Imagine that if in the beginning, Microsoft required any software that would run on a Windows machine must have been purchased through them. That for every single purchase on a Windows machine, a cut went to Bill Gates on top of what you paid to actually buy Windows. That would have never been allowed. But, over time, governments have capitulated to big corporate interests, whose sole mission is to extract as much profit out of the consumer (or other businesses) as much as possible.

Your argument that it "seems" to be "ok" for Microsoft to do this on XBOX is invalid and is mere whataboutism.

I have a pihole that I route all requests through, use firefox with ublock origin. Is there anything else I can do to prevent these parasites from tracking me?

Nonsense. Live in a city with great public transport, and it's not the public transport that sucks, but assholes who don't care about annoying others that sucks. And who are the biggest assholes in the city that I live? Why, the assholes in car who see fit to lean on their horns at all hours of the day.

Pricing fixing is illegal. Coordinating with your competition, even if it's through an app, is illegal. This isn't supply and demand, it's price fixing.

Video from More Perfect Union on how hotels are fixing prices: https://ancillary-proxy.atarimworker.io?url=https%3A%2F%2Fwww.youtube.com%2Fwatch%3F...

Imagine you could only buy your Windows applications from Microsoft. That you couldn't install other applications from other places, for "security" purposes. And then when regulators finally did something about it, Microsoft would have the gall to say we're going to charge a "technology" fee to put your application on the computers people already PAID for! What a complete and total joke. That Apple is allowed to do this, and make these ridiculous claims, while having another platform (OSX) that doesn't, shows you how fucked up the corporatocracy really is.

I don't think that's necessarily the case. You're assuming that their intentions might align exactly with ours - eg revealing the whole truth to everyone all at once (because anything else just wouldn't qualify!)

What if their intentions differ from ours? What if we aren't ready for a full scale arrival? What if we need something else?

I don't believe in UFOs - I think every single instance is explainable by something much more mundane.There's even a chance the military does internal drills where they expose their people to something "unexplainable" and see how they react. That's far more likely than some 1950s space saucer traveling trillions of kilometers only to crash land in ONE PARTICULAR REGION OF THE WORLD PRIMARILY.

That being said. I'm listening. I'm open to hearing what people have to say, but only if they're open to hearing that they might be wrong about it.

Is this unique to the Copenhagen interpretation? Does the same problem exist in Bohmian mechanics?

Guaranteed jobs have been tried before, in communist states like Czechoslovakia. Workers would show up drunk, do nothing, and get paid. Shit doesn't work.

The issue with universal basic income is of course who gets to define what "basic" is. Our political system is not up to the task of deciding this question. Shit, it can't even manage to pull off pretty easy and obvious solutions to similarly large problems (eg implementing carbon taxes to combat global warming). Our political system is controlled by a small number of very powerful people, most of which are leveraging their financial power into political power. If UBI comes about, and we have the same political systems in place, it'll be a "Let them eat cake" scenario where their definition of what constitutes "basic" does not afford much in terms of dignity or freedom.

If we're really going to address this problem, we have to fix what's fundamentally broken first. Our political decision making model is corrupt and can't scale to solve global problems. We need to fundamentally rethink how we govern ourselves, how we resolve conflict, and how we organize. But before we can do that, we have to identify *what* is the fundamental flaw in our political system, the core of which were designed when the fastest way to communicate was to tell someone something and have them run to the next town over. I believe what is limiting us from going is our information sharing/management strategy: delegation. Delegation is ultimately a bottleneck for sharing information (the messenger has very limited bandwidth). Delegation of political decision making power is also extremely shaky, and success in that regard largely seems to come down to luck. Just look at how many developing countries fall as their the political structures, built on delegation, prove themselves to be fragile and brittle. We in the west don't like to acknowledge this - we like to blame the people, rather than accept that we just got lucky. We write off instances where corruption and the concentration of power has led to horrific destruction, blaming the people rather than the system.

The problem is that getting people to accept that the strategy that has gotten us this far has its limits. Once you do that though, you can do something pretty amazing. If you're a crypto programmer, or are interested in discussing this further, shoot me a message.

Let's think this through.

If it's just other life - microbial - this might come as a surprise to some, but honestly, the universe is so big, it's bound to happen. What's it mean for us in the long run? Eh, does it really matter? It'll mean that the next step is more likely, but given the odds already ...

Technological life - eg life that has altered its planet's atmosphere enough that we can detect it using standard astrophysics. Well, this is interesting, but unless we can contact them, it doesn't mean much.

Technological life that can communicate with us - This becomes more interesting, for obvious reasons. Is it bound by the rules of physics we know now? Or, like in *Contact*, can the aliens actually communicate instantaneously (in contact, via Einstein-Rosen bridge, wormholes, which are theoretically possible now, but the science is far from settled. I mean, GR still has closed timelike curves possible, and I doubt a unified theory would allow such paradoxes to exist).

If they can communicate with us, it's a question of how long/how fast. Current physics, or will a unified field theory allow something faster, say something *instant*? How does that change the game?

Worst case - their intentions are bad. Or they have good intentions, and don't know how to establish contact without risking a huge fuck up. Game over for Earth, and really, there's nothing we could do about it, could we.

Best case. They know *exactly* what they are doing, their intentions are not only good - minimize harm and suffering, maximize freedom and happiness - but they know *exactly* how to pull it off. What does this look like? What would it truly mean to have the best case for first contact? Contact hints at this - small steps, and the ultimate question is "how? How did you manage to survive?"

Turns out if you run this in your head logically, the answer pops right the fuck out, and I suggest you do that now, then we can compare notes.

Working overtime with no vacation with three or four project managers breathing down the back of your neck while your boss who has ADHD keeps piling on new (but useless) projects. Burn out can hit you and hit you hard.

You probably are not aware that there will be an international meeting in Paris soon. Many governments will be represented, and the protests are an attempt to somehow sway more governments to act?

But no. Far easier to knock down strawmen. Sick of protesting crap. Yeah, democracy and free speech are so sickening, ugh! Why don't we have more countries like North Korea and China where the governments really know how to crack down on these stupid protests! /s

Congratulations Pete, you're one of those persons who is capable of taking a complicated, confusing law, and twisting it so as to make it look like what these agencies are doing is legal, when they are clearly not. As long as people like you exist, and they always will, it goes to show why we should never trust the government to have these sorts of capabilities.

Snoop on property within the UK .. fucks sakes, you realize we're talking about people here right. Nah, best to call it property and further distance yourself from what this really means.

Shame on you.

Get politics out of economics? Politics is applied economics. The two are practically inseparable. I can't see anyway of separating the two.

If you want to get money out of politics, you have to look at where is the money going, and it's going to ONE thing. Campaigns. Campaigns for elections.

Why do we have elections? Oh, to give people the chance to elect people who will represent them. How's that working, when over 50% of the US congress are millionaires?

Elections are a sham. It's a horserace between two (or more) teams, and you got people cheering their team on like any other sport. It's not about the issues - it's about the brand, the characters pushing the brand, the identity being sold - a true American/Canadian/Whoeverian votes for X! If you vote for Y or Z, you're an idiot. The issues don't really matter. Politicians are professional bullshitters, they'll do whatever hand waving it takes to get around the issues. Even if you're a well informed voter, what happens? You make a smart, educated choice, and your elected politician then "compromises" in order to get anything, anything at all, accomplished. The ideals and principles that made you vote for that person? Gone, because the system doesn't work that way. If you want to get anything done, you need more power, so vote in the way that gets you the position on that committee, and by the time you get the position to do something, you've been so thoroughly handled by the system that you no longer see what's broken, what's wrong with it, and are happy to turn the next batch of "leaders" into followers.

Get rid of elections, get rid of the money in politics, get rid of the professional bullshitters that are politicians. The alternative? A sortition. I'd bet good money that you take a random person off the street, they'll be as well equipped to look at the problems we're facing than any of the two faced, self serving power hungry people you've got in your government right now. Have an approval vote to approve whatever laws or changes to the rules the sortition proposes. If the citizenry approve, then the sortition gets rewarded. If they don't approve, then the sortition should be paid the median wage. Either way, the next year, a new sortition gets randomly selected, and the work continues.

Democracy as we know it is broken. Elections were a step in the right direction, to move power away from the nobility, the chosen few. And look where they've gone - another Bush v. Clinton race in 2016. AGAIN. What an amazing choice America has. And while other countries don't have exactly the same level of bullshit going on, they still have significant bullshit. Canada, where the vast majority of people oppose new proposed laws, even one of the main political parties oppose it, but they approve the vote because otherwise it might be used against them in attack ads come the next election. Shit is broken, and we need a real fix.

Of course they've learned from history! If you want to keep power, you need to distract the citizenry. They should be so preoccupied that they can't deal with some nebulous concept of having only the illusion of privacy. High unemployment, stagnant wages, but just enough entertainment to make sure the masses don't get off their couches after a long day. If you want to keep power, you need to know who the subversives are, because if they ever do get into a position of being able to do something, you want to have enough dirt on them to shut them down before things get out of hand. Or, more likely, have enough powerful media voices repeating the mantra that everything is okay, to drown out the voices that are pointing out what's actually wrong.

They saw how it failed in East Germany, in the old countries, where force accompanied the spying. Now they know that they need to cover their asses - pass laws that vaguely sound like they allow what you're doing. Have secret courts that are "independent" that rubber stamp whatever you want. Parallel engineering for cases where the information was gleaned illegally. I don't think these systems fell apart because of their secret police tactics, but rather a culmination of other various factors - economics, and seeing how things operated outside of their ridiculous bubble. So the Americans, Canadians, etc, made their bubble that much larger, so that they can say "Everyone else is doing this as well, quit complaining".

To be fair - this isn't the politicians per se - but rather the establishment, the bureaucracy. The politicians buy their lines about public safety and security hook line and sinker, and why not, they were paid for by the powerful, who want to ensure that they'll maintain the status quo. A small subset of the population will buy whatever it is their politician is selling, and it's just enough to give them a glean of credibility and legitimacy.

No, the only people who haven't learned from history are the citizens. The citizens who keep thinking that professional politicians are capable of fixing anything, of accomplishing anything, despite leading *democracies* into unjust wars time and time and time and time and time again. That politicians are capable of getting a handle on the bureaucracy, to prevent corruption and incompetence. Hah. To be clear - I'm not advocating we go to anarchy and get rid of government. No, we need democracy and even a *representative* democracy, but the representation has to be fair and equitable - it can't lean way out of proportion to represent the rich and powerful, which is what most every democracy has right now, because elections are such an easy thing to subvert. A democracy must be completely open and transparent, otherwise corruption and incompetence, hand in hand with secrecy, grows and spreads like a cancer. Until more people realize this, and decide to do something about it, things won't get any better.