I find it amusing that news media outlets are stoking fear and resentment over the government hacking technology to spy on us when the information it gathers is a mere shaving of what corporations like Alphabet and Facebook have access to on the back end.
How is it preferable that a handful of incredibly talented, well-funded, private companies know more about you than your mother or your best friend (or arguably yourself)? Why are people more frightened by a bureaucratic government agency led by Donald J. Trump than the world's leading researcher in artificial intelligence, who owns the index to the entire internet, and creates things like this: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=-7xvqQeoA8c? Why is Wikileaks working so hard to protect these companies?
> How is it preferable that a handful of incredibly talented, well-funded, private companies know more about you than your mother or your best friend (or arguably yourself)?
It's not preferable, but it's less worrying. It's less worrying because companies can't legally throw you in jail or take all your money or kill you.
And scary robotics promo videos aside, they aren't in command of the world's most powerful military and an enormous police force to boot.
If at any time they threaten you in a meaningful way, you can freely leave their services. If things get particularly bad -- like, worst case scenario -- you can even flee to a part of the world where they have less influence. Government does not provide you any of those options.
People are right to be more worried about government intrusion than private intrusion. (They are of course also wrong to be unworried about private intrusion.)
> Why are people more frightened by a bureaucratic government agency led by Donald J. Trump than the world's leading researcher in artificial intelligence
If it comes down to a forced choice, I'd much prefer Page or Brin over Trump. At least the former two are on IMO the correct side of existential issues -- nuclear arms, global warming, and so forth. (Of course, as indicated above, I'd prefer neither.)
It's less worrying because companies can't legally throw you in jail or take all your money or kill you.
But they do this all the time. Sometimes illegally, sometimes with full force of law.
The settlement of the Americas, through what might be considered a public-private partnership on the part of several nations (Spain, Portugal, England, France, Holland, Russia, largely), resulted in the genocide of a native population once numbering perhaps 40 - 50 millions. What this lacks in the intensity of nuclear annihilation, it greatly exceeds in magnitude.
The public-private partnership of Belgium in the Congo saw untold atrocities, including the unhanding of hundreds of thousands or millions of Congo natives. See Joseph Conrad's The Heart of Darkness.
Or of England, the East India Company, its private government and army within India, and the Opium Wars against China -- chemical, biolical, and conventional war against two entire cultures.
Labour unionisation, a concept and principle defended by Adam Smith, John Stuart Mill, and other classical economists, say violent opposition by factory and mine owners particularly in the UK and United States. U.S. Steel, the West Virginia Mountain Wars, the Wobblies, the Triangle Shirtwaist Factory fire, and more.
Industrial accidents have killed or destroyed many tens or hundreds of thousands: the Halifax, Galveston, Port Chicago, and West, Texas, explosions -- some entirely private, some public-private partnerships. Mining accidents claimed an average of greater than 2,000 lives/year for much of the first half of the 20th century, statistics tabulated by the US Department of Labour, and available online. That's on the order of 100,000 souls over the century, virtually all of their deaths preventable. The Union Carbide Bhopol disaster. Dam failures, including Johnstown, in the United States (this was the instigation of the Red Cross as a disaster releif organisation, and of significant concepts expanding liability law). For public-private parternships, the Vajont dam disaster, claiming 2500 lives. And showing that poor management, planning, engineering, and response aren't solely the remit of nominally capitalist societies, the Banqiao Dam disaster of 1975, in China, in which some 170,000 souls perished, on par with your nuclear bombing example, though it was but 25 thousands who died immediately from drowning, the others were lost due to starvation and disease in the following weeks -- as I said, exceedingly poor planning and response.
There's the US housing bubble leading up to the 2007-8 global financial crisis, and the robosigning and fraudulent documentation depriving people of their very homes.
For raw corporate aggression, I'd suggest the Johnson County War:
On April 5, 1892, 52 armed men rode a private, secret train north from Cheyenne. Just outside Casper, Wyo., they switched to horseback and continued north toward Buffalo, Wyo., the Johnson County seat. Their mission was to shoot or hang 70 men named on a list carried by Frank Canton, one of the leaders of this invading force.
There is the insidious poisoning of millions through lead, asbestos, tobacco, mercury, and dioxins, both generally and across specific sites, all whilst paid corporate shills actively and deliberately sowed confusion on the matter, knowing full well that their position was false. Naomi Oreskes and Eric Conway have covered much of this history excellently in Merchants of Doubt.
And there's the little matter of carbon dioxide emissions and their effects on global tempeatures and ocean chemistry, known since the 1880s, and recognised as a major threat since the 1950s, but still actively denied by numerous interests more concerned over their trillions of dollars of accumulated wealth and power than over the fate of the planet they live on and the souls they share it with.
* > still actively denied by numerous interests more concerned over their trillions of dollars of accumulated wealth and power than over the fate of the planet they live on and the souls they share it with.*(
Interests that are now controlling the US government....
However, Trump says climate change is a Chinese hoax and bullshit. Trump's advisor Myron Ebell says the environmental movement is "the greatest threat to freedom and prosperity in the modern world". Trump's head of the Environmental Protection Agency is Scott Pruitt, who believes the EPA shouldn't even exist.
Trump's Secretary of State is Rex Tillerson, former boss of Exxon. Exxon is being investigated for spending decades ignoring its own scientists’ research, which tied fossil fuels to climate change. It also has a $500 billion oil deal with Putin, for which Trump will have to remove sanctions.
Trump also says he's going to bring back "beautiful clean coal".
So, under Trump, there's a green light to destroy the US environment and the whole planet for the pursuit of profit.
Trump is using the presidency as a marketing platform to promote himself, his properties (including Trump Tower and Mar a lago), his daughter and in-laws. The GOP is using it to give very rich people $600bn in tax cuts while ensuring that (if its AHCA goes through), tens of thousands of ordinary Americans die because of a lack of health insurance.
What's going on in broad daylight is bad enough. The behind-the-scenes corruption is probably worse.
[I]if you have heavily invested in fossil fuels, time is running out to realize a return on your investment. Buying a US administration tailored to maximize ROI while fighting a rear-guard action against action on climate change and roll-out of a new, rival energy infrastructure is therefore rational (in business terms).
Russia and the Putin angle is best understood as part of this; oil and gas exports accounted for 68% of Russia's export revenues in 2013. The possibility that Trump is personally heavily invested in Rosneft via shell proxies while being at loggerheads with Merkel might be an inversion of the normal state of affairs in international relations for the past 70 years but is entirely consistent with the big money picture: Germany is trying to push (heavily) for renewable power....
This, quite frankly, makes as much sense to me as anything else. If not considerably more.
An: sometimes a conspiracy really is a conspiracy, and they really are out to get you.
Interesting piece. The move to exploit dirty energy while destroying the environment is clearly the centrepiece of Trumpism, as I said above. Whether Bannon is actually planning some sort of "final solution" is open to question.
The real problem is that the world burns whether there's a conspiracy or not....
There's a tendency toward this among all living things, and worse cases in the past: Great Oxygenation Event and Snowball Earth being an extreme case. William R Catton, Jr., made the point, in Overshoot, that assigning blame isn't particularly useful. It's the dynamics which drive the thing.
At the same time, humans can, and do, know better. Yet we're headed down that same path. And there definitely appear to be those capitalising on the short-term view.
To me, at least, there's a difference between information I willingly, if unwittingly share on a social network vs having the government unwittingly and unwillingly collect information indiscriminately. Furthermore, Facebook, Google, et al do not have SWAT teams that can be sent to smash open my door and flash bang a baby based on what they find.
I'm not saying I think it's good that private companies collect all of our data (and personally the info a CC company has creeps me out far more than FB or Google), but I can choose to stop using their service and greatly minimize the amount of data they receive. There's very few caves in the world where you can hide from the US Government.
How is it preferable that a handful of incredibly talented, well-funded, private companies know more about you than your mother or your best friend (or arguably yourself)? Why are people more frightened by a bureaucratic government agency led by Donald J. Trump than the world's leading researcher in artificial intelligence, who owns the index to the entire internet, and creates things like this: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=-7xvqQeoA8c? Why is Wikileaks working so hard to protect these companies?