This is a very accurate take. There is a ton of collection that the government is explicitly not allowed to do. However, the ability to purchase this data is much less regulated. So the work around is, get contractors to do the data collection and then purchase that data.
There needs to be a landmark supreme court case that decides that "Search and Seizure" protections include paying corporations for the sought after items.
As long as Alito and Thomas are still alive, this will never happen. I have no doubt that both of them have been the recipients of Peter Thiel's "generosity".
> As long as Alito and Thomas are still alive, this will never happen.
Unless the court shrinks down to three seats (or four, if the Circuits cooperate) Alito and Thomas alone can’t dictate the way the Court treats the issue.
because this isn't simply a matter of the constitution, it involves a massive corporation and both of these men have been caught receiving gifts from wealthy
"friends" then openly refusing to cooperate when this information came to light.
We are assuming they are the only 2 doing (and as far as I know, none of the other judges have been implicated) but that's like finding two drunk guys passed out on a bench on a college campus and assuming that binge drinking isn't rampant in college.
I thought Carpenter vs United States was that case, but apparently it wasn't. Terry stops by local officers based on tips from regional Fusion Centers via WhatsApp sounds less unusual every day. Parallel construction has become a long-established technique.
I would hope this case wouldn't be hard to make. If the government isn't allowed to censor people through third parties (e.g., threaten onerous investigations of a platform unless a specific person is kicked off), the government shouldn't be allowed to conduct unreasonable searches through a third party. Would we be okay if the FBI contracted with private detective firms to conduct warrantless searches?
Noob question: how private orgs can do surveillance that government can’t?
Could I - as an individual - do such surveillance[1]? Won’t three letter agency knock on my door? Is there a difference between digital surveillance and physical surveillance?
[1] obviously at smaller scale, but imagine same level of creepiness.
create an LLC and start doing online marketing ("online marketing").
you're a marketing company. you're gathering data for data mining that you will sell to other brokers. lots of small or niche marketing firms out there.
could you do it as one (1) person? might be hard. but you and a few coworkers / employees is perfectly reasonable.
chances are you won't sell directly to the government but to an aggregator, but it's not crazy to think that a small org could potentially sell to the gub'mnt if the data is juicy enough. would have to be very niche stuff though, like maps of labor / union folks, or data tracking Islamic prayer app use, etc.
keep in mind that being a government vendor means you have to jump through certain hoops, and those can be onerous, but again, not theoretically impossible.
At times, depending on the state, the government can even put out RFCs specifically to ask for corporations to bid on providing data that the government can't collect itself.
Purchase? You're misunderstanding how government consultancy works (this is what EU states use consultancy firms for, and that's what Palantir really is)
A purchase works as follows: I like ice cream. I give you 5$. You give me an ice cream. I enjoy ice cream.
This is: government likes private health data. Hospital gives Palantir 5$, and your health data, repeat for 1 million patients. Palantir gives the health data to government, employs the nephew of the head of the healthcare regulator. Your unemployment gets denied because the doctor said you could work.
Buying means exchanging money for goods and services. This is exchanging money AND goods AND services for nothing. It's highly illegal for private companies, if you try it you'll get sued by the tax office the second they see it and find all company accounts blocked "just in case", but of course if you are the government, directly or indirectly, it's just fine and peachy.
And you might think "this makes no sense". But you'd be advised to check out who appoints the head of the hospital first. It does make sense. (In fact just about the only break on this behavior in most EU countries is that the Vatican still has control over the board of a very surprising number of hospitals. Needless to say, the EU governments really hate that, but there tend to be deals around this. For example, in Belgium the hospitals get 50% less per resident. These sorts of deals were made, but they now mean that if the government wants the Vatican out of the board ... they have to increase spending on that hospital, often by a lot. I'd call them "Vatican hospitals" but one thing government and the Vatican really agree on is that they do not want patients to know the underlying financial arrangements around hospitals, and in many cases it's quite difficult to find who controls a hospital even though it's technically public information)
The problem with today's society is you walk into a hospital bleeding and they make you sign an ultimatum.
Legally this should be treated as signing under duress and invalidated.
If someone's life or well-being depends on it, and undergoing services in not a choice, terms and conditions should not be legally allowed to be unilaterally dictated by one party.
“on its face” is doing the heavy lifting here. Banking is highly regulated but you don’t need government permission to open new branches. The food supply chain is heavily regulated but you don’t need government permission to start new restaurants.
The supply of medical care, from operating rooms to doctors themselves, is heavily controlled by the state. There are billions, perhaps trillions of dollars that would flow into reducing the cost and increasing the availability of high quality medical care in the US if this were not so.
The demand is through the roof and will continue to rise. But the right to supply is only handed out to cronies.
> Banking is highly regulated but you don’t need government permission to open new branches.
The closer economic unit would probably be a bank itself, and to my understanding you do effectively need the government’s permission to open one of those.
All of those are normal things for operating any business, and are not limited in the usual case.
Liquor licenses notwithstanding.
There is no default-deny for getting a business license or opening a restaurant in a commercially zoned area, anyone can do it. Licensing and permission aren’t quite the same thing.
in Western history, culturally, Church was a founding force for the existance of hospitals, full-stop. Repeat with more money and more fallable humans and yes some of what you say is accurate. But, if you start naming the behavior as if it is synonymous with the original founders of Hospitals, you a) create an intellectual dishonesty on your part, b) attract wing-nuts and sociopaths who are looking for a place to join in the chanting, c) obscure important details while the casual readers focus on the glaring finger pointing.
If you want to actually contribute to this very difficult topic, please refrain from welding disparate labels together in the introductory materials.
Oh I fully realize that the original hospitals were ... let's say better than the gutter by about 10%, and no more than that. Both for the patients and everyone else in the street or even city.
And I do realize the only reason the Vatican management is better is because the Vatican is ALSO corrupt ... but with different masters. The improvement is coming from the conflict between these groups. I do get the impression the Vatican is actually the more moral of the two parties, meaning compared to the government, but not by a huge margin.
The way I read it, GP is saying that the Vatican's influence reduces such unethical distribution of medical information. Your response reads like a rebuttal, but I'm not sure what you're trying to say, nor rebut.
>in most EU countries is that the Vatican still has control over the board of a very surprising number of hospitals.
>Needless to say, the EU governments really hate that
> if the government wants the Vatican out of the board ... they have to increase spending on that hospital, often by a lot. I'd call them "Vatican hospitals"
> one thing government and the Vatican really agree on is that they do not want patients to know the underlying financial arrangements around hospitals
> in many cases it's quite difficult to find who controls a hospital even though it's technically public information)
I am responding to these somewhat "breathless" statements that imply more than they delineate. My rebuttal is that these words frame a kind of inquiry that is common among conspiracy-attracted commentors.
The subject deserves more rigor and less insinuation IMO.
This is an interesting idea. One thing that might help targeting is to have some sort of chemical that attracts the mosquitoes. In that way you can bring your target to you.
Most of the railway trips people were taking would be fairly short distance trips you'd now hop in a car for, not a plane. Inter-urban transit, not trans-continental. You can look at old railway connectivity maps of the US to see the kind of station density available along the lines. This is why the size of the US continent is not a really good explanation. It's like saying "Europe is too big for trains, which is why nobody rides trains in the Netherlands". You don't take a plane from Amsterdam to Rotterdam, and you wouldn't have taken a plane to get from Boston to Providence either. Trains also can serve small towns that airplanes don't, because you don't stop a plane at every town along the way between city centers. In fact, many towns just sprang up around train stations.
> In fact, many towns just sprang up around train stations.
And this is how the Japanese system works so well. The trains don't make money, but the massive improvements to land value near stations does and the train companies own that land.
They get to make money, society gets the personal and economic benefits of a functional public transit system.
Passenger trains on their own fundamentally do not make money for the operators in most cases, except perhaps specialty routes like airports: the value is distributed into society, but doesn't all come back as ticket prices. So any system where a train company is just a train company will either need heavy subsidy or will slowly wither away under "efficiency" drives.
What they do have is a huge pile of capital intensive resources that are juicy targets for vampiric extraction and captive markets that are slow to extract themselves when exploited (and slow to come back).
Well, quite. A fully ticket-funded passenger rail system is a rare, rare thing. There are simply better ways to make money than going solo on building and running a railway and not either diversifying or getting state support.
Yes, it's true for roads, but no-one expects roads to all turn a profit in the way that rail lines have to. Even for place with road use fees for motorways, most people can access the road system for rather less than the cost to construct and maintain it.
This is untrue. From here: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Farebox_recovery_ratio
... look at all the entries in Japan where ratio >= 100%. It is a lot. This one is bonkers to me (JR Central Rail: 245.95%), but easily explained by owning and operating one of the busiest bullet train routes in the world between Tokyo and Osaka.
And, this does not include all of the (profitable) real estate projects these companies use to further increase ridership!
However, it may not include the real estate income, but it does include the income from extra ridership created by the real estate being near the station.
It's true, the bullet train prints money for JR. But there are also many train companies that are only profitable because of their real estate holdings around the lines, especially smaller private companies like Tokyu.
The bullet train in Japan only "prints money" for one JR company: JR Central, thanks to the busiest(?) bullet train route in the world: Tokyo to Osaka. Most other bullet train lines in Japan are break-even or loss making, but supported by the central gov't (for social policy).
> only profitable because of their real estate holdings around the lines
Again about Tokyu: This is untrue. I could only find stats from 2005, but all train lines in the Tokyo metropolitan area (including Yokohama) have improved farebox recovery ratios in the last 20 years.
After the opening of the last Tokyo Metro line (Fukutoshin) -- with direct connection to Tokyu Toyoko line (Shibuya to Yokohama), the farebox recovery is surely much higher. I guess over 150%, but probably closer to 175%. The trains are jammed 8+ hours per day. This means that, excluding real estate development, the Tokyu train lines are profitable by themselves.
> especially smaller private companies like Tokyu.
About Tokyu: "[S]maller"? Absolutely not. It is surely one of the top 5 largest private rail companies in Japan by revenue/profits. They are huge in the Tokyo area.
I work for a company that is open source and has a large community. I blows my mind (and often aggravates me) how rude some people can be.
For some reason people feel that it is appropriate to throw barbs in their issue reports. Please to everyone out there, if you find an issue and want to report it (hurray open source!) please be kind with your words. There are real people on the other side of the issue.
Always remember, you catch more flies with honey than vinegar.
> I blows my mind (and often aggravates me) how rude some people can be.
That seems to be a general characteristic. I strive to be cheerful and helpful whenever I'm asking for something. I feel like (sadly) it sets me apart from the crowd and helps me to get what I'm asking for. And IAC, with so little effort on my part I may brighten someone else' day and that makes me happy.
Just last week I asked housekeeping at a hotel for an old style coffee pot since I had brought my own coffee and filters. I started with "Can I pester you a moment?" and the conversation went up from there. Housekeeping was extremely friendly and helpful. Later I guessed this might have been her way to disarm some of the typical hostile interchanges she's been the brunt of.
I always feel like I'm imposing, and I have to remind myself that there are people who are eager to hear what I have to say. I try to set up my issue reports with appropriate background, and I always volunteer to, for example, submit a PR for a documentation change if the resolution requires it. And I have had some of the most wonderful interactions with complete strangers who had an idea, built a tool for themselves, and found other people had the same need.
There's a broader topic of ... just be nice to people. It doesn't cost anything. It does reassure me that this universe has been struggling with this for decades upon decades--witness the Malvin and Jim scene in WarGames. "Remember when you told me to tell you when you were acting rudely and insensitively?"
I think I kind of get it. By the time someone actually gets to the point of filing an issue report, they are at the end of their rope. They have tried everything they can think of. They have googled and found no one else having the same problem, or fixes that don't work, or people saying "why would anyone need that feature". They feel like they're being gaslit, their time is being wasted, and that the developers are intentionally antagonizing them. And then the form to submit the issue has way too many fields and comes across as very adversarial.
That's certainly how I felt when trying to get my drawing tablet to work properly under Linux Mint, although in my case I skipped filing an issue and just gave up and went back to Windows.
FWIW the "datadog doesn't like otel" thing is kind of old hat, and the story was a little more complicated at the time too.
Nowadays they're contributing more to the project directly and have built some support to embed the collector into their DD agent. Other vendors (splunk, dynatrace, new relic, grafana, honeycomb, sumo logic, etc.) contribute to the project a bunch and typically recommend using OTel to start instead of some custom stuff from before.
They support ingesting via otel (ie competing with other vendors for their customers) but won't support ingesting via their SDKs (they still try very hard to lock you in to their tooling).
That has already begun. Saw stop technology is already working it's way into regulations. A decent non saw stop table saw will cost you ~500 USD. A saw stop saw will be 1200.
When this article first came out, I had a similar reaction, that it seems that regulations that just favor one company doesn't seem all that right.
But I remember in that thread a few had said that as part of this, SawStop will be forced to license their patent to competitors.
Maybe that'll drive up the cost of table saws, but to be honest, people like me (at best, a wannabe weekend woodworker, not a pro) have stayed away from Table saws because of a concern for safety, but things like Sawstop being more ubiquitous might result in people like me buying them, and expanding the market, possibly bringing prices down.
Sure, Sawstop does nothing to prevent the big issue with table saws (kickback) but still, having a riving knife + sawstop probably makes a huge difference in the overall safety of using a table saw, and that seems worth it.
But an average table saw used professionally probably cuts more than 700 USD of limbs during its lifetime. So that seems very warranted and no, we will just take care very well is not a real substitute. That is what at least 10% of our parents also thought while we were fathered.
Professionally, sure: It's easy (and correct, I think) to assume that a saw that gets used every day, piling on hours, will do more than $700 worth of damage to its operators over its lifespan -- on average. Even with misfires being expensive (~$400, IIRC), it's still completely sensible to spend the extra money for professional use.
I'm not a professional, though. I may need a table saw for some projects, but the projects I undertake that require a table saw are few and are far between. My use won't wear out the saw in my lifetime.
Usage of a table saw in my own shop will be at least a couple of orders of magnitude less -- averaging perhaps a few hours per year. Furthermore, without an angry boss-man looming over me to maximize production, I can spend as much time as is necessary to optimize every operation in a safety-first fashion.
If we assume that it is just two orders of magnitude of difference, then: Spending an extra $700 for a sawstop-equipped saw is rather unlikely to ever pay for itself in my shop at home.
(Now, that's not to say that I wouldn't want this kind of safety feature in my own shop. The idea of losing even part of a finger forever is much scarier to me than spending an extra $700 one time: After all, I can make more money but I can't grow new fingers. It's just not such a financially-obvious choice as it is for professionally-used saws.)
