There’s always a lot of hand-wringing and FUD around giving people ID numbers, but never a coherent rational argument. What makes it a big brother nightmare for all humans?
Like all automation, having a database of your population greatly increases your efficiency, without regard to whether this power is used to do good or to do evil.
There are many still alive who remember the evils done by the Stasi, when I was a child, there were many who remembered the evils done by the Gestapo; when those are your core examples of a citizen database, such thing naturally seems "big brother".
The irony is the mirror image: America seems almost* totally willing to have private databases while disliking government ones, Europe seems almost* totally willing to have government databases while disliking private ones.
* to anyone about to reply "not I": don't be blind to the "almost", I know many here will be exceptions
All the things that surveys do but where surveys would be really slow, repetitive, and suffer sub-population sampling biases; and all the things that censuses do but with better temporal resolution.
I assume it’s a simple accidental transposition of “case in point”, an instance or example that supports, or is relevant or pertinent to, what is being discussed.
Ha! I always thought "case in point" meant "the whole case demonstrated in a single point", as in, the small argument that summarizes (and hopefully answers) the whole overall question.
As a non-native speaker I appreciate comments like GP, because they let me improve my English and speak better. It's not pedantic if the "shamer" is obviously right (I've consulted internet and it looks like he is). I think correcting other people speech is valuable because it lets us all understand each other better.
I use 1password with Fastmail integration to create unique email addresses for each login. This new “sipping from thimbles” approach to authentication breaks that because iOS and/or 1pass don’t recognise it as a login until the password screen, so I’m swapping and searching and copying and pasting just to log in. I viscerally hate that sort of user hostile design of the auth/login.
South Africa’s violent crime problem isn’t despite its wealth, it’s because of the wealth and, crucially, the inequality in its distribution. Higher inequality is associated with higher crime and lower social trust.
In many police departments in the US the problem is essentially that there are so many bad apples that every good apple that comes is spoiled or cannot do good. This can only be changed be decisive action from the top.
How many bad apples does it take, to spoil the whole barrel?
I'm not disagreeing with the comment I'm replying to, just trying to challenge the perception that there's anything ok with "just" a few bad apples. The acceptable number of bad apples is zero.
This is obviously idealistic and impossible in the real world (given the size of a police force). What is needed is a system that gets rid of bad apples with time, instead of letting them thrive and corrupting other apples.
The problem with getting rid of bad apples with time is the amount of damage even one bad police officer can do given half a chance, and even if they are punished for what they did it would not erase the bad things they have done. Policing violations are often violent and the effects long lasting.
This is an industry where you can murder someone, get paid leave for it, eventually let go without losing retirement benefits, and then get hired the next county over.
How many bad apples does it take, to spoil the whole barrel?
It doesn't just take apples, it takes time. If you remove the bad apple as soon as possible, the rest of the barrel can still be fresh and healthy. If you leave it to rot, you spoil the entire batch.
What I meant by that is that any police department should be able to handle one officer that falls out of line. One person that has an impedance mismatch with the general culture of an organization should never be an issue. We all know that from our work places: one highly motivated guy won't change the lazy majority, one lazy guy won't change the highly motivated majority etc. If you have one such person in your organisation the rest of the organsation will either work around it, or try to contain/get rid of that person. This self-correction works only up to a certain fraction however.
Where that cutoff percentage is, depends on the single organisation and the individuals within it. But I believe that in this case it is a combination of police culture ("we always did it that way, we need to protect our own") and systemic incentives ("if we hide bad behaviour we look better than if we expose it") are the key to understanding this.
They do handle cops that fall out of line, but falling out of line in this case means turning in bad cops. The good cops get pushed out and sometimes even murdered
Should we defund and abolish public schools since more than zero teachers are child molesters? Should we defund and abolish fire departments since more than zero firefighters are arsonists?
> Debian doesn't ask people before including their packages, and ex. nixos pulls directly from those "non-distribution" channels.
Then Debian (or NixOS) are publishing the code for distribution, and Debian (or NixOS) should be morally obligated to do the bare minimum to make the code acceptable for others to use.
I wonder if it being so long is part of the filtering process. Only good recruiters will read the whole thing and bother to reply.
I personally believe it is unnecessarily long, formal, and diplomatic. It does not fit who I am and, if I were to read it, I would have the impression of an annoying and insincere corporate speak.
I believe I can achieve all the goals of being polite, respectful, considerate, and filtering for serious offers with a much, much shorter and informal response.
Something like:
Hi X, thanks for the contact. Company Y sounds interesting and I do think I might be a good fit for the role. I am not actively looking for a new position now, but i’d like to know more about the job description and compensation details. Thanks!
This should all be sincere if course. If the company does not sound interesting (like all crypto for me), I only reply a respectful “no” ( ”Thank you for the contact, but I am not looking for a new job right now.” ). Similar when job is for roles that I have no experience whatsoever, which often happens. In this case I also mention that I am not a, e.g., Android engineer (I am a web frontend).
Also, if there is no company or role mentioned, I give the first reply, but obviously removing the acknowledgment that I like the company/role and ask for details about it too.
There is no true free market in the world. One of the defining characteristics of a free market is perfect information. This is one of the downsides of market imperfections.
Ergo, it is a downside of all unregulated markets.
I would avoid the term "imperfection" for something that is fundamental to markets. The information on conditions of production usually has to come from the seller and there is usually little incentive for them to provide it unless compelled to.
It is fundamental to all markets in the real world. It is also a defining trait of the platonic ideal of a free market, and one of the reasons why the platonic ideal absolute free market is unrealisable. Markets can be more or less free, but never entirely so. Regulation by non-market forces is one way that markets are made less free. Such regulation is often intended to counteract or offset other things that make the market in question less free.
Didn't say that. Poor information on the conditions and effects of production is fundamental to unregulated markets. Much like externalities, they are not mere "imperfections" or footnotes which is usually how they are presented in pro-free-market Econ 101 texts. They are fundamental; e.g. much of the environmental threat the planet faces can be contributed to externalities and poor info. Nevermind the poor animal-poop slaves.
Regulations and activism (such as this type of journalism) are some of the non-market forces that can compensate.
Why do you think that a free market requires perfect information? Do you think the situation is the same for a democracy? Does it also require perfect information?
The linked commentary argues for the abolition of medical licensing. I could probably rest my case right there.
We actually had a lengthy experiment with that earlier in America, pre-regulation. It's where the term "snake oil salesman" originated. The establishment of medical licensing led to a dramatic improvement in public health.
If there's one characteristic of deregulation advocates that you can count on, it's that they have a complete disregard for history.
As for democracy, many attempts have been utterly subverted by voter fraud -- e.g. myriad dictators that win >90% of the "vote" in their countries. It is only through strict regulation that we've come to trust the accuracy of our polls to the degree that we have in the U.S. Having said that, what passes for democracy here is still utterly dominated by money, in that the best-funded candidate usually wins. Again, regulation of money in politics would be one way to improve on that defect.
Elections in the US are very poorly regulated - political appointees are Election Officers, gerrymandering of political districts is wholesales and your election turnouts are very low by international standards. The best funded candidate wins because your political parties are very weak. One of the core reasons behind this is that in 1948 you nationalised your political parties. In no other country in the world is the internal 'elections' of a political party - the way you select your candidates/primaries - run by the state. In only 8 of the states (I think!) are candidates selected by members of the parties only. Membership has no meaning - which means parties have no meaning - no collective existence. This lets private money rule the day in all your parties. When I was selected as an SNP parliamentary candidate in Scotland I was forbidden to spend ANY MONEY on my selection campaign. Only paid members of the party can select a candidate - and the only way to get selected is to be known the members personally and to do the work.
I'm all for regulating money out of politics. But point of clarification (since we're being all parliamentary).. I was comparing the U.S. to countries with even weaker election controls.
Before resting your case regarding the licensing of individuals to practice medicine, would you please comment on whether individuals who write software used in medical devices should also be licensed?
Your response and the URL of your link refer to free markets, and they by definition require perfect information. The info at your link talks about something else.
In particular, perfect information is required in order for the free market to allocate resources efficiently; if obtaining information has a cost, there are all sorts of fun ways to abuse that in order to break competition and misallocate resources. You can see this in the US cellphone industry - by increasing the complexity of their plans, cellphone providers have made it more expensive to comparison shop, meaning that customers (rationally) go with the first option rather than the lowest-cost one.
You can also see this with some of the smaller-scale Ponzis and investment scams - so long as the amount of money each investor has invested is much smaller than the amount it'd cost to investigate the investment, it's not rational for them to do so. One of the recent US Ponzis, Perma-Pave, actually failed because they got greedy and took on a large investor with reason to investigate what had happened to their money.
The same reason integrals require continuous functions, which also can't meaningfully exist: it's a mathematical model. Just because it can't possibly exist in the real world does not mean it's useless or even "wrong" per se.
The link you posted is on shaky ground and is quite unrigorous. The whole "democracy" example is poorly thought out. and then oddly enough we have a "regulated" democracy in the form of representatives and checks and balances ... to just add insult to injury to your argument.
>One of the defining characteristics of a free market is perfect information.
'Perfect information' is an unrealistic assumption used in neoclassical models which treat knowledge as just another input, on a par with raw ore, pork bellies or gasoline. In the real world it just doesn't work like that.
The defining characteristic of the free market is that it is a creative process of discovery. It creates knowledge where none existed before. There can be no such thing in principle as 'perfect information'. Information tends to exist in the state of being inherently dispersed among the actors, often tacit to the point of being inexpressible. The market facilitates the use of such knowledge, and the the discovery of new knowledge.
I agree with the point you are making. In the spirit of agreement, I would suggest that the right question is "what is it about your relative's blood test that you specifically want to bring to the attention of the NSA, government, contractors, and lobbyists."
Privacy should be the default state and expectation, and disclosure should be by exception when necessary, for exactly the reasons outlined in your post. The argument that privacy only matters if you have something to hide conceals a number of assumptions, and misses the fact that one doesn't know what one might one day wish one had hidden.
There’s always a lot of hand-wringing and FUD around giving people ID numbers, but never a coherent rational argument. What makes it a big brother nightmare for all humans?