I have recently moved to a macbook pro for work, having used Ubuntu on my prior machine. In my experience, the mac (despite having significantly more modern specs) is more buggy and just not quite as snappy for these little things. Opening windows, menus, terminals takes longer (even with the swoopy animations turned off). Wake from sleep also takes longer, and a few times a week it is frozen for a few minutes on wake. Maybe I have a lemon.
Do mean that a government is less trustworthy than an independendent corporation? That a corporation will better look after the interests of its citizens than a government?
> Do mean that a government is less trustworthy than an independendent corporation? That a corporation will better look after the interests of its citizens than a government?
Quite frequently, yes to both questions. Choice is key and many often feel more empowered to individually choose their company than their government.
How does that square with it being an implicit goal of most companies to own their entire market, eliminating that choice?
When there isn't meaningful competition in a market, it's specious to point to the abstract possibility of competition as an argument for sucking it up and cozying up to the monopolist, who has structured your arrangement with them to limit your freedom and recourse as much as practicable.
A profit motive doesn't magically make the human foibles that the "Gubmint is baaad" crowd insists will lead to the end of human freedom — and puppies, too — more manageable, or less dangerous to the rest of us.
> How does that square with it being an implicit goal of most companies to own their entire market, eliminating that choice?
Oversight. If you want meaningful competition and don't have it due to harmful monopolization, that's the government's problem to solve. Nobody's asking for self-regulating companies here. It's very important to understand which forces can or cannot actually eliminate competition and choice. If there is a path towards choice, I'll take it. Often that path is unclear of course.
The government which we're "stuck" with, and which we shouldn't trust because it's actively dangerous to our freedoms, is what's supposed to protect those freedoms from predatory companies?
Which is why I argue they are oftentimes less trustworthy than corporations due to the latter's more limited scope. I'm not clear on the argument you are making here. Regardless, the one I am making is that companies are often more trustworthy than governments (the original question) especially since there is technically a level higher in the authority hierarchy.
And I'm saying that, in my experience, that position seems to be more an article of faith for people of a certain ideological bent, than a demonstrable reality.
Maybe my premises and categories blind me to that risk in some way; I'll certainly cede that possibility. I'd be curious to see people who think the way you're describing do the same, vis à vis theirs.
That's the trouble with articles of faith, though: for the people who hold them, they're axioms; for the rest of us, they're implicit, unsupported premises to someone else's argument.
As a US citizen, and a former service member, and I can confirm that most independent businesses and corporations are more trustworthy than the US government.
Personally, I see a lot of similarities between "big" government and "big" business in terms of potential for abuse and massive bureaucracy and neither is particularly trustworthy (they are both composed of individual human beings with motives and desires). The major difference is that the government can abuse its power in the name of the "public good". Plus every business is beholden to the market and will go out of business if it does not provide what the public wants. What I am worried about is that we soon have a situation where the regulators that are intended to protect the consumer from abuse, prevent newer more ethical competitors from gaining market share. This happens a lot in the US where big business and big government form a sort of symbiotic relationship to maintain the status quo
Some people say this kind of populist stuff (and worse) on campus here too. I feel like some of the polarising optimisations in social media that have happened in the US etc spill over to here - but the stakes are much higher here.
My anecdote: In undergraduate engineering, a lot of the people around me were on ritalin. I never felt disadvantaged because I felt it didn't give anyone a clear advantage in the hardest subjects like mathematics or nonlinear control. From what I saw, it didn't seem to improve intelligence that much; rather it helped the distractable people to not get distracted from studying for example.
This is something I wonder about. I'm certain they never delete anything, because in aggregate all that data is surely very valuable and will be for years to come. However, I hope that by marking it for deletion, it becomes more likely that it gets stored on increasingly distant/cold media, increasing the likelihood that over the years it gets overwritten or corrupted or some drives fail. If times get difficult, maybe they'll mark my data as low priority, and let it get overwritten to save some money. Can anyone shed some light on this - is this just wishful thinking? Is storage too cheap?
Another thing I wonder about: perhaps if some companies want your facebook data, they might pay a rate and see all current information on your facebook. By deleting your data, you've denied these lower-tier companies from accessing it. I suspect that with enough money, they could buy access to deleted posts too. But such companies are probably fewer in number.
Government: "You know that data you were required to delete when $(USER) requested to be forgotten? We require you to provide it in connection with our ongoing investigation of $(USER)."
Is this a real issue though? If I comply to regulations to remove data as required by law, I'd be surprised if a government body could require me to provide data I am supposed to have deleted.
And on the subject of backups, those are typically exempt but there are some obvious problems there when you restore a backup at a later time.
To me the big ticket items in the GDPR are the notification duty and the data processing agreement 'chain' that gives some level of certainty that the companies you deal with are going to take this serious.
The implementation details and all the moving bits and pieces are most likely not going to be the parts where the real tests will be in the first year or two.
