741 karma · joined December 27, 2013
Right. How about just having a sane and humane foreign policy instead of blowing up people all over the World? How about NOT creating hostility against the US in the first place? Did that ever cross your simple minds?
Oh sorry, I forgot - this would make the NSA/military less important, so that's no option, I suppose.
Instead, it's thousand times more important to get real transparency an accountability in our governmental structures and money completely out of politics.
There's more, if we were to build and live in a rational/logic/just system:
Anybody who produces something that somebody is willing to buy on the market should get the same salary per hour worked, since every life has the same value (and therefor every hour of a life, too), where everybody would have the right to the same amount of education, "for free"/paid-for by taxes.
Now you might say "but, shouldn't the stronger/more intelligent/however better guy be paid more?".
No, because, it's not his merit/fault that he is the way he is: Everything in our lives is a function of 2 variables:
a) Our inherited/given genetics that were b) planted in a given environment, to logically lead to the result that is "us", today.
But we don't live in a just system. We're still stuck in the "money equals power" state of evolution, like some kind of a Middle Age of rational thought.
In other words: almost none to zero.
How should we be able to trust them ever again?
I mean, it's been shown that people like Obama an Clapper openly lie. Nobody seems to care about that.
I'm still not sure that it's a good idea to accept the weak bone they'll throw us to make us forget about the real issue (Obama hinted at some limitations he might enforce).
Obama was being surveilled as well, before being elected:
http://www.boilingfrogspost.com/2013/06/19/podcast-show-112-...
Which means Obama may effectively be a puppet (if you compare his promises and reality, it sure looks like it). And that would then mean that no future President would be able to start limiting the growing corruption, with the NSA in power.
The only way to achieve this, is to eliminate EVERY kind of asymmetry in society (which we should have achieved a long time ago, since we all always pretend that every life has the exact same value). If you keep any kind of asymmetry within society and accept mass surveillance, democracy is dead because mass surveillance will of course be abused to increase and further protect power monopolies.
This means, every kind of power would have to be distributed equally over every citizen. And that also means that everybody would have to receive the same amount of money per hour of work (all education being paid for by everybody, meaning entirely financed via taxes).
While that would be the perfect model and the most sane one, I doubt we are culturally mature enough to get there fast enough.
The only sane thing to do is have it recycled.
“Vacations are for the affluent/rich”
How to reduce the value of the Internet as much as possible for everybody.
Nice, really nice.
The temptation that none of the big data hoover companies (Google, Microsoft, Apple, Facebook, Yahoo, etc.) will be able to resist is something else:
When you have so much data on everybody, you have created yourself a situation that allows you to "hack the system" to your advantage and the disadvantage of those who don't have all that data. You can analyze the trends that the data shows and link them to the movements of the stock exchange, and you're all set for infinite passive income and domination - now you know before everybody else what to buy and what to sell and when (you can call it "insider trading based on data").
Now, if you, as the user want to supply all that data, that's up to you. If so, you'll not only be appreciated by those companies but by certain government agencies as well.
But if this is really what you think, then you should not put any children on this planet - they don't deserve the mess you/we're about to accept/create for future generations.
On a brighter note: think about people like Applebaum, Snowden, Assange, Manning, etc. They fight and keep fighting. Each of them accepts that we have to sacrifice something personal/important to get back a life that is worth living. If they can, why can't you?
PS, if you feel depressed (many people do, especially with these horrible recent news), it might be a good idea to get a professional opinion on that, maybe there's more to it.
It has been Apple's strategy all along to get you to buy literally everything from them. Their USP was to have it all integrated.
Problem is: Once you understand that at least 1 peace of your integrated platform is foul, your whole equipment "looses value" for you, because it's now less integrated.
It's a similar strategy to how banks have been protecting themselves: Be/remain "too big to fail", meaning: Become so big that, when your bottom line is under attack (by whatever market forces), the whole society suffers. Thus, society will protect you, no matter how you behave.
And when I read that the US government tracks mobile phone movements all over the world (generating a ton of other information about people), I turned it off permanently (flight mode) and use it only as a PDA.
Turns out, landline phones combined with email is more than one needs.
If I wouldn't have stopped using the "mobile call feature", my iPhone would have gone straight to ebay, right now.
But the Swiss rejected it, probably because the government told them to vote against it (the gov always hands out brochures "recommending" how to vote). I suppose they got manipulated by the classic manipulation-by-fear strategy: "If you don't let our CEO's rip you off, we'll destroy your economy by going elsewhere." Of course they found their way of communicating this only between the lines (and not explicitely), which makes it very powerful b/c you can't call their bullsh#t.
We need more education.
...until we feel the resulting pain, which means it will be too late b/c the people in power will have built enough protections to ensure their position (= even less democracy).
Which is probably in the interest of the NSA. How else can they justify their dirty work if their is no more perceived "treat".
Literally everything is infected.
Again, either the NSA goes (and you know that won't happen) or information technology goes or democracy as we know it goes.
Everyone, take your pick now.
"Cisco does not work with any government to modify our equipment, nor to implement any so-called security 'back doors' in our products," the company said in a statement. Contacted by SPIEGEL reporters, officials at Western Digital, Juniper Networks and Huawei also said they had no knowledge of any such modifications. Meanwhile, Dell officials said the company "respects and complies with the laws of all countries in which it operates."
They don't really appear to be "outraged".
Literally everything is infected.
Again, either the NSA goes (and you know that won't happen) or information technology goes or democracy as we know it goes.
Everyone, take your pick now.
- 100% distributed / peer-to-peer
- public key encrypted
- open source
Thing is, neither the Constitution nor the law was respected, as we've learned. So why should anybody have trust in some politician or President who declares a new law? For agencies like the CIA and the NSA, there is no law.
I'd argue that a company that explicitly agrees to work with the NSA, for example by handing them over Windows security holes to be exploited by the NSA (and potentially other hackers), knows exactly the kinds of things that are going on.