Most people do all their Windows activity from one single specific location. It's Android and iOS that know you just drove down and made a stop at your city's most popular drug marketplace, or that you and your secretary were in the same hotel at 7pm yesterday.
Safe from coffee shop people or in a dorm, probably yes. If you lock your laptop with a good screensaver and have a decent PW, those people are not getting in anyway.
Plus with smart phones hardly anyone carries their laptop around these days.
But with what M/S is doing with Windows 11 "security" any ad company with $, lawyer with a warrant or alphabet soup agencies, can get a decent idea with what is going on even if they cannot get to see your data in Excel or Word.
But most M/S office data is now in the "cloud", so all bets are off for those files in many cases.
For the vast majority of users bitlocker just means that if someone steals your laptop or you leave it on a bus then short of a concerted effort by someone with technical ability, no one will have your photos or tax documents. It absolutely serves a meaningful purpose even if it has significant shortcomings.
Where I grew up as a kid, we had what was called singing bridges. There were 2 maybe 3 of them crossing the river. There were steel grates where water and snow would fall trough to the river below. When yo drove over the bridge you would hear a hum.
I the 90s they replaced these bridges with pavement. That was a bit sad to see, but that is what you get when cities fix everything in the cheapest possible way.
What is needed are enforceable laws that force companies to pay a living wage. The wage paid is based upon the cost of living in various US metro regions. The wage must be updated every 6 months. And we need a single payer health system.
Plus a type of tax that forces the ultra-rich to pay, if needed, a wealth tax that some countries are enabling.
All businesses run on a profit margin. It's a resource game, thinly veiled by the money layer as means of exchange. If you make the price of buying labor by decree, the owners of the business will either buy less of it (supply/demand ratio), automate it, raise the price to offset the increased cost or close the business down, because the costs are too high.
Businesses are shaky constructions and when you regulate them out of existence who will be generating the taxes for the government to redistribute?
About the "single payer health system", it's not a panacea. Many countries struggle with single payer systems, because there are also problems there too. The best working example for a medical system is Singapore. Compulsory medical saving account with government subsidies in that account for the poor. All prices are transparent and patients pay from that account and have premiums over the basic treatments, thus creating the market dynamics needed for the market to work and still requiring personal responsibility, by making sure the patients sees the costs and chooses himself.
That works only as long as people are employed and there are enough jobs to employ people. Simplest solution for a company is to outsource or automate jobs away as much as possible. After a couple years customers will adjust to the new norm even if it's a worse experience for them.
I use to buy someone a coffee via github once per month, but github required my cell # so I left github. I wish that person has another way of doing that.
But it depends upon what the person is doing, I found value in that project so I had no issue. So, for the article's author, it depends upon what the person is doing or writting :)
Yes, the days of Andy Griffith is long gone, at least in the US the country is slowly turning the local police into storm troopers.
But even back then, some groups of people were treated badly by the local police in some areas. Now it seems the bad treatment is has become "DEI" instead of good treatment expanding to everyone. :(
Those days never existed. In real life Andy Griffith would be an alcoholic who beats his wife and lynches black people who don't get out of Mayberry before the sun sets.
There's an old report (like from the 1990s) on this that put the DV rates at 40%. That's probably high but it's the source for a lot of the "cops beat their wives" claims.
A fundamental problem with cops is the thin blue line is very real. The rise of cameras on cops shows pretty clearly that a decent number of cops bend over backwards to protect their own. I find it pretty easy to believe that cops won't arrest their fellow officers on a DV call.
Police unions fight HARD to stop any sort of accountability or tracking of misbehavior of cops.
That's what the ACAB sentiment is about. It's not that all cops beat their wives or make up reasons to pull over minorities. It's that the ones who don't do that still cover for the ones who do.
That study is extremely misrepresented. It looked at household conflict rates, but the internet imagined that every act of violence was perpetrated by the officer, and not the spouse. In fact, the study found that the spouses of officers reported a higher rate of aggressive acts against their spouses, than officers did against their spouses.
The researchers also didn't conduct these studies on non-officers in the same location, in order to determine a baseline rate.
You also have the fact that "violent behavior" was not defined by the researches, so it left everyone to use their own personal definition. Maybe people thought violent behavior was yelling, or slamming doors. Is that domestic violence? Maybe, but I think when most people hear domestic violence they imagine a man beating up his wife.
And then there is the issue that these studies only involved a few hundred people from a specific location, like 40 years ago.
The conclusion is as true as the study shows. The conclusion was based on the questionnaire given to cops and their spouses in 1991 in some small town, those were the results. It's on other people who want to expand that to argue that 40% of cops beat their wives or whatever to show that it's true.
While I don't disagree with the sentiment, since you have a friend who's a cop I'm compelled to ask the uncomfortable question, is an otherwise good cop who protects bad cops still a good cop?
You know how all the people taking part in a robbery get charged with murder if just one of them kills someone?
I’d view it like that. A cop that covers up corruption for a partner is guilty of corruption. A cop that covers up a DUI carries a similar amount of guilt.
A cop that exercises ‘professional courtesy’ to overlook a minor traffic violation? Same negligible amount of guilt.
You aren't acknowledging an awareness of culture or systemic issues. Cops that remain on the force despite being aware of the excessive force, rampant theft, corruption, institutional racism and lack of accountability choose to accept and implicitly support that system for their own benefit. That's why people use the metaphor of "bad apples" to refer to police. You can't remain a good person in an evil system.
I'm sure Derek Chauvin was a real nice guy to his friends and neighbors, but he still murdered George Floyd in cold blood. Cops are great at compartmentalizing, it's part of the job.
The problem for people like that is that they're working in a system that rewards and mandates bad behavior. You want your traffic tickets to stick so you can make quota? Ticket more black and poor people. They won't contest the tickets as much. Drug arrest and conviction quota? Find people who can't afford an attorney, they'll get an overworked PD and likely take a fast plea bargain.
Good people are responsive to the incentives we've created for them also.
nerds stopped existing around the 1990s when money was poring into tech. The bros moved from marketing into tech for the money, pushing out nerds. An example of this is all the bloatware being created.
Yes some still exist, but I think the tend to be working in non-tech jobs or maybe in Corp IT and working on their own items in between.
You can get a certain portion of the population to pay $20/mo. but I think it's a very small population who's paying enough to actually cover frontier models in agentic workflows right now.
Either I've fallen in with a unique group of non-techy people willing to pay for an LLM subscription, or you just not giving enough credit to it. I guess time will tell
> Only about 3% of households were paying for AI in February, using the most recent numbers available from the Bank of America Institute, which researches consumer trends based on the bank's customer transactions.
But even among these people I doubt most spring for the $100 plans, let alone are willing to pay hundreds or thousands of dollars per user the way corporate users do.
The funniest part of all of this is that, I as a techy dev type person, pay $0 for any LLM account. No, I'm not cheating with a paid by employer account. I just don't use it. So I guess my little group is breaking all of the stereotypes
Well Biden increased the IRS budget a lot, when the idiot was re-elected one of the first things he did was cut the IRS budget, took out Biden's increase plus some.
This was done to ensure the IRS cannot audit the very rich. That works because the auditing the rich is very expensive and you need highly skilled Auditors for that.
> That works because the auditing the rich is very expensive
But it is "profitable".
It is one of the very few things the government does that generates short-term "profits" - every dollar spent auditing the rich and collecting from them generates more money than is spent, and we have never been close to break-even.
If you truly want to run the government like a business, increasing funding to IRS audits and collections is one of the hallmarks of what you would do.
EDIT: a lot of what the government does, and it should be everything the government does, is profitable, but it's more like "we spend this money, it increases GDP on some timescale, and then we get more taxes from it". This is short-term because it is more direct. The IRS audits bring in more tax revenue quite directly.
Started in the second half of Biden's presidency. The republicans argued that the IRS was already overfunded in the first half and refused to allocate additional budget for them.
This isn't just a Trump thing, it's a Republican party thing.
The ultra wealthy were already safe; it's much cheaper for the IRS accuse a middle class household with a couple W2s and a Doordash 1098 of inadequately tracking their mileage and fuel receipts than it is to review the reams of paperwork they'd receive when auditing any of the ultra-rich.
Meanwhile, even in an alternate reality where IRS was occasionally seizing some billionaire's entire life savings for cause, the proceeds would fund the federal government's operations for just a few hours. Hours! No amount of collected taxes make a difference when congress spends 2-3x what they collect!
> Meanwhile, even in an alternate reality where IRS was occasionally seizing some billionaire's entire life savings for cause, the proceeds would fund the federal government's operations for just a few hours.
Do you imagine that when the government spends, it feeds money into a furnace and it's gone forever? That's not how it works.
It pays people and companies. That money comes back as more taxes.
The ID along with their telemetry, M/S can map you to what you do and from where. That pretty much makes their builtin disk encryption useless.
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