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wooter

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thats what I'm saying. many people jump to 'discrimination' when its merely a discrepancy. discrepancies exist everywhere for entirely benign reasons. furthermore, believing its discrimination for its own sake (like age discrimination) would contradict the belief that companies optimize for profit (which I don't think is a bad thing) since there no absolute causality there.

netflix came to be a multibillion dollar business without these laws. more likely, we'll get more consumer friendly options over diverse, specialized 'types' of ISPs, thanks to caching, as we have seen like free music streaming on t-mobile or free netflix on flights. or more vital/cool things like guaranteed rates for remote medical monitoring through partnerships

HN has reached a level of popularity where its attracted too many non-engineers that love jumping into these threads with ignorant, reactionary, hyperbolic responses. every post on uber/tesla autopilot has at least a few people calling for elon to be tried for manslaughter for car accidents. really shows the stupidity of the mob. this thread is another great example. if only it were benign and didn't have real, foolish policy implications like the GDPR

If a government project has a net economic (or public health) benefit then by definition the money was not squandered.

Just want to point out that this statement doesn't account for opportunity cost. if it could go to something of greater net benefit, the difference between the two could be considered squandered.

unreal. and advocates deny any and all costs and collateral. i can't believe their spending limited political and financial capital on this rather than the multitude of real problems in the EU - without any compelling cost-benefit analysis no less.

so you think EU law should dictate viable fonts, libraries, and distribution methods? why is the EU so paternalistic and authoritarian? why don't they focus limited economic resources on bigger problems? where is the cost-benefit analysis?

HIPAA does a lot of damage to innovation in healthcare research and industry. Still, I don't know why you assumes every law that exists is perfect justification for the a more expansive law. This is exactly why slippery slope is not a fallacy. The state always wants more power under the guise of providing safety.

"The individual" was not held, by those people who enacted those laws, or by the majority of people who voted for those people, to be above the rule of law.

Correct. And had individual rights been upheld we could have avoided the costly lessons and lives destroyed by those rights-trampling laws.

Nor was the individual held to be above the rule of law in Enlightenment thought.

The theory of natural rights, which was central to the Enlightenment, held that the laws and governments were formed only to secure individual rights and could not be made to supersede them. A constitutional convention is voting on how to best uphold and respect those rights, not overrule them.

banning prostitution and the drug war have both proven to be counterproductive.

The individual is not held sacrosanct,

By you perhaps, but those are the principles of the Enlightenment and modern western society and have served us far better than collectivism.

especially when he/she acts against the group.

Right, sharing my data with another individual or company isn't "acting against the group" or even involving the group.

What remains to be decided here is whether the collection of data by "surveillance capitalists" is corrosive enough to society to be forbidden or restricted as well.

Not if you respect individual, natural rights. Furthermore, scientific/medical research, traffic prediction, spam detection, self-driving all are arising out of voluntary submission of data by free individuals. I don't see any sense in hindering innocent, positive efforts out of a desire for retribution against "surveillance capitalists" based on the "guilty until proven innocent" model of preemptive regulation. Thankfully the principles of individual, natural rights have been codified into the US Constitution to a large degree.

But is it right to let companies track users simply because the users say it's ok?

Yes. Are we not free individuals capable of consent?

I think the EU would be right to consider it's citizens not as adults that are able to make decisions on integrity or privacy.

I find this paternalistic, authoritarian attitude to be immoral. Sad to see the ideas of the Enlightenment, of Locke and the founding fathers, so casually discarded.