fitz13

Seems like Krugman phoned this in.

Half of the column is other people's words and at no point does he even attempt to back up the headline (which acts as his thesis) that Bitcoin is Evil.

He wrote a slightly more in-depth opinion in 2018 [0], but again, he ends up casting doubts on the adoption/use so far, but hand-waving away those who would talk about the future of the technology.

Krugman probably has to deal with more cryptocurrency enthusiasts than I do, but I'd be far more interested to hear him propose a theoretical fix for the problems he identifies, or some admission of the potential for blockchains. Without that, in both the OP's link and [0], he just comes off as contrarian.

Krugman's Nobel Prize was well-deserved, but like Chomsky and other popular academics, it's so hard to separate the brilliant-thinker signal from the spotlight-powered noise.

0: https://www.nytimes.com/2018/07/31/opinion/transaction-costs...

Good points, well made. Especially about the hacking.

My only other thought is that a government/organization interested in using/misusing such a database would be willing to invent a pretense.

I'm not sure how heavily to weigh the precedent of government surveillance skirting these kinds of protections. I assume that Portland doesn't have a FISA court rubber-stamp equivalent, but I can't know for sure.

Either way, I think you're right that adding speedbumps to the process is a good thing, especially for data security. I just hope that people don't consider this too much of a victory, although it is definitely a victory.

It's true I may not be, but I'm not sure what the material difference is between real-time facial recognition and performing the same analysis on security camera footage after the fact.

I should clarify, I'm not arguing in favor of real time facial recognition, I'm just skeptical of this move's efficacy in preventing the same outcome.

Thanks to the practice of Parallel Construction and using Third Party vendors, I'm sure there would be a way around this.

Hypothetically, the Portland PD sends all the details of the crime, including images, to a Third Party. Third Party, through use of proprietary black-box algorithms, returns a list of likely suspects. Portland PD investigates the suspects, and constructs the parallel case, without the need for the Third Party's report to ever enter the court room. Not that I think Portland, Maine is an epicenter of authoritarianism.

Is it a good thing to have idealistic laws? Or is it damaging to have a false sense of security?

"Multi-screening" in this case means multiple devices, not 2+ displays of the same device, although I have my suspicions about that.

The Daily Mail article[0] has a bit more substance, but a little less humor.

[0] https://www.dailymail.co.uk/news/article-8829539/EU-dimwits-...

Tutanota is my first e-mail provider since deGoogling.

ProtonMail didn't have an integrated Calendar (at that time at least) and was more expensive. Fastmail is Australian which is a non-starter from a privacy perspective. Unironically written from the US. Also, more expensive to use your own domain.

Tutanota is €1/mo (billed yearly), lets me use my own domain, has a calendar, and is based in Germany.

Since using it, I realized without the Calendar scanning my Inbox and auto-adding flights and trips and birthdays, I don't use it as much. But I also haven't traveled much since March.

Definitely worth a look if privacy is a goal, and money is an object.

The Android app's good, and available from F-Droid. And the features are solid. There's definitely room for improvement, but no glaring deficiencies in my experience.

To be specific though, their roadmap [1] includes "Import External Mailboxes into TutaNota", and I don't use their desktop client, so I'm not sure what export options are available there.

[1]: https://www.tutanota.com/secure-email/