When you invade somebody and lose - you return to status quo (with some bad diplomatic consequences but still). There's a point past which it doesn't make sense to escalate.
When your citizens try to overthrow you and you lose - you and your family are dead soon. There's no thing that autocratic government won't do to avoid being overthrown.
As for fantasies of gun rights preventing fascism - it didn't historically (see Italy where before Mussolini the gun laws were very loose). Nor did fascism necessarily resulted in stricter gun control (in Germany Hitler actually loosened the gun laws after he took control). It frankly doesn't matter.
The simple fact is - in a developed country uprisings have 0 chance of winning against a professional army. Hand guns change nothing. The only way to win is to persuade the army to take your side. Which usually happens when the country doesn't have enough money to buy their loyalty.
US police officers kill about 1000 people a year, guns don't seem to protect them.
The narrative of armed citizens operating in a structure to defend citizens and the constitution works fine if you don't have armed citizens operating in a structure to defend citizens and the constitution.
If you lose hearts and minds of one group armed US citizens (the military), why is your group of armed citizens any more justified?
If you don't lose it, why do you need the armaments?
He designed a building called a Panopticon, a design for a factory that allows many workers to be monitored closely by managers. He also thought it would make a good design for prisons, another interest areas. A lot of modern prisons resemble/derive from the Panopticon.
We need to remember that not everything is a new problem. Digitisation creates new privacy avenues which can be violate or defend. The bigger picture often stays the same. Solving problems by exercising more rigorous control over workers... in ways they don't like.
I think many HN-ers have a certain class blindness about these issues. A lot of jobs require urine tests, monitor employee's screens, motivate using cctv, etc. Some jobs actually require this. Often though, it's just a class thing. Urine tests for CS agents and warehouse workers. None for programmers.
As bad as it is, it's still better than actually being constantly watched.
There is somewhat of a distinction between spying to sell you papmers and spying to maintain political power/stability. The latter can get bad fast. Ad businesses can be creepy, but their motivation is mostly just to sell you stuff. In both cases, it doesn't feel great at first... but you do get used to it.
Spying to make you sell pampers... that can go either way. Whatever lock-in powers Apple or FB wield... bosses have more power over employees than retailers over consumers. Add privacy belligerence to labour relations... third party ecosystems.
don't panic.
For example, if you go to some big box store and forget to make you pay for something, I don't know many people who will point out the mistake and pay their due. The same people will probably be more inclined to do so if the shop in question is a small shop and they know the owner personally, even more so if he is an actual friend.
And the level of trust reflects that. Big box stores will monitor everything, because they know their customers can't be trusted, while friends will not even keep tabs. At the highest level, I don't know any country that trust their citizens when it comes to paying taxes, for good reason. There is an entire industry dedicated to more or less legal tax avoidance, opposed by an army of legislators and inspectors.
We have lost trust long ago. I'd say the turning point is the invention of the lock, thousands of years ago. I mean, isn't the lock and its information counterpart, cryptography, a symbol of distrust? For me, it is, but it is also what allows us to be secure among people we don't know.
The country may not trust their citizens when it comes to paying taxes, but it's not an absolute lack of trust. They set up regulations outlining rules and punishments, back them with various enforcement mechanisms, and... they trust it's enough for vast majority of the citizens.
They trust most people will be nudged towards paying the right amount of taxes - that's why they don't generally surveil every single transaction you're making. It's hard for a regular person to get on the IRS radar in a way other than interacting with government services in a weird way somehow. When they notice something suspicious, they will follow up, but the process set in the aforementioned laws is again very much trust-based, giving the suspect the ability to explain themselves at various stages, and not digging through one's entire life until late in the process. It's based on a reasonable assumption that most of the issues a country's IRS would flag are honest mistakes.
Same with every other process in most (all?) societies. There are directions, nudges, deterrents. Not total surveillance. But the newest trends in technology businesses seem to desperately want to move us towards the latter.
But that's an interesting example. The guy is doing a poor job, so if you want to be impartial, you should fire him for not meeting your expectations.
But it is natural to understand why he is doing a poor job. I mean, maybe it is just a temporary personal issue (ex: sick kids), or maybe just not his fault (ex: task more complex than expected, broken IT, etc...). Or maybe he needs training. It is fair to fire him without trying to understand?
Unfortunately, one possibility is dishonesty, as it is the case for your employee. And that's when surveillance comes in. You can flip the argument of "accept monitoring or get fired" around in favor of the employee as in "you are doing a poor job, normally we would fire you for that, but it may not be your fault, so if you allow us to make sure of that (by monitoring), we will try to find another solution".
Of course, it can and is often abused, but it is not black and white.
An interesting parallel to ankle bracelets (also mentioned in the article). As a form of punishment, it's the justice system's way of saying, "you're doing a very poor job as a citizen, but we don't think it would be fair to put you in prison for it, so if you allow us, we'll impose some lesser restrictions and monitor your adherence, to make it easier for you to improve your behavior".
No country on the planet forces everyone to wear ankle bracelets by default.
Maybe you pay him too little.
Maybe you should offer him additional contract pay. More he does, more he gets paid.
The core idea they are all based on is that you can provide mathematically provable distributed consensus if you're willing to jump through enough hoops. That you can build systems that can achieve and enforce agreements without any need to trust the participants. All you need is to trade enough electricity for it. And so the whole crypto space is currently trying to refactor every single aspect of our society to eliminate the need for trusting other people.
The problem is, they're looking at it from the wrong end. The right way of looking at it is, interpersonal trust is a huge performance optimization. It's what allows societies to exist and cooperate without jumping through hoops or burning more electricity than a developed country just to send small amounts of money around.
What the crypto space is explicitly trying to do is to eliminate the most important feature of our civilization.
Wage workers? No. That’s just false. I don’t know what exactly you’re trying to say but it’s wrong. This is just another appearance of the same class warfare that drives slavery. Working people didn’t ask for this any more than slaves asked for slavery.
Maybe it'll come crashing down - this whole concept of $ for data - some day, but until then you'll see all of these abuses. And again it's sad how conspiracy theorists were mocked at for this exact hellish scenario. Either people start demanding for something different or the abuse will not stop.
I remember, because it was only a few years ago, companies would allocate anyone who needed one a BlackBerry. Any work calls would come to that device, you would use it for emails on the go etc, it was managed by the corporate IT department and when you weren't on call you could leave it in a drawer. It was very clearly "theirs" and could be treated as such.
It actually was ordinary workers who said, hey, I would much prefer to have the company take over my own personal device for this, which I have paid for and pay all the bills for too, it would be soooo convenient not to carry two phones, and of course companies gleefully said yes.
And nowadays if you want a "burner phone" for use at work, you pay for that yourself too! Congratulations everyone, we played ourselves. Well not me, I miss the BlackBerry days, and I said all this when BYOD was becoming fashionable too. But they still took my BlackBerry away and made it all but impossible to stay employed and not install their MDM crap on my own phone.