[chiaro]

He writes well, and it's an interesting look at how intertwined the government has become (was it ever not?) enmeshed with corporate empires. Unfortunately in the wider population, Google's image is nigh unassailable. The average user wouldn't know about their being saddled with military contracts through their Boston Dynamics acquisition, for example. For this, and other reasons, 99 times out of 100, "free market" consumer action such as boycotts have negligible impact. That's alright though, when you can trust the state to properly monitor and regulate ethical conduct, though it doesn't look like we'll be quite so lucky here.

Regulatory capture is one of the biggest problems in the government today, but the solution isn't decreasing the power of the government over companies, it's decreasing the power of companies over the government.

[smtddr]

>>Unfortunately in the wider population, Google's image is nigh unassailable.

Well, for me I _still_[1] think of Google as the good guys because I place the blame for this mess squarely on USgov, which perhaps ultimately leads to the public's lack of empathy - but I see this as a chicken-and-egg problem. I don't know if USgov laws created a socioeconomic setup that made people too stressed about day-to-day life not care, or people not caring resulted in our current socioeconomic setup. That's the cycle I'd like to break; but blaming Google solves nothing. What are they suppose to do? Just straight up say "Screw you USgov, we're not obeying the law. Don't care about your gag-orders or your subpoenas. We're just going to flat out refuse. Do your worst, come at me bro." --- I would think even Google must crumble under the full force of USgov that would swiftly follow such an act of rebellion.

Afterall, Google cannot dodge, bob and weave like say... Snowden.

1. https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=8443796

[mindslight]

> What are they [Google] suppose to do?

Not have a business model predicated on datamining users' information, and build their systems in such a way that they are unable to collect troves of unnecessary information.

But the only way we'll ever see any change is through users/developers: Detach yourself from such businesses. Don't build your dream on top of their corrupted platform. And if you must use some of their services for pragmatic reasons, consider them hostile governmental entities and thoroughly understand what you are giving away to be stored indefinitely.

Even if we demolished the NSA and put the traitors' heads on pikes, it would only be a matter of time until insurance companies robustly created similar chilling effects: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=7928484

[smtddr]

Basically, you're saying to just not create a business like Google. That's not a practical solution because... money. If there's an opportunity to make money, it will be taken. Even the illegal & immoral ones, not to even talk about perfectly legal avenues.

More tangible problems with your idea of never collecting huge amounts of userdata are:

- If Google didn't collect userdata, I suspect their search wouldn't be working even half as good as it does now.

- Gmail, or any email provider?

- Amazon's shopping history with your address and CC recorded?

- Youtube?

- cellphone service provider? (yeah, you could avoid logging conversations & SMS but you're still the kind of company the NSA would come to for spying on a person simply because you'd be a major hub of communication)

[mindslight]

Yes. Users wising up will hopefully put an end to that money. Your statement is similar to saying that ending the NSA is not a practical solution because "power". So our personal autonomy is fucked because money and power - I'm willing to admit that this may be the inevitable answer, but in what way is it productive?

It's indeed hard to imagine a world in which users control their data - that is the extent of how hard we've been pwned.

Some of these systems were in place long before the issue could possibly be on anyone's radar, and would/will take quite a lot of work to extricate ourselves. anonymous payments - hard, especially now with Bitcoin on the scene. cell service - a bit harder, TOR+wifi+bearer payment for programmatic wifi access. physical address obfuscation - even harder, physical package mix network backed by repu (fuck, I give up).

But Youtube? You could write a software frontend tomorrow that avoided being Google's slave by not sending cookies. Comments would be a little harder, but that's a feature - I think a recent study showed glancing at those actually causes brain cancer. Beyond that, I guess TOR to scrub IPs until a better (high-latency) mix network comes along.

Email is a broken naive protocol like HTTP which relies on centralized identities, and can thus never really be secured. But secure messaging itself is a low hanging fruit. The fact we don't have it already shows that we seriously need to invest effort into building the ladder.

[smtddr]

When I said youtube, I meant the fact that people upload their lives to it. Not the cookie or IP tracking stuff. Speaking of uploading lives, let me add Facebook. So there just can't be a Facebook?

Devolving the internet & its services isn't the answer. You'd also have to just stop using cellphones too. There is no hiding from a corrupt government. You can't expect the general population to do all this stuff you're talking about. You have to fix the government. Focus on corruption-in-USgov and NSA, they are the enemy. Anything else is a distraction because it's not reasonable to say "Don't make a useful service for millions of non-technical people". Somebody, something, will always be popular and become a major hub of communication. To prevent that, is to prevent the evolution of not only the internet... but even society in general. And you'd be doing all that to avoid a corrupt-government, which you will fail at because you cannot avoid a corrupt-government. Anyone who thinks they have is wrong; it's just that USgov/NSA isn't interested enough in them yet.

The only exception is Snowden, and we all see the sacrifice he had to make to do it. If we all did that then... well... there is no America anymore. If that's what you're advocating, then you're asking for a nationwide revolution. Which is fine, btw. I'm supportive[1] of that. I'm just saying that avoiding a couple of social sites doesn't put you out of reach of the NSA. You'd have to get a significant amount of US citizens to go completely off the grid and live like hermits... or Snowdens. If that happened, I will happily call that a revolution and celebrate.

1. https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=8458114

[mindslight]

(for context, I hope for both the NSA and Facebook to go out of business, and was recently thinking Snowden might make a good Schelling point for a write-in candidate)

There's always going to be collection of selective disclosure. Some of that could be changed by a culture of secrecy (youtube videos in skimasks ^_^), but in general there will be people who post everything to the friendster du jour. And I don't see how one could ever stop assuming that information will be archived indefinitely. For this, my hope can only be for a symmetric Brinworld transparency where it ultimately doesn't matter (and to the extent some does, people learn to navigate these contours).

But for stuff that doesn't need to be shared, I think you're focused too much on the NSA, when it's really just the most prominent example. Any sufficiently-funded intelligence agency is going to have plants that work at significant corporate information troves. Exfiltration isn't terribly hard when companies setup geographically diverse data centers on purpose.

And as I said, insurance companies are a far more worrying threat to me as far as dictating everyday terms of your life - "we noticed you buy an awful lot of beer. Your auto insurance rates will be doubling unless you let us install a GPS-enabled breathalyzer in your car". I suppose this could be held back with legislation if we had a working political process, but I also recognize that economics tends to win out regardless.

You say 'devolve' when talking about moving to non-centralized services, but this is a loaded term. I view web toys (also a loaded term, heh heh) as a stop off from the Internet becoming mainstream-recognized before its application technologies were really polished to withstand model precession. There's no reason privacy-preserving technology couldn't have a similar interface, yet be easily self-administered with the help of any friend who is just slightly savvy (besides that it's much harder to get such software funded when there's no point for capital to invest because it rightly takes the middlemen out of the picture).

[api]

"Regulatory capture is one of the biggest problems in the government today, but the solution isn't decreasing the power of the government over companies, it's decreasing the power of companies over the government."

It's both, really. Companies are incentivized to meddle with government because government meddles with them. The revolving door goes in both directions. It's the dark side of "public-private partnership."

BTW... I really wonder if it's possible to get as big as Google without kowtowing to the state. Are you allowed to get that big without being summoned to some... ahem... "interesting" meetings? Seems to me that no government would allow private power of that magnitude without ensuring that its leadership was somehow beholden to state interests or at least was "with the program."

[nickff]

>"That's alright though, when you can trust the state to properly monitor and regulate ethical conduct, though it doesn't look like we'll be quite so lucky here."

Please provide an example of an industry whose regulator has performed this task well (or a list of regulators if you can find more than one), as I am not familiar with any in North America (my area of residence and familiarity).

>"Regulatory capture is one of the biggest problems in the government today, but the solution isn't decreasing the power of the government over companies, it's decreasing the power of companies over the government."

Why is the former solution inferior to the latter? I believe that the first solution is the only solution because of problems such as the aformentioned regulatory capture, as well as public choice, and various resource allocation (market-related) reasons. Please explain why I am mistaken. If you would like clarification with respect to any of my reasoning, let me know, and I can show my work (but I don't want to bore you unnecessarily).

[chiaro]

1.

That's kind of the catch, isn't it? All the government agencies that do their job with efficacy wouldn't be the ones you'd be made aware of. Only when something goes wrong do you become aware that your local water board performs useful work.

To the point though, regulation ensures our planes crash at a rate of less than one per 21,000 years of flight time. Food safety regulations have dropped e.coli poisoning by half in 15 years. I believe there's a state by state comparison on road deaths following seatbelt regulations, showing a clear causative effect.

Maybe we'd be a bit more aware of the fact that the government actually works pretty well most of the time if we sent our little prayers of gratitude to the Federal Aviation Administration on touch down instead.

Despite this, my larger point is that it works even better in most other Western countries. You can see this quite clearly in at least one case by comparing public expenditures on healthcare per person. Single payer health insurance is more effective per dollar, regardless of possible criticism on other grounds.

2.

Largely, because the free market is a poor regulator, and the government does it pretty well most of the time. To break it down:

a) there are things we'd rather corporations didn't do, for the good of society as a whole - such as misleading consumers about ingredients, or hey, hiring local cartels to break down some unions in Columbia.

b) consumer action by itself is ineffective. Boycotts, in the vast majority of cases, are too transient to be effective. This is compounded by the sheer number of companies one must try to keep track of to be an ethical consumer, the cartel example above is Coca-Cola, for example. Furthermore, say a mining or oil company is doing massive ecological damage. It's just too difficult to be able to track the produce of that mine to any decisions you make personally to effect what minute sway that decision would have.

c) the solution is to codify our standards for this behavior by social agreement, and penalize corporations that are found wanting. This is a regulatory body that provides a net benefit to society.

I do agree that the government has protectionist and overreaching regulations in certain areas, but I believe it's remiss to label the entire government as such. "Big" and "small" government are rhetorical buzzwords that prevent people from evaluating regulations and regulatory bodies on the case by case basis they require.

[nickff]

1. The Federal Aviation Administration (FAA) is actually used on Wikipedia as an example on the regulatory capture page; saying that "[i]n a June 2010 article on regulatory capture, the FAA was cited as an example of "old-style" regulatory capture, "in which the airline industry openly dictates to its regulators its governing rules, arranging for not only beneficial regulation but placing key people to head these regulators".[1] If you believe that regulations have improved food safety, I suppose that would be attributable to the Food and Drug Administration (FDA), where there is substantial evidence that it has caused more deaths than it has prevented, as well as evidence that it has gone out of its way for the benefit of some corporations; I have too many citations to provide for easy reading here, but the Wikipedia page is a good start.[2] It is possible that seatbelt laws sped up adoption, but the government has continued to ratchet up safety requirements without regard to the cost/benefit ratio to consumers, and the regulations have prevented further innovation in many area of automotive design and construction.[3][4]

2. a) Although the 'ingredients list' is a frequently cited example, the court system is sufficient to police this, as product descriptions are legally binding; the judicial system serves well in areas without 'consumer protection' agencies, such as electronic component performance specifications.

b) Is the problem that consumer action is ineffective, or that the majority of consumers don't agree with you, and engage in the same boycotts you do? Boycotts by individuals and corporations were effective in pressuring South Africa to stop apartheid, and have worked against many companies including Nike. I for one cannot manage to persuade my fellow citizens to boycott "The Simpsons" (which I don't find funny), or "Lululemon" (which far too many people wear outside of yoga classes), but that does not mean that I should be given the coercive power of the state. Perhaps the onus is on you to be more persuasive, and regulators are unnecessary here as well.

c) Maybe codifying standards into law is a possible solution, but the real problem is that there is no way to prevent the standards which are codified from being crafted in such a manner as to benefit special interests more than the general public (for public choice, and political ignorance reasons).

[1] http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Regulatory_capture

[2] http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Criticism_of_the_Food_and_Drug_...

[3] http://econlog.econlib.org/2014/10/09/mueller2.jpg

[4] http://www.autonews.com/article/20140331/OEM11/140339975/tes...

[wutbrodo]

> the Food and Drug Administration (FDA), where there is substantial evidence that it has caused more deaths than it has prevented,

This claim establishes you either as having horribly terrible reading comprehension, being a liar, or being a lunatic. The idea that the FDA has _cost more lives than it saves_ is so laughably insane that I don't even know where to begin. I guess the easiest place to start is the fact that your "sources" say nothing of the sort: the closest they come to you claim is the the a _specific_ amendment that the FDA made 50 years ago "may have cost more lives than it saved". To somehow conclude that applies to the FDA at large seems impossible for anyone with a reading comprehension level higher than the second grade.

[chiaro]

Reading through the specifics, you are right, it seems that the FAA is not doing as good a job as it should be, with episodic laxness in safety checks. It's a leap to say that the industry would be safer or otherwise better off without it though.

Claiming that the FDA has caused more deaths than prevented is, I'm afraid, utterly mindboggling. I can't really entertain the notion seriously, and can only think that this is more selection bias. Do share the evidence, though I feel it'd be a difficult thing to quantify concretely.

Ingredients lists is a throwaway example. More difficult elements to police are things like pesticide usage, hormone usage, presence of disease causing bacteria or molds. The reason Mad Cow Disease is no longer relevant is due to quick identification of the problem and suitable regulation to rectify it. 4.4 million cattle were killed to eradicate the disease, which is difficult to imagine happening quite so thoroughly by the individual volition of the farmers involved.

As for boycotts, it comes down to a separation of belief and behavior. Say a company with production in the third world sometimes uses slave labor. I'm confident that the majority of consumers would agree that this is not a morally acceptable thing for the company to be doing. However, this doesn't necessarily translate into changes in purchase decisions, if the consumer even finds out about this fact in the first place. Immoral corporate action is only rarely confronted by boycott, and only rarely does that boycott then work. Personal preferences are beside the point, and it's disingenuous to compare cartoons to human rights abuses.

Codification of standards can and is done without privileging special interests over the commons. In most other Western countries, this is pretty well understood. The political structure in the US (low voter turnouts require excessive campaign funds which require pandering, for one) means that regulatory bodies may be more susceptible to capture than most, but the fault does not lie with the existence of the body in the first place, nor in most places, does it wholly negate what good the regulator does do.

It does look that way, of course. "Fluoridation of Water Saves Another Ten Million Cavities" is unfortunately a headline I've yet to see.

[PeterisP]

I don't know what exactly the parent poster had in mind about FDA, but a commonly seen argument is that delaying a drug for a year by requiring more tests saves X expected lives (more chance to discover adverse effects), but also costs Y lives (those who would've been saved during that year), and that FDA are motivated by political reasons to act to ensure safety even in cases when X is significantly less than Y - thus, in effect, killing many people.

But that's not my point to make, so I can't give specific examples.

[chiaro]

Any interesting point, though it'd be hard to believe that'd come anywhere close the amount of lives saved by ensuring food and medicine are safe.

[lovemenot]

He does indeed write well. This made me lol:

>> That April, $32,300 went to the National Republican Senatorial Committee. A month later the same amount, $32,300, headed off to the Democratic Senatorial Campaign Committee. Why Schmidt was donating exactly the same amount of money to both parties is a $64,600 question.