> Once it became trivially easy to obtain food, water, and shelter
I would argue that the average human being doesn't consider these things easy to acquire. For society it COULD be easy to distribute these things if we decided that was a goal of ours, but we haven't gotten there yet.
I would be very interested in seeing the ideas (or problems?) invented by children born into a world where this was true, but unless things get very interesting very quickly, I doubt we'll get the chance.
It's also inconsequential for everyone who has a data cap on their phone plan. Running out of data 20% sooner isn't a win for people who can't afford a luxury plan.
I use it for as few things as possible and it does them very well. I only want notifications for things that may be immediately relevant (phone call, text msg, calendar event reminders) so when I walk away from my phone I'm not worried about missing something important. It works with Smart Lock on Android so my phone stays unlocked when I'm close and locked when I'm not. Vibrating alarm clock that won't wake the whole house, sleep & exercise tracker without needing to carry my phone. I don't actually "use" it very often, but it is a very passive yet essential part of my routine and keeping myself on track. I am very forgetful and used to have entire weekends pass by where I forget to check my phone unless something reminds me to and the Pebble helps make sure I get only the essential information when I need it without unnecessary interruption. It also shows time and weather at a glance ;)
If you are successful at astroturfing and have good stats to prove it, what would be your motivation to hide that? Of course you would not want to reveal specific campaigns, usernames & subreddits you used, but what would be your motivation to hide the stats that are not identifiable? Your corporate identity would not be linkable to astroturfing usernames anyway - that's kinda the point of whole enterprise - so why not make it publicly available?
OTOH, if you know or suspect that astroturfing has a very low ROI, you have lots of motivation to not publish anything, but instead tell the clients: "our ROI is spectacular, but unfortunately we can't show any data or stats because you know, we have to do it in secret, so just trust us and pay us $TONS_OF_MONEY, and it'll all be awesome!"
Untie a person's ability to survive from their employment status. If we had universal healthcare and basic income then the necessity of most of the employment laws would cease to exist.
> The judge said he disregarded Weadock’s testimony
That testimony seems irrelevant to the charge which resulted in the jail time. Theoretically valueless or not, the discs were sold with an infringing logo. That combination--infringement and commercial intent--is a crime under our laws.
Also "Bitcoin traders have been less than pleased with the realization they have to pay taxes on any of their earnings" isn't a fair statement. I have spent a lot of time reading on crypto currency forums this last year. I think most people (aside from some of the more libretarian / anarchist "taxation is theft" folks) were aware that that would be some kind of capital gains tax on what they cashed out. What people didn't realize was that you would get taxed per transaction on unrealized gains.
If your debit cards info gets stolen, they take YOUR money and the bank may not necessarily be in as much of a hurry to get it bank. In the mean time, you have no cash, maybe for days or weeks.
If your credit card info gets stolen, the thief had access to credit card company money, not yours, and you still have access to all your cash as long as you personally can refuse to pay for fradulent charges. It is the banking institutions money they have stolen access to, and the CC company has incentive to shut down the fraud ASAP.
It's not about the morality of supporting credit card companies or controlling spending impulses, it's about whose money the thieves have access to and wither or not you have the ability to pay rent 2 days after your card gets stolen.
I think you're replying to the wrong person here. I absolutely agree with you on this point, and at any rate wasn't at all talking about personal liability when using a debit/bank card vs. a credit card. I was in fact replying to a poster who doesn't use credit cards because they don't like how the CC system is run, which I thought was odd, since the banking system overall is rife with sketchy practices. In other words, if they don't like CCs, then they shouldn't like debit/bank cards either.
I think your wildly over dramatic metaphor is still wildly optimistic in assuming that the explosions are already done. I agree the fallout will continue, but I seriously doubt we have seen the worst of how bad this can get.
Sadly you may be right, but quite a few of the major surveillance companies have already been looted: Yahoo, then Equifax, then Facebook. Maybe Google hasn't (yet, that we know of), but it's probably just a matter of time. Fortunately, other than the "psychographic" woo-woo promoted by various organizations, that stuff has a relatively short half-life, and it seems like quite a few people are aware of the problem.
Think of it like nuclear power: it has both advantages and problems, and it seemed inevitable until Three Mile Island, Chernobyl, and Fukushima killed it. What if we're watching the general public become aware of the downsides of the surveillance economy?
I would argue that the average human being doesn't consider these things easy to acquire. For society it COULD be easy to distribute these things if we decided that was a goal of ours, but we haven't gotten there yet. I would be very interested in seeing the ideas (or problems?) invented by children born into a world where this was true, but unless things get very interesting very quickly, I doubt we'll get the chance.