Just pray that you don't have any jerk-off "power traders" holding energy back from you until the price goes up. Remember what happened to California?

Well, with the guys who taught Enron how to "power trade", as well as how to hide distressed assets offbook, recently buying the largest power producer/distributor in Denmark, what are the odds of them doing that?

I speak of course of Goldman Sachs

Your body does not contain tiny furnaces into which magical goblins heave small pieces of the food you've eaten.

Hey, I'm fat because my inner goblins work so hard. If you're skinny, it's because your inner goblins are themselves fat and lazy. This is the origin of the saying "beauty is only skin deep"... because your insides are made of fat goblins.

Do you think that taxes are supposed to be penalties, as opposed to funding things?

BEcause, what you're saying is "why aren't people willing to pay for things that they aren't getting."

I think a nice park is worth X, and I am willing to pay my share of X. That doesn't mean I'm willing to set my share on fire if I don't get the park.

There is to another way to distinguish "shitty driver guy" from non-shitty driver guy. Shitty driver guy gets traffic citations and has accidents.

But it's less accurate than tracking driving. Insurance companies respect that now because they don't have a better solution. But they actually use practically the same algorithims. They won't respect that anymore once they have the actual information it is a proxy for.

Because why would they want to use a poor proxy? Its not like the privacy market is that big. And then they have the risk that the person is a bad driver (or becomes one) that their metrics didn't catch. Which just slows the death spiral, doesn't prevent it.

Every time you fill your gas, please write a check for twice as much and make it payable to the U.S. Treasury.

Is this just a lame rhetorical device, or are you not aware of the difference that scale makes?

That is, it's probably worth destroying 99.99% of the salmonella on that chicken, but not 0.01%

You don't think that maybe Global Cooling has anything to do with it?

Just because it's colder where you are, doesn't mean the difference is not more than made up somewhere else. By which I mean, the earth is warming, even if from your limited perspective you don't see it.

It's well established that people distort recall of facts, weighing of evidence, etc. to prove their ideas correct. This study seems to just say "what if the facts being distorted came from a scientific paper" and "what if the ideas were political (free market solves everything, we could get rid of all guns by making them illegal)."

It's such an unsurprising result that I'm amazed they ran the study.

How else can we ensure that the algorithms actually do what their vendors claim?

Well, it's predictive, so the only way would be to match predictions with final outcomes. No need to open the box. In fact, it would probably distract people to do so.

It's more complicated than that. Poor or middle class people who worked really hard for what little they have hate the idea of someone who "did nothing" catching up with them. After all, they did do a lot of work. And they were promised a reward for it.

So, in a way, the paying shit wages saved the rich twice over, once in not having to pay their employees, and again in lower taxes cause "screw the lazy bums.

Whereas if middle class people felt like thy had extra, they wouldn't mind programs that saved money overall, by, I dunno, feeding the homeless and giving them preventative care.

But I do find your point of view of how this attitude originated to be a really interesting take on things. Is there a book or something you can recommend that expands upon it?

Why would you be opposed to big data finding out when you take a dump in the morning, as long as its voluntary?

What does "voluntary" mean in this context? Seriously, the point of Big Data is to take things you want to reveal about yourself, and convert them into things you do not. So, are you saying it's okay as long as Big Data uses what you are offering up freely? Or are you saying it's okay as long as what Big Data reveals are things you were planning on offering for free anyway?

If you do all your internet activity through tor, and don't subscribe to cable TV, and find non-identifiable ways to obtain your video entertainment, the only thing big data can work with is your bank account, credit card, library card, and social security number. (And cash payments can limit what your credit card can say about you.)

Well, and if you don't live in your parent's basement, utilities, bank accounts, your job, what other people say about you/tag you at on Facebook, plane and hotel reservations, bars record IDs as you use them, mass transit cards, and a lot more.

It won't keep you safe from the NSA, but big business isn't holding a gun to your head (yet).

Big Business is far more aggressive than the NSA. Hell, the NSA just insisted that business shares what it collects with them

Surely any judge would issue a warrant in a millisecond after seeing that horrific video

Scary thing you said one: The video should no bearing on the issuance of a warrant. As a rule, warrants should be issued on how reasonable a search it is, and likely to turn up evidence. Not, how horrifying the crime is.

Scary thing you said two: You think a warrant would be necessary. The data is not the suspects, but the car company's. And the car company has no rights to privacy vis-a-vis that data to protect. So the government can just take it. See also, the metadata surveillance program.

I think this is a pretty shady practice, don't get me wrong, but it's not quite as "secretly" as the summary made it out to be.

It depends on whether it is, "Here is the GPS consent form, saying we will track you til you pay the care off" or "Here, sign this 82 pages of forms and you can drive off now" where people miss clause 18.f.ii

Now, people should read what they sign. But the way people react when I read waivers, etc, you'd think I'm the only one.

Rates go down when insurance companies can reduce risk.

Yes, cost savings in an oligopoly are always passed promptly along to the customers. That is a real thing that economic theory or practice says happens.

Some insurance companies may but there will always be at least one who will not. There will always be a customer base who prioritize privacy over rates and there will always be at least one company to serve that client base.

Insurance is an area where death spirals are common as the least risky leave the pool, driving up average risk. The issue is there is no way to distinguish "privacy guy" from "shitty driver guy". So all the people in that pool are given "shitty driver prices". But those shitty driver prices cover the average shitty driver. So, at timestep n+1, the least shitty drivers without the devices comply with monitoring to save money. At timestamp n+m, where m is likely to be a couple of years, the deathspiral is complete and there is no way to distinguish between privacy and people who intentionally crash into trees.

At that point, compliance, or opting out of the system, become mandatory.

But lest you still think that people prioritizing privacy are catered to in the market, I'd like to know what cell phone you use? what carrier? what ISP? (I invite the rest of Slashdot to ask more leading, and saddening, questions along these lines.)

Which at least a known cost.

Yeah it's a lot, almost doubling the unit cost. But, if we ship a dozen together...

Does ANYONE think that this would be happening if the gov agencies didn't think they could get something from it ?

You mean like make money (it will be profitable) and aiding their citizens (cheaper goods) and keep money in Australia (better Australian economy) and lowering the cost of trade with Australia (general trade = good arguments here)? Because, yeah, I mean, I do think the government does things for any one of those purposes.

Or do you mean nutter "if it weren't for this, how would customs officials have the right to open packages coming into the country on clearly marked USPS/UPS/FedEx shipments?"

On a personal note, this is great. Overseas shipping is such a complex beast my company was not planning on shipping to Australia (at least until we grew larger). Saying to Australians, "you can purchase our product through a ShipMate account" will help my company with more sales, and Australians who want to buy our product.