I think they are always negative. Including on bank notes.

I wonder if we could have a real, open and direct democracy. All the models we have right now work via indirect clowns. Then again, looking at how some people vote, perhaps direct democracy can only work if people are clever.

The problem with direct democracy is not that people are dumb, it is that they are incompetent.

To do politics right take skills, and I don't expect the average mechanic to be better at it than the average politician is at fixing cars. How should I know if we should subsidize organic farming, ban alcohol sale after 8PM, or increase the defense budget? At least in theory, politicians are professionals who deal with these kinds of questions, they are supposed to know the technical and social implications, or find experts to help them if they don't. Some people think they know, and judging by how stupid most of their ideas are, they don't. I don't blame them, it is just not their field, and my ideas are probably just as stupid anyways.

> To do politics right take skills, and I don't expect the average mechanic to be better at it than the average politician is at fixing cars

I would. Politicians are pre-selected for people who want to lead and that's the last kind person that should be allowed to.

If checking for counterfeit bills becomes harder, trust in the currency is degraded. Once that happens, vendors will either incentive digital payments (which are definitionally tracked), switch to a tracked currency, or barter more. Trust in bills is super easy to take for granted.

Your use case asks for a visible watermark, not an invisible one.

Eh bank notes have watermarks just to make them harder to forge. They also have serial numbers, but as almost no businesses pay attention to them they aren't really used to track transactions. The provenance of a particular bank note isn't that interesting beyond knowing whether it's a forgery.

The problem with these spymarks is that they can be used to include data that's completely invisible to users - even potentially to sophisticated users and the programs that consume the marked files. So while I can make an informed decision whether to share a picture, I may not be informed about any spymarks. Vs a normal watermark that aren't designed to be invisible.

> A watermark is a visible mark embedded in a physical or digital medium to verify authenticity or assert ownership.

We also recently had this with LG spy-TVs. Cars here in the EU also spy on people, allegedly to show how alert they are. Perhaps they sneakily upload that information somewhere ... Facebook also has the spy-glasses now. People getting angry about Flock-spy-cameras.

It seems we are now in the age of spying of everyone at all times. Future spying will be done via even smaller devices.

People are most afraid of cameras, somehow.

The concern is valid, but microphones are far worse. They're simpler, smaller, extremely sensitive to sound and an order of magnitude cheaper, both the mic itself as well as any spying with it.

It is possible to record voice using few bytes, to send later. It's further possible to transcribe cheaply into text, and analyze said text.

And mics are already everywhere, including in devices that do not need them, as well as speakers that can be rewired by software to act as microphones.

That's propaganda.

Chinese speak English. I mean, you only need to watch youtube videos here.

Trump and his cronies will do a lot more damage. It is in my opinion de-facto a dictatorship here at work. Recent polls have a support base of ~33% only. That's not sustainable in a democracy. Why can he still cling to power?

The House and Senate GOP are afraid of his voter base and act accordingly in lock step and 33 percent of all voters still gives him greater than 60 percent likely GOP voter approval. So this boils down to House should have expanded from 435 and Senate was a mistake unless one thinks land area of happenstance state lines is good proxy for decision making power (since competent and determined minority in senate can just stop things from happening also as opposed to number of votes of entire nation for presidential election)

I liked Sun Microsystems. And they were not that wrong because in 2009, Oracle acquire Sun for 7.4 billion$. Granted, Sun was perhaps more worth at that time; and most definitely before that but it is also not a total disaster either. Except, of course, that Sun died. And I do not like Oracle at all. It is a very different company. Like a slow behemoth - it keeps on bulldozering over but nobody is excited about it while it does so.

I think the big US mega-mega-corporations, while powerful and dominating, also became super-boring. Nobody mentions how epic Google allegedly should be, or is; in 2012 that was much more common. People fatigued from corporate propaganda. And now the AI slop propaganda - that one accelerates disinterest and decay.

I think Sun should probably have pushed more on its key technologies. Simplify java, simplify Solaris while pushing on it hard - who knows what could have happened. It is idle to want to talk about it now though.

> An EU law that puts large fines on social media companies for doing entirely unrelated things, like, let's say, personalized advertising?

But this is not about fines on companies. It is to force age sniffing onto people.

The state sniffs for ID here. That's the new part.

> care for humanity, choose to ban (or, better, algorithmically deboost) certain individuals

I think in France there is the three-strikes crap law. After that people are forbidden to access the www.

This is terrorism by a state. And censorship. Typical for a dictatorship. The label democracy is just equally as fake here as Putin's Duma "elections" auto-awarding the genocidal dictator with "now I can mass-mobilize people and kill many thousand people more".

> requiring age verification on social media for everyone :(

This is not the end goal though.

The end goal is forcing this onto everyone. Show ID, show what you visit, otherwise you will not be able to access the internet. That is the real agenda. They just use salami steps, by trying to convince people that this is about the kids. It was never about the kids and never will be - kids are just the excuse, similar to other laws claiming protection against terrorisms. These are all lies.

Dictatorship.

It's quite interesting to see how all these fake-democracies resort to willy-nilly censosrhip. Usually USA under Trump is the biggest hypocrite, but it is amazing how many EU countries are not that much better really. We need a global colour-map based on objective factors with regards to censorship. And then we need to replace the lobbyists that act as decoy politicians establishing censorship such as the one shown here. That's clearly a corrupt clique working.

That's sad. I do not want my money to go into ads anywhere. I decided that for my own life, I can do well without propaganda, aka ads. I can not kill ads in reallife, e. g. if a poster shows this on some house, but I can most definitely get rid of it on the www, which I do. Ublock origin is the bare minimum (I can also use it via thorium actually, so via the adChrome code base, but I'd love to be able to de-google myself as well - the sooner the better. Sadly I still depend on Google too much, which does not make me happy. Now that Google ruined its search engine, though, I am looking for viable alternatives. The other search engines are really bad though, although I have increasingly noticed that I get different search results, e. g. qwant shows other things than Google, and in some cases better results using the same search query, which was interesting. Sooner or later I can completely abandon the crap that is modern google search).

The Spy Glasses need to be abolished everywhere.

I was, however had, quite surprised when I saw them used by "auditors" (here, I refer to e. g. "auditors" on youtube specifically). Now this brought a problem for me, because auditors on the one hand, bring interesting encounters, even if they (or some of them) meta-jabait and provoke (again, only some of them at best, in many cases they don't really). But when they use spy glasses to serve greedy mega-corporations, this totally shifts the whole "audit" instantly, because then they also support evil Facebook, Google or what not. And that kind of runs counter to the whole audit-idea. So far I only saw one use the facebook spy glasses, but I wonder whether he even gave any thought to this. I understand why he uses spy glasses, but I don't understand why he does it to benefit Facebook. That IMO puts the whole idea behind audits instantly in a wrong angle. I haven't seen others use it, so perhaps it just was one or few, but they don't seem to really think anymore. Some audit channels were also censored by Google in the last weeks, others were not, but this just amplifies the whole problem here. Imagine if the spy glasses were made by Google. And the auditors depend on Google money. It's really strange. The whole setup does not work well. I understand that they want to make money, but why would I want to support facebook-agents using spy glasses at all? That makes no sense, so I decided when an audit-channel uses facebook spy glasses or anyone else's corporations spy-glasses, I won't watch anything from there. Same with AI content - anyone using AI content I instantly add to a perma-ban list. I recently saw more and more people use AI slop images and AI filters. This is soooooo horrible. These people don't seem to understand that AI slop kills interest. Yet some swear by it - it is fascinating. Those who use AI slop, can not be convinced that using AI slop is detrimental. They have been converted into AI skynet servants.