I suspected that liberals would eventually start cloning the genius of Urbit, in a more politically friendly package, but I'm surprised to see that no one on /. is mentioning it.

In my experience, it's usually the folks who are the strictest about "Pay me! No checking email at home!" who are also the most willing to screw around at work, show up late, leave early, etc. If one can spend their time reading Slashdot and Twitter at work, or chatting with coworkers about pop culture nonsense, why shouldn't one be willing to pay the employer back for some of that time by checking some email at home? That seems like a completely fair trade to me.

"Privacy" is not a Platonic solid. It is not a universal good. It's a catchall for any number of qualitative circumstances, any number of which can be good or bad or neutral. "Privacy" is great if you're Joe Public, and a lack of privacy would negatively and measurably effect your physical well-being. "Privacy" is an irrelevant measure if the lack thereof has no perceptible effect on your life.

As usual, European countries are putting their abstracted absolutes before real world practicality, because apparently doing anything else is *cough* *cough* Nazism.

Somehow, you can trust your country to have a standing military and police force, capable of stomping your lights out, imposing martial law, or nuking the entire world, yet you can't trust them to collect phone and email records to investigate terrorism and global espionage threats?

This decision is completely bonkers.