Society & Citizenship – Page 23 – Amalgamated Contemplation

Daily chart: Welcome to America | The Economist

Which countries have naturalised the most immigrants over the past decade?

Source: Daily chart: Welcome to America | The Economist

I’d like to see a graph next to this of GDP and per-capita productivity against foreign-born population percentage.

The perils of panflation | The Economist

About the abuse of information to achieve a desired effect that negatively affects society.

Price inflation remains relatively subdued in the rich world, even though central banks are busily printing money. But other types of inflation are rampant.

A virulent monster is dangerously out of control. Let us slay it together

Source: The perils of panflation | The Economist

Creating Victims And Then Blaming Them | TechCrunch

I think this is the perfect example of why I don’t think that “opt-out” (as opposed to opt-in) is *ever* an acceptable policy except in extreme cases.

Perhaps my ears were too finely-tuned by years of education at a liberal college campus. I may be alone; the majority of opinions formed in the last two days seem to agree that people, especially women, must be educated about the privacy implications of Facebook.

There is a discussion to be had about the default privacy settings of Facebook. But when I hear people proclaim the importance of educating these presumably ignorant young women about the dangers of Facebook, it is just a little too close to comfort to those seeking to educate women about the dangers of hemlines that end above the knee.

“You can always opt-out…” No. Please. No. Wait — I’ve reconsidered. That’s fine. Just tell me when you want me to stop hitting you.

Source: Creating Victims And Then Blaming Them | TechCrunch

I think this is how we should feel we have been treated every time some company buys your email address and sends you spam with an option to unsubscribe, every time a service substantially changes its policies and reminds you that if you disapprove then you can always stop using their service (which, given the ubiquity and monopoly of many online services, is near-complete BS and they know it).

That said, if a technology is created, a customer explicitly opts in to using it without bothering to learn about it (even if the information is hard to come by or requires substantial time to learn and education and mental capacity to understand?), and that customer is subsequently harmed by the technology, then is anyone to blame/at fault? If so, who {inventor/developer/manufacturer, retailer/seller, customer, society} is it and how much culpability and responsibility do they bear? Why?

The Coming War on General Computation

Because general purpose computers are, in fact, astounding — so astounding that our society is still struggling to come to grips with them: to figure out what they’re for, to figure out how to accommodate them, and how to cope with them. Which, unfortunately, brings me back to copyright.

In other words, an appliance is not a stripped-down computer — it is a fully functional computer with spyware on it out of the box. … Because we don’t know how to build the general purpose computer that is capable of running any program we can compile except for some program that we don’t like, or that we prohibit by law, or that loses us money. The closest approximation that we have to this is a computer with spyware — a computer on which remote parties set policies without the computer user’s knowledge, over the objection of the computer’s owner. And so it is that digital rights management always converges on malware. … And on the network side, attempts to make a network that can’t be used for copyright infringement always converges with the surveillance and control measures that we know from repressive governments.

Freedom in the future will require us to have the capacity to monitor our devices and set meaningful policy on them, to examine and terminate the processes that run on them, to maintain them as honest servants to our will, and not as traitors and spies working for criminals, thugs, and control freaks.

Source: 28c3-doctorow/transcript.md at master · jwise/28c3-doctorow