I don't understand the emotion, or even the idea that I have to feel something about cars or roads. What is it to do with me, why should I care? Its not as if I can do anything about it.
The governance structure provided us with road infrastructure in the past. We were sold this idea and developed our lives around it.
Now the governance structure wants us to live in smart cities, with no cars. This allows for greater control and tighter management of the tax paying stock.
No one gets to vote for this stuff. It is not a way of life I would choose - I don't like being manipulated. I'm not going to stand at the sidelines and clap these changes on. It is communitarianism - but its not a good thing.
"Our revealed preference seems to be that we'd rather have homeless people live in tents than have poor people get free or nearly free housing."
Well, I'm sick of your preferences; they make no sense to me.
I'm being facetious, but why talk that way? You are an individual. If you have an opinion state it.
Government and its decisions are not you, you do not need to pretend that you agree with these decisions, or that they are somehow the result of a benign expression of voting decisions that you are bought into.
> I'm being facetious, but why talk that way? You are an individual. If you have an opinion state it.
This phrasing makes clear the policy preference of the polity of San Francisco while also implying that the author does not agree with it.
As you say, the author is an individual and does not need to pretend to agree! This author seems to agree with you. They have expressed their opinion as well as noted that of of the polity.
UBI is such blatant bribery by the existing governance structures, in order to ensure conformity to their ever increasing dictats.
I don't see how anyone things this action is a good thing - it's inflationary, it's bribery. How will people voice alternative opinions, when to do so will risk loss?
UBI is just a trick to have everyone willingly sign up into assimilation into the government's citizen-borg.
While I'm not a proponent of UBI I'm not sure it's a trick. It's coming from a lot of different people and places. I think it's an idea that people want to try and think it might work. Personally, I think it's an idea that will ultimately be abused by corporations and the government.
The point is that it makes peoples survival dependent on the whims of politicians. In the future, if they choose to disqualify you from UBI for any reason, what recourse do you have? We should not be giving politicians direct coercive control over our lives.
And to people who say "if they disqualify you, then it's not universal, ha!": legislators don't let things like simple semantics stop them from enacting laws. If they really need to, they'll just re-define the word.
Both invest (almost?) exclusively in an agency capacity, i.e. they don't directly make any investment decisions other than by shaping what sorts of products they offer.
"Pegasus takes advantage of so-called zero-day vulnerabilities of software running on mobile phones, meaning built-in flaws that not even developers and manufacturers are aware of."
No one has 'the truth', it's just not that sort of thing. Everyone has opinions. Some opinions are lies. Transparency is the way to deal with the lies.
But if you're the one lying and have your hands on the levers of power, censorship is a great tool.
"Few pause to think that their phones can be transformed into surveillance devices, with someone thousands of miles away silently extracting their messages, photos and location, activating their microphone to record them in real time."
They were designed to be surveillance devices! Remember when you could replace your phone battery? They corrected that 'design flaw'. Smart phones, smart meters, smart cities, 5g... this is the infrastructure of the technocracy.
Smart = spy.
When papers like the guardian present articles like these as if they care, they are in fact doing a different job. They are actually acclimatising us to the future so that we are not shaken into action, but wring our hands for a bit and move on.
To those talking about journalists needing to protect freedom, what world are you on? Have you heard of 'project mockingbird'? Have you not yet realised that journalism is just a part of the governance structure, along with education, and of course the government?
This seems a bit over the top to me. I don't think I agree with your overall sentiment, even though I share some of the fear.
Our phones were certainly not designed to be surveillance devices, that's just a side effect of having one central device that includes pretty much all of your life's data. As convenient as it is to have everything that matters to you on one device, it simply makes spying that much easier.
I'm not going to go into the smart home debate. I personally don't think that most smart devices are actually spying on you, though a lot of them are security nightmares and could be easily configured to do so by a malicious third party.
I don't share your sentiment towards the guardian at all. I think it's important they are writing articles like this -- thereby doing more to put an end to it than most. You not using a cell phone and telling your friends not to either is likely not having as much an impact on the public as such an article does.
That last sentence of yours pretty much makes any debate pointless, however.
The idea of journalism is good in principle, but it rarely works in our modern highly centralised and easily controlled society.
Journalists are not independent enough to create a market of actors with different ideas and point of views. If they are, they're probably internet blogs or youtubers and are labeled conspiracy theorists by mainstream journalists.
In the mainstream media you have a few narratives (typically one per party but there may be variations) who are sponsored by either the government or massive businesses.
There are certainly noteworthy exceptions (think about Greenwald - Snowden) but those are few and far.
I'm curious where you got this idea from. If anything, my university history classes looked at US history as a power struggle and certainly not through rose-colored glasses.
Sure, elementary education glosses over the state's transgressions and the like, but it doesn't seem exactly appropriate to go into detail about how native americans were raped and murdered by colonizers to a 9 year old.
Education teaches people to think critically, which is incredibly important to liberal society and, if anything, would encourage people to _not_ be obedient workers.
You can't blame them! What seem like valid differences of opinion are political, national security threats, etc. Intolerance abounds.
But please - that 'storming of the US Capitol' was a joke - those people were pretty well behaved, and waved in by the police. I suspect to provide a justification to portray republicans badly later on. All those riots, in Portland etc, in the middle of epidemic? Those are fine and can carry on for months.
They weren't *all riots, for the most part they were peaceful non-violent protests. Your view of reality is through an obvious lens of propaganda if you think protests in Seattle about racial violence vs. attacking the US Capitol to stop an election is even remotely equivalent. You should be ashamed.
You realise downvotes are a big deal for managing information on certain sites that we frequent...