Sorry I think I meant to click reply on some ridiculous post by rsilvergun and you got caught in the crossfire. At any rate, I'm not sure this is a problem with or a feature of capitalism, which as an economic theory embraces competition as a means to provide the best goods and services at the best price. I see the situation an inverse of co--a fascistic (for lack of a better term) syndicate/oligopoly due to the corporate/government dynamic we enjoy.

You could make the same argument: "that's why Nike uses child labor and in third world countries" because they can't find an American willing to work for unsustainable, veritable slave labor wages in a miserable sweatshop. Well, no shit, Sherlock.

No. The real problem is your framing of the situation is at odds with reality. The reality is that American citizens could be employed to do all of these things (as they have been in the past) and and in reasonable working conditions at living wages, but that idea is at odds with the idea of multi-billionaire individuals, and trillion dollar companies who collect disproportionately to their risks and efforts.

If you have a problem with the Bezoses and the Musks of the world, I agree with you: that class of wealth should be basically unobtainable; it's only through exploitation that it's possible in the first place.

A recent visit to my local county head office is enough to tell me the government is drastically over staffed, with rare exception. In researching some real estate issues, after doing everything I could via the internet and being bounced around on the phone with zero success, I had to take a trip down to the county office--a modest size county, far from the biggest in my state. I witnessed dozens of workers idling away doing nothing productive, even visibly playing on their phones while directing visitors from one office to the next, and even from one building to the next, giving conflicting instructions and taking no accountability to the obvious dysfunction.

Given stories I've heard from friends and family who worked in the government, I can extrapolate the average federal government department is vastly less accountable and infinitely more wasteful. Undoubtedly many thousands of times over, just due to being that much less visible.

I agree. Questions like this often seem to come from people who don’t *want* to use AI, or perhaps are afraid of it for whatever reason, and they’re looking for reasons that they shouldn’t use it.

If that tracking device includes an electric shock collar which activates every time you lift your hand to your mouth once you exceed 1500 calories... It very well could.

Companies like Amazon seem to be betting on the AI taking over theory. It's probably the only explanation that makes sense now, because their reputation among skilled technical people will be permanently damaged by moves like this. It won't suddenly repair itself whenever the pendulum swings back to being an employee's market, if the great AI revolution turns out to be just another hype cycle after all.

Working at a FAANG used to be attractive to a lot of highly skilled technical people and having employment history inside that bubble used to be a positive thing on your resume. I'm not sure how true either of those things is any more. Maybe those who are still there and making premium TC in a big US city are still getting a decent deal out of it. For others, most of those big brands seem to be increasingly unattractive, and having history there seems to be increasingly regarded as neutral or even negative when employers outside that bubble are hiring.

FWIW, I'm a little more optimistic. In the UK, we don't have the kind of pork barrel politics that is endemic to some other western democracies. The ICO are, like many government regulators, under-resourced, but they are basically trying to do a decent job and I think moves like the one we're discussing here today are going in the right direction.

Which is exactly why it's vital for governments and their regulatory bodies to step in and protect the ordinary citizen who isn't an expert on these things from the abuse that the big companies who are will otherwise commit in the name of profit, just as they already do with financial services, caterers, healthcare providers, and so on.

Fantastic. Then we can go back to having dumb devices that just do their jobs and don't have all the other junk attached competing for the market instead. That worked for a few generations before all the 1984 stuff. I'm betting it will work just fine for generations after it too.

And please spare us the rhetoric about how nothing could possibly be affordable if it doesn't violate our privacy to help pay for itself. The difference in pricing in a competitive market is likely to be pretty small. The only reason they can get away with intruding as much as they do right now is that market competition has failed because everyone is lapping up the free money. I, for one, am glad the ICO has other ideas about how things should be .

You are correct. I do not believe that will happen. If it does, then it may run afoul of the constitution, and then you can point at this post and say "told ya so", and I will buy you a cookie--even if it turns out that in doing so it saves the government a tremendous amount of money.

Ok, so the *government* can't pay the president except for his salary. I still do not see a prohibition against the president running a private enterprise.

AIUI, your costs can't (or couldn't) generally be passed on when using the small claims system. Has that changed? It's been a while since I went through the process, so it's possible that my information here is out of date.

There is obviously a personal data angle here. There might also be a defamation angle if the system works as implied by TFS, since it appears that someone's reputation has been affected because someone else lied about them and this has demonstrably caused harm? If there was more than one relevant incident then there might also be a harassment angle.

Please be careful with that advice about requesting compensation in a Letter Before Action, though. There are fairly specific rules for what you can and can't claim under our system and just going in with claiming some arbitrary figure of a few thousand pounds in "compensation" for vague damages is far from guaranteed to get the result you're hoping for. If someone were serious about challenging this kind of behaviour, they might do better to consult with a real lawyer initially to understand what they might realistically achieve and what kinds of costs and risks would be involved.

Liberals / leftists really aren't the ones who want open borders; at least even if those interests do coincide with other interests, their option really does not matter much:
It has long been and continues to be big corporate interests, and billionaire / globalist class who actually own those corporations who want and benefit from open borders more so than anyone else.
Nobody remembers that in the 80s and 90s, and even into the early 2000s it was the democrats beating the anti-immigration drums, as it was the labor unions who correctly surmised that illegal immigration artificially suppresses wages, and the democrats often go where the labor unions lead them. During those times the democrats blamed the Koch brothers and the rest of their sort who had influence in the Republican Party for keeping the borders open.
The reality is they both were responsible, just for different reasons.
Now that the demographic shift caused by those policies is hitting stride (2nd and 3rd generation immigrants from those times are becoming voters), and they align overwhelmingly with the democrat party, that party now wants unlimited immigration. It just so happens they are now on the side of the oligarchs on this one issue; they want to suppress wages across the board and bringing in more laborers does just that.
And people are SHOCKED the labor unions and laborers in general (even Latinos whose families came in in the 60s and prior) are moving away from the democrat party, and cozying up to the republican party. I am not. It is entirely predictable.

The amusing thing to me is that you're blaming Trump for this, and who you really need to be blaming is Obama and Biden, and basically all of the previous administrations of our time.
Trump is a symptom of a disease, not a cause of it.