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Comment by eternityforest | Hacker News Reader

If someone does something themselves and believe it benefits them, they often want to share that benefit with others.

My time and safety are more valuable to me than my privacy, and I think everyone should consider their priorities.

If you want to use Tor and degoogle, I have no problem with that, I'm glad someone is studying that stuff in case it ever becomes truly necessary for people.

But not every person can join every protest. In terms of good done for the world compared to inconvenience to myself, I'm not convinced staying private is the most effective thing.

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It's very clear to some of us this stuff is already truly necessary, and the trajectory of how the situation is evolving is not looking very nice at all.

So enjoy the locally optimal time and safety you're able to get out of it, but please consider the global downsides of pushing the public perception in the wrong direction.

Come to think, the situation is rather similar to enjoying the conveniences of modern, energetically wasteful life without considering the climate problems this will cause for future you or future generations.

Only specific aspects of modern life are energetically wasteful, depending on what era you compare to.

Many modern conveniences reduce resources use, because they replace real things with ones and zeros, and for better or worse many industries are getting forgotten.

I'm still hopeful the future will be a place where privacy is readily available but not strictly needed, but I can see why people would think otherwise.

> Only specific aspects of modern life are energetically wasteful, depending on what era you compare to.

> Many modern conveniences reduce resources use, because they replace real things with ones and zeros, and for better or worse many industries are getting forgotten.

I agree, I didn't mean to relate it to all aspects of modern life, just the energetically wasteful ones.

There definitely are energetically wasteful ones.

Although aside from the baseline things like refrigeration and plumbing, a lot of them aren't real conveniences, they're just traditions that evolved as displays of wealth. I wouldn't call nonnative lawns or large houses(Aside from maybe people with kids) or not being able to repeat an outfit within the same week or two convenient.

Some of them might be hedonistic in some way, but a lot of things that make pollution are pretty high effort.

The two large ones I'm thinking of is excessive meat consumption and excessive air travel.

Privacy is not a "protest", is a right. You are safer if your privacy, is preserved, not the other way around. The "freedom isn't free" argument for surveillance doesn't really fly.

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