I agree with parent that this whole thread comes off as extremely hyperbolic.
I've known this information about my friends and neighbors for the better part of the last decade. In most states this is public info and you can even look it up from a web form using name, zip, and dob.
Companies will have a Chief Privacy Officer whose job is basically to provide oversight and, of course, absorb the risk. That person will probably be paid well.
I'm actually OK with that. We're always complaining that companies don't take security/privacy seriously because there's no incentive to do so. See e.g. the Equifax HN threads. Having a person in the C suite who'll end up in jail if the company seriously fucks up is, IMO, a net positive for the world.
Startups aren't even covered by this bill until they've gained lots of traction (1 million users and 50MM+ gross receipts). At which point, again again IFF their business is data hoarding, they will need to hire approx. one additional employee.
I'm sure startups/consultants will step in to provide regulator compliance as a service as well, so maybe not even that.
It's not like people will be thrown in prison because their DB wasn't patched quickly enough. They have to knowingly and intentionally lie to the federal government in an annual report.
The bill defines covered entities in Sec. 2.(5)(A) and 2.(5)(B). In particular, companies with less than $50,000,000 in gross receipts and information on fewer than 1,000,000 customers are not covered by this legislation.
And even if those apply to your local coffee shop or whatever, Sec. 2(5)(B)(iii) further limits the definition of covered entity so that businesses that do not provide 3rd party access to information are not covered.
So Starbucks and other huge coffee chains/retail shops are the only organizations that would have to re-evaluate data collection from their public Wifi hotspots, and even then might be exempt depending on what they are collecting and how they are using that information. And, I should point out, these companies will need privacy experts on staff anyways, so this provision is highly unlikely to cause them to shutter their in-store Wifi networks...
Additionally, some of the more onerous requirements only apply to a subset of covered entities with yet larger gross receipts and yet larger numbers of tracked consumers.
But, unequivocally, your locally owned mom & pop coffee shop is excluded from consideration under this provision multiple times over.
A lot of your news is not just "not-depressing". It's actively uplifting. In fact, most of the stories on the front page are "feel good" stories.
It'd be cool/useful if you could provide news on the important issues of the day that's simply "not-depressing". I.e., factual and detached and doesn't elicit emotion, but not explicitly feed-good.
> As in most descriptions of it are annoyingly ambiguous.
My very first interviewer (intentionally) didn't spec fizzbuzz correctly. The real test was whether the candidate listened to the customer's/lead engineer's spec instead of jumping to conclusions.
Fortunately, I was just entering college and hadn't heard of fizzbuzz before. I passed the "test" but for the wrong reason.
That's called an apartment building. Or a large house with many bedrooms. Both happen all the time.
In fact, just last weekend I let 20+ people into my house for a party. The notion of privately owned property didn't suddenly become absurd at the beginning of that party...
"Exclusive right to use" is not unique to intellectual property, nor is the ability to scale a piece of private property from 1 user to N concurrent users.
Steko's comment might be a good place to continue that particular conversation. Such an approach would require careful design of incentive structures so that patents remain accessible without making the status quo of bullshit patents even worse.
Shipping & Transit LLC had not only a prototype, but also a product:
Jones developed this into a service called BusCall, which had some modest success.
I think the actual solution is simply improved patent review. The patent system is broken because there are so many bad patents; if only truly innovative stuff was patented, I think a lot of the reasonable criticism would become a lot less reasonable.
But without additional funding, improved scrutiny at filing time would also dramatically increase the cost of acquiring a patent, which is already expensive for individual inventors.
Knowing the difference between "file" and "directory" and being able to touch type won't get you a $200K engineering position at Google...
Furthermore, if the goal is to generate as many $200K-comp-caliber engineers as possible, parent's point is the right one. A kid who shows up at college with the ability to write well and a bit of mathematical maturity has a much brighter future than a kid who is "good with computers" but struggles with basic math.
My comment was specific to the USA and maybe even certain parts of the USA.
> Most tradies here have their own business
Maybe this really is true in Australia. IDK. People say this a lot in the USA, but both statistics and personal anecdata indicate it's complete bullshit. Starting a business is hard. Getting the money to start up is hard. Handling cash flow is hard. Handling everything from deadbeat clients to litigious clients is hard.
> + the cash jobs that they don't declare on tax.
Software engineers can also make $$$ by committing tax fraud and other crimes.
> Still, it is very hard to make developers pay for software.
I don't think this is true. There are lots of things that developers throw money at, and each developer can easily think of multiple processes that would happily through hundreds or thousands of dollars at if those processes could be automated.
However, it is hard to build software that developers will pay for.
I.e., the demand is there and it is strong, but the products that meet that demand are generally Real Engineering Problems.
I always get called elitist/out-of-touch when I point this out, but it's really true that most people working in trades do $50k with mediocre benefits.
Everyone always lashes out at this with anecdata, but both the hard data from Labor and the 15+ datapoints I have personally all seem to agree that $60k is "really good", and that's with overtime. Statistically, for every wealthy plumber/small business owner pulling down 100k+, there are a lot of folks pulling down $50k or less working for the man.
Other downsides: The trades are extremely sensitive to certain types of recessions. And most trades are hard on your body. Plumber is actually one of the better trades from that perspective. Even stuff like welding and machining, which outsides think of as less hard on your body, are usually brutal. If the setup was such that they don't need you carrying stuff, going up and down stairs, etc. all day -- ie. if you could just stand in one place and weld/cnc without doing back-breaking labor -- then they'd have automated the work already.
This might all be specific to the two labor markets I know most well, but... sigh for smart kids, going to college for an in-demand STEM degree is still a great life choice and probably much higher ROI than a trade. And saying so isn't elitist.
Driving truck also seems to do better over the past two decades than most trades. Still sensitive to recessions, but much less so. None of my trucker relatives/friends have had bouts of unemployment since 2008, but all the construction and manufacturing trades have been in and out of work pretty much continually since 2009 (maybe things got better around late 2015)
If college isn't for your kids, have them also consider healthcare. Might be more stable during recessions and less hard on their body. The only downside is that there are fewer options for entrepreneurial endeavors than in the trades. Also, outside of large cities, there's only one or two dominant employers and that holds down wages. But the same is true in tech and trades.
>> But it has the net effect of pushing the tax burden down onto smaller companies who are competing with the Amazons of the world.
I.e., even if we need a solution to "sclerotic tax increases", this is not a good one, because the solution only works for massive companies.