Should it matter? The founders weren't gods, they did their best for their time. They made mistakes, and times have changed. Amend the constitution, make it illegal.

Came here to say essentially this, it's not my country but I still wish collecting this kind of information on this kind of scale were illegal. In every country.

The other thing is, making it illegal only works as long as you don't have authoritarians in power. Once they are in power, they will allow it and everyone is fucked. Imagine if Nazis had access to modern technology when they were tracking every Jewish person.

What point are you trying to make? Unless attacking Iran is done to free the Iranian people from oppression, "current regime bad" is irrelevant. And the USA government is not even pretending that it's about freeing the Iranian people from tyranny.

That has been working so well with Russia.

Thanks for the context, I find it interesting. Is it not still the case though that the power company can choose to stop servicing homes to start servicing a data centre, because there is no regulation against it? Or asked differently: could it be that there are lots of regulations in that market but also that they are not directly relevant to that point?

I think it's more "thanks, free market!" than "thanks, AI bros!". In a free market there is nothing to prevent this kind of phenomenon to emerge. Unless you assume that everyone acts for the good of the community. But one premise of free market proponents is that people act selfishly.

This story is essentially a demonstration of the negative effect of a marker that is too free. This could be solved with market regulation. Something like "require data centers to produce their own energy" or "tax energy sale to data centers" or whatever smart policy makers come up with.

I wasn't talking about wood in particular, but about your general argument that it's about freedom. You have not answered my question. I assume that you agree that it is generally sane to limit one's personal and individual freedom for the benefit of everybody else.

"not as bas as the worst peaks of the past 35 years" is not a rebuttal to "they are struggling". They could still be struggling, it's just not the hardest it's been.

Should I be free to burn toxic stuff next to your home if I'm your neighbour?

You wrote "no" and then did not provide any contradicting argument. I already know everything you wrote (I think we all do). I also think it needs to be made illegal. Your "if you don't like it, go work somewhere else" is exactly what I meant with "unlikely to happen in the US". It is unlikely to happen in the US because people would rather say "if you don't like sociopath megacorps spying on their employees, encourage the employees to lose their income" instead of saying "we need laws that protect employees against their sociopath corporate overlords". Somehow, for reasons that elude me, this kind of logic is prevalent in the US.

It's great that it works for you. I didn't try to convince you otherwise. We can all be happy that you are where you want to be. There's many people who have a different take than you.

I don't know about Canada but I haven't heard about Europeans doing this. That being said, if you have enough money, I think the healthcare is good in the US, so I wouldn't be surprised if some rich Europeans did that. But rich people are not a concern, they're going to be fine no matter what. For most people, US healthcare is bad, this is well studied. See for example this https://www.commonwealthfund.o...

This should be illegal by default for all employers, including for Facebook. There are boundaries to employment contracts, and that usually is because of the law. We still have human rights while working. Make it a human right to not be tracked to that extent, it is dehumanising. I realise this is unlikely to happen in the US but seriously, making this illegal is one of the best justifications for having a government.

Yes, that was my point. I'd rather be unemployed in Europe than struggling to make ends meet with two jobs in the US. Don't get me started on healthcare.

Including unemployed people

You make a generic argument for features in general. And I believe you have a point in general: companies shouldn't ask for permission before adding a "print" button to their product. In this particular case though, I don't think it is very useful to treat this addition as just one more feature. OP explains pretty well why this feature is unusual in its nature and in the impact it has.

Look at it this way: if the next version of Chrome starts mining bitcoins, does not make it opt-in or easy to disable for non-tech people and gives you 50% of any gain realised by this mining, will you still make the same argument?