I'm always surprised how defensive people get in here about privacy when so many corporations have vastly more information about you than the government does.
This is very true. There are a handful of countries, South Africa comes to mind, where the government lost that monopoly and security is a type of commodity which has to be purchased in the private sector.
That's not really true though is it. The Sackler family caused over 500,000 deaths. Nestlé has killed millions of babies. DuPont and 3M poisoned every living creature on Earth. Nobody spent even one day in prison for any of it.
Corporations all over the world routinely and knowingly poison, injure, or outright murder their employees and their customers. They spend massive amounts of money preventing the public from knowing about the harms they are causing. Even in the most egregious cases where there is well documented proof of what they've done the heads of these companies still get away with it. They profit from it. They're just happily living their lives in their mansions and on their yachts while graves are dug and families are torn apart.
From my perspective, the difference is that we societally condemn the Sackler family in the same way we societally condemn Robert Pickton or Ted Bundy.
It is absolutely failing of the government and the American legal system that nobody spent time in prison for Purdue's lies and poison, we're in full agreement there.
That said, this position alone doesn't suggest that otherwise law-abiding citizens should be more concerned about corporate surveillance than they are government surveillance.
No, the reason that law-abiding citizens should be more concerned about corporate surveillance than they are government surveillance is that those corporations sell all your data to the government so that the government can get around the need for things like warrants and probable cause while at the same time those companies are also exploiting your data every chance that they get in any and every way that they think will make them more money or give them power and influence over you.
It wasn't until the current administration that the US government handed over the people's most sensitive private data in bulk to private corporations in exchange for bribes.
Not that it makes it any better, those people were treated as just externalities to doing business. Government violence is a lot more targeted. Yes, it has the same result but the intention is very different. One is just careless, the other is malicious.
When corporations knowingly kill people it isn't careless. What they do is entirely calculated. For example, it wasn't carelessness that caused the Philip Morris executives to hire a bunch of scientists who were then ordered to falsify reports saying that smoking wasn't harmful in an attempt to trick the public to keep smoking when the company was sitting on a mountain of evidence showing that their product was killing people.
Government violence is different though. When the government acts against the public they are generally required to follow long and complex procedures with multiple points of checks and accountability. A cop has to get enough evidence to convince a judge to issue an arrest warrant. A person is taken into custody and given access to a lawyer. A trial is held in court with a jury. At every step there are volumes of records detailing exactly what was done, by whom, and why. All of that information is public record and we can request those records to keep watch on what the government does. If the government abuses the power we give them we can vote them out of office and replace them.
Obviously there are a lot of problems with our legal system and places where all of that breaks down, but the goal was for there to be transparency and accountability and nothing stops us from improving the situation. With corporations on the other hand, they act in secret, they don't have to ask anyone for permission, they aren't required to keep records of everything they do, you have no legal right to examine the records they have, and even if you find out a CEO is responsible for murdering a bunch of people for profit you have no power to vote that CEO out of office.
It's pretty clear which of whose two entities is the larger threat. Which one of them has already repeatedly poisoned you and your entire family. Which one do you think was responsible for more violence done to your loved ones?
Because things that won't get you into trouble today will get you into trouble tomorrow when they change the rules. I'd prefer to have the government know as little as possible about my doings.
This isn’t a “gotcha”. Many here take exceptional steps against this kind of thing and also advocate for restrictions on what kind of data corporations can collect.
The corporations aren't going to throw you in jail if you cross state lines to get an abortion. The US government is already doing this when they get that data.
Governments and Companies have different motivations.
Governments want control, Companies want money.
Control typically comes from a reduction in rights, freedoms, money. When you fail to give those up "naturally" violence, worsened living conditions and abuse are the tools used.
Of course it's much better, Schongauer was ~25 when he did the engraving. Michelangelo was 12 when he copied it. Likewise, it goes without saying that Haydn's symphonies circa 1765 were much better than Mozart's from the same time, since Haydn was ~30 years old and Mozart was ~10 years old.
The remarkable thing about the early painting/symphonies isn't the absolute quality of the work, it's that they showcase the artists' intrinsic baseline talents, which they would then leverage as their skills improved with maturity to become some of the greatest artists of all time.
I have a few blog posts which have received only about ~250 upvotes across different communities, plus a GitHub project with just 30 stars.
Still, both of these were really interesting to my future colleagues (not the recruiter) who interviewed me in the last round of the interviews which landed me my current job. They had read them ahead of time and it really shaped the technical part of the interview.
maybe not the recruiter but the hiring manager or prospective colleagues who'll interview you later?
not the number of stars, but I like looking what people have done online ie GitHub/blog. I feel like it is a nice thing to talk about.
I know it's an unpopular opinion these days cause everyone wants work life balance and not work beyond the office but it's always nice to see projects you've worked on it does show some interest. also while one can fake GitHub activity it's hard to fake well thought out and cared for projects.
it's easier to fake metrics from your previous jobs like I saved X amount of money for the company or had Y efficiency gains.
I was contacted by a spanish HR agency, they said that my github contained code that they considered an outlier and would like to forward some job applications. Never heard of them since. Maybe scraping github for talent isn't good business.
As a hiring manager that visited every resume Github link because of my FOSS background, >99% of them had nothing of substance (no activity, school projects, etc).
Probably because there's a bunch of English speakers on here from Canada, the US and the UK. TBH I think it made it to the front page because of interesting discussion in the comments, not because of the content of the article itself
I know most reactors are built on like 20 year old designs, mostly for safety reasons. Is this reactor more modern in that respect? Finally using some new ideas?
