The major problem is that no one trusts government not to abuse it and use it to track everything people do. There will be some proportion of people who trust the current government, but will be paranoid that a future government will abuse it, and there will be a proportion of people that don't trust the current government to not abuse it.
You might be able to get more trust by the government assigning a third party to audit the systems to make sure they are working as advertised, and not being abused, but you would still get people being paranoid that either the third party could be corrupted to pretend that things are okay, or that a future government would just fire them and have the system changed to track everyone anyway.
No matter what you do, you will never convince a subset of people that a system that can potentially be used to track everyone won't be abused in that way. Unfortunately, those people are most likely correct. This is why we can't have nice things :(
For the record, I thing it would be great to be able to have a trusted government issued digital ID for some purposes. I especially think it would be great to have an officially issued digital ID that could be used to sign electronic documents. My partner and I moved home recently, and it was not easy signing and exchanging legal documents electronically.
> You might be able to get more trust by the government assigning a third party to audit the systems to make sure they are working as advertised, and not being abused, but you would still get people being paranoid that either the third party could be corrupted to pretend that things are okay, or that a future government would just fire them and have the system changed to track everyone anyway.
The scheme is one step ahead of you, Auditors are required [1]. Government's role in the scheme is limited to operating the API in front of its departments which are read only and scattered (eg no central database), funding the auditors and trust registry (a Digital Verification Service public key store), and legislating. The verification work will all be done by private sector digital verification services - whichever is associated with the wallet app you've chosen. There were 227 of them last year already working for various services - we all benefit from the sector being brought under a formal regulatory framework.
The tracking you fear doesn't seem to be possible beyond what is already tracked when you open a bank account etc, but this is entirely outside the scope of the wallet's operation. It's been designed specifically to make the kind of abuse you fear impossible, at least in its current format, where government is out of the loop except as a passive reference, and the DV services are legally prevented from retaining any data without your consent. Of course that could alter in future, but as it stands the framework doesn't allow for what everyone fears it does.
The Daily Mail is frequently referred to as either 'The Daily Fail' or 'The Daily Heil' (referring to the fact they supported Oswald Mosley and his fascist ideals, and remain very right wing). It is not a quality publication by any means.
That's because we are no longer in the EU. Before Brexit they were legally mandated to allow free roaming in the EU. Now they are back to charging whatever outrageous prices they wish.
Yes. In this case, it represents "teaching" the compiler something it didn't previously "know" about. But wanted to connect that to whether the computed output of a language could ever be falsifiable, i.e. we would not know it happened.
It would be interesting if someone could do a deep dive into what solar would cost if forced labour was taken out and all workers were paid a fair wage. Would it still be super competitive?
If someone could show that paying a fair wage to workers would still leave solar compellingly cheap then it might incentivise some parts of the supply chain to clean up their act. That's "if" of course.
Yes. The US Department of Commerce has been litigating this every year for over a decade, with a deep dive into what kinds of "subsidies" the top Chinese solar producers might be receiving, including deeply implausible kinds of subsidies, and as I recall one of the "subsidies" they were supposedly receiving was that their employees assembling solar panels were working for lower wages than electronics assembly employees in Indonesia. These investigations, carried out under a "guilty until proven innocent" standard (called "adverse inference in selecting from the facts otherwise available") end up with a quantitative "countervailing duty" to apply to compensate for the "subsidies" as precisely as possible.
You can be certain that forced labor would be considered a "subsidy", although I don't recall ever having seen it mentioned in these filings, so my inference is that it's not a significant factor.
The last one I examined in any detail was https://www.federalregister.gov/documents/2023/07/11/2023-14..., which imposed a 10.33% countervailing duty on Jinko panels, a 14.27% countervailing duty on Risen panels, and a 12.61% countervailing duty on all other PRC panels. This was enough to ensure that under 1% of panels sold in the US were Chinese solar panels.
But we're talking about competitiveness with fossil fuels here, which are about 200% more expensive than solar power, not 14.27%.
You might be able to get more trust by the government assigning a third party to audit the systems to make sure they are working as advertised, and not being abused, but you would still get people being paranoid that either the third party could be corrupted to pretend that things are okay, or that a future government would just fire them and have the system changed to track everyone anyway.
No matter what you do, you will never convince a subset of people that a system that can potentially be used to track everyone won't be abused in that way. Unfortunately, those people are most likely correct. This is why we can't have nice things :(
For the record, I thing it would be great to be able to have a trusted government issued digital ID for some purposes. I especially think it would be great to have an officially issued digital ID that could be used to sign electronic documents. My partner and I moved home recently, and it was not easy signing and exchanging legal documents electronically.
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