HN user
"We" is referring to something much broader.
Yes, it's all very poetic. Can you define it though?
What else did "we" do? Were "we" the nazis? Or were we the allies? Were we the indians or the europeans? Did we write "All along the Watchtower"? Did we invent the first digital computer?
"We"? I don't remember dissecting any bodies or making any discoveries in the field of anatomy. Do you?
If you hard-code group selection (setting the group as the unit of evolution), then you are already assuming what you want to prove.
MacOS doesn't run on other mobile devices.
They are the same for the purpose of the argument being made above.
So you gave up on democracy?
Oh, I think you misunderstood me. I don't blame the people who enlist at all. I also point my finger at the profit-makers.
When I say "you guys" I mean "Americans". All of you.
PS: What a weird thing to down vote this post -- it simply clarifies my initial message.
With no lack of empathy for the veterans (of all countries) and the horrible things they go through...
Don't you guys ask yourself how come you are always at war? Why you have "generations of veterans", even though you have by far the most powerful military force to ever have existed?
There is no credible conventional threat to the US, and there is no unconventional one that can be mitigated by fighting a war.
Not participating in unnecessary wars would help the mental health of soldiers much more than therapy or whatever else.
http://www.ribbonfarm.com/2009/10/07/the-gervais-principle-o...
(you're welcome)
So you "cringe on" Wikipedia?
I said you were paid for your attention
I get payed for my attention in euros, after signing a contract or entering an agreement. Maybe that sounds silly to you, but that is how I roll.
I assume that you are implying that I have some moral obligation to the people publishing publicly accessible content. If you are not implying that, then we are all in agreement and there is nothing further to discuss. We both agree that ad blockers are fine, case closed.
If you are implying that, you are wrong. The WORLD WIDE WEB was not built on that premise and we were here before the marketeers and advertisers arrived. If the former manage to make some money while providing people with something they want, that's fine. I have nothing against honest business. But don't try to pretend that I have any obligation to do anything just because I accessed a resource that you made public. If you want to charge for your resource, name the price and make it private. Maybe I'll buy it. I buy books all the time. But it's not my fault or moral failing if your business model doesn't work.
You are using the concept of "relationship" with two different meanings.
When I click a link, there is a relationship between me and some entity in the same sense that the term is used in computer science to describe relational databases.
This is not a relationship in the legal or ethical senses. By clicking a link, I did not agree to anything at all. All I did was react to an announcement that there is some resource somewhere, and deciding to take a look at it. If I decide to do it from a terminal and read the HTML directly without rendering, that is no one's business and my actions are not unethical in any way.
The advertisement industry is starting to behave like the music industry in the early days of the web. They are willing to destroy the best tool ever created for global human communication and knowledge sharing for the purpose of protecting an obsolete business model.
So what you are saying is that, simply by clicking a link, I become obliged to execute whatever piece of code is served to me on my machine or render any media on my display without knowing in advance what it contains?
That is not how the web works, and that is not the social contract that it was built on. Sorry if it doesn't fit advertisers' needs, but that is really not my problem. Maybe advertisers and payed content could go to some other medium that accommodates all the restrictions you desire, and then we can all be happy?
Nope, they are not paying me for anything. Again, I did not enter into any agreement. I just clicked a link. They are expending their resources in an attempt to capture and profit from my attention. Those are very different things.
Many times they also payed to make it hard for me to get to the content that I actually wanted. This is commonly known as SEO.
They are not paying for anything. No one entered an agreement or signed a contract. They are trying to exploit the content in a certain way, and the receiver of the content is free to take counter-measures.
I don't see how 1. applies. People using this plugin are not securing any gain and no one is being deprived of any right -- unless you use it on a website that first makes you explicitly accept to be tracked and served ads in exchange for the content.
It may well be true, but don't think that you're being filmed any less in any other first world country.
In Germany there are strong laws against CCTV proliferation. They exist mostly in public transportation, and their presence has to be clearly advertised. You can even order Google to blur your house on street view. Try it in a German city, and you will see how common it is.
And yet, Germany is one of the safest countries in the world.
It all depends on your model of who is on the other side of the camera. If you think the entity on the other side is on your side, you probably have fuzzy feeling about cameras. If you don't think that the watcher is someone like you, it feels creepy.
Again, historically, people who had comfortable positions in an oppressive regime tend to sincerely claim that the abuses being attributed to secret/political polices are an exaggeration. They are usually not lying, they had a nice position in society, so those that protect the status quo feel benevolent to them.
Most people on this site have a very nice situation in live compared to the remaining 99% (to be conservative) of the world. So I take any "doesn't bother me" uttered here with a grain of salt. Also, many here have a vested interest in the expansion of the global technocracy.
When I go to the UK I feel oppressed, even though I have no intention of breaking the law. You can argue that I am crazy and should take some meds, but this is how I actually feel. Judging from art that I see (for example from Banksy), I don't think I'm alone in feeling like that.
Thanks! :)
That is a great idea, but it will not work. People will say that only the government and big corporations can be trusted with that data, because of reasons.
There's no point arguing over something we can't measure. Instead let me give you a scenario:
Behaviour X is illegal. "No expectation of privacy in the public space" people argue that, well, stopping illegal behaviours is great, don't you think? There will always be an implicit shaming: surely you are not up to something questionable, right?
Time passes and now 75% of the population believes that behaviour X is fine and should be legal. Nobody will ever rebel and do X in public, because they could go to jail. Civil disobedience is over.
No, we have total order and we should go through the "proper channels" to change the law. Like Snowden should have done. Like homosexuals should have done, instead of throwing the reality of their existence in everyone's face, in the public space.
Don't you see how much power this apparatus of surveillance represents? Don't you read enough history to know how much power corrupts, and how no human being can be trusted with it?
How the fuck can anyone believe that politicians care about crime? Crime has been going DOWN, consistently, for decades. Do you ever see politicians pointing that out? No! They want to give you more "solutions" for a problem that appears to be solving itself. Why? What is in it for them? Ask yourself that.
Want to save people? Show them how to eat better. Improving nutrition would be orders of magnitude more effective in saving lives. Can't be done though, because it would interfere with too many corporate interests.
Not really? I don't look for cameras and I legit don't see them pretty much anywhere. I know they're in all the tube stations, but it doesn't make me wary?
Are you saying or are you asking?
I'm sure cameras mean you're less likely to do things which are not allowed - but guess what, I actually would rather have less vandalism, less assault, etc etc.
Yes, and you are also less likely to do things that are allowed, but that could still harm you depending on who's watching. Kiss your girlfriend. Do a silly dance. Participate in that protest. Use that t-shirt with the political message. Hold hands with your gay lover. The public space changes when you point a camera at it.
Don't worry too much about arguing with me -- I will lose this argument. Every day that passes, fewer people will remember what a world without constant monitoring looked like. You can't miss what you never experienced.
Now if you want to straw man and say "well they can make anything illegal and use the cameras against you" - well sure.
A strawman is when you attack a claim that was not actually made by your opponent. Maybe the expression you are looking for is "slippery slope"?
Come back to me when they do that,
"They" have already done that over and over in analogous historical situations. I can show them to you, but you will probably just say that I am exaggerating and that this is a different situation. Just as people did back then.
until then I'll keep enjoying lower crime rates.
Crime rates have been going down for decades, long before all this new tech. The perception of crime rates has been going up, because of many things including the lowering standards of journalism. I live in a very safe big city where CCTV cameras are mostly illegal.
I have no problem with businesses having CCTV inside their premises -- as long as this is clearly advertised, so that I can decide if I'm ok with it or not. But I don't think they have the right to point the camera to the public space outside and film me without my consent.
Cameras are a tool of authoritarianism because they tell you in no uncertain terms that someone is watching. Pointing a camera at a space changes how people behave in it. There is no way around it. Maybe you don't value what they destroy, but it is hard to deny that something is destroyed.
Imagine kids playing. Do you think they behave the same when no adults are watching? And do you think it is good for mental health to have zero "unsupervised" time?
And then, let's not be naive. After Snowden we know that the reach of the government knows no bounds. Every private camera is potentially public. Everything that is recorded is potentially recorded forever, and sifted through by increasingly powerful algorithms. In this realty, one less camera is always a little bit more freedom for everyone -- to do both good and bad things, of course, but I would rather live like a free adult than as a constantly supervised child, always submissive to Society with a big S.
Yes, I think modern airports are a good prototype for the sort of dystopian environments we can expect in the future. It will only get worse until the entire thing collapses, as it always does -- Stasi, McCarthyism, Gestapo, you name it. This time it's more scary because the technology is sci-fi compared to the previous iterations.
I am more and more convinced that the cyberpunk guys got it right in terms of predicting future trends :(
I agree that more authoritarianism leads to less crimes. This is a well-known fact. But at what cost? Historically, we have been through all this before.
Notice that it's never just the cameras. You also have to make it illegal for me to hide from them. No face camouflage, for example. And even if you don't make it illegal, you will immediately single me out and pay close attention to me. Not in the old sense of having some police officers "keeping an eye on me" but in the new sense of using the full power of all of our current technology to track me.
I'll tell you what the cost is: spontaneity, randomness, street-level interaction, the right to be WEIRD. All this while crime rates have been naturally going down for decades. None of this stuff is about crime for the politicians, it's about control and business deals (I promise you someone sells all those cameras and related equipment to the cities, and it's not you or me).
I am not that old, but old enough to already see that historical lessons don't last long, and everything has to be learned over and over again :(
I find it extremely creepy to visit the UK because of all the cameras, sometimes actively pointed at me. It is one thing to not expect privacy in the public space, in the sense that others can see you. It is another to be actively targeted by a gigantic network of cameras connected to who knows what -- in an age where automatic face recognition is becoming trivial.
I would like to ask people who make the "you have no expectation of privacy in the public space" claim if they wouldn't mind if I hired a guy to follow them everywhere they go and then report to me.
In the end, I am aware that this is a losing battle, and that people who feel as strongly as me about not being constantly under surveillance will have to move out of big cities. Big cities are becoming highly controlled environment, where one doesn't feel like a sovereign human being anymore. In a sense they are an externalisation of corporate culture.
Boring
What do you mean with the "nothing is so black and white" cliché in this context? The psychological reaction of onlookers has nothing to do with an action being ethical or not.
And yet uBlock Origin pull it off without betraying its users. Go figure.
Interestingly you accuse the other side of being unreasonable when you are the one confusing reason and ideology.
Nope, I said zero things about ideology. All I said was this: an AdBlock program is a program that block ads. That's what is reasonable to expect: that it does what it says in the tin. If an AdBlock program starts charging money to allow certain ads to go through, then it is betraying its users.
Some people want a program that filters ads according to some criteria of quality? Sure, I don't care. But it's not an ad blocker anymore, it's an ad filter. Right?
The only ideology in this discussion is coming from people who argue that the public has some obligation to accept ads or tracking in exchange for free content. I made no moral judgements, I just have a strong personal preference against ads and tracking, a lot of other people in my "box" or whatever the fuck it is do too, and this is why ad blockers became popular.
And let's be honest: people who claim to like to be exposed to "high-quality ads" typically have some vested interest in the ad business.