And if someone is trying to find large numbers of people from a certain demographic they don't like in order to capture and do unpleasant things to those people, do you think having a detailed profile of everyone's entire life available at the touch of a button will make this (a) harder or (b) easier?

If the parallel isn't obvious enough for you, please consider a controversial subject like gay marriage and the power of the Christian Right in the US, or the attitudes towards Muslims exhibited by some people in Europe and the rise of far right political parties in the same places.

No. Just as correlation does not imply causation but can certainly suggest a potential causal effect worth investigation, so a very clear difference but in only a small sample can suggest something worth investigating using a larger sample and proper controls. The kind of behaviour I describe has been widely reported anecdotally, so unless you've actually do have some more robust data that shows otherwise, it remains a plausible theory that the situation I described among the younger generation I know is also the case more widely.

In other words, I'm not claiming that my own experience is necessarily representative, but I am claiming that it might be until better data shows otherwise.

With a different meaning since you been gone...

Stuck in Rutland Weekend Television.

If anyone was to ask "Could I have too much tech?" I would laugh in their face.

Businesses do not go around asking, you know, perhaps the smartphone, laptop, and desktop I gave to my employees is too much. The idea is just plain ridiculous.

The real question is "Could the tech we are giving to students suck balls so bad that it is worthless?"

Because I have seen businesses give out crappy tech and I am sure some schools do as well. But the idea of 'too much', is just so inane it is not worth discussing.

If the menu only changes once a day, why not use a phone to take one picture, then use Dropbox or something similar to post that one picture to a constant location which is publicly visible?

You're right, it's not representative; I carefully phrased it as a statement of personal experience rather than a general claim for precisely that reason.

It is suggestive of a generational change in attitude, though.

Surely you're not suggesting that there might be some correlation between people willing to answer questions on a potentially sensitive subject from a complete stranger and people who might be less concerned about government spying? That's just crazy talk!

Here's another one still: people who grew up sharing everything publicly on the Internet already take steps to conceal their true identity from anyone they don't want to share with.

Most of the generation before me use their real names on Facebook. I'm struggling to think of anyone of the generation after me who does.

In fact, I'm struggling to think of many who actually use ID-tied sites like Facebook at all, or at least not for extended periods. Multiple accounts, shifting rapidly from one platform to the next, disposable communications via the likes of Snapchat... These kinds of behaviours are almost universal for the younger generation.

Personally, I tend to think that's a very good thing. My major concern is that sometimes the technologies the kids use aren't nearly as private or as temporary as they have been led to believe: plenty of supposedly deleted Snapchat material mysteriously reappears later by one mechanism or another, popular communication tools like WhatsApp might actually be owned by data hoarders like Facebook, modern data mining techniques can still ID people with high reliability from surprisingly small parts of "anonymized" data sets, etc.

Indeed. Next week, your Jewish German grandparents are more sceptical of state surveillance than your Christian American grandparents.

Given some of the atrocities I've seen (including a few not a million miles from here) I reckon they'd be respectably mid-table.

Shouldn't it be the hundredandeleventyfirst?

our healthcare system sucks because we tolerate these parasites on our system that have to "profit" for some reason. there's no competition. so they just siphon profit and buy off our legislators and regulators to keep the money train flowing

they are natural monopolies

they are monopolies alone, no government needed to make them

you don't spend billions to build a hospital across the street from another. there's no free market. we're not talking about nail salons

you don't go shopping for an oncologist based on cost. you don't shop around for hospitals while you are having a heart attack. there's no capitalism here

so we need government control, rather than make believing a magic free market fairy fixes things

i'm not a socialist or a statist. specifically on the topic of natural monopolies *alone*, universal payer is the least worst option

citation: all of our social and economic peers: uk, canada, japan, germany, australia, etc: they spend far less on healthcare, and have higher quality healthcare. and it's all government controlled

our bullshit system persists because our government is corrupted. we need to fix the corruption, then kick out the parasites

And a gold sash? I watched that yesterday.

Key phrase: "If Gates sold all of his stocks "...