To provide some better perspective, this link has a picture of the incident, and described in greater detail that the mechanism of action wasn’t simply some newspaper rallying for a boycott.
Apparently, the parent company Gourmet Master Co. runs a chain of cafes, which used apps to facilitate orders via smart phone, leading to a drop in impulse buys?
I dunno, something tells me regular people just aren’t that rabid about territorial disputes regarding places they’ll never visit, or might only visit once or twice during a vacation.
If America were to entertain the option of trading Hawaii for Puerto Rico, as state #50, would people go nuts? I probably wouldn’t, but then again, I’m not most people.
Starship Troopers had that sort of thing going on, in the sense that Heinlein portrayed the society of the novel as a militaristic, conservative authoritarian regime born out of economic turmoil of a vaguely sketched past that alluded to predecessors being too laissez faire, sloppy and permissive.
On some level it was a joke shot through with distortions, deliberately inaccurate misinterpretations of history, and willful ignorance among the characters of the xenophobia’s capacity to forge bonds among the ingroup of humans volunteering to accept the burden of fighting outsiders as a gateway to other privileges.
This part is glossed over with the premise of starfleet academy, or the motivating factors that impel characters toward their rank and status. So, we start to see that star trek is something of a cartoon, with “post-scarcity economics” being a deus ex machina for unlimited resources, leading to unlimited technology, leading to unlimited resources, with only a vague line connecting warp drive to first contact with vulcans, which then grants all other technologies for free as originating from alien discoveries.
Anyway, I think we’re pretty close to the idea of robots doing a lot of tedious things for us, if we play our cards right, which means we start to see a lot of things essentially growing on trees. Automatic hamburger machines mean less people slaving away over a hot grill in a low paying fast food chain, which is great, but this premise of automation won’t really save us unless robots can solve the human condition end-to-end.
It means we need a place to stay, clothes to wear, food and water, and something to keep us stimulated and occupied in such a way that we don’t get lonely. All this so that we can go out and find things that keep life interesting, once all our basic needs are met by default. That doesn’t seem to be where all our great inventions are taking us though.
With a harsh light and a strong lens, a lot of consumer oriented inventions do nothing for anyone. Business still seems to aim at bankrupting customers and competitors alike in furtherance of bigger business. Taken to logical conclusions those coziest with successful businesses get taken care of, and it’s near total neglect everywhere else.
But that doesn’t exist in a vaccuum. Really all the most extraordinary inventions have been miitary concepts. Preparing for war makes peace. Maybe that’s the proper inspiration at work here...
Okay, so wait a second. Hold it right there. @nerdponx is onto something here. This is really important.
You take your fingers, and take your 100+ key keyboard, and you think about how reliable your structured articulation of codified text syntax can be, when storing files on a file system the UNIX way.
Take that same philosophy, and make that happen with spoken word, and a language that has ~65,000 words. Phrases over text files, spoken through the air, instead of written down, saved and interpretted.
If that were what these speaker/microphone combo systems were about, and they weren’t internet connected, and exclusively piping profitable surveillance data home to some corporate data center to mine for buying habits in aggregate, this would all be very different.
Anyway, the future is fucking stupid, and I hate it. I hope JavaScript bitcoin mining eventually sucks so much accidentally wasted computational energy into some quantum computer with an unterminated while loop, that it conjures a black hole and erases us all.
Keep in mind that there’s actually a path to breaking people out of this point of view, but it’s a really deep, dark rabbit hole, with lasting ramifications.
When you take this principle into account, however, a huge segment of the world makes much more sense, although the realities that become evident are kind of horrible.
The fastest path to lead people out of this mindset, is to prove to them their own error by bringing them in on some misbehavior (such that they perceive it as a serious violation of their own personal code), for which they both benefit from, experience no consequences, and find deep tempatation to repeat.
To broach the subject of crossing some personal line with a person like this raises an eyebrow. Crossing that line in front of them reveals a mixture of feelings. Inviting them to participate is met with uncertainty. Pulling the trigger with them gives way to a period of paranoia, until the coast is clear. Then, twice then, three times. Now, they’re convinced that morality isn’t set in stone, and laws are the commands of mere mortals, to be broken at will.
But, now what you have on your hands is a convert. Once conservative, and yet still as much, but eager to experiment and challenge their own views. This is where stereotypical morally abivalent, yet superficially conservative people come from. Seduced out of their naive, obedient world view, but entertaining dubious integrity. So now it’s no longer divine authority in an imperfect world conceived by some paranormal perfection, but instead, simply might makes right. And so, you get tasteless materialism, and a ruthlessness to obtain status.
After a certain age, this sort of thing really can’t happen with some people. When you’re a teenager, transgressing certain boundaries can be harmless and naive, but after a certain age, cheap thrills don’t work. That’s why we find a broad split of sheltered, uptight squares, mixed in with smaller segments of snobby, cavalier libertines or cheesey, greedy sociopaths.
It’s a distribution of age brackets for teenage misbehavior. The cornier the yuppie, the later in college they started breaking the rules, or maybe they never broke any rules, and that’s why they’re stuck with this holier-than-thou attitude.
No one really tries to break encryption, when side channel attacks can capture a message during the process of encryption.
No one thinks in encrypted text. The plain text is always created and then translated over to the enciphered copy. The plain text will always exist in some way, so that a message may be proof-read before sending. Even if printed on the sceen of a secure display monitor.
If an environment is stifling enough, it might be painfully obvious that someone is stepping out of line to work on carefully disclosing secrets. Obviously laws don’t matter in China, and if there’s a scent of dishonesty in the wrong context, I’m sure it wouldn’t take much find a way to watch every second of someone’s humble existence, if they’re not above executing pregnant women to send a message about what not watching your husband gets you.
It’d be best to imagine something else. Stenographers are much too busy in court, recording transcripts of proceedings as they transpire. They wouldn’t have time to help avoid detection.
I think it’s probably better to use a stegosaurus, given their spiked tail, and boney plates, which will scare off any attackers.
Or maybe just safely conclude that casually pondering what might or might not work isn’t good enough, and cannot compare to what’s faced in a real situation, where simply knowing what the word steganography means wouldn’t help either.
HN has only ever been civilized by way of preferential moderation. Don’t delude yourself with rose colored glasses. Just continue to take my comments personally, as if you were being attacked by a close friend.
https://medium.com/@shanghaiist/taiwan-coffee-chain-85-c-dis...
Apparently, the parent company Gourmet Master Co. runs a chain of cafes, which used apps to facilitate orders via smart phone, leading to a drop in impulse buys?
I dunno, something tells me regular people just aren’t that rabid about territorial disputes regarding places they’ll never visit, or might only visit once or twice during a vacation.
If America were to entertain the option of trading Hawaii for Puerto Rico, as state #50, would people go nuts? I probably wouldn’t, but then again, I’m not most people.