All we need is an omnibenevolent entity in charge of it. Nobody else can be trusted to properly define what is meant by ‘responsible behaviour’
Could you make up your mind and let us (and yourself) know which scenario you’re actually talking about?
They are both similar. The former requires more shoe leather on the ground and won’t be as definitive, but it can narrow down suspects. Why do you care which one, though? Aren’t both equally bad?
I would very much rather have someone stick a needle in my arm once every 6 weeks to take my blood, than I would have my actions closely monitored and recorded. What people want is a not-insignificant factor.
Rather than an omnibenevolent entity, think crowd sourcing. By allowing private individuals and groups to record events at any place and any time, misdemeanours by those in power can be recorded, as well as the everyday delinquency of ordinary people. With the continued increase in memory storage that modern information technology permits, we could all be recording a significant portion of our daily lives soon.
Remember those dash-cams in Russia that recorded the meteor strike? They do that to protect themselves against abuse, by individuals and by officialdom. That is sousveillance.
Interestingly, undirected individual intrusion into my privacy doesn’t bother me that much. I guess because it’s normal; thousands of people see me walking down the street with their eyes - and I have no doubt that I must have wandered through the background of many people’s snapshots and videos.
Purposely collating and analysing all that data just in case transforms it into an entirely different proposal.
Heck, I don’t even mind appearing naked in public - if someone really wants to gaze on my bare ass while I (discreetly as I can) change at the beach, it’s their eyes - and I don’t own the light that bounces off my hairy bum.
So I’m not especially hung up on preservation of privacy - but I would object to the systematized erosion of it.
Unresponsive. I did not ask you to justify anything. I asked you what the value is, to you, of saving a stranger’s life. You can discuss the world you imagine me living in to your heart’s content, but you still haven’t answered the question.
Theoretically, you’ve got an easy win here. You’ve claimed that my argument is weak because I can’t tell you the value of a person’s privacy. This is your opportunity to show that your argument is better because you CAN tell me the value of saving a person’s life. Don’t you want to score the easy points?
Let’s not assume that, since you have no proof that it is, and I have ALREADY provided evidence that the majority of those cases are NOT people tied up somewhere waiting to be rescued. In terms of providing proof that the subset is not very small, the ball is in your court.
As far as I can tell, you only ever imagine people walking down the street, dining at a café, or tied up in someone’s basement. Apparently, I live in a post-apocalyptic anarchist heaven (whatever that is, it sounds like fun), while you live in made-for-TV chick flick.
I am NOT sure that any one person’s life is of more value than any number of people’s loss of privacy every time they leave the house, particularly when “any number of people” is in the millions. That is the debate, regardless of how many times you try to pretend that the debate is “one person being observed walking down the street one day.” In the same way, the people losing their privacy are not “those people”–they are us. All of us.
How do I compare it to what?
You, mean the fact that, of all the examples that have been given of how a person can be harmed by this massive loss of privacy, you are ONLY able to think about the example of someone who is having an affair? No, I’m not butthurt about it. Your continued insistence on displaying your inability to address anything other than a strawman version of my argument doesn’t embarrass ME at all.
No, we don’t have to fall back on any feelings of mine. If surveillance didn’t have an impact, there’d be no reason for you to be in favor of it. There’s also no reason to compare “the impact of surveillance” with “the impact of a physical assault” unless you have come up with a new argument that you are presenting in some sort of code.
And you really are wasting time. If my argument is as inferior to yours as you claim, all you have to do is make your logical argument and quantify your position to show that you’re the winner. What are you waiting for?
Didn’t you JUST say this, like, several sentences ago? Just scroll up a few lines…you’ll find
It is not a strawman unless I’ve misrepresented your argument. So, how 'bout clarifying in what way I’ve misrepresented your position: If one saved life is worth “any number” of privacy violations, are you NOT saying that one saved life has infinite value?
If you’re going to accuse me of making a strawman argument, you need to be ready to back it up with some kind of proof.
What is the value of this thing you call a “saved life”? I’m asking you put a value to it. You have failed to do so at every turn. So, how is your argument any better than mine?
I’m not sure if you’re calling me a sociopath, or if you’re calling yourself one. You haven’t demonstrated the value you give to saving your life or anyone else’s, btw.
So far, I’m arguing you to stalemate without even trying very hard.
I guess there are no people who do stupid things in made-for-TV-movie land. Try to imagine, hypothetically, a world where you can’t count on people not doing things that are stupid, particularly if they work for the government.
No, what I’m suggesting is that investigating every one of these cases immediately would be astronomically expensive. And if we use SkyEye, including the controls you’ve suggested, it will still be astronomically expensive, and by the time warrants have been issued and the recordings have been reviewed, most of the Missing People will have already turned back up, so most of that expense will have been for no benefit, to society or anyone else.
Well, if you can’t quantify why some stranger being kidnapped would affect you negatively, who do you expect to do so?
You don’t win points by offering criticisms to MY argument that I can as easily apply to yours. I expect when you finally catch on to this fact, it will be a major epiphany for you.
Is that your dramatic way of saying you can’t answer the question? As a reminder, the question was, “What good does it do you specifically if SkyEye saves the life of some stranger you’ve never met?” If you’re saying that the fact that you can’t answer the question means that “people can’t expect any aid from society”, well, I don’t really follow your logic.
Well, this is taking an odd turn. I pointed out that your response had absolutely nothing to do with what I had said, and you respond with something that is even more nonsensical?
How does this have any remote relationship to the two sentences of mine that you quoted? Since I was pointing out the way you’ve worked your way into an unreasonable stance, based on nothing…I guess this response means you’d rather appear insane than unreasonable?
Your suggestion was that I could inquire to find out if the police had been “watching” the surveillance footage of me, and that the answer could be gotten by checking the logs. So, assuming the logs know which grid references every user has been looking at, how do the logs know which of those grid references I was in at any given time?
Sure, we can use that analogy, in which case I mean that a great many of the cases that you think your sledgehammer (SkyEye) will solve are actually finishing nails. And an obvious implication would be that your “subset” of solved cases is not nearly as big as you want to assume.
The definition is pretty easily addressed:
[QUOTE]
[ol]
[li]the sill of a doorway.[/li][li]the entrance to a house or building.[/li][li]any place or point of entering or beginning: [/li][li]the threshold of a new career.[/li][li]Also called limen. Psychology, Physiology. the point at which a stimulus is of sufficient intensity to begin to produce an effect: the threshold of consciousness; a low threshold of pain.[/ol][/li][/quote]
Given that we were talking about whether my answer would be “no-brainer yes” or “NOT no-brainer yes”, I lean toward #4 being the most relevant. However, since YOU were the one that claimed that my examples were providing thresholds, please feel free to indicate which definition YOU were using, and how that definition leads you to conclude that there were two thresholds contained in my two bullet points.
That is to say, rather that trying to imply that I don’t know what I’m talking about, why don’t you demonstrate that you know what you are talking about.
I gave two examples. YOU decided they were thresholds. I have said repeatedly they were not, and you have repeatedly insisted that you know what I meant better than I do.
When you make unwarranted assumptions about my argument, and then make up a whole bunch of stuff that I never said that you think supports your unwarranted assumptions, it is not ME who is obfuscating.
If you weren’t so busy correcting me about what I meant, it might have occurred to you to stop and say, “Maybe I misunderstood you. What did you mean by that?” But I guess that’s just not your way. Your way is to tell me what I meant, then suggest that I’m being dishonest when I disagree.
How can it be anything but arrogant–and foolish–to be so damn sure that you know what I’m thinking better than I do?
What would make me happy would be if you would stop accusing me of establishing thresholds OR boundaries wrt my opinions when I have not done so.
Thank you. That was my point: They only exist in your head, not in my posts.
Look at the quote you responded to. The word is not “harm”; the word is “affected”. YOU said you wouldn’t be “affected”, and I pointed out that you would, in fact, be affected. Now, you are restating MY argument as if that were your position to begin with. It wasn’t; you have contradicted yourself, again.
What’s the difference between “feeling you have been harmed” and “having actually been harmed”?
What if it was a non-random asshole? Would that be okay?
Value to whom? I’m sure it has value to you…how much value? How much value do you suppose it has to me? I mean, it’s clear that MY privacy is of no value to YOU. Why should YOUR life be of value to ME?
What does it mean when you say you “assume” my life has value? Either it does or it doesn’t. How much do you value my life? And why would you value my life if you don’t value my feelings? If I were dying of bone cancer and in excruciating pain, would you say that the “value” of my life was more important that the “value” of my suffering?
What about the poor victims who you were talking about being trapped in someone’s basement, terrified. If you don’t value their feelings, what difference does it make whether they are happy in bed at home or terrified in someone’s basement? As long as they are alive, the value is the same, right?
Yep, I used the same kind of argument on you that you’ve been using on me. Annoying, isn’t it?
Since her mother picks up her poo in a little baggie and throws it away, “getting caught” is not an issue. She doesn’t like being watched; it make her angry…I don’t know why, any more than you do. She’s a dog; she doesn’t explain herself.
Well, if it’s any comfort, there’s only one person who thinks you’re making a rational argument here. I guess you think that makes YOU right.
If you didn’t spend so much time putting words in my mouth, I could spend a lot less time spitting them out.
-VM
One physically exists, one is a mental construct. The latter can’t exist without the former.
These are open cases that should be closed. A subset of these people will be jeopardy. If the numbers aren’t there to prove it as they can’t be because no one has found these missing people, then I’m not sure what I’m expected to prove.
So, someone recording that activity is okay then? What activities do you think people are doing that recording it would prevent them from doing it?
I assume people are watching every time I walk out the door. This thing you speak of only exists in your head.
It has an impact on solving crimes and saving lives. I have yet to have it explained how it impacts anyone going about their daily routine. Well, unless they are a serial killer.
No, I’m the loser for arguing with someone who puts a thing like privacy over life itself.
Put whatever value you want to between the brackets below. Any of these things that make up what a human does, wants to do, or value requires one primary things before that can happen.
A Human life = [privacy] + [freedom] + [Safety] + [love] + [knowledge] + [children] + …
Humans through history have existed and thrived with various combinations of whatever makes up the right side of the equation. None of it, not one exists without what is on the left side.
I will always chose a person’s life over someone else’s privacy. Convince me that I shouldn’t do the same for 1 person’s life over a 100 people’s privacy.
All the time. That is why there is a process to improve tools and processes. A process to educate people. Stupid people can’t be expected to make good decisions. Using the tool should point out things that work and things that don’t. One of the many reasons that you live in a technologically advanced society rather than ripping your prey apart with your teeth is because we learn and improve upon things.
I have said I don’t think it is economically practical, at least at this point. It is unlikely to be technically feasible as well. So, if it was magically available right this instant, then a cop shouldn’t use it if he thought it was warranted to do so? Not only is this form of automation a potential time saver, it should help to focus the officer in where they should conduct the search. Again, it is another tool, like DNA, or finger printing, or any number of other systems and processes police use to do their jobs. If they spend their time mucking about with the new toy rather than doing something more productive, then they should be educated on when it is appropriate to use it.
How about we quantify what value they put on their life rather than either of us doing so for them? You seem keen on me not making this personal, but I’ll ask you personally then. What value is your life vs my privacy? I’ve already said a system like this is unlikely to affect me, so feel free to place little value on my side of the equation. I’ll even let you speak for anyone who thinks like me. Place whatever value you want for us and whatever value you want for yourself.
If the system can identify you, then it would know where you are at any time and would record someone looking at a grid you are in. If the system can only identify you when someone request that it does so, then when they do so it should mark what grid you are in. If it can’t identify you, then all your activity is anonymous. The only way they could infer that some dot was you was if they started at you house and followed you around. As you house is fixed in space, that grid could be recorded.
And sometimes a finish hammer would take a thousand times longer to accomplish the task than a sledgehammer.
And the affect on privacy is not nearly as big as you want to assume, as well.
Two examples at either end of a range. Hey, whatever, buddy. If it makes you happy, then I’ll drop it.
One I put a bandage on to correct.
Value of your feelings in this matter on privacy. Again, I had assumed that was what we were talking about.
Physical pain isn’t the same as ‘feelings’. I’m for assisted suicide, so if you couldn’t deal with the pain or there was no solution, then ‘Hit the button, Max’ and end it. Hell, I’d be for any person who wanted to end it for any reason to walk into the Soylent shop, identify themselves (to prevent having to use the skyeye to find them!), acknowledge they are not under duress, and step into the meat grinder if they wanted to.
I’ll take that as your funny way of saying that you can’t tell me the value of a person’s life any more than I can tell you the value of a person’s privacy.
You said that you think the subset is “very large, possibly all”. I’m not asking you to prove it; I’m asking you to provide ANY sort of evidence in support of your hypothesis. I’ve already provided evidence that, for the cases that eventually close, the vast majority were NOT being held captive. The ball is still in your court.
I’m not reposting everything I’ve said so far in the thread just because you couldn’t be bothered to read and respond to any of it the first time. You’ve ignored and misrepresented so much of what I’ve posted that your case is in need of having its life saved. If I didn’t have some perverse interest in trying to squeeze a rational debate out of you, my best move would be to just shut up: The easiest way to win a debate with you is to let you talk.
If I were the only person who believed privacy is a thing, that would be a correct statement. But I’m not, so it isn’t.
You don’t really have the authority to declare privacy an invalid construct, which is why no one really cares when you make such declarations. You’ve been offered numerous definitions and rejected them all. Either you’re being foolishly stubborn or you’re the lone sane person in a world full of crazy people. Neither situation offers much opportunity for your argumentation to serve any useful purpose.
If that’s your position, then you shouldn’t say things like “it has no impact”. You give the impression that you have a great deal of difficulty making up your mind about what your position is.
And I guess that’s you’re funny way of saying you can’t quantify your position. What is this thing that is “like privacy”?
I thought the idea was to come to some understanding of the value of human life. I don’t really see how this helps. Plus, I don’t see how you think you can “mathematically” represent human life without some consideration of time.
And most of them are dead now. Which, as you suggest, means that all of both sides of the equation are gone now. And what is the value of those lives? And what would the value of “saving” one be–since we all eventually die, anyway. I think that you really need to give some thought to what life actually is, including its limited duration, as part of your efforts to establish its “value”.
Imagining yourself a king, are you?
Let’s explore that word you used, “always”: Suppose I’m dying of pancreatic cancer; I have no family, and I’ve only got a few weeks left to live, and I’m in a great deal of pain. Some other guy is in his prime, perfectly healthy, has a great job and a happy social life. However, he’s gay, and he’s from a Southern Baptist family. If they were to find out, he would be ostracized, so he keeps his gayness a secret from them. So, which would be more tragic, me dying a week or two early, or his secret being exposed? Which is of more value, my life or his privacy?
And by the way, that 1:100 ratio you’re suggesting is WAY generous. As I recall, we were talking about some 300 million Americans being under surveillance every time they go outside vs about 2,000 unsolved Missing Persons cases per year, many of whom are probably dead or don’t want to be found. If we’re generous and say 10% are in need of rescue, that would be more like “one ‘saved life’ to 1.5 million people with less privacy.”
How do you fix them? We’ve got piles of examples of how our legal system doesn’t work, and making very little progress on fixing them. The fundamental problem isn’t that SkyEye represents a “bad system”; the problem is taking a *legal *system that doesn’t work all that great and adding to its potential destructiveness.
You’re talking about the wonders of the gun, and I’m talking about the maniac you want wielding it.
Yeah, and one of the things that we’ve learned is “the power of government must be limited” and one of the things we’ve improved upon is having legal rights like “life” and “privacy” defined in our laws.
As usual, you’re missing the point. The costs I was talking about would still exist if the system was available right now for free.
You’re teetering right on the edge of catching on to why your approach to this argument is so cockeyed…how about we quantify what value they put on their privacy rather than either of us doing so for them?
Because “making it personal” distorts the question…
…because we are NOT talking about a system that trades one person’s life for another person’s privacy. We are talking about a system that trades EVERY PERSON’s privacy for more “security”, which will result in some small percentage of those people living longer (“saved life”). Every time you talk about one person giving up some privacy to save another person’s life, you are distorting the issue to an extent that makes it impossible to make meaningful comparisons.
It’s not about you, and it’s not about me. By any meaningful measure of “value”, your life AND your privacy are of no value to me, and my life and privacy are of no value to you. However, your life and privacy are of value to you, and my life and privacy are of value to me. It may be that I’m horribly depressed and my life is of little value to me, even though my privacy still is of great value. It also may be (and seems to be) that your life is of great value to you but you don’t greatly value your privacy.
Having said all that, you would probably be offended if I said that my life is of little value to me, so yours can’t be worth anything to you. But, you don’t seem to see a problem with your saying, “My privacy is not valuable to me, so yours can’t be worth anything.” And you can’t seem to grasp why I’m defending the privacy of people in general.
Most people value their lives, for at least some of the time they are alive. Most people value their privacy, for some amount of the time they are alive. But each person values their own life and privacy more than anyone else’s. I don’t want you messing with mine, and you don’t want me messing with yours, and the only way this can really work is if we agree, in principle, that they are both equally valuable. You keep waxing poetic about saved lives, but recognizing the value of the lives of strangers–in the context of this kind of discussion–is not about empathy or altruism: It is about justice. I want my “stuff” (life, liberty, property, privacy), and the only way that can work is if everyone else’s is important, too.
If you want to talk about this on a personal level, the discussion is NOT about one person trading privacy for another person’s life. It is about one person trading privacy for his/her own life: There is a remote chance that one day you will be kidnapped and held in someone’s basement. Are you willing to give up your “outside” privacy every day, from now on–with all the risks it entails, including the possibility you might be abused by the system–in order to increase the chance that, should this day come, the police can use this system to find you. The loss of privacy is not a probability: If you turn the system on, the privacy is lost. The abuse is a probability (admittedly low, for most people); and the life saving is a probability (like really, really low, for most people, as in “vanishingly small”). As far as I’m concerned, on a personal level, the question is, “How many people would want to make this big trade of privacy for a small amount of extra security?” And if we consider the Missing Persons data, it sure looks to me like there is very little (but not zero) risk that any particular person is going to NEED to be saved by SkyEye.
You can add criminal-catching into this, but I don’t know how much it really tilts the equation. If someone kills me, I may hope (now, theoretically) that he is caught and punished, but if that happens (in reality) it won’t actually do me any good, because I’ll still be dead.
Notice that your obsession with the possibility that I might be cheating on my wife never really figures into how I think about this issue.
This is not the system we’ve been talking about. We’ve been talking about a system where a PERSON can identify you by tracking back your movements over time, not a system that automatically does it. If we were talking about a system that actually tracked every person individually (without even requiring the extra work of figuring out who’s who), well that sounds REALLY creepy to me.
Again, not what we’ve been talking about. We’ve been talking about a system where a PERSON is reviewing the footage to backtrack someone in it. The “system” does not know which pixels are being observed or what people in the footage the user identifies.
You’ve got it backwards. They could start with me on the street and backtrack to see where I came from. That’s when my anonymity goes away, and I don’t buy that the “system” will know that the user has just identified me.
Fine with me. But, for the record, one of those examples represented the position you’ve been advocating in this thread. You have also continually suggested that I personally would not trade any amount of privacy to save another person’s life. Since that’s not my position, I gave an example of a case where I would trade some amount of privacy for another person’s life. My hope was that you would drop the strawman argument (“Smartass doesn’t think a person’s life isn’t worth giving up any amount of privacy.”) In addition, I thought you might notice that the example I gave is NOTHING like what SkyEye is, and thus recognize the difference between “any amount of lost privacy” and “the amount of privacy SkyEye will take away.”
Obviously, my hopes were in vain. However, I never would have guessed that you would turn those two examples into some kind of mishmash of normal distributions and process control charts, with thresholds, outliers, and who knows what else.
So, if the cops just barge into your house, search through all your stuff, and break all your toys, as long as they don’t lay a hand on you, you haven’t been harmed. Is that really your position, or is this another case where I’m supposed to be smart enough to know what you really mean in spite of what you actually say?
That was not what I was talking about when you declared feelings irrelevant. If you would pay more attention to the thread of the conversation, there’d be no need to assume what we’re talking about–you should remember it.
Please clarify the distinction that you’re making. If you’re suggesting that physical sensations are meaningfully distinct from emotional responses, that’s going to be problematic. If I feel pain, but I don’t mind it, then why would the physical pain matter at all? It’s my emotional response that *makes *it relevant.
I don’t see how this is remotely relevant to the question of the “value” of someone’s life.
-VM
You can’t have privacy without life. I don’t know how to make it clearer than that. One is obviously a fundamental foundation of the other.
Could it be that the vast majority that are found or return voluntarily are the ones that are not tied up in someone’s basement or buried in a shallow grave? I don’t need to prove that as we know for a fact that these particular people are still missing. We can’t know the reason they are missing because we can’t ask them. Once we ask them, then we’ll know.
Gee, you got me there. I’m all for implementing tools that have no impact on the purposes they were implemented for.:rolleyes:
You wouldn’t. For the rest, it represents that without life then there is nothing that has value. You can’t value privacy if you are dead. So, a human life is of more value than privacy. And as humans don’t wander around continually worried over privacy violations, then privacy is only one component that adds to the total value of your life. So, if you value sex and your privacy, then maybe you won’t have sex outdoors because of the potential of a camera catching you do it. Yet, there are people who make a living having sex on camera.
Name me one person who after, not before, they are dead gives a shit about their privacy? Or anything else for that matter? So, your idea on what privacy means to you only applies if you are alive to contemplate it. So, the length of your life isn’t relevant.
Your life. That someone chooses to act upon their desires in secret rather than face them openly not only hurts them, but also their family and everyone else who is in a similar position and is also afraid to come out. If they think they can not be open with their family, then what kind of family relationship do they truly have that is worth keeping?
Solving murders is a worthwhile goal and one of the reasons this tool would be useful. You can’t just hand wave it away. I’ve never said it would just be used for one purpose of saving lives. That is one of the many reasons for having this tool. Because we are focused on this area at the moment, doesn’t negate the other uses.
So, while those who want to make things better by adding this tool to the investigative mix, others are free to fix what they see are shortcomings in the system.
No, I’m talking about a tool to potentially help people and solve crimes. You are the one who thinks the wielder is a maniac.
I don’t have a problem with this. Yet, many (most) around the world live happy and full lives without this concept.
And the benefits as well.
And yet every day you give money in taxes to support services like firemen, welfare, pensions, schools, and a myriad of other things that go to help the lives of other people. You trade a portion of your life (in work) for every dollar you give away. Yet, the requirement is there because you live in a society that benefits from you paying taxes.
Agreed. Other than I don’t value my privacy over your life. I don’t know you, I probably don’t care to know you, but there it is.
Couldn’t of said it better.
When I weigh the possibility that someone could potentially use this tool against me vs that it could benefit me, then of course, when do we implement? I don’t do anything that anyone could use this tool to abuse me with. If there was some activity that I was doing that I was so worried others would find out about, then it is far more likely that this sort of tool wouldn’t help the people I was hiding my secret from.
Yes, the only point of the system.
Do they have a warrant? Or are you suggesting that this tool will allow them to do that?
That and the fact that someone else is force-ably making you feel this pain and have the corresponding emotional response.
Every time I think “he can’t possibly get any more arrogant and absurd”, he does…
We are talking about this in the context of real-world history of government behavior, not some abstract realm of Platonic ideals. Given the former context, this is more or like debating whether it’s a good idea to drop a load of submachineguns into the exercise yard of the local prison.
Expecting people to take some responsibility for their lives? Expecting people to remove themselves from hateful people? If they have a choice (easy or not) and don’t do it, what sympathy is expected from anyone else and why should their ‘plight’ be a consideration in this discussion?
Must be tough living with such paranoia. Let me guess, you’re a prepper?
Steve, you should know better than to call names in Great Debates.
Warning issued. Please don’t do it again.
You’re missing the point, even though you MUST have some grasp of it, since you seem to realize that it would suck to be held hostage in someone’s basement. If that was all that remained to you in life, would you think your life had “value” to you?
“Having life” ain’t worth all that much if you live it in a dark, locked cell. So, you can say, “Without life, things like liberty and privacy are meaningless,” but I can also say, “Without privacy, my life would be worth very little.” The PURPOSE of having more than just a right to life is recognizing that having other rights to go with it, like liberty and privacy, are necessary for you to derive value from being alive.
Your arguments suggest that life is the “only” important right. After the AI singularity, it is conceivable that each of us could live alone in a padded room, with friendly robots tending to our needs and keeping us perfectly safe (and locked in, alone) so that we live 100 years or more. But would such a life have “value”?
I keep thinking that you must see that the value of life depends on more than just “being alive”, but your arguments suggest otherwise.
If you would look at the data that’s been provided so far, you could form an opinion about it for yourself. My opinion, based on what I’ve read, is that when cases that have been open for a long time are closed, it is by finding a corpse. And a lot of THOSE corpses aren’t murder victims. Most of them seem to be accident victims (or victims of heart attacks and such). So, SkyEye might help find them, but won’t likely save them.
That’s a pretty ridiculously naïve position to take. People have been going missing for years, and old cases have been being closed for years. Eventually, many ARE found. Very rarely are they found to have been held hostage for years. The fact that there are always a certain number of open cases does not support your argument.
If that’s a ridiculous position, then maybe you should be careful not to suggest that it IS your position. Your eye-rolling suggests that you think that I can tell which of the ridiculous statements you make are the ones you really mean. From my side of the table, they’re pretty indistinguishable.
You’re adopting one of the most ridiculous stances on the “value of life” that I have ever seen. If what you say is true, then no one in history’s life had value, because they no longer are alive.
And by ignoring time, you allow yourself to speak as if when someone dies, their entire life is erased. In your vernacular, if you were to murder me tomorrow, then you will have “taken my life away”, as if I never lived. In reality, you will have shortened my life–you can’t take away the decades I’ve already lived.
By the same token, if some nice police officer prevents you from murdering me, we would say, colloquially, that he “saved my life”. In truth, he has allowed me to live longer. If I were 100 years old, he may have saved some of my life, but he won’t have saved much of it.
So, if SkyEye “saves” one life (makes it longer) but abuses of the system “ruin” other lives (same length, but now miserable), then it is not the stark tradeoff you are suggesting, UNLESS there is no difference between years of life lived happily and years of life lived in misery.
Liberty and privacy do not add years of life (for many people, they subtract years of life), but we want liberty and privacy so that whatever years we have will have a better possibility of being happy years.
As long as you keep arguing about life as if all time spent alive were equal or that “saving a life” was like granting someone immortality, then the discussion will continue to just be gobbledygook.
I don’t know of many humans that “wander around”, but I know a great many who worry a great deal about privacy. If this SkyEye thing were to go online, my wife would never let me raise the blinds on a single window in our house again.
Things like liberty and privacy do not “add value” per se, and it’s a distortion to speak as if they do. They provide the potential for value. Being allowed to pursue happiness doesn’t guarantee that you will catch it. But most people want to be able to try.
Does it matter that the Founding Fathers valued life and liberty? They’re dead now, so they clearly don’t care about such things anymore.
Come to think of it, we are ALL going to die–most of us will be dead in less than a hundred years, at which time we won’t have life and we won’t care about liberty or privacy. Given that we know that outcome is basically guaranteed, why would you suppose that life OR privacy are really of any value?
One topical example: There have been people who have had their sexual orientation exposed to the public who have then committed suicide. Which means that they concluded their lives no longer had value because they had lost their privacy.
And if the length of someone’s life isn’t relevant, why do you think it is of “value” to use SkyEye to help them live longer (“save lives”)?
Since all human lives are finite, to suggest that the length isn’t relevant in determining its value–while simultaneously arguing the importance of “saving lives”–suggests that you are not giving this subject any serious thought.
I can simply stop here, if I choose to. This quote is so ridiculously judgmental and insensitive that it really makes no difference what you argue from here on out: No one who reads that paragraph will care what your opinion of SkyEye is. In fact, they will probably favor any “other side” of the debate, just to gain distance from you.
If you really think that it is okay to sit in judgment over other people’s lives in this way, I strongly suggest that you do some re-thinking of how you see the world or find a way to at least SEEM less dismissive other people’s problems and challenges.
I’m not hand-waving it away; you are. Your whole argument is built on the notion that “life” is more valuable than “privacy”, so that “saving lives” is worth any amount of reduction in the right to privacy for the population. Regardless of whether solving murders has “benefits”, you’ve presented no evidence that it will “save lives”. Generally speaking, when we catch a murderer, we don’t claim we are saving the victim’s life, we are seeking retribution on the victim’s behalf.
The part that I’ve bolded is missing something important: Your “while” has created a clause that includes a subject with no predicate. Specifically, while “those who…by… to…” do what?
That is, unless you meant “those who want to” as the subject and “make things better” as the predicate…but that can’t be right, because that would suggest SkyEye only captures footage of “those who want to” give up their privacy. Surely, you wouldn’t misrepresent SkyEye as some kind of opt-in system, would you?
Yep, and I’ve provided evidence to support my belief. You’ve provided NO evidence to support your belief that this “tool” will only be used for good. You’ve have only hypothesized ways to try to limit the ways it can be used for harm.
I’d be interested to see your evidence for this belief.
I am seriously starting to be concerned that you may have some form of dementia or a memory problem that prevents you from keeping track of the discussion. If that is the case, please advise me how I can help accommodate you so you won’t keep jumping back to the beginning as if the conversation just started.
If this is not the case, please stop derailing the debate by just randomly restating one of your premises. In this case, I did not make the claim that there were no benefits, so simply saying “benefits would exist” is just a non sequitur. What I argued was that the benefits of SkyEye wrt Missing Persons cases would be very small, but the cost of using it would be exorbitantly high–even if the system itself were free. Please address that argument, as opposed to just implying that I have said that there would be no benefits.
Please pay attention: I do not give money in taxes. Taxes are not optional. More importantly, I do NOT pay for these services solely for the benefit of other people. We ALL pay for these services FOR OURSELVES. It is NOT the case that I pay for firemen to put out fires at every house but mine. I pay my portion toward firemen IN CASE there is a fire at my house. I don’t pay for schools to educate everyone’s children but mine. I pay my portion for them and I expect them to teach MY kids.
This speak as if I were not part of society–as if I exist outside of it. The IDEA is that I am one of the MEMBERS of society who benefits. The FURTHER IDEA is that I have a say in what “benefits to society” are funded by society, which I express by voting. What exactly in the hell do you think political debates are actually about?
Well, if we have a debate about some sort of device that allows one person to trade their privacy in order to save one other person’s life, we’ll all know where you stand in advance. However, this can only be relevant to a ridiculous distortion of the topic we’re discussing here.
When the tool exists and either a) a majority of other people agree with you, or b) you become the dictator that you seem to want so badly to be.
Yes. I understand your position on your individual, personal privacy. I’ve understood it for pages and pages now. We’re not talking about you. We’re not talking about me. SkyEye is not a system that individual people can opt in or out of. There is no option where just Uzi gives up privacy; there is only the option where we ALL do.
As before, I don’t really understand sentences that only have a subject, with no predicate.
Since you have said that you’re only “harmed” if you require a bandage, then it seems to me that the presence or absence of a warrant is irrelevant. Unless we’re talking about paper-cuts, or something.
What the hell does that have to do with the distinction you were making between “physical pain” and “feelings”?
-VM
While I appreciate where you’re coming from, and I really want to acknowledge you for staying with me in this bit of windmill-tilting, I can’t think of a single relevant response that won’t just land me in detention hall with you.
That is, if I haven’t inadvertently signed myself up already…
-VM
Since he was talking about actual history, I’m not sure how paranoia is relevant. If we were talking about things the government has NOT done in the past but MIGHT do tomorrow, well we could be engaging in paranoia. However, if we’re talking about things government has actually done, then we’re just studying history. If we’re predicting that the government will continue to do things it has already done in the past, we may be cynical, but that hardly qualifies as paranoid.
For example, if I predict that you’re going respond to my last post by misrepresenting my arguments and randomly changing the subject, then I’m not being paranoid: I’m simply predicting that you will to stick to your established pattern.
I have to ask: What’s a “prepper”? Are they notoriously paranoid? When I was in high school, there were people we called “preppies”; however, they were not paranoid, just difficult to tell apart from a distance.
btw, you should consider yourself fortunate if you get away with just calling another poster paranoid, even if you phrase it as “living with paranoia”.
-VM
You can’t have one without the other.
You can’t have one without the other.
So, it finds their dead body. A tool can have many uses. You’ve latched onto only one of them as if it is the only one.
Agreed. Didn’t know it until they were ‘found’ now did we?
No point in pursuing this much further. But one last kick at the cat. A person only values their privacy when they are alive to do so. Once they are dead they don’t care about privacy, or anything else for that matter.
So, you are dressed up as a furry frolicking through the woods and a bear attacks you. For some reason the cop knows you don’t want this public (apparently your church group frowns on this sort of activity, but you love them despite their anti-furry bigotry), so he has a choice to make on shooting the bear. Do you choose your privacy or your life?
Game set match. No one can pursue anything if they are dead.
I’m not judging them. Their friends and families that they love so much are which is why they are hiding what they do. I DON’T CARE THAT SOMEONE IS GAY OR THAT THEY ARE CHEATING ON THEIR SPOUSE. I’m just not giving their concerns any weight in my decision making.
Never said that (or at least I don’t think so given the length of this thread). Essentially, I’ve said my privacy is less valuable than your life. I think I have mentioned cost vs benefit a few times. I just disagree with the value you are placing on the concept of privacy.
I’ve presented more ‘evidence’ that this tool could save lives than you have that it will affect people negatively. Nor has that been my sole focus in this discussion. It has only been given such focus in my discussion with you. We can talk about the potential benefit to society in catching serious law-breakers, if you want.
I don’t implement controls on systems unless there is a reason to do so. Proof enough right there that someone could use this system for nefarious purposes.
Almost any hunter gatherer culture, I imagine.
Right. After you quantify what the cost will be. You have said many things, but haven’t put any numbers to anything other than to say everyone will be affected by loss of privacy. Yet, I’ve said, it won’t have any effect on me. I’ll just ignore it. I suspect most people will.
Please pay attention: I do not give money in taxes. Taxes are not optional.
[/QUOTE]
How many angels dance on this pin?
I pay taxes so that everyone can benefit, and yes, that benefits me. I may not ever use many of the services that government provides.
Yes, lets talk about the group of people that don’t include me or you, but that we should give weight to in our discussion.
You keep ascribing things to me that I’ve never said. So, here goes. Yes, if you made me supreme dictator, your life will have a little less privacy, but you will be far more secure. There will be no death penalty other than for government officials who abuse the trust of the people and their positions (eg. the guy who uses this tool to stalk his ex-girlfriend). They will be publicly drawn and quartered.
Now, given that this system would be implemented by a democratic government, then I expect that people will present their opinions for and against such a system. I’m presenting my argument for this tool, not the position of supreme dictator.
You keep saying ‘me’ as if I’m not one of ‘all’ (assume for the moment that I live in the US). It is quite obvious that not everyone is giving up their anymore of their privacy even though you keep saying they do. Someone could potentially be watching every time I walk out the door now. The only change to this supposition is it’s confirmation.
The same government that builds roads, provides health care (oops, sorry, I was thinking almost everywhere else in the world, not the US!), educates children, provides support of the aged and those in need, etc. That government. And sometimes they do bad things as well.
Prepper. I’m referring to the more anti-government portion of same. Maybe not the best example, but it just came to mind as I’d just been watching a youtube on some guy testing the capability of plate steel to stop bullets during the apocalypse (or whatever social disorder required him to wear body armor). Called himself a prepper.
Vs being said to have dementia, or wanting to be dictator? Heh.
I find the lack of trust in your government truly disheartening. And I say this as a person whose personality has difficulty with people in power, so it wouldn’t be hard for me to argue your side of this argument. My belief is that the value outweighs the costs. And I presume it will be inevitable as technology advances.
Depends on which is “one” and which is “the other”. However, since we were talking the “value” of life and not the presence of it, the point is that you can have a miserable life that is of no value. It would be nice if you would acknowledge that and stop parroting that “dead people have no privacy”. If you think that statement is meaningful, then it suggests that dead people’s lives had no value or that the value of a life (and whatever privacy it included) ceases to exist at death, which makes ANY discussion of the value of life or privacy absurd, because everyone dies. If that’s not what you are suggesting, please clarify what you ARE suggesting.
And these particular uses do NOT save any lives.
These posts will become much more manageable if you will confine your responses to the topic under discussion. In this case, we were NOT discussing whether tools have multiple uses. We were talking about how many lives this tool will save, to compare against the amount of privacy lost.
I don’t understand why you seem to find it impossible to stay on topic.
If you’re trying to make a point here, I have no idea what it might be. If I throw a rock off a cliff and count the seconds until it hits the ground, I now know how long it took. If I do it several hundred thousand times, and count the seconds every time, I’ll have some data for making predictions. If I prepare to throw another rock, I’ll feel pretty comfortable predicting how long it will take to hit the ground. But, of course, I won’t know how long that particular rock takes until it hits.
If I look at all the Missing Persons cases that have, eventually, been resolved for, say, the last 40 years and then use them to predict that most of the currently unsolved cases are dead (and NOT tied up in someone’s basement), the prediction is likely a pretty good one. Your observation that “we won’t know until they are found” does not in any way invalidate my prediction. And it’s pretty lame to just throw that out there as if it does.
So what does this have to do with anything? Are you suggesting that it would be okay to parade naked dead people around, since they no longer value their privacy? If a young actress dies, should it be okay to publish naked pictures of her that she would NOT have wanted published when she was alive?
How the hell should I know? I am not a Furry OR religious. However, it is conceivable to me that there might be such a person who would rather be dead than have their fetish exposed…
That said, I can’t believe you really think this is in ANY way analogous to SkyEye. Let me ask you, do you perceive any difference between these two situations:
- There is a bear chasing me and it wants to kill me.
- There is a 1:1,000,000 chance that someday someone will abduct me and hold me hostage.
There are probably a lot of people who would give up a significant amount of privacy (at least temporarily) to be saved from a bear. I am not at all convinced that there are a lot of people who would give up a big chunk of privacy in perpetuity because of threat #2.
Surely, you can see the difference. And surely you can see–since I’ve said it OVER and OVER, that it is NOT my position that no amount of “life-saving” is worth giving up any amount of privacy. Your analogy suggests that you are STILL debating a ridiculous strawman version of my position.
So, I guess your position is that no one should have any privacy at any time if there’s a chance that all of us giving up all of our privacy might save a person’s life, right? You’d be in favor of having SkyEye extending to filming the insides of our homes, too? Because dead people don’t care about privacy.
Of course not. All you said was, “If they think they can not be open with their family, then what kind of family relationship do they truly have that is worth keeping?”
That doesn’t sound judgmental at all.
This issue is not whether YOU care about someone else’s business. The issue is whether they are entitled to keep it private. Again, this is not about you. And I have no idea what “decision making” you are talking about. We’re not talking about your personal decision to opt in for Sky Eye, because it’s not an opt-in kind of tool. We’re talking about whether it makes sense to opt EVERYONE in–including people who value they’re privacy more than you do.
Yes, you keep saying that, and you keep failing to understand that it is irrelevant. SkyEye is not some kind of flea market where Uzi can go purchase Smartass’ life by giving up his privacy. This is not a tool that saves one life for every person whose privacy is violated. It MAY save a few hundreds–or a few thousand?–lives by violating the privacy of 300 million people. There IS NO ONE-TO-ONE trade here, regardless of how many times you try to pretend that there is. It makes no difference whether you would trade your individual privacy for my individual life, because that sort of trade is NOT on the table here.
You’ve mentioned it, but you refuse to admit that the “benefit” in saved lives is a small number while the cost in privacy is a very big one. For instance, if we decided that one person’s life is worth, say, 50,000 people’s privacy (and, to be clear, we haven’t decided any such thing), then it looks to me like the SkyEye benefits in “lives saved” would still NOT outweigh the cost in privacy lost. And that’s not even considering the dollar cost of the damn thing.
Your talk of trading one person’s privacy for one person’s life is a monumental misrepresentation of the numbers in play here.
Exactly how low are you willing to go in your willingness to make specious arguments? I can make the same one:
I have presented more “evidence” that this tool could affect people negatively than you have that it will save lives.
An honest debater holds his side to the same standard as the other guy.
Waste of time. As far as I’m concerned, this kind of privacy invasion can only be justified by a bunch of saved lives–it’s the only part of your argument that has ANY chance of being compelling to me. You might find someone else who’s willing to take that up with you, but I think you may have run off all potential takers with your “I don’t listen but only say the same things over and over again” debating style.
I don’t see how your claim that you do or don’t do something represents proof of anything, except that you’re still talking.
So, to be clear, you think that the above statement qualifies as evidence in support of your claim that “many (most) around the world live happy and full lives without this concept [limited government and protection of human rights].”
Thanks. That is some impressive evidence. Can’t imagine why anyone would ever doubt you.
Please try to follow along. The quote you’re referring to was not about the cost of privacy. It was about the cost of using SkyEye to track down every missing person case. And I did provide numbers; I just assumed you could do the math…but I’ll help you out:
Just considering the police officer’s time, there’s the time to do paperwork and get a warrant issued to review the footage. Let’s say 2 hours. There’ll be time to go through security protocols, access the system locate the person and review footage, backtrack, etc. Let’s say 4 hrs.
661,000 Missing Persons cases per year
x 6 hrs
= 3,966,000 police man-hours per year (a little under 16,000 additional officers).
I have no idea what such an investigator would make…let’s say $25/hr. So, the cost, just in police man-hours, to use SkyEye for all these cases would be $99,150,000, even though 559,000 of those cases would have been closed in a matter of days WITHOUT SkyEye.
And that’s just the cost in police hours, not counting lawyers, judges, or the cost of the system itself and the people who run it.
Yes. Let’s.
You have presented your opinion. However, presenting an argument means more than just saying the same thing over and over again. It also usually entails paying some attention to the argument the other side is making.
You might be dying of cancer right now. If your doctor finds a brain tumor, the only change to this supposition will be its confirmation.
-VM