I agree with you on the general principle that we should demand better privacy protection from the government, its agents, and the corporations that claim its citizenship.
Arguing about who has killed more seems mildly pointless since it relies on a clear cut distinction between "business" and "government" which would be hard to find in a lot of real world situations. Even aside from stuff like the east indies company, Hearst's newspapers helped create a situation where a war was declared, what share of the resulting death toll do they get?
Beyond that, something I've noticed over my years on this planet is that, generally speaking, power cannot be destroyed, only transferred.
What I mean by that is someone is going to have power over all sorts of aspects of your life, in ways that range from what color you can paint your house, where you can buy a house, how much you get paid, whether or not you get paid a salary, how much taxes you pay, etc etc.
I would, in general, prefer that the entity with that power be some kind of democratically elected institution, hopefully with lots of various internal and external safeguards.
As you say, we should be worried about the government collecting and storing our private information. But if we stopped them from doing that, then some other entity would just take over spying on people.
Sure, Obama (and friends) got the ACA passed which, among other things, forbade health insurance companies from refusing service to people with "pre-existing conditions" as well as also forbidding lifetime caps on services needed for treatment.
Is it the best most perfect law ever passed in the history of humanity? Obviously not. Is it substantially better than what came before? YES. It's hard to explain just how screwed you were if you started getting hit by the "pre-existing conditions" disqualifier or your health insurance decided that they only needed to spend a million treating your cancer and after that you're on your own.
Your comment seems to frame this as a "two sides issue" as if it was a see-saw and you can only move back and forth between one side and the other with no room for nuance or alternate directions.
Governments can do a lot of things that hurt you, this is a consequence of having power. Giant Corporations can also hurt you because they also have power.
In general I would agree that say, walmart, is mostly interested in encouraging you to shop at their stores more frequently with the information they gather, it's also true that other corporations are currently selling the information they gather to the government.
And, of course, if I dislike what e.g. the department of labour is doing with information it's collecting, I can vote for various representatives up and down the hierarchy of power, in the USA this would include things like state governors / attorneys, federal legislators, presidents, etc, all of whom have some level of influence over my information being collected and used.
If I dislike what walmart is doing, my options are considerably more limited. I can lobby for a law to be passed against it or I can essentially wish for it to go out of business.
People do listen to it and enjoy it but to some degree it becomes a marketing problem. I don't know how to weight the moral issue of someone missing out on a song they would love and instead getting a one they merely like because the ai stuff is flooding the market, but it would be nice to tip the scales a bit in the other way.
> An old book could seem socially "problematic" from a 2026 lens (especially for young people for whom that is before their time),
Or, you know, you've just read the old books already because they came out 10 years ago and that's a lot of time to read.
I doubt it has anything to do with "romantasy" as a genre, anything that has people actually reading books, on a regular basis (as opposed to the people who mean reading as consuming one "notable" novel a year).
In any case, epublishing has made a lot more books available and filtering through them was a difficult task even before AI increased the output dramatically.
I've been saying for a while now there's a large untapped market for actually effective recommendation systems (almost certainly human driven given the demonstrated limitations of computer systems so far), as mentioned it was a problem to find "the good stuff" even among just self-published pre-ai books, now it's way beyond that.
I guess to some degree it's the same basic problem as spam filtering, but considerably more nuanced and difficult.
I know it's fashionable to say stuff like this, but you know what's also a rounding error by that logic? THE SCIENTIFIC GRANTS WE'RE DISCUSSING.
Like, sure, 600million for a ballroom is small compared to the annual interest payments but it could fund, dunno, at least a dozen scientists. Maybe even 2 dozen! Add in the 1.6 billion dollars trumo was trying to embezzle from the irs and we could get a couple dozen more studies going.
If that number is too small and trifling for you, how about the $80+ billion dollar budget for ice? Think we could afford a few studies with that?
Oh hey, a good faith argument. I thought about going and googling for more studies supporting my position, but I'm not sure if that actually has much of a point?
Maybe I can come up with a stronger/more defensible argument: creating a just and equitable society is valuable on multiple levels including moral and economic.
Societies without "lower classes" are good for a variety of reasons.
Researching into why we have lower classes and, hopefully fixing that, is a good thing for a bunch of reasons.
Something something how many potential new einsteins aren't pushing boundaries because they had to drop out of highschool and work 3 jobs?
> "real" diversity of thought isn't allowed under globohomo. The goal, of course, is handouts for race communists and to further solidify communist control of political
Arguing about who has killed more seems mildly pointless since it relies on a clear cut distinction between "business" and "government" which would be hard to find in a lot of real world situations. Even aside from stuff like the east indies company, Hearst's newspapers helped create a situation where a war was declared, what share of the resulting death toll do they get?
Beyond that, something I've noticed over my years on this planet is that, generally speaking, power cannot be destroyed, only transferred.
What I mean by that is someone is going to have power over all sorts of aspects of your life, in ways that range from what color you can paint your house, where you can buy a house, how much you get paid, whether or not you get paid a salary, how much taxes you pay, etc etc.
I would, in general, prefer that the entity with that power be some kind of democratically elected institution, hopefully with lots of various internal and external safeguards.
As you say, we should be worried about the government collecting and storing our private information. But if we stopped them from doing that, then some other entity would just take over spying on people.