Obligatory civics note: The EU is not the authority behind the European Convention on Human Rights, which in turn motivated the UK's Human Rights Act. Leaving the EU and leaving the ECHR are different actions.

I think you're being overly optimistic about the EU's role in protecting various things within Britain as well. Between the opt-outs and special cases, a lot of the intended protections under EU rules get watered down here anyway.

In some respects, the most compelling argument for leaving might be that it simplifies our political system and thus makes it harder for our national government to avoid taking responsibility for unpopular actions. At present, it's far too easy for our administration to be saying something popular at home, while simultaneously negotiating for an opposing position at European level, and then when the European version goes through because there's little real accountability at that level, the folks back home can mumble something about the EU making us do it.

This is an attitude I struggle to understand. If an employer has reduced overheads, that is good for their business, and makes it more likely that they'll be around to pay the staff next month as well.

Maybe for big businesses with vast war chests you could make an argument that the staff don't see the benefit. However, in the economic climate we've had for the last few years, with even well-established small (and sometimes not so small) companies with reasonable business models going to the wall all over the place for little more than being in the wrong place at the wrong time, dumping a load of extra administrative overhead (running payroll, filing tax returns) and additional costs (bank charges for making the additional payments) on those employers doesn't seem to help anyone.

However the AC I replied to was, explicitly, and that's what I was addressing.

No, they aren't.

Signed,
Someone who actually runs a business and has to arrange payments and file tax statements accordingly

By this argument, everyone ought to get paid daily, assuming banks calculate interest daily where you are. At some point, it just becomes absurdly inefficient.

Paying monthly in arrears is the standard for salaried work here in the UK, and since most household bills are also monthly and the related government tax calculations tend to be monthly, everything lines up just fine.

And it's not your money they're holding on to, if your contract says you'll be paid monthly in arrears. It's theirs until payday, in black and white. If you don't like that, negotiate yourself a tiny payrise or something to compensate for your lost interest.

By the way, you're pretty much wrong about the whole interest-earning thing for businesses as well. Here in the UK, businesses earn about 0.1% annual interest rates on money in most bank accounts. The amount they save by deferring salary payments to monthly instead of some more frequent interval is negligible. The saving is in halving the admin overhead (relative to fortnightly payments) and making fewer financial transfers (for which banks will charge a fee).

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=vFCBwob65Nw

As a bonus, Roddenberry's First Law states that you can use a main deflector dish to do anything, so if they succeed in building this technology then we can also look forward to faster-than-light travel, instantaneous communication across distances of galactic scale...

That depends on the circumstances. This isn't a black and white question, and there may be good arguments either way that need to be reconciled to reach a balanced view.

Anyone can sue anyone in most legal systems, but in general organisations aren't people and I don't personally believe they merit the same level of privacy protection as people.

Again, I don't think this is a black and white question. In the era of databases and search engines and biometric recognition and asymmetric observer-subject relationships where you can be watched remotely but can't watch back, actions that used to be considered reasonable and harmless might not be any more. On the other side, with the kind of technologies we now have available, actions that help to restore the balance between privacy and free expression might be more reasonably expected where previously they were prohibitively expensive. For example, consider the way Google now blank out things like people's faces and plates on cars in Street View in response to privacy concerns.

Information doesn't want anything at all, any more than your car wants to be doing 50mph past the local school when the kids are coming out, or the smoke from your office neighbours' cigarette break wants to be floating up through your window and making your asthmatic colleague uncomfortable. You want to lecture people about society? How about you stop hiding behind cheap sound-bites as an excuse for being inconsiderate towards other people.

That attitude is why we had to invent data protection laws in the first place.

And defamation laws.

And model releases for photographers.

And press complaints regulations.

And a whole bunch of other stuff, because it turns out that being able to collect arbitrary data about an individual and use it for arbitrary purposes can be very damaging to that individual in particular and ultimately to civil society as a general trend, and it turns out that there are enough people in the world who would abuse that kind of data to the harm of others that we need to punish those who do as a deterrent.

Well... Yes. Yes, it is.

When someone mentions me in real life conversation, it's a private discussion, taking place between a small group of people, in a given place, at a given time, in isolation, and probably for their own personal reasons.

When someone mentions me on the Internet, it's a public discussion, taking place in front of the entire world, accessible from anywhere in the world, archived for all eternity in a searchable format also accessible to the entire world, potentially correlated with any other data about me that is out there, for any purpose.

Do you really not see that there are different implications and potential consequences to those two scenarios, and that maybe understanding and protection of privacy needs to evolve along with understanding and development of technology?

That story is indeed terrifying for several reasons.

The British military has an undisputed capability to launch a nuclear strike and has very good special forces. Strictly in terms of national defence, those seem to be the two most valuable capabilities in today's world. One deters attacks by nation states or other similar "large" opponents, and the other takes care of terrorists, kidnappers, and other similar "small" opponents.

This is in no way intended to diminish the other valuable roles that British forces can play in the world, for which obviously just a nuclear strike capability and special forces are insufficient: peacekeeping missions, fighting piracy at sea, rendering humanitarian aid, and many more. But it seems you'd have to be crazy to attempt a direct military attack on Britain at this point.

I'm not sure what any of this has to do with intelligence agencies and privacy issues, but I think it's a fair answer to your implied question.

Isn't that a bit like saying (to pick a government's favourite flamebait) you will not see any widespread outrage until the terrorists try to set off a weapon of mass destruction, and it's only then that people's right not to be attacked by others comes into play?

Given the potential consequences, maybe we should be more careful about allowing anyone to have these capabilities in the first place? For once, Godwinning the thread at this point would actually be justified.

What's unclear about "It's not your network, so don't try to join it without permission?"

The law is pretty straightforward in this area, and the underlying principle doesn't admit much ambiguity.

Even if you inadvertently monitored data that was broadcast in the clear -- and knowing how the protocols, equipment and signalling standards involved actually work, I think it would be quite a stretch for an organisation like Google that was using specially-equipped vehicles to claim ignorance here -- there's still the matter of recording them afterwards, and then the further matter of not deleting them even once you've become aware of them.