alejantrot

South Europe: Download speed around 10Mb/s, upload 1Mb/s

Oh its easy. I've already quit 10 times. I'm actually thinking of quitting again next week :)

Actually the only time I managed to quit smoking for more than a few weeks when I was away from my friends/girlfriend for a five months and had no one smoking around me all day. It's easy for me to quit, it takes me a -pretty painless- couple of days. But after a while I relapse.

Um, no. Factory owners have a lot of power (lobbying, uniqueness, etc) when compared to factory workers. We're talking about a newly industrialized world, with a new working class. Their response was to form alliances with each other because they share common interests.

There are many reasons why unions are failing now. Factory workers do not form 80% of the workforce (in the developed world) any more. People now work in various different positions and lines of work, so they don't feel that they have mutuals interests with many others.

Power brings corruption. When the unions gathered a lot of power, we started seeing politicians emerging from the unions to take the power. And gradually they started betraying the people that voted for them and took the unions down with them.

Also, there is now a more egoistic mentality in most people. People tend to believe that they're more worthy than the rest, which is all nice until you realize that that is what most people think and only a few of them are actually going to make it.

There are many other explanations and possible causes on why unions failed: "The best they can do is fall back on the default explanation of people living in fallen civilizations"

No, and we can also do better than a startup analogy that pretends that unions and strikes were anomalies in production that factory owners threw money at. There was a lot of blood spilled for the right to form unions, the 8hour work day, etc. No, most factory owners a couple of centuries ago were not just giving away money like a startup. They hired thugs, killers, had governors in their pockets and used the police, etc.

these, plus:

- The Triumph of the Nerds: The Rise of Accidental Empires

- Pirates of Silicon Valley

Quitting smoking. Best habit I ever had. It improves my life every time I pick it up.

I get the author's fear, but how is that any worse than doing mass surveillance for a fuzzy reason like "national security concerns"?

All the totalitarian regimes cited reasons like "national security concerns" or "enemy of the people" to mass monitor their citizens. Using mass surveillance in order to catch a thief or a killer is still excessive and undermines our freedom, but at least it's a much more specific and debatable reason than chasing ghosts.