly processed and with excessive use of chemicals and added sugar, the furniture is from cheap material and shoddily built, the building we live in was built cutting corners and skirting laws as much as possible, the software we use is mostly garbage thrown together to "ship fast and break things", the doctors we go to are uninformed and trained to dismiss you as fast as possible, the car repair service wants to rip us off based on our lack of knowledge. I could go on forever here.
It's honestly a joke. We are all the proverbial boiling frogs and allowed everything around us to fall into ruin (and continue to do so).
This assumption you presented only works for the uninformed masses. If you investigate for 5 seconds into anything we purchase, we pierce the veil and see how it's mostly utter garbage. Most of these regulatory institutions became a facade where big corporations get a pass and we pretend they are doing a good job.
Regulators can't ever win this battle. Even if they aren't corrupt, they can't be insulated from the influence of big corporations and they are, and will always be, underfunded because regulation inevitably means less profits. We can't have that, can we?
I think it's fitting that the parent poster used supermarkets. They're a relatively recent thing and often seen as lower quality. In my country it's still relatively common for people to forage for mushrooms and berries in the forests. There's no regulatory oversight over that, but people are still fine.
Supermarkets and this kind of regulation hasn't necessarily stood the test of time. It's hard to say if it will considering how every system that gets built seems to slowly get corrupted or bent in somebody's favor.
The forests in which people are foraging for mushrooms and berries have no need to optimize for profit. The moment humans get involved in the supply chain, the more the need for some form of (idealized, for sure) oversight from agencies.
Evolution results in other incentives. Beware the assumption that nature is somehow benevolent. It can go either way.
Some mushrooms are poisonous. They evolved to protect themselves from being eaten. On the other hand, some plants evolved so their fruit will be eaten and spread their seeds.
> In today's world, almost everything we purchase is pure garbage. The food is overly processed and with excessive use of chemicals and added sugar, the furniture is from cheap material and shoddily built, the building we live in was built cutting corners ...
Everything that existed in the past is still being made and is available for purchase. You just have to pay the price. If you are a commoner with a job, your real income is a tiny fraction of what a worker was paid in the past, thanks to inflation. So mass produced garbage is what is available within your budget.
More than half of the working age population in industrialized nations do not work (including many who are employed). A good part of the population have never worked a day in their life and will grow old and die without ever having done anything useful. Everybody else has to pay for their sustenance, and one way is the general decay you see.
If a few billionaires stopped sucking up all the money, we could sustain pretty much everyone without those compromises. But that's not gonna make shareholders happy.
But I find that even expensive items are not guaranteed to be of quality. As one example, take luxury cars with defects and horrible build quality from Tesla. The other day we had a whole thread about how bad sofas are today, even the expensive ones. In the service front, I've spent crazy amounts of money on doctors out of pocket after failing to get good answers from the health insurance folks (here it's different compared to the US) and got the same type of incompetence.
Selling mediocre products/services is simply more profitable.
Even if you spend the extra money, the incentive for luxury items is many times to still sell you similarly bad products/services and pocket the difference for even more profit. It's so frustrating.
It's easy to blame billionaires or other far away people, but rotten businessmen and politicians wouldn't have floated to the top unless the underlying society wasn't also rotten. Avarice is a global and local issue, most of us have family members with this disease. Most people here on this board will succumb to the disease in time. That's why people are hesitant to talk about it or solve the problem. Instead we blame billionaires or the president or the archduke of Austria, thinking that they are the root of the problem.
Agreed. To be fair, personally I don't blame billionaires per se. They are mere proxies for the real issue: the profit motive.
But it's easier to sell that billionaires should not exist than it is to sell that we shouldn't seek to profit over each other, given how profitable it is for a few and how much some people hopelessly seek wealth.
The article referred to the beliefs of fisheries scientists and what the authors have suggested are their analogous counterparts today in the "security community". It is not focused on the beliefs of computer users.
For many years on HN I have seen comments that constantly try to shift the focus away from articles like these and place blame on computer users. This is old hat. We are past that nonsense.
This article is addressed to the "security community". But some HN commenter is trying once again to shift the focus to computer users, making sweeping, generalised, incorrect, and ridiculous assumptions about them.
There is a commercial motive for destroying privacy and collecting data. Computer users are not voluntarily "giving up on privacy", or "trading away their data", with informed consent, to enrich software developers. It is being taken, without notice, often unbeknownst to the victims. There is no "contract".
Regulation will continue to gain momentum as it is obvious to anyone outside of the so-called "tech" companies and their supporters that this is a bad deal for society.
The problem is not the behaviour of the victims, it is the behaviour of the perpetrators.
This is the liberal viewpoint (I subscribe to it too). The conservative viewpoint is to do mostly do what our ancestors did (given it worked for many generations). My problem with this approafh is that it limits progress and favours folks who are already doing well.
It's way past time that consumer-first became modus operandi for Tech. LLMs (GPT-4 quality or better) have the potential to enable that future.
It'll take an avalanche of high quality products coming out of small-footprint companies. Each company utilizing LLMs to shore up any limitations due to their size, and every one of them having a consumer-first mindset from the get-go. It can be done.
Regulatory standards have not drifted. They have been captured by companies as big as some countries. Entire political and social system has been slowly eroding and reverting back to the Charles Dicken's times. We are just living in the times were cracks are visible enough and we can clearly see them.
Tech bros never faced the same scrutiny as regular industries do (or at least there were no consequences).
Incorrect. We operate in a military smorgasbord where the war hungry U.S. government gets an unlimited budget of trillions of dollars year after year and their modus operandi is COLLECT IT ALL ... EXPLOIT IT ALL. The government believes that they are the only one's entitled to privacy for National Security™ purposes and their crimes are covered by criminal and conspiratorial compartmentalization. They go after journalists and whistle blowers like Julian Assange and Edward Snowden with dictatorial fury because the true enemy of fascist governments is Privacy for the People.
Your perspective is cute business school brain washing but the real fact is that businesses like the FAANGS have realized that they can tap into fascist daddy's money faucet and sidestep the shelf-joke analysis you portrayed. Why worry about stocking shelves with good products to maybe sell units to individual consumers when you can sell to one big monstrous entity who can sign a billion dollars' large contract to ingest and process everything against the masses who barely have $100 to pay for a piece of software.
Buffet is probably a better translation, in this context: I don't think the emphasis was on it being bread. (The bread of the metaphorical smorgasbord signifies… resources? Pokémon? something that isn't bread, anyway.)
To be very honest I'm tempted to downvote this , not because I would disagree if this was the topic at hand, but because it seems like a deranged rant that's very loosely related to the comment it's replying.
Not to mention, if you compare the US, its citizen's intentions, and its government's intentions, and yes the DnD's intentions to all but a tiny handful of countries, the US is a golden boy of good.
Compare today's US to, for example colonial powers. The US is pure in comparison.
Compare the US to what happens to journalists in Russia, China, Iran. The US is a beacon of justice.
Is the US perfect? Nope. But do a little comparative analysis, and the result is that the world has never, ever seen such a peaceful empire.
The rancor often displayed on such comments makes me wonder.
While I agree that the tone of parent is... unhelpfully agitated and aggressive. The broad strokes critique of US foreign (and domestic) policy is on point.
The US began as a corporate colonial project - Virginia Company, London Company, Plymouth Company, Massachusetts Bay Company etc. It proceeded to expand through genocide of indigenous populations and wars of conquest - Cherokee–American Wars, Mexican American War, Spanish American War, Quasi-War with France and on and on.
From the first the US (contrary to domestic myth) was colonial, expansionist and interventionist. US involvement in theatres around the world has initiated, prolonged and expanded conflicts - from Vietnam, Cambodia and Laos to Iraq and Afghanistan. The US has toppled literally dozens of democratically elected governments and helped elect numerous authoritarian dictators. The list of countries where the US has engaged in 'regime change' is so long it could fill up this comments character limit but to cite a few Hawaii, Panama, Honduras, Nicaragua, Mexico, Haiti, Philippines, Korea, Venezuela, Libya, Palestine, Syria etc. America has funded (and continues to fund) genocides, death squads, torture sites (its own as well as those of its allies). The US has replaced democratic leaders in countries as friendly as Australia as recently as 1975.
At the risk of turning this comment into a letter to the editor of Foreign Policy - the US is not remotely a 'golden boy of good'. On balance Pax Americana has kept Europe at peace, but at the cost of keeping Africa, Latin and Central America, and parts of South East Asia impoverished and constantly at war.
Is it China? Is it Russia? No. Would they make worse imperial powers? Almost certainly. It's a unique kind of tyranny, one that manages to convince it's own elites against all historic evidence it's a 'force for good'.
Not to mention, if you compare the US, its citizen's intentions, and its government's intentions, and yes the DnD's intentions to all but a tiny handful of countries, the US is a golden boy of good.
Note the conditionals. "intentions" and "compared to all but a tiny handful of countries".
Also note the context where I was careful to say "Compare today's US".
In these contexts, the history of the US is meaningless, and only today counts. And I was referencing "colonial powers", which are historical, to us actions today.
I know all the US has done. I also know all the British Empire did. I also know how Russia, China, Iran, and various tiny dictatorships around the world act.
Yes, the US is very much a "golden boy of good" in reference to, and comparison to these things.
Anything and anyone can be made a monster taken out of context.
Sincere question: Is the second half of your assertion that U.S. government is directing/coordinating the conduct of the Israeli military or that their lack of action makes them makes them equally culpable/complicit in said actions?
Ah, the backwards world view, where people defending themselves from relentless aggressors, including ones that call for an end to their existence, are somehow wrong to end those endless attacks.
Israel would be nuts to leave even a wisp of Hamas in power in Palestine, and yes attacking innocent ships gets a defensive response.
Next up! Man attacked by machete wielding lunatic punches him in defense, how dare he!
I initially read your comment with the opposite meaning to what you intended, since it's so well known that Israel has been relentlessly attacking and settling Palestine for over 70 years.
You are forgetting the Ottoman Empire, the Byzantine empire, the Roman Empire, the Ptolemaic Empire, the Babylonian Empire, the British Empire, the Canaanite Empire, and all the others I have neglected to mention.
That both are just random dates? That borders shifted continuously for thousands and thousands of years, and were called different things?
How do you arbitrarily pick a point in time, and say "Oh, this is the point land was stolen!". It's absurd. The same thing is true in every single country on the planet. There are people there, that took the land from other people!
I have some Scottish blood. The English took my land, 500 years ago. My ancestors were kicked to the curb, or killed in battle. Do I blame them? Or is that OK? What about the fact that the current English took land from the Romans? And endless waves of invaders between? Or war after war fought? Or the Romans from people before both?
Where does it end?
It's the same in every country on the planet!
Does all this mean that if Israel stands with static borders for .. what, 100 years, then no one can complain, ever, even once? Or is it 200 years? How long? What's the official time when the latest guy is the bad guy, but everyone else is pure and perfect?
The problem here is we're both unsure, but you're pointing at the UN. I'm throwing my hands up and saying, that no country on the planet can stand if the metric is "They took my land".
The time is generally 'reset' after a fairly long period of peace, but that doesn't prevent people declaring their own independence. You'll note Scotland had a referendum on this.
How long must Putin occupy parts of Eastern Ukraine until it's 'his'?
Throwing your hands up is just surrendering to the strongest power.
Oh we know all about US atrocious behavior on the world stage. But this is completely irrelevant to the topic at hand.
TLA agencies gonna TLA. But US military does not explain the enshittification and the surveillance economy. That's all on private business, small and large. Ethically challenged entrepreneurs, marketers, advertising industry, and yes, MBAs. But they're not a US phenomenon, they're a global issue.
I think you're romanticizing the past that brought us to the current state of consumer markets. Until the 1930s in the US, the primary guiding principle was caveat emptor and it took a lot of regulations to change expectations.
We live in a regulated "supermarket" economy. What surfaces on a screen is entirely analogous to what surfaces on a shelf: People check the price and make their choices based on taste, budget etc. They are not idiots, they operate under a simplifying assumption that makes life in a complex world possible.
The implicit assumption central to this way of organising the economy is that anything legally on sale is "safe". That it has been checked and approved by experts that know what they are doing and have the consumer interest as top priority.
People will not rush back home to their chemistry labs to check what is in their purchased food, whether it corresponds to the label (assuming that such a label even exists) and what might be the short or long term health effects. They dont have the knowledge, resources and time to do that for all the stuff they get exposed to.
What has drifted in the digital economy is not consumer standards, it is regulatory standards. Surfacing digital products with questionable short and long term implications for individuals and society has become a lucrative business, has captured its regulatory environment and will keep exploiting opportunities and blind spots until there is pushback.
Ultimately regulators only derive legitimacy from serving their constituencies, but that feedback loop can be very slow and it gets tangled with myriad other unrelated political issues.