And I thought I am cynical enough to no longer be surprised by GOV's process to circumvent the Constitution and make nineteen eighty-four the reality. I was wrong.
As a long-time IT Guy who has grown tired and disgusted with GOV's fascist, class-war behavior, with this court decision I say to them:
Bring. It. The. FSCK. On.
While maintaining an air-gapped rig is a PITA, I can do that.
While conducting my Connected Life via a live image, removable-media-based system is a PITA, I can do that as well.
While good encryption slathered on everything is annoying, it is doable.
BTW, GOV... As long as you are connected to a network, you have no reasonable expectation of privacy;
Expect your thoughts and beliefs laid bare; your plans to be known by others sooner, rather than later; your secrets to be learned by all;
You want to see what Cyber Warfare _truly_ looks like?
Unless you're willing to take your computer with you everywhere, it's still easily compromised with hardware modifications when you're out of the home. Your router's firmware probably has multiple 0 days the NSA/FBI could exploit. Intel's Management Engine is an effortless backdoor into every laptop and desktop you have. Securing your smart phone against privacy issues is a lost cause.
The only real option you have left is using a typewriter with a one-time pad in a sound isolated room with a sheet over your head. And even then what you type isn't anonymous, it's just encrypted to withstand everything up to, but not including, some government agent holding a wrench (insert xkcd comic here)
At a superficial level, I think I would notice extra chips/wiring/HD showing up on a naked Mo-board.
Going further, as you wish to approach this in pseudo-apsolutist terms, GOV would simply choke on any effort to go _that_ far. Be it the Hardware Effort or the Software/Data Collection and Processing Effort (times many many millions), they would gag on The Spew. Yes, no encryption protects data for ever, blah blah. Good Encryption and other impediments just makes persuit/enforcement not worth the effort [insert THX-1138 reference and every real-world example of governments failing to absolutely control their populace here].
And since I am willing to talk in Absolute Terms, GOV is lousy at math. They may know something about Social Psychology, Propaganda, et al, but the Citizenry has both the guns and the numbers.
And from my perspective, they don't care. While part of the EU, GB has yet to move off the GBP for the Euro.
Also, it looks like Brexit will kill the LSE-DB merger. With LSE slated to be the lesser partner, I doubt the move would have been in GB's best interest.
When I first started teaching (university level), trying to come up with what I thought would be acurate grades would keep me awake most nights.
Asking fellow faculty revealed that they too had wrestled with the same problem, they developed a "feel" for what was right, and that they had simply accepted it as a pain point.
I refused to accept that. One semester I told them at the beginning of the semester that they were competing against their classmates. I was not setting upper and lower bounds for grades, their classmates were.
I used the full range of grades (A+ to F), and when I tabbed the grade distribution, the results freaked me out: It was an almost perfect bell curve. I decided to use the method again the following semester. Same results. I did it again the following semester. Same results again. I then permanently adopted the method.
Other results included the, "Why didn't I get an "A" on Project/Paper X" drama during office hours dropping off to nothing;
Student's were much more comfortable knowing they were competing against their classmates, rather than trying to "figure out" their professor;
My Teacher Evaluation scores didn't change across my changing grading methods;
My stress level went _way_ down, and allowed me to better concentrate on creating and delivering content.
Good Grief. For a lot less than an F-35 program, they could install a TSM rig, with off sight backup.
Ours (at a state university) deals with petabytes of data. We've had to escalate to IBM's Tier 3 support a couple of times over the past decade, but we have never lost a file.
Not happy with the headline. They voted no for an "unconditional" basic income. I think that is a huge difference, especially when a majority of the voters also want immigration reform.
While that's how I read it, perhaps the condition would be citizenship. I.e. they don't want to simultaneously allow more people into their country and also give everyone in their country a lot of money for fairly obvious reasons. However, the article doesn't give translations of the actual measures so it's hard to say.
That's because the referendum is open ended. The referendum text: «The confederation provides for an introduction of an unconditional basic income.» It's a very short text.
The referendum committee made a non-binding proposal to give Fr. 2500 and if someone already earns Fr. 2500 they would not get additional money. The details would still need to be worked out by the parliament. In Switzerland being founded on consensus this means that after a «yes» a huge discussion would start how to implement the basic income. But it seems that the referendum is going to be rejected.
That is exactly what I had in mind re: my original comment. Seeing from other comments there would be an earnings threshold. That, to me, is not "unconditional."
I'm probably running afoul of language/translation shear...
No you are right. For me it's not «unconditional» neither. However the commitee's proposal is not legally binding. Parliament would have needed to work out the exact details.
They might have conditions on income, property ownership, citizenship etc. In Cyprus (where I live) the recipients must agree to give unrestricted access to their bank accounts and the application form is quite long (15 pages IIRC). There are people (elderly mainly) that are unable to complete the application.
It's conditional yet it's still called "Minimum guaranteed income".
One basic-income like proposal is that it's available to those who are willing to work for others. I.e., society owes you enough income to survive, but in turn you owe society the fruits of your labor.
The values of those obligations may not match up - i.e. unskilled people maybe paid $7.25/hour for labor worth only $3 - but at least it's a reciprocal situation with shared obligations. I.e., we're all in this together.
We are not there yet. If we had perfect law enforcement and security then maybe. There is a reason real estate in the middle of some cities is cheap (crime). Of course perfect law enforcement has its own problems (like when nazi's in power).
But yeah, I don't understand why we need protectionism on the internet.
Exactly my thought. Stephenson's article is my all-time favourite Wired piece. Here it is, a great longform read: http://www.wired.com/1996/12/ffglass/
Cash is not going away anytime soon for at least a couple of reasons: Trust (Account Overloards say I have 100 USD in my account when I actually have 1,000), and cash is a very handy debt instrument for the issuer.
(and)
FDR did not take the US off the gold standard, he outlawed private ownership of gold. Nixon took the US off the gold standard in the early 70s.
There are innumerable small shops/cafes/restaurants that are cash only. Will banks or governments subsidize or provide free equipment in order to not harm the idolized small business owners and job creators?
FDR in effect broke the gold standard in two ways:
1) First since gold was illegal to own, Federal notes were effectively no longer redeemable for gold
2) The dollar was inflated from $20.67/oz to $35/oz
This meant two things; first the dollar was backed in gold by name only since you couldn't actually take advantage of that fact in any quantity. Second the Government was able to change the dollar/gold ratio at its whim. This breach of trust meant that the dollar was not and would never again be as good as actual gold.
As a long-time IT Guy who has grown tired and disgusted with GOV's fascist, class-war behavior, with this court decision I say to them:
Bring. It. The. FSCK. On.
While maintaining an air-gapped rig is a PITA, I can do that.
While conducting my Connected Life via a live image, removable-media-based system is a PITA, I can do that as well.
While good encryption slathered on everything is annoying, it is doable.
BTW, GOV... As long as you are connected to a network, you have no reasonable expectation of privacy;
Expect your thoughts and beliefs laid bare; your plans to be known by others sooner, rather than later; your secrets to be learned by all;
You want to see what Cyber Warfare _truly_ looks like?
You can't handle the truth.