Another way is: there are two options. Either we have strong anonimity on the Internet, or the authorities have the power to catch criminals. Which one do you think would win in a vote?
I don't know if this was a rhetorical question with an implied and obvious answer, but to me it actually is a curiosity, I have no idea which one would win a vote.
Those who paid attention knew that Trump needed to win votes in specific states, not on the Upper East Side or in the Bay Area just like those who pay attention realize that only places like Bay Area or Upper East Side would have people voting for anonymity vs. ability of police to solve crimes.
Could you explain? I mean, if the government has the ability to catch criminals that think they are anonymous then how exactly is true anonymity of non-criminals maintained?
To be clear, of the two evils I'd prefer having the risk of a few bad people getting their way than to trust the "good government" to always protect me by knowing everything about me, but this is far from a trivial subject. In some ways this is analogous to the issue of the right to bear arms. There's always a tension between safety and liberty and it's not always clear where the optimal line should be drawn.
Everyone knows if you want true anonymity when conducting criminal activity you don't use a service with a dollar trail straight to you. You use a system you've gained unauthorized access to and you doctor or delete the logs. Criminals have no qualms illegally accessing other people's systems, so it's not logical that giving non-criminal users access to true anonymity would give the criminal users any capabilities they don't already have. In fact there could be benefits to non-criminal users of such a system possibly shielding them from certain types of criminal activity, so it is not even true that society inherently has more to gain by prohibiting truly anonymous networks.
Point taken regarding criminals using criminal methods to gain anonymity, and I have little doubt that often the real agenda behind government action in this field is accumulation of power and control over the population in the guise of protecting it. However, like with guns, when there is an abundance of them and they can be easily and legally obtained, you will probably end up with more casualties by criminals who would otherwise perhaps not have seen the investment (and risk) in obtaining one worthwhile. To be clear, I am for everyone's freedom for total anonymity and believe it is a faster way to a better world than trusting governments with too much power - it's just that I think that it doesn't come without a price.
You can't. Any network having strong anonymity needs to have zero negative effects on the real world by design. The Internet is not that. It is inextricably intertwined with huge areas of our 'real' world. So strong anonymity on the Internet will never happen, politically. At most there'll be some subnet like Tor or Freenet and even those aren't immune from legislation.
when will this meme end? I don't own any crypto anymore, but I find it endlessly weird that a government can just declare something illegal and immediately begin arresting people with no warning.
That would be like me hopping on my bike, pedaling for hours, which charges up a battery that is attached to it with an inverter, putting it into a carboat, driving onto the water, to get into my seaplane.
The original goal was for me to be in the air. LOL
Yes, but many people have been designsted as "having stopped looking for work", which means the statistic doesn't count them.
Additionally, those who are employed perhaps are underemployed, working as an Uber driver or bartender or chipotle or etc.
>the economy has improved
For the top 6% of Americans that are millionaires, it absolutely has improved. Most of their income is from capital gains, dividends, and business equity.
The average person with student loans has almost none of these things. They are relying on a wage from a job that requires them usually to pay rent, own a car, buy a monthly transport card, and so on.
When you are only making $1400-2000 per month after tax, and $1,000 of that is out the door on work-related expenses alone (rent, transport, insurance, phone), there isn't much left over for a $300 per month student loan payment.
Disclaimer: Don't shoot the messenger. These are merely my thoughts on what is happening. Please reply with criticism.
The amount of people I know with degrees who work in retail, or something completely unrelated is staggering. From my observations, I'd guess "underemployment" is the biggest contributor to the late payments.
This is just another example of why I urge any young people I know (high school age) to think long and hard before choosing to go to a 4 year college. When I graduated high school in 99', we were primed to think "college degree == good job". Of course, that is anything but the truth. And, it only serves to put someone in serious debt without any guarantees.
Hands on technical jobs like electrician, plumber, welder, are many times more lucrative than some bullshit business degree. A friend of mine's son is 22 or 23, and making a hell of a living welding. Granted, he's exceptional at it. But, that doesn't change the fact that his 2-year trade school investment was a good one.
Or, teach yourself a skill. Like lots of us on here, I'm a self taught programmer. It took years of doing small projects in the evenings, but I make a living from it now with $0 in student loan debt.
The key is a marketable college degree. In fields such as aerospace and defense where the credential is the key to open the door, get the credential as cheaply as possible. Do a couple of years at a community college and then finish at a state school. Name-brand degrees bring no extra value. Oh yeah, and get your master’s while you’re still in the zone.
The idea that trade school somehow is lower tier or oppressive is a staggering disservice. Just like every college-bound high schooler is not med school material, not every high schooler is college material. Put a wrench or saw or blowtorch in the hands of a doctor or engineer, and crummy is the likely result. Skilled trades are an honorable, respectable way to earn a good living. Forcing people into tracks for their own supposed good but where they feel hopeless is horrible social engineering.
In fact, the conventional wisdom these days seems increasingly to be that you should go to a top-tier law school or just not bother. And that seems to be becoming fairly common advice for MBAs as well, although that's not as cut and tried because MBAs cover a wider range of programs than law degrees do.
Law is not a guaranteed payout. The competition is incredible, and if you don't get into those firms, there's a big drop off in what you're likely getting paid. $30k a year jobs for those that didn't make it into the prestigious firms (or start their own practice) is fairly common.
Not only what you said, trades can also lead you down a path of owning your own business. If that is the direction you go often you can exceed the incomes of the college educated quite handily.
Great point, but for some reason union-protected professional educators who hold degrees from accredited institutions and who control state education monopolies are hostile to this worldview and deride it as “demeaning.”
think long and hard before choosing to go to a 4 year college
A college degree is still worth a considerable bump in lifetime earnings.[1] Perhaps you should revise your advice to "think long and hard before choosing to go to an expensive 4 year college" or "consider spending the first two years of college at a local community college."
One question I have regarding spending the first 2 years in a CC is how does this impact your ability to get admitted to a 4-year school later on, particularly a top-tier (say top 50) university? Are these schools less likely to admit students who will only spend a couple of years there vs students entering straight out of high school, all other things being equal? I don't know the answer, but given my son is on a track to gain admission to a top university, I would hate to give advice that could hurt him in the long run.
My state has multiple public universities which regularly appear on top 50 lists and for many in demand fields in the top 5 or 10. The CC systems have agreements with the state public universities guaranteeing admission after 2 years attending CC. There are of course requirements that must be met during the 2 years. They vary from school to school, so you do need to target a specific school while attending CC. These requirements generally involve minimum GPA, credit hours earned and required courses. Since the requirements can vary so greatly between schools many of the CCs have counselors dedicated to working with students to make sure they meet the requirements of the specific 4 year school they would like to attend.
The universities were required to enter these agreements by state law. In an attempt to bring in more out of state tuition dollars some have started to voluntarily enter similar agreements with CC systems in other states.
Do some research and see if there are similar arrangements between CCs and public universities in your state or with out of state universities.
tssva is correct, most states have matriculation agreements between the CC system and state college system. So, at worst, you finish your degree at your home states flagship state university (obviously, those vary, but generally, each state has at least one well respected institution). If you're in VA, you "hit the jackpot" and have many choices (UVA, W&M, VT, plus a half-dozen other solid choices).
Locally (VA), students are guaranteed admission to the state university system if they meet a published GPA threshold. That threshold varies by school. The one big caveat - students are not guaranteed placement within specific programs. So, at GMU, an overall GPA of 2.85 is required to transfer, however that is might not be high enough to guarantee placement in their Computer Science program (which is highly competitive and close to fully enrolled).
I don't know how this applies to transferring to an Ivy (or other top-tier private). For the Ivies, I assume the caliber of student who can gain admission is going to figure out the finances (for better or worse). I also assume (big assumption here) that even a "useless" liberal arts degree from Harvard makes one employable at a reasonable salary (vs the same degree from a 2-tier school).
Edit - one "local" private school (Shepherd U, WV) also has a guaranteed transfer program from the local (Northern VA) CC system. They offer a tuition discount to those transfers. http://www.shepherd.edu/nova-transfer-admissions/
Unfortunately, my state's universities are decidedly mediocre. Both flagships sit outside the top 100 nationally. Bordering states do have strong public universities, so I will have to see if there is any reciprocity. Otherwise, it looks like we'll have to do a lot of close examination of the total financial packages being offered when the time comes.
I graduated in the mid-90s with $20k in debt. That wasn't fun but it was manageable. I can't imagine graduating with a mortgage's worth of debt.
VA also has a private college subsidy (effectively brings most private college tuition down near state-tuition rates). Maybe your state offers something similar? And, check other in-state privates, maybe they offer something like Shepherd U.
I would be very, very careful making the conclusion college degree leads to lifetime earnings, it's possible that a third (or forth, or fifth, ...) factor that makes people more likely to earn a college degree is what leads to the bump in lifetime earnings.
It is also completely useless to lump together all college degrees from all schools.
Sure, it's a massive generalization. But, no more so than "college is an over-priced waste of time," which is a claim I see repeated on HN and other tech-centric forums.
This, exactly. I don't know why you're getting down-votes. It's indisputable that both (1) the economy improving on average and (2) the distribution of those gains is highly skewed to the right-side of the income/wealth table.
Stories based on average numbers lose a great deal of the details that matter.
Completely agree, especially when the USA has nearly 330 million people!
Last year according to credit Suisse, the median wealth of the typical American actually /decreased/! And if I remember correctly, it was by quite a sizeable chunk, from 49,000 usd to 45,000 usd.
And the median excludes children, so it is adults only.
I have all the statistics in the world to back up what I'm saying, but even more important for me is anecdotal stuff that inspires me to dig deeper.
When you see the sheer number of young kids working chipotle or retail; when you see the demographics of uber drivers vs big 5 software engineers; when you realize that so much of the wealth in the US is old money that continues to centralize, pool, and grow (much like gravity);
when you realize all that, at the very least, it makes you say "hmmm... I need to rethink and dig deeper into this topic on my own".
Besides all that, I'd add that the unemployment rate is an aggregate measure. There's no guarantee that the unemployment rate for arbitrary subsets of the population (e.g. college graduates) is the same as the aggregate unemployment rate defined over the whole population. So, supposing that college educated workers actually were more likely to be unemployed than the average worker (they aren't), looking at the national unemployment rate would be just ... looking at the wrong place.
But here's a "nice" graph (the graph is nice, but the trend is worrying): https://fred.stlouisfed.org/series/LNS11327662. Labor force participation for college educated workers fell by 3.9 percent points since 2009. This is rather massive compared with the actual unemployment.
I really wish the people at statistics offices would come up with some new measure of unemployment. Sometimes I feel a scalar doesn't cut it.
It's always nagged me how we can say the economy has improved without taking the distribution into account. It's like saying one person gained five bucks and three people lost a dollar. Sure there is two more dollars but the community/society isn't necessarily better for it.
It used to be that when someone at the top got a bit richer, they would invest that money. Which meant opening up a factory, creating jobs as a side effect. Now, it seems the better investments happen to be things that don't create as much jobs.
> Yes, but many people have been designsted as "having stopped looking for work", which means the statistic doesn't count them. Additionally, those who are employed perhaps are underemployed, working as an Uber driver or bartender or chipotle or etc.
Yes. In most countries I know of, employment statistics are more about making economy/government look good and hitting targets, and less about giving any real numbers that people can use to understand the big picture.
Those numbers are all computed, and they've all been getting better as core unemployment has (that is, they are trending together). The only number that is getting worse is the number of people retiring out at 65/67.
I do agree that we have to look more at wealth equality to see what's going on.
If you include the unemployed as well as those who want a job but aren't actively looking, it's around 5% which is considered low.
But the point of the article is that the unemployment rate is moving in the opposite direction to the arrears rate. Unless the basis for these figures has changed recently, this would require that an abnormal number of graduates aree becoming less emlpoyed while an abnormal, and larger, number of grads are becoming employed. Seems unlikely.
> ...perhaps are underemployed
Are you sure? I'm not totally familiar with the exact counting mechanism in the US but, in the UK, if someone is in part-time work but is looking for more hours or full-time work, then they count as unemployed, not employed.
For further reading on this, look to articles about how the Phillips Curve (the theoretical link between inflation and underemployment) is broken (if it ever worked).
The Phillips Curve, at least in it's older formulations, was just a description of a certain regularity in the data. So it isn't a "theoretical" link, strictly speaking.
I never said I am commuting on $5k road bike. I just compared the price of the electric car to price of high end carbon fiber road bike (which I have, but don't use for commuting to work).
I commute on cheap mountain bike. Too many potholes and obstacles, etc for any road bike with 23mm tires. It would get destroyed on first ride to the city core.
Regardless of this guy's politics, it's weird for someone to die in their sleep at 38.
He was arrested on drug charges before, and my subjective impression of his demeanor makes me think he might have been on downers like heroin or klonopin.
If he did die in his sleep for no reason though, then it is a terrible thing and it pains me to think about.
In this article, the government directly accuses Google of deliberately storing data overseas, so that they don't have to comply with certain court orders.
How is it a crime to store data internationally?
Am I a criminal for storing my photos on a Russian VPS?
Does this enrage you?
Also absolutely insane that one ruling in one Fed District Court is non-binding to the other Courts.
Also absolutely insane that one ruling in one Fed District Court is non-binding to the other Courts.
What is the point of having the Supreme Court if courts which are nominally peers of one another are bound by each other's decisions? By having multiple cases with slight variations of the facts involved, the Supreme Court gets multiple data points upon which to base their decision which is then binding for the whole country.
From the article, and I'm no expert: they referred to that other court as a "sister court". My take on that was that those courts reside on the same legal 'tier' so neither one really dictates for the other, SCOTUS is the point of final arbitration.
You aren't a criminal for storing photos on a Russian VPS but you might be a criminal if you store data related to your money laundering activities on that same server. If the government can meet a reasonable standard for a warrant and prove that there is likely evidence on that server, should they be unable to secure access? What if that data were related to an imminent attack?
I'm in favor of protecting data privacy and hope that the courts side with Google/Microsoft but I don't think that the arguments are as crazy as you describe them. From the government's standpoint, tech companies are enabling criminal's efforts to circumvent the law and endanger citizens.
Offline laws are struggling to keep pace with the internets, nothing new.
> If the government ... access? What if that data were related to an imminent attack?
We can always play the game of upping the consequences but it's always the case that people are willing to throw out the rule of law when there's enough danger and I think that's the standard we should hold.
If there's an imminent attack I think the argument should be that the danger is so great that the police/military must be given an exception to the law, not constantly expanding their power just in case.
When "the rule of law" can be changed at whim by one side to the detriment of the citizens, without recourse by the citizens to fix those changes, then "the rule of law" is a farce and has already been thrown out.
Too often, the group who is currently in charge of a government gets a free pass to play havoc with both constitutional interpretations and general reasonableness of the societal rules and laws simply because they are the government. They are not held to any standard of responsibility for the changes they force upon the citizens.
How often do we find that governments create more and more law and regulation solely for the benefit of that government and its "backers"? These laws and regulations end up being to the detriment of the citizens, those for whom, ostensibly, that regulation and law is supposed to protect and benefit.
I should make note that irrespective of any imminent threat, law enforcement and military should always be held to the highest possible standard and never given any exception in following the law, that is the path to them never following the law and becoming a "law" unto themselves.
Which is fine, but my hope is that giving the police and military a method to deal with 'national security' threats by seeking exceptions on a case-by-case basis that generally applicable law can be reigned in unburdened from dealing with exceptional cases and add a bit of additional transparency because people would start paying attention when it's invoked.
> never given any exception in following the law
But my point is that in your world the law needs to explicitly handle exceptional cases and remain consistent which I think leads to an unnecessary expansion of power. For example I think there is a strong case that when faced with a credible bomb threat that the police should be able to compel suspects to unlock their phones. But outside of literal states of emergency I would be very uncomfortable with police having that power and I think asking the court to effectively instate temporary martial law to acquire powers like this would actually reduce their power most of the time.
* It means we can write laws without having to worry about exceptional cases that can be used as loopholes.
* It's an incredibly high bar to meet. I think the courts would rightfully be reluctant to grant these powers.
* There would be little chance of these powers setting a precedent since it's by definition since they're suspensions of the law.
* It would be an incredibly loud signal that would be obvious to anyone and everyone if it was being abused.
The problem is that this exists already and doesn't work. The fundamental problem is that "suspect" is based on assumption of guilt first and not on assumption of "innocence" first.
We already have enough evidence that the "haystacks" are far too big. Law enforcement should required very highly trained individuals that have extremely high standards of protecting the citizenry without requiring exceptions to obeying the law. Yet, what we see is LEO's of all description who are self-entitled, above the law and are only concerned about what they want, they kill, they steal, they destroy with the courts (in many cases) just giving them a free pass.
Society at large, doesn't trust them and these non-trusted groups are not interested (on the whole) to change to gain that trust back. So, until they change there is no logical reason for giving them any leeway.
In terms of your exceptional cases, there are laws already on the books that handle this. There is no need for additional specialised law to cover these cases.
The problem of "crime prevention" is that this is not an add-on feature. "Crime prevention" is a fundamental feature of a society that is responsible. Yes, there will be instances of a crime happening and you need to deal with this after the event with the appropriate action. Unfortunately, in today's society, many things that are "crimes" only because a section of society think they should be are treated as more serious than things that are really crimes. So copying a film is more punishable than taking a life. Go on from there.
If the data are stored in a Russian VPS, you ask the Russian authorities to get them for you.
Asking Google to get them, is akin to asking a hacker hack foreign servers. Would you like the reverse? A Russian company delivering data from US based servers just because a Russian court asked for them?
If I understand the 5th amendment correctly, and its caselaw, you would be OK storing evidence of your own crimes overseas, but evidence relating to other people you could be compelled to turn over.
Hooray! Maybe the US will finally stop being judge, jury, and executioner.
>[read article, which states, "the virus has not yet affected pilots' ability to operate the drones"]
Well, damn. I guess we can keep our fingers crossed.
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