The talking point that private industry is tracking you as well is tired, and ostensibly smart people should stop trotting it out. Meta and Apple can't arrest you or secret you away to a foreign country -- at least not yet. That makes the distinction a difference.
The better talking point here is that once the data is collected, you must assume the government can get to it, always. Who actually stores it (a public or private entity) is an irrelevant implementation detail, and people pretending otherwise are being foolish.
Sure, but how is the government simply obtaining the data directly not an escalation? A subpoena at least requires an additional step and ostensible checks.
Sounds like the way they're obtaining it without a subpoena is by simply purchasing it from a commercial data broker, though. If that's true, I'd say the real problem is that a broker is willing to sell virtually anyone this data with essentially no oversight – a problem that's sadly existed for quite a while already. One of their buyers being the government isn't the first-order problem there.
Absolutely, but that doesn't erase the fact that the government gathering the information directly is an escalation. They know they can subpoena it -- that presents a hurdle. They're opting to end around said hurdle.
What does "surveilance capitalism" mean in your opponion?
Just some companies which collect unfathomable troves of data but have no incentive to clamp down individuals or manipulate democracies?
I just spilled my rhetorical counter argument...
You are right, the distinction between public or private abuse of power is futile in the end, but this doesnt mean we should put a blind eye on private corporations doing the dystopian ground work, by eg. relativizing all this with a "It could be worse. It could be the government but thank god its only palantir bundling the data, so no f'ing issue here. Calm down smart people!".
How would you substantiate this statement? He won with among the smallest popular vote % margins in history [0]. In fact he won by less than HRC beat him by in 2016. There is no strong mandate for this administration, regardless of how you slice it.
I am very much against the defunding of the NIH and CDC and I think RFK Jr is a very dumb person who is the worst person on earth to put in a position like that.
That said, fortunately the US is not the only place on earth that smart people can work on medicine. It’s frustrating to me as an American to see the republicans so ecstatic to force a brain drain, but these researchers didn’t suddenly lose their knowledge, they’ll likely just move somewhere else and this research can keep going.
Of course science can happen elsewhere, but science is struggling to get enough funding already. With a major rich country pulling funds, cancer research worldwide is affected.
I count $3,043,276 in funding from the first NIH grant plus $10,515,749 from the second. I don't know how where the funds for the "Robertson Therapeutic Development Fund Early Clinical Development Award" and "The V Foundation for Cancer Research" came from and how much of the broader grants were spent on this research, but this particular research seems to have been funded mostly by the USA.
As above, it is common. See: property taxes and mark to market. It is perceived as being administratively infeasible because the folks who would be paying the biggest bills want you to believe that.
The problem for the mantainer would be dealing with the spam of silly PR just to collect money.
I think that all PR are important and useful, even fixing a sincgle char in a typo of the docs, but if the incentive is high enought people would send unuseful PR,like fixinf
[0] https://news.bloombergtax.com/tax-insights-and-commentary/se...