admiralteal

If the data were properly encrypted and could only be decrypted by the client on their own device

Yeah, but part of Wyze's sales pitch is their AI image recognition features, and they'd lose all training data by doing that and would force it to be processed locally, both of which would be a dead end.

I realize these might not be features you want nor care about... but those are the features they want to offer.

Also if the shareholders vote for policy X, the company cannot work against policy X or ignore policy X.

If your shareholders all get together and vote for some policy or program that will DEFINITELY hurt the stock value... well, the company still has to do it because it obeys the shareholders. And it has to try and do it the best possible way -- malicious compliance/bad faith can also potentially get you in trouble.

But since the majority shareholders in, frankly, most meaningful public companies are the likes of hedge funds, then the majority of votes are always going to be to do the thing that boosts share value. This inhuman corporate concepts simply cannot care about anything other than more dollars. On the rare occasion where they may try, it gets labeled as ESG wokism and they get threatened legally by conservative governors (at least in the US).

The real problem with shareholder capitalism may be the terrible influence of hedge funds and professional investors rather than the fundamental principle of the investor-based system. But the hedge fund and professional investor is also a kind of natural consequence of these systems.

Can't wait for the day a major court declares EULAs universally nonbinding outside of the most common-sense terms. Even though I doubt it will ever happen.

"We can store and display your content and use stuff you publicly post as examples in advertisements for our platform" is pretty common sense.

"We can use the things you post to do complex data analytics to package and sell your identity to advertisers" is fucking sus.

"We can use the things you post to train ANN generative systems to build next-generation technologies to impersonate you and your peers" is simply nuts.

The idea that displaying an EULA with an "agree" button is informed consent is just preposterous. Even lawyers don't read them.

Pretty sure if e.g. the US manages to pass a carbon fee

But it won't. Politically radioactive. And in the meantime, you could've been advocating for policies that actually have traction. That build constituencies instead of tearing them down.

But whatever. You've got Faith in this policy and there's no point arguing with it.

George Shultz, one of the founders of CCL, was literally one of the guys who helped Regan craft his economic policy vision, and I'm sure many of those he brought on with him were part of that field too. I don't just call anything Reaganomics, but I DO call this shit that way.

If you seriously want to hear different voices, I recommend you start with David Roberts at Volts: https://www.volts.wtf/

He interviews everyone, has clear opinions, and backs up his positions with practical politics.

(edit: maybe start with this one?: https://www.volts.wtf/p/do-dividends-make-carbon-taxes-more )

I already told you my actual solution. You didn't listen.

we continue along the path of e.g. the IRA and invest heavily in alternatives, renewables, and infrastructure development. Fossil fuels are already a significantly more expensive energy source than solar and wind and that gap will only keep growing wider, ESPECIALLY if we delete fossil subsidies. And those learning curves are how we will kill fossils worldwide. Why should a developing nation with flexible climate ethics be importing Russian coal when they could be building renewable energy production that does not require importing a suspect commodity that will be even cheaper for them?

It will then turn out to be completely uneconomical to use fossil fuels at their true price, as it should’ve been.

Renewables are ALREADY out-competing fossils joule for joule and learning curves are only making that delta bigger over time. The US has seen a spate of utilities buying up coal power plants just to shut them down because it is so uneconomical to operate them, yet still we have politicians vowing to support coal just because they like it / to own the libs.

The issue is that there are people who want to use fossil fuels. Many nations' entire economies depend on it. So they'll keep doing it. They'll sell and use the fuels in places that don't tax them, if they have to. They'll literally build demand. They'll push to get every molecule out of the ground and sold, even as returns diminish.

Not to even get into the conservative lunatics who want to keep using them on principle, even knowing they are an economically bad deal.

Even if you could get a carbon tax passed in the US (which is a giant, giant, giant "fat chance"), it'll have more leakage than the tattered Depends worn by all of our politicians.

Meanwhile, like with any tariff, the people hurt most by this carbon tax won't be the producers. Saudi Arabia is not going to agree to pay our taxes. Instead, it'll be the end consumers. Regressively, with the poorest and most vulnerable consumers who cannot afford to immediately electrify hurt the worst.

The philosophy of the IRA is the way to win this fight. Invest, incentivize, and do it progressively. Building a constituency all the way.

Why does CCL, an organization that was founded by a bunch of neoliberal/Reaganomics businessmen specifically to advocate for setting up a carbon tax, advocate for a carbon tax. Hmm, let me think about that for a few minutes and get back to you...

There's so many voices in the climate movement saying the same things I do -- that chasing carbon taxes and similar politically radioactive policies is terrific waste of time and that we should instead focus on building incentives and public works towards research, infrastructure, and energy investment. But chase that white whale, have fun.

Plenty of other ways from a carbon tax -- not least of which because the carbon tax has itself proven to be a convenient industry distraction that sucks air out of the room.

Especially since it's not clear removal tech will ever be able to ramp up sufficiently to cover continued burning.

A carbon tax is an albatross. It's not even worth seriously discussing. It's ten steps beyond politically infeasible -- probably even more infeasible than actual prohibition. It's innately regressive even if you try to do weird structural things like progressively returning the money (because the return is just going to be economically inefficient and complex tax codes ALWAYS benefit the poor and vulnerable the least).

And most importantly, the fossil fuels have to stay in the ground. We have already pumped out too much and we must move towards pumping no more.

The fossil industry would in many ways LOVE for a carbon tax solution because that would be the exception to prove the rule that continued extraction will be allowed forever. That their business model, which has plenty of cash already, can drill baby drill.

And in the meantime, we continue along the path of e.g. the IRA and invest heavily in alternatives, renewables, and infrastructure development. Fossil fuels are already a significantly more expensive energy source than solar and wind and that gap will only keep growing wider, ESPECIALLY if we delete fossil subsidies. And those learning curves are how we will kill fossils worldwide. Why should a developing nation with flexible climate ethics be importing Russian coal when they could be building renewable energy production that does not require importing a suspect commodity that will be even cheaper for them?

This is a heartbeat of history; people who can profit off of the suffering of others will do so remorselessly.

So many other stories you can look up. Obvious shit like climate change or smoking, where it's well-known how unrepentantly evil the industry has been in suppressing the science and research they KNEW indict their product.

For an equally-tragic but less-well-known story, you could look into the Radon Girls. That's a heartbreaking saga of corporate malfeasance where the bad guys basically got away with it.

If you like podcasts, this is narratively similar to the content in two of my favorites. You're Wrong About and Well There's Your Problem. The former is more about cultural moments and moral panics, the latter is oriented towards the arrogance and carelessness of engineers (though sometimes is just historical stories).

And that the thing they are most concerned with is labor organization.

Enshitification doesn't really apply to GitHub because you aren't really locked into GitHub. At least you aren't so long as you consider the git part of it to be more important than the social media platform part of it. Repositories are totally interoperable with other services so the cost to jump platform is fairly low. At least so long as you aren't relying on curling stuff directly from GitHub, which everyone knows is a terrible idea and very bad practice yet happens all the time anyway.

The template and framework of this idea requires social media platforms be finger traps, with way higher costs to leave than enter.

Doctrow himself is pretty clear about this. Interoperability is the way you fight back against enshitification.

It's real-time chat. That's fundamentally different, philosophically, from the way a forum/wiki works.

You can cludge forum-like features into it with stickies and bots and yada yada yada... or you could just use a platform that is designed from the ground up to be a permanent knowledge store instead of extended, glorified AOL chatrooms.