Posted by alexzeitler 10/22/2024
I think that's reversed - that's property rights being stronger than ever. "Own things forever and just rent them out" is NOT a weak formulation of property rights from the point of view of the producers of those things.
There's not an inherent privilege of purchasing over renting in property rights. In either case you're paying for something, it's just a different slice of that something. They're different transactions that can benefit the different parties different ways in different situations. But if technological development lets the owner get the financial rewards of selling through "licensing" that's hardly a reduction in the owner's rights - and it's hard to make a "pro-strong-property-rights" argument that's based in "people should be forced to sell on the buyer's terms, not their own."
I don't think there's anything inherently right about renting or owning.
Rather, it's one of the things we need to learn about and decide which is better for our societies.
Right now, we are far into testing the "renting" side, especially when it comes to housing and software, and it's very clear that, at least as currently implemented, this is creating an unhealthy society with massive wealth inequality.
I don't have an answer to this, but the only people I see arguing for the status quo are the very few who have benefited from it - landlords, politicians, company execs etc. Or at least people who aspire to join those classes.
If you do find yourself arguing for it, please ask yourself whether you're doing it for selfish reasons rather than looking beyond yourself.
Maybe it proves your point that I'm technically a landlord now, but only to help out a neighbour so they could stay in the area for cheap, because they needed to downsize, approached me and we agreed on a very low price. I wasn't initially planning on renting it out because it needed some upfront work to be liveable, which might be even more selfish considering the housing shortage where i live...
Fundamentally that's the question. Do we want a society from the perspective of "the producers" or the greater population?
Not trying to put words in OP's mouth, but I think the general idea is that software has allowed "the producers" to shrink in number and grow in power, turning independent farmers into serfs if you will. Should that cause us to reevaluate the previous question?
Look at what the right wing US party always runs on - cutting taxes for "job creators", "running the government like a business", and bail outs for Wall Street.
At least half of this country fantasies about being at the beck and call of "the producers" of things. Fanboys of Elon Musk squeal if he interacts with them on Twitter.
Bruce Schneier, for one, not sure if anyone else had applied the feudal analogy before him. His remarks stand up quite well, I think:
https://www.schneier.com/essays/archives/2012/11/when_it_com...
We were way more worried about that before GNU/Linux became a thing.
What piece of software do you need for your life, but you're forced to lease?
If I own a piece of land, I can charge people to visit it, but I don't give up my property rights to do so. We don't see that as an "erosion" of property rights but rather the opposite.
This is a great topic to discuss right after you accept the End-User License Agreement and Terms of Service.
Of course, if they do run we send the hounds after them.
Clearly this is a case of revealed preference.
It wasn’t though. People learned photoshop on a pirated copy and used that to make art that Adobe didn’t care about. Companies are the ones who paid the $1000/seat license for their professional designers.
Although Nintendo 64 tried to push the envelope in what consumers would pay, the price of video games on the mainstream consoles has stayed in the $50-$75 since at least 1985.
Not the same experience at all compared to N64.
And how many games do people have to subscribe to PSN to use? How many people have to pay for internet to use their game? How many games have microtransactions or DLC? How about a season pass? How about all of the editions they have? What's the cost of a controller? Does a console come with one or two? How many times do you have to buy a game because backward compatibility doesn't exist?
I'm not a big gamer and I realize some (maybe most) of these are not required, but let's not act like the gaming industry is surviving off the base price of a game like in the 90s.
> By removing ownership from the product offering the seller can reduce the price.
The price of ownership is greater than the price of licensing, as it comes with additional rights and privileges than licensing.
If a product or good is only offered and priced without ownership, how can you say that people "are ok with" not utilizing an option that's not provided to them? They cannot purchase ownership, by what means could they experience the difference?
The products you use as examples were wildly successful under an ownership paradigm, what says that Photoshop or N64 games would have been somehow better if they were licensed goods?
The reason I say people are ok with it is because the companies who didn't switch to a licensing model and kept their old prices either are no longer around or had to switch to a licensing model in order to stay competitive. If people were ok paying higher prices for the benefit of ownership then that's what we would see in the market today.
This is such a huge hand-waving blanket statement that I apologize in advance for my response.
The CAD shop I worked at was doing fine on R14 for YEARS and specialized apps/etc with hardware dongles until everyone got onto the 'SaaS' or 'Subscription' mode. And frankly, the "choice" our shop had more than once was 'our customer signed a deal to use this so we have to buy it'. What was worse was they did that twice in one year, and the second product cost as much per seat/year as the first product cost FOR OUR WHOLE TEAM per year.
> Another example is video games. The average Nintendo 64 game used to be $75.99 in 1997 which is $150 in today's dollars. Today the average PS5 game price is $70. That's half the price.
You're comparing apples to oranges there. Heck, even back then, a -huge- benefit of the PS and Saturn was that production costs for discs were -cheap-. Something like 3$ including case and sleeve. Compare to N64 carts which as far as I can understand would cost somewhere between 15-30$ depending on size of ROM. Neither of those factor in actual 'distribution' costs (i.e. shipping to retailer) but I know which format was lighter/smaller... Also PS1 'greatest hits' were the closest we had to steam sales at the time.
> By removing ownership from the product offering the seller can reduce the price.
Says every SaaS that gives a nice intro contract that will even give a nice first contract, knowing that by renewal the buyer will be more at their mercy with too much pain involved to 'get away' from ever-increasing prices... Low-Code tools are really good at this strategy lol.
Nowadays, it’s about $800, and I have access to any of their apps I want (I still only use the three, though).
Pricing works by what people will pay for, not by how much it costs to produce.
Removing ownership increases profit.
Also, N64 games have additional utility, like resale or gift value, which affects the price comparison.
If salary of the average Joe was doubled as well your logic would be ok. Bit it did not.
P.S. It appears that I am wrong about median salary growth so my point should be discarded
Using the most recent numbers against the last quarter of 1997, it actually increased to 2.29× the 1997 amount, well over double:
Employed full time: Median usual weekly nominal earnings (second quartile): Wage and salary workers: 16 years and over
Q4 1997: $508 / Q3 2024: $1,165
All-Transactions House Price Index for the United States [1]
Q4 1997: 204.87 / Q2 2024: 682.18
i.e., roughly 3.33x
Median Consumer Price Index [2]
1997-12: 170.42938 / 2024-09: 353.73857
i.e., roughly 2.07
Take that as you will (I was mostly curious).
Interestingly, it seems console prices have kept pace with inflation.
NES at release: $180 ($428 adjusted for inflation)
PS5 right now: $450 (standard) / $500 (slim) / $700 (pro)
The internet connects everyone and allows for free-flow of information, free-flow information is eroding people's trust.
We want free speech, but people use words to deceive and coerce. You can't make rules to stop this - people will always find ways around them.
Ken Thompson wrote "Reflections on Trusting Trust" in 1984 (fitting as it may be). The conclusion being that we can't rely on computers to build trust. But we need trust to live in a society.
It's human instinct trust one another. But falsehoods spread fast online, and after being fooled so many times, people are losing their natural trust in others.
What's the way forward? I'm curious what this crowd thinks.
The early internet was mostly that (BBS, Usenet, forums). But on the modern internet we mostly consume random google sites & TikTok accounts that are probably bots.
FAANG has actively replaced following with algorithmic feeds because they're more profitable.
Since it's no longer political to mention Iraq: every major news organization lied about the war, they knew they lied about it and millions died. The only person to be held accountable for this was the one person to tell the truth: https://www.commondreams.org/opinion/phil-donahue-iraq-war
We can't solve the issue of truth through our current institutions because those institutions are rotten to the core. The best we can do is keep them from destroying the channels from which we can hear how badly they are fucking up and allow us to organize.
https://news.gallup.com/poll/651977/americans-trust-media-re...
My point was about small communities though. For country scale organizations it's a much trickier problem indeed.
It has to be decentralised, i.e. you or an open source software agent that you control is what's doing the filtering and deciding what you see.
It has to be a moderatorless system where you end up with what you actually choose.
I just read supercommunicators by Charles Duhigg and one of the best take aways from it was to remind people that they have multiple identities that they hold dear, and some of them may be in conflict. It gets people to think more and not regress to knee-jerk beliefs they think they're supposed to hold based on their identity on a given topic.
HN, while being large, incentivizes that brilliantly, by highlighting new accounts in green.
Alternatively: it's what users want.
The data supports your thesis, but in the same way a meth addict wants more meth imho. The algorithm is hitting a reward center (TikTok has put on a masterclass in this, for example).
I would be interested to see user preferences with regards to algorithm vs chronological feed when the cohort is on GLP-1 agonist of some sort (which inhibits malfunctioning reward center behavior, including alcohol, tobacco, and opioid addictions).
Social media is to the 2020s what cigarettes were to the 50s
That is an interesting thought. Thanks!
I thoroughly despise the frankly Puritan attitude that society should prevent people from harming themselves
So why are they so opposed to adding some toggle in the options to allow chronological feed then?
When trust is lost, it takes 10x, sometimes 100x more effort to regain it.
Sometimes, even with 100x the effort trust does not return.
These are Life 101 basics. Pretending these laws don't exist doesn't make them disappear.
From my perspective, the root problem is that institutions that want to be trusted - and traditionally were - don't want to make the effort to regain the trust they lost. The media and the government come to mind. Instead they waste energy shamelessly demanding to be trusted, which only widens the gap. They blame the violated, which only widens the gap.
And into that void, the nefarious has rushed in. Until the institutions embrace "true trust is earned" the nefarious will thrive in the gap.
Trust is one of now corrupted words. It's current meaning is a Frankenstein knock off of the true meaning of the word. Other examples include journalism, and leadership (which have also fallen due to lack of sacrafic).
Yes, it's Orwellian. Normalized. But still Orwellian.
[1] https://blogs.ubc.ca/etec540sept09/2009/10/31/unintended-con...
- The barrier to creating and distributing content was higher (it still had to capture people's attention).
- We didn't have all the tools to artificially create content, just our imaginations.
I'm no doomer by any means, and I think it's useful to look back at history for clues as to how to manage it but it's hard to find clues when the situation is so different.
I still believe education and critical thinking are the best antidote for disinformation, but higher education in the US has continued to come under attack (and perhaps rightfully so with the costs rising extremely out of proportion to inflation).
The printing press lowered the barrier to distributing ideas. The internet lowered the barrier further.
In each case, there is a period of social turmoil as society "catches up". The Peasants' War, Müntzer, the Münster Rebellion, Matthys, Hoffman, and on and on are all events and products of the change in availability of printed word.
We developed social technologies to counter the faults exploited by increased information availability. "Don't believe everything you read," is a meme which acts against the bias exploited by highly available text. The invention of journals, newspapers, and citations all act in the same way.
We haven't developed enough new social technologies to counter the change in information availability. Our existing techniques aren't enough to hold tide and frankly, like all change, going back is never an option, but finding new ways to exist are.
That wasn't necessarily better. We put democracy in place for a reason. But there has been a shift in the societal basis that underlies democracy, and we'll be forced to come up with another set of solutions.
This form of gatekeeping has been eliminated with the zero cost of any person being able to publish their thoughts digitally and without review. Furthermore, misinformation and disinformation now has a financial incentive by way of "driving the clicks."
In short, not everyone's voice needs to be heard by all, especially when extremism is required in order to "stand out."
I think for topics that are not as easily provable as reproducible builds though, trust gets murky.
There was something else I read (can't find it now) that made a similar analogy for a web of trust.
A web of trust (e.g. PGP) will have de-facto authorities since there will be a tendency for more people to sign individuals presumed to be trustworthy based on their history. It follows that the system runs into issues if their key gets compromised or if a false individual is subject to a sybil attack, producing the illusion of trust. See also: github stars, cryptocurrency, social media follower counts.
In other words, I "lost trust" in institutions, experts, officials etc., when I found the information on the web that I consider to be "the truth" which overrides what established organizations previously proffered to the me.
The Web did cause me to lose trust, but only because it made the actual truth available to me and made me realize how dishonest most people are.
There may be examples of this... A mechanic who overcharges you can be "found out" now by a customer who does some online research. Previously, this work would be accepted as is, but it is now (rightfully) questioned. The dishonesty was always there, but it's more readily discovered now.
Hope I'm making sense...
Oh, I agree. It is tiring.
> If I get screwed for $200...
Some scams do far more damage than $200.00.
> The scammer won't survive in the long run.
Not really true. Some entire industries are built on scams and last decades or indefinitely.
They do.
> You can't make rules to stop this - people will always find ways around them.
Would you be pissed if you got penalized for this comment?
She writes: "For example, just as legislatures rely on independent legal teams to help draft legislation that will survive court challenges, they also need independent technology experts they can turn to for reliable information. Making tech expertise available to lawmakers would go a long way toward reducing lobbyists’ effectiveness and ensuring lawmakers understand how technology impacts issues like healthcare, education, justice, housing, and transportation."
This shows insufficient knowledge of the US situation. The U.S. Congress used to have an Office of Technology Assessment.[1] It was abolished in 1995. "House Republican legislators characterized the OTA as wasteful and hostile to GOP interests."
The generic problem is monopolies, not "tech". US banks and drug stores are down to 2-3 major players. Tough enforcement of the Sherman Act might help. Although the experience with the AT&T breakup is not encouraging.
[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Office_of_Technology_Assessmen...
If anything, your point shows the bipartisan us vs. them is the main problem if claiming bias against a party is enough to get rid of something disliked. Is that what you mean by monopolies?
And to be clear, I agree monopolies are an issue, but that doesn't negate other issues such the fact tech solutions can result in enforcing implicit rules that weren't decided through democratic process despite impacting populations at the same level a government decision would.
The government twists the companies' arm to make it do things that the government is not allowed to do. Company refuses to play along? Threaten to break it up. There's a reason why AT&T has dedicated wiretap rooms for the NSA. DJI not selling drones to Ukraine? Threaten to ban it in one of its biggest markets.
Instead, the causal process that let to the creation of this book and ad was that the political patronage relationship between American progressives and American tech companies fell apart. This leads to demand for post-hoc justifications for subsequent changes in cash allocation, lawfare budget allocation, etc.
The author started with the conclusion "... and that's why we have to disenfranchise tech companies" and worked backwards from there.
Therefore, this document cannot, on expectation, communicate to you any useful entailments, except insofar as that conclusion might incidentally be correct for reasons totally unrelated to the author's thought process.
A few weeks ago I saw Zero Days, which is a good documentary on Stuxnet and it's pretty wild just to what extent tools in that domain are out of the purview of the public. Offensive capabilities that amount to acts of war seemingly have no democratic oversight, and even an ex-director of the NSA thought the amount of classification of materials went too far. Very few people were willing to speak at all to the filmmakers even years after it had already blown over.
Whether its some sort of dystopian privatized policing by Palantir or tools used by three letter agencies, what the article warns of has arguably already arrived a decade ago.
If you are fortunate enough to live in a country which has free and fair elections, then vote.
Remember how the US came to be in the first place.
> Those countries exist?
Yes. The US is one, others exist today as well.
> Where there are free and fair elections the politicians seem bought out by unchecked corporate interests.
Start by voting for the least objectionable politicians in the general election (local, state, and federal).
If you do not like those choices, remember this and vote in the primary (or primaries where allowed) for the least objectionable politicians.
If you do not like the choices in primaries, remember this and get involved in the selection process for the least objectionable political party.
Note the recurring theme of involvement in the representation process. Those who do not want you to have this type of agency spend a lot of money to disparage it.
You just contradicted yourself. Do we have free and fair elections, or do we have a system whereby the wealthy have disproportionate influence? It's one or the other.
> You just contradicted yourself.
I did not. Please re-read what I wrote dispassionately.
> Do we have free and fair elections, or do we have a system whereby the wealthy have disproportionate influence? It's one or the other.
This is a false dichotomy[0]. The US has had free and fair elections for at least 40 years. I wish I could confidently state a longer period. Some might include the 70's but few would include much of the 60's.
What the wealthy do in attempt to convince people they do not have agency, or that their involvement in representative government does not matter, is orthogonal to having it. I humbly recommend contemplating the difference.
HTH
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Begging_the_question
See, I can do that too.
In large part, people do not have that kind of agency, and telling them they do is deceptive liberal bullshit.
Free: there are no longer Jim Crow laws[0], such as voting poll taxes[1].
Fair: each eligible voter whom casts a vote in US elections has it included in the vote tally (see below).
> In large part, people do not have that kind of agency, and telling them they do is deceptive liberal bullshit.
Every eligible voter has the ability to cast their vote in one form or another. In extenuating circumstances, some votes will not be included. I am neither a constitutional nor civil rights lawyer, so will not attempt to clarify those situations beyond acknowledging they exist.
I will not further engage in this thread as my interpretation of your replies thus far is they are not based in intellectually honest discourse.
If you're anywhere in the West, this doesn't describe your democracy but a cartoon of it.
Like yes, if you only show up for--in the U.S.--the Presidential general election, your vote isn't that powerful because it's not supposed to be in a country of a quarter of a billion.
Pure democracy doesn't work. (More accurately: election fetishisation doesn't work. It tears itself apart in manufactured partisanship.) We live in a republic. The Congress is democratically elected. The President is meant to embody the strengths of monarchy. The Supreme Court represents the oligarchy. This is civics 101, succinctly summarised in the Federalist Papers.
> senator from Wyoming has just as much of a vote as California
I vote in Wyoming. We're not the oligarchy. We're not even a swing state. You're complaining about, broadly, the Electoral College (and our system of apportionment). That's orthogonal to that of corporate interests. If anything, the fact that each of my resresentatives has fewer people they're accountable to makes them harder to buy off.
Look, however you rationalize it in your head, power is highly concentrated in the US. Unless you are a member of the ruling class, being in favor of this basically amounts to Stockholm Syndrome.
Wat.
> Civics 101 is blindly deferring to the architects of a system whereby only rich, white property owners could vote
No, it's understanding the tradeoffs systems of governments make in erecting the systems that they do.
Have you read the Federalist Papers? If not, I suggest starting there. It's more interesting than railing against the woke mind virus or corporations.
> however you rationalize it in your head, power is highly concentrated in the US
It's not consistently concentrated. And even then, it's not that concentrated. I've managed, as a rando, to get language put into multiple state and twice federal bills because I was the only person in my district who called in on a low-priority process. Nihilism in American politics is often just cover for civic laziness.
that's not true in the US, a republic not a direct democracy. Never has been.
Because unchecked corporate interests / you don't vote for the President but for electors are hot takes?
(Also, "your vote is at the very least supposed to be proportionally significant to the general population" doesn't technically make sense. I think I know what you're getting at. But even ignoring the political structure and just focussing on voting, you're assuming by statement values for parameters which lie on a spectrum.)
Blind deference to the status quo illustrates poor critical thinking skills.
In general, I think far too much attention is paid to single election cycles at the federal level. And I'm not sure why. The state you live in has significantly more effect on your experience with government, outlay of benefits, taxes, education and environmental policies than who holds the presidential office, for essentially all issues that matter.
In the rare case that a federal change affects you (likely a court decision, thanks to lame duck congress), states routinely step in, as we've seen recently.
The one exception to everything is that if you want _other_ states to live like _your_ state, then yeah - you better try to get the federal government aligned with your virtues. But why any sane person would want that is beyond me.
Society is shaped by those who just simply show up, so show up if you want a say.
Empirically, people who think the government has a duty to protect it's citizens from corporate raiding have not shown up to vote. The US has had 2 years of total democrat control during my entire life, plus a decade.
For the most part it's people who are politically apathetic, as if letting the choice be made by only the most rabid political fans is a better option than making your mild opinion known. Or they swear that "both sides are the same" despite Congressional votes not being secret and "both sides" being trivially not the same on many very important issues.
Elections have consequences. We got exactly what we voted for.
Nearly all of this happened before the citizens united decision.
It seems to work reasonably well.
I keep a document called "Timed Predictions," so I can check back on bold predictions such as these.
I'm adding an entry for this. In a few years, I'll evaluate whether we experience "a wave of disaster" due to overtaxed energy grids in 2026-2027.
It's a little different in that it only publishes bets made directly on the site, but that also helps remove some of the ambiguity that otherwise would be inherent in trying to judge predictions made elsewhere.
https://www.metaculus.com/faq/#public-figure
But apparently removed it recently:
2021-10-02 (did not come true): "I would not be surprised if Apple completely closes off the Mac ARM64 platform for “security” in the next few years. The option to boot third-party OSes seems like a short-term gimme to keep the pitchforks and torches at bay." -- https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=28731406
2022-01-12 (did not come true as a "crisis"): "Long COVID / PASC [...] will easily be our next great public health crisis sooner than anyone can imagine." -- https://twitter.com/JamesPhipps/status/1481442131751456770
2022-04-04 (we will soon see): "Unless we see big structural changes in the Democratic party's coalition, then the modal outcome for 2024 is Donald Trump winning a filibuster-proof trifecta with a minority of the vote." -- https://twitter.com/davidshor/status/1511028728381734912
2022-11-18 (did not come true): "I do not think Twitter will die, but it will go down in the next few days due to the World Cup and its overwhelming traffic. When it does, Musk will dedicate himself to bringing it back up, and boldly claim that his mission is to “keep Twitter standing.” In the background, he will realise that nobody wants to work for him, and that there is no path that involves him running (or even keeping) this website that resembles any kind of success." -- https://www.wheresyoured.at/the-fraudulent-king/
2024-01-29 (by the end of 2024): Brigida v. @SecretaryPete will be settled by the start of year 2025 -- https://x.com/tracewoodgrains/status/1752118772960514234
I'm holding my breath on both of those but I'm curious why you think otherwise.
For the second, "sooner than anyone can imagine" is admittedly not a specific time frame, but we're 2.5 years later and I haven't heard any news about long COVID lately, certainly nothing calling it a crisis. But this also could certainly change in the future.
"How Much Does Long COVID Cost Society? New Data Shed Light"
https://www.medscape.com/viewarticle/how-much-does-long-covi...
"Long COVID: confronting a growing public health crisis"
https://www.thelancet.com/journals/lanres/article/PIIS2213-2...
"The Long Covid Moonshot"
https://www.sanders.senate.gov/press-releases/news-sanders-i...
"Long Covid is a significant health crisis in China too"
https://www.thelancet.com/journals/lanwpc/article/PIIS2666-6...
"Long Covid at 3 Years"
https://erictopol.substack.com/p/long-covid-at-3-years
"The future of excess mortality after COVID-19"
https://www.swissre.com/institute/research/topics-and-risk-d...
"Covid Brain"
https://erictopol.substack.com/p/covid-brain
"The Indomitable Covid Virus"
https://erictopol.substack.com/p/the-indomitable-covid-virus
The reason you don't hear any news about long covid is that it affects peoples brains, hearts, immunity, microbiome, organs, and employability. The hospitals do not attribute the rise of problems in these areas to long covid, so there is no news about long covid as the ultimate source of increases in childhood diabetes, the rise of autoimmune diseases, middle age heart attacks, a higher background death rate, decline in lifespan, availability of workers, etc. These are all reported as isolated mysterious facts that nobody understands. But just prior to the rises was a huge pandemic from a disease that causes long covid with many research reports of very long lasting damage to multiple systems in the body; maybe the cause is not so mysterious? Swiss Re the insurance company is certainly paying attention.
And the pandemic is not over, more people are getting long covid right now and it's not just the old people. The main fear is that this is a slow moving crisis where 5% of all people lose _some_ capability every year, including the capability of fighting off other infections, and also including those who are reinfected. It doesn't take long for that to have widespread effects and indeed effects are showing up and there are already economic consequences. The reason researchers were saying "sooner than anyone can imagine" is that this is an exponential effect and now that the CDC is no longer collecting data (and much of the world followed suite) it is difficult to predict with precision. However, like all exponential effects it will at some point start the steep part of the upward climb.
We have been experiencing overtaxed grids for decades now. Rolling black and brown outs happen every summer on a hot, cloudy, still day. The issue isn't big-tech, the issue is that we're living in a fantasy where we can keep the grid running with renewables and no sign of terawatt hour batteries.
I then build a continent wide physics based electrical network simulation down to the individual house. There is no way to keep the networks stable in the coming decades with more and more intermittent sources coming in.
Large heavy spinning shafts are the only thing that's kept us from catastrophic failures and pretty much no one knows or cares.
We're betting civilization on pixie dust and unicorn farts.
Building out and running more syncons seems like a low bar.
I appreciate you work in the field. but, so do a bunch of people in the grid forming world who think it's entirely feasible to move beyond the base load model. Maybe they are all smoking pixie dust, but I think it's not clear you're right and they're wrong, because BOTH OF YOU have fucktonnes of experience and skin in the game, past and present.
As a random asker (ie me), why is your input here better than the people doing the planning for the Australian east coast grid?
https://aemo.com.au/-/media/files/initiatives/engineering-fr...
https://www.aer.gov.au/system/files/ElectraNet%20-%20System%...
Perhaps it's different in the US, but here in Toronto I've noticed the frequency and especially the severity of such events decrease over time. It's been 21 years since "the big one" (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Northeast_blackout_of_2003). This year's biggest event was much less impressive (https://toronto.citynews.ca/2024/07/16/power-outages-toronto...), and that was caused by exceptional storms (https://www.thestar.com/news/gta/a-parade-of-storms-how-toro...).
If somebody said 25 years ago that access to government services would be completely privatised there would have been uproar. Not only did we consent to this, we did it willingly in exchange for convenience. Now we are screwed.
Americans used to be all gung-ho about "those who give up freedom for security will not be free or secure" but it's much worse than that. We gave up security for convenience and handed everything about ourselves to an unscrupulous bunch of billionaires who are intent on replacing government wholesale, and we will be paying them while they do it.
Where is this? For instance the IRS still allows you to file by mail[1], and it's unclear why you'd need a phone to go to a hospital or walk in clinic. As for needing a phone to access your company networks, I don't how it's deserving of outrage anymore than needing a laptop to do a modern desk job.
[1] https://www.irs.gov/filing/where-to-file-paper-tax-returns-w...
That being said, I'm not convinced that access to government services has been "completely privatized" as you claim. Governments often partner with private companies to develop and provide these services, and there's usually some level of regulatory oversight in place. This collaboration has led to some really valuable innovations, like online portals for tax filing and telemedicine.
The Benjamin Franklin quote about trading freedom for security is still relevant, of course. But maybe we should also consider the flip side: by resisting technological change, we risk getting left behind. Finding a balance between convenience, security, and individual rights is the real challenge.
Rather than sounding the alarm about an "insidious takeover," perhaps we should focus on the practical steps we can take to ensure our rights are protected. Advocating for open standards, strengthening regulatory frameworks, and investing in digital literacy programs would be a good start. Let's try to have a nuanced discussion about this, rather than resorting to hyperbole.
Giving up liberty for security, (or just convenience or religion) in the US goes back even further. Cold War policies and inquisitions, any number of vice laws, restrictive zoning, to name a few from the 20th century.
They always could. It's called a search warrant. The idea that your security camera footage was inaccessible to governments was incorrect to begin with.
> Governments are increasingly outsourcing all kinds of processes to tech companies. And if a tech company operates in the name of a government, it should be as accountable as the government. I call this “the public accountability extension.” It sounds simple, but it would be a huge game changer. Right now, as governments outsource more and more critical governmental functions to tech companies, they also offload governmental accountability.