The good old days never existed? Of course they existed, as is evident by the better days that followed. You’re simply mismatching things and are affected by the toxic gaslighting and abusive psychopathic lies that have denied the reality and turned the abuser into abusers who say things like “the good old days that never existed”.
Everyone wanted to come to America precisely because the good old days existed and the rest of the world has what it has precisely because America’s good old days existed.
Whether you are doing it on purpose or not, you are spreading the spite and jealousy of abusive toxicity that gaslights America about its achievements, no different than a common abusive person says “I’m the only one that loves you”.
It is precisely because America and the Constitution was such an affront to the abusive psychopathic ruling class that hates having its powers to abuse being restrained for the first and only time in human history, that they’ve leverage every single force they can over centuries now, to dislodge America and the Constitution to set their absolute and tyrannical powers free again.
It will be too late, but when America and the Constitution finally falter, humanity will have to face the reality of what it was tricked into, unless that’s not even possible in the dystopian nightmare the ruling class has in store for humanity that makes 1984 seem like a quaint story.
The challenge you have is not language related, but rather logic related. The issue our Swiss friend raises is valid, no matter the language.
Do Americans not have an expectation of privacy even when talking in public, based on the expectations of the individuals engaged in speech?
For example, when you are at a restaurant with friends, is there not an expectation of privacy within the context of your conversation with someone? Any reasonable person will have an expectation of privacy that will generally be limited to all those people around your table and with whom you will be making eye contact, as long as you are speaking at a tone that is reasonable for that context. No? Is the speaker going to be speaking so that everyone in the restaurant can understand their speech? No? So it’s not public then, right? Ignoring incidental overhearing, of course.
Inversely, if we consider what the American system clearly considers private, the home and, by extension, the car; if you have ever heard a conversation through thin walls between apartments or maybe a phone conversation on car speaker blasted speakerphone, is that private then? … are Phone conversations then also not private since in most cases the caller will not likely be aware that their direct conversation partner is blasting their conversation to the parking lot on the car’s speaker phone?
These scenarios, among others, beckon a requirement to make privacy expectations approaching unachievable. Is that reasonable? No, of course not.
And that’s before we explore things like focused beam microphones that make all conversations within any line of sight or even just things you whisper into someone’s ear not radically private based on the current American nonsensical definition reasonable and privacy.
The problem in America is not the speech part, but rather that the logic and reason itself has been inverted and perverted by sophists and abusive manipulators over the decades, which have turned everything upside down, including the definitions of “reasonable”, “public”, and “private”, i.e., the core logic of the matter.
None of the founders of America and the writers of the Constitution would recognize any of these current assumptions built into definitive and even the words they wrote, let alone all the illogical and lazy cruft that has been added after the twelfth amendment. They would think we’ve gone insane, because were have our, more accurately, sophist psychological manipulators and abusers have driven us so insane that we engage in the horrid abominations and abuses that are normalized all around us today. It has long been an ever worsening entropy problem.
To provide some clarity on my own position, I understand and echo your desire to have a society in which our quiet moments are not intruded upon. I am not arguing that the expectation that you not be monitored is unreasonable. What I am saying is that these feelings do not line up in a tidy way with the words “private” and “public”.
In all versions of modern English that I’m aware of, “public” is an antonym of “private”. In all conversations around this topic, they are often treated as though they are not. There’s an intuition gap that you rely on your conversational partner to cross. What you do is say “I have a right to privacy, and by privacy I do not mean literally private, I mean incidentally non-public, due to circumstance”, only not in so many words. It’s the way I talk about it as well, because there’s no well understood and unambiguous way to describe what I just called “incidentally non-public”.
Assuming, of course, that you accept that public and private are antonyms, you can demonstrate this intuition gap by instead of talking about public and private, using another pair of antonyms and talking about up and down, and instead ask the question: Does everyone have the right to be up while down?
That’s obviously a terrible and nonsensical question, but I feel it is exactly what some people read when they encounter someone’s desire for privacy in public. How can you be private in public? How can you be up while down?
This isn’t sophistry or maliciousness: it’s a real way that real people interpret the conversation. Failure to recognise the intuition gap is what leads to a failure to understand the other person you’re talking to.
If you're getting into the definition of public vs private you also need to consider what constitutes a reasonable expectation. Not just from our current reference frame of everyone having phones and every business having cameras, but from a few decades ago as well as a century, or more, ago. What may constitute a reasonable expectation today may be extremely divorced from that of when the laws were written. I love the nuance you are getting into, but I do think it needs to be taken at least one step further for a good conversation to take place. People are working with different assumptions and not communicating these well and results in very different versions of reasonable expectation. 50 years ago, even 20, it was pretty reasonable to assume that you could not, let along would not, be recorded unless you were involved in a large public demonstration. I think if we're getting down to public vs private that we should also consider this aspect. And I think we should recognize the difference between a private activity within a public space from a public activity within a public space. The ecosystem has changed and with it we must be a bit more nuanced.
The definition is at its root: “private” is by nature privative: it is essentially defined by what isn’t. If privacy includes “not being observed”, “not being recorded” and “not being overheard” it is hard to have a conversation around asserting the right to privacy, when some of those rights are violated indeliberately and necessarily by virtue of you just being in view or earshot of another person.
The thing you touch on at the end—not quite privity, not quite secrecy, not quite privacy—is the thing I wish I had a word for.
It’s exactly this ur-privacy, though, that people find missing in their lives and are trying to express a well understood, if cloudy, desire for. It’s also something that I tend to agree with the various European governments on, despite my annoyance at the “I know it when I see it” nature of the thing.
I think this is because it is more nuanced that you, or most people, are giving credit to. Privacy is not a binary option of private vs public but rather a continuum. This is where "reasonable expectation" falls and tries to create a division, a third option. But I think we need more since the environment has changed. As an example, if in a public place you pull yourself and your friend to a dark corner that's obscured you have increased your expectation of privacy. Because you're literally "hiding." The extreme of this might be a public bathroom where you definitely do have a legal expectation of privacy despite being a public place.
So the problem here is that we're trying to make clear cut discriminators when the world has gotten a lot messier. Unfortunately legal systems require discretization, because it is easier to legislate clear boundaries (laws are piecewise functions -- if-then-else). But the world is messy and it needs to be recognized that those discrete boundaries are fuzzy too (i.e. they are guides, not hard fixed and objective boundaries). Probably also coupled with human propensity to discretize continuous variables due to the compression effects. This really is why we have many "know it when I see it" definitions rather than hard rules and you may notice that as complexity is increasing (making this more common) and so is the disagreement with said loose definitions. Then we have a core problem of communication breaking down because everyone is working off a different set of assumptions, assuming everyone else has the same assumptions, and unwilling to accept other bases because our assumptions are objectively generated ;)
>Do Americans not have an expectation of privacy even when talking in public, based on the expectations of the individuals engaged in speech?
No, they don't, because that would not be a reasonable expectation.
>The problem in America is not the speech part, but rather that the logic and reason itself has been inverted and perverted by sophists and abusive manipulators over the decades, which have turned everything upside down, including the definitions of “reasonable”, “public”, and “private”, i.e., the core logic of the matter. . . None of the founders of America and the writers of the Constitution would recognize any of these current assumptions built into definitive and even the words they wrote
I'm pretty sure the founders of The United States and the writers of the Constitution would understand that speaking at a restaurant (in their day, more likely in a public house) with friends is public.
Ben Franklin was a newspaper-man. You think he didn't deal with things overheard and published? These people were revolutionaries - successful revolutionaries generally know that their acts can be witnessed if not done in private spaces.
>let alone all the illogical and lazy cruft that has been added after the twelfth amendment
Weird cut-off, friend. To me, some of the illogical and lazy cruft was added prior to that in order to justify owning other people.
>> Do Americans not have an expectation of privacy even when talking in public, based on the expectations of the individuals engaged in speech?
> No, they don't, because that would not be a reasonable expectation.
If you asked someone before 2000, do you think their answer would be different?
Would setting/context change that? i.e. a person talking to their friend on the street vs giving a speech at a protest/demonstration?
I think before you call reference to Ben Franklin, you have to also consider the differences in settings between today and then. A lot has changed and the discourse around the subject is not properly taking this into account, and often not even acknowledging the existence of change in the first place. "Reasonable expectation" is deeply contingent upon the availability, accessibility, and utility. This cannot be an ignored part of the conversation.
>If you asked someone before 2000, do you think their answer would be different
No, I don't. I do not think reasonable people ever had an expectation of privacy while in public, especially when they are interacting with other people/strangers.
>Would setting/context change that? i.e. a person talking to their friend on the street vs giving a speech at a protest/demonstration?
Setting and context could change the expectation of privacy, sure - if you're in a private place, it's different from being in public.
>I think before you call reference to Ben Franklin, you have to also consider the differences in settings between today and then. A lot has changed and the discourse around the subject is not properly taking this into account, and often not even acknowledging the existence of change in the first place.
Are you saying people have more of an expectation of privacy now? I thought your whole argument went the other way.
> No, I don't. I do not think reasonable people ever had an expectation of privacy while in public, especially when they are interacting with other people/strangers.
Yeah, I don't buy that. Let me be quite specific: do you think someone would answer the following question differently "what is the likelihood that you will be on camera if you walk to the library and back?" I absolutely guarantee the numbers will change and approach 0 pretty rapidly. This is not just a psychological question (which does matter too btw) but a technological one. Clearly Ben Franklin would have answered that he would not expect such a thing despite being a person of high fame in his time.
> Setting and context could change the expectation of privacy, sure - if you're in a private place, it's different from being in public.
Except that this isn't a binary option. A public bathroom is a public space yet I think most people would be hard pressed to argue that you do not have a reasonable expectation of privacy there, especially in a stall. In fact, this is even legally codified. There's a spectrum of private-public and it is not clean cut. What I've suggested above is that there are variables you aren't considering. A person's model on the expectation of privacy is dependent not just on their condition of public/private property, but also on their expectation of people having recording devices, the expectation of that use, the expectation of ability to notice them, as well as other more refined setting attributes like doors, locks, and other such things. It is far more nuanced than "inside vs outside." As another clear example, I have a higher expectation of privacy being in the middle of a national forest than if I lived in a apartment on the first floor in a big city. Obviously there are more conditions and we can't have a reasonable conversation without recognizing this.
> Are you saying people have more of an expectation of privacy now?
Obviously not. Reread. "availability, accessibility, and utility" is referring to recording devices and the ability to search through them. Additionally, your analogy doesn't even make sense since a lot of investigative journalism does "spy" on people in private settings (e.g. source information from a dissenting party about a conversation that happened in a private room on private property). Again, way more nuanced than you are giving credit for.
>Yeah, I don't buy that. Let me be quite specific: do you think someone would answer the following question differently "what is the likelihood that you will be on camera if you walk to the library and back?"
They'd probably answer that differently, same as if you asked them about someone filming them on their cell phone or any other technological change. That doesn't have much to do with your earlier question, though.
> There's a spectrum of private-public and it is not clean cut.
Sure, there is a spectrum, based on community norms. There is a degree of privacy you expect in a bathroom, and it is greater than the degree you expect at your table in a restaurant. I wouldn't describe being in a bathroom as being 'in public' though.
>Obviously not. Reread.
I think you should read the last paragraph you wrote on the comment I replied to. It was completely unclear. You were replying to a statement that even in Ben Franklin's time there was no expectation of privacy in public. You did not refute this, essentially saying 'times have changed, you're not considering how things have changed.' Logically, that means that there is now an expectation of privacy in public.
> That doesn't have much to do with your earlier question, though.
It has everything to do with the question. Being recorded is a different level of privacy invasion than being seen.
> I wouldn't describe being in a bathroom as being 'in public' though.
And thus why you can't assert that your definition is absolute. If people are disagreeing and you admit community norms differ, then you can't have an objective reference and that's my main point.
>Being recorded is a different level of privacy invasion than being seen.
Why do you think I used the newspaper-man example? Being recorded in text has happened for a long time.
>you can't assert that your definition is absolute. If people are disagreeing and you admit community norms differ, then you can't have an objective reference and that's my main point.
I never asserted that my definition was absolute. I applied the spectrum to your examples. A 'reasonable person' standard is not an arbitrary bright-line rule, it's representative of the community and what their idea of a reasonably prudent person's expectations and behavior are.
> Why do you think I used the newspaper-man example?
And a voice recording is even more reliable and convincing but hasn't existed for "a long time." A camera is even more so. Today's state is not equivalent to a written record. Basically take your newspaper-man, make them better, and make a lot more of them. Your argument is failing to convince me not because I haven't understood your argument, it is failing because the assumptions being made are shaky. I will not buy a claim that anyone honestly believes that a random person telling their friend about something they overheard is equivalent to that same person showing their friend an audio recording or a video.
This is what I have been consistently claiming and saying is a critical aspect where you keep just saying that people have memories. These are not the same, and it is not remotely reasonable to say that they are the same. And if this were all that mattered, then you'd have a reasonable expectation of privacy were you to walk around a non-metropolitan city late at night while everyone else sleeps, simply due to you having a reasonable expectation of everyone being asleep. If you want to be convincing, dig into the complexity and connections that are related to your argument. Think about the factors that interplay and through what mechanisms. Specifically look at how these variables changed over time (taking into account prevalence and utility). Honestly, I don't think you can do this without coming to a very different conclusion. You're lacking sufficient complexity to account for the relevant data. It is fine to start simple, but you gotta add complexity to make strong conclusions. Ignoring the difference between cameras and newspapers isn't helping.
> And that’s before we explore things like focused beam microphones
Let's drop that. Instead, let's remember that 20 years ago there was not an expectation that someone would be carrying a microphone and camera on them. It was also less likely that one could do so without you noticing. Not to mention the quality of those devices was exceptionally lower, making identification harder and requiring you to be in much closer proximity. Take that back just another decade and a camera needed to sit on your shoulder, making you easily identifiable.
A problem with a lot of these conversations is that they're using modern technologies and notions in reference to laws that were written well before these things. There is a big difference between a very small number of easily identifiable people who require large resources to record the public, doing so in low resolution, and the modern notion of trivially doing so, and in high definition. Not to mention the ease/cost of storage, ability to search, and share that we have today. The Overton Window has shifted so much that we're completely forgetting the landscape differences.
Please read at least the 13th amendment before using the 12th as a cutoff! It's hard to believe you know what any of the amendments say if you're claiming those after the 12th are illogical.
My list or reasons I go hard against ads, even though I can appreciate quality ads that can serve a legitimate purpose:
1) tracking me across in serval ways, only making me more fanatical about it by selling my information and activity to who know whom.
2) malware/virus injections … it still happens way too often.
3) garbage ads; for garbage products, products/services I just purchased, or the infamous scam ads to defraud people.
Because cities are run by people and out whole civilization’s incentives structure has been turned upside down and inside out for at least 100 years now. When there are Not only no consequences, but also immense rewards and any few consequences are simply calculated into the operating budget, it leas to all these types of things we see today all across the western world where corruption, fraud, public plunder, and degeneracy are rampant and well being the house of cards down in some period.
I cannot go into the actual reasons for automatic action here because it is heresy against the church, so to say. But let me put it this way, it makes no sense and is insane, because it is of course not logical or sane, regardless of the various excuses and irrational mental knots America has been twisted and abused into in orders to support it.
It strikes me just how detached and ignorant your perspective is, largely not because it bothers me that people like you exist, but how it seems practically impossible for such detached and decadent perspectives to proliferate without collapse being imminent.
So you, member of the spoiled rotten, pilfering upper strata, parasitizing the larger society while at the same time degenerating it, want the regular people you are living off in decadence, to also pay not just current rates, but even higher rates so you can see your utopian, egotist, narcissistic vision come to fruition?
You want people who can’t afford the luxury of EVs and who are already being destroyed and pillaged by the likes of your strata, to on top of that abuse, also pay more?
Do you want them to also just eat cake? Or perhaps maybe they should also just try being billionaires? Just stop being poor, people. Right?
It’s unfortunate that humans seem to have made essentially zero progress in preventing what has been captured in numerous stories. Possibly the most relevant one being that Hubris is struck down by Nemesis; the origins of those two words themselves, something most people do not even realize.
If you ever have the chance, there is an excellent statue of Hubris in the Louvre. It is a bit hidden and tucked away, which makes it all the more prescient. Note when it was created.
We've banned this account for egregiously breaking the site guidelines. You can't do that here, regardless of how right your views are or you feel they are.
Normally I'd just post a warning but your account has a pattern of breaking the site guidelines repeatedly. If you don't want to be banned, you're welcome to email [email protected] and give us reason to believe that you'll follow the rules in the future. They're here: https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html.
>Do you want them to also just eat cake? Or perhaps maybe they should also just try being billionaires? Just stop being poor, people. Right?
I think billionaires are buying private planes, not EVs. The people buying EVs for their daily transportation several orders of magnitude closer to being homeless than they are to being billionaires.
I thought something like that myself, i.e., that it could have been legends, or a kind of proto-religion based on stories told by earlier ancestors that would have come from the north, which these people would of course not have known. They only knew that there were stories told “from the homeland” where there were large beasts and plenty.
It’s not personal, because basically everyone does it, but I love how people just say “inflation adjusted” as if we aren’t talking about fraud, they, plunder by a parasitic ruling class that used to live off the “inflation” delta between their assets and profits increasing, and the income of regular people increasing less. What’s gotten even worse now though is that they’ve gotten so greedy and there have been no consequences, that mere inflation is insufficient, they commit open theft and fraud through things like the COVID relief con job where $800 billion dollars go missing or are known to have been stolen.
Inflation is simply a manipulative way of covering up fraud, but those vomiting the fraud.
(Mild) inflation benefits debtors. The people who benefit from constant prices are the rent-seeking class, who never have to take on any risk to keep income. You have this backwards just as the people you claim to dislike want.
Your #1 debt is likely to be a fixed rate mortgage. That payment gets less in real terms every time there’s inflation. And even if it’s not yours it’s still most people’s. So most people are helped by this.
Everyone wanted to come to America precisely because the good old days existed and the rest of the world has what it has precisely because America’s good old days existed.
Whether you are doing it on purpose or not, you are spreading the spite and jealousy of abusive toxicity that gaslights America about its achievements, no different than a common abusive person says “I’m the only one that loves you”.
It is precisely because America and the Constitution was such an affront to the abusive psychopathic ruling class that hates having its powers to abuse being restrained for the first and only time in human history, that they’ve leverage every single force they can over centuries now, to dislodge America and the Constitution to set their absolute and tyrannical powers free again.
It will be too late, but when America and the Constitution finally falter, humanity will have to face the reality of what it was tricked into, unless that’s not even possible in the dystopian nightmare the ruling class has in store for humanity that makes 1984 seem like a quaint story.