Aceticon

The mouse driver is already part of the OS in Window and Linux.

That shit you complain about is the Adverts Delivery & Private Data Capture application.

Yeah, those are a massive, MASSIVE concern when it comes to pervasive surveillance.

When I lived in the UK it already had a similar thing in the form of license-plate-reading cameras all over the place (the UK is even a biggest civil society surveillance dystopia than the US, or at least it used to be but maybe the US has caught up with it).

When driving in anywhere but dirt roads in such a country you absolutelly are almost constantly under surveillance and that shit is going into a database were it will stay forever and ever.

Redlight cameras, however, need not include "always on" or even "license plate reading" features.

Fucking Fascist!

You clearly don't live in and never been to my country (Portugal, which in my personal experience of driving all over Europe has some of the worst driving in the continent) if you think running red-lights is a rare behavior.

Around here, were there are no zero red-light cameras that I know of (unlike other countries in Europe I lived in), it's literally the norm for people to run the red-light for about 30 seconds after it has switched over from yellow. There's even a joke around here that "Green means Go, Red means Stop and Yellow means Accelerate". You will literally get honked at by the person behind you if when you see the yellow light you slow down so as not to run a red-light.

Curiously, in the other countries in Europe I lived in which did have red-light cameras, such behavior was incredibly rare.

Even more entertaining, when I first moved out of Portugal as a young adult I went with that very same behavior trained and not soon after I started driving in my new country of residence (which was The Netherlands) I almost immediately got a €50 fine for running a red light in that way and getting caught by a camera, tried to dispute it, got told "Red is red, it doesn't mater if it has been red for 1 second or 1 minute", paid the fine, learned my lesson and never did it again. Whilst anecdotal, it's none the less one data point of red-light cameras working at making people change their habits.

In The Netherlands they weren't shorting the yellow light times, but that's because unlike in the US were the Law and Politics are a total shit-show, the Dutch actually have specified in the law the minimum time period for the yellow light (you know, because they have politicians which are at least somewhat competent and not on the take) and if city halls had it lower than that all of their red-light fines would end up thrown out in court if it was ever found out (and taking them to court over there is also way cheaper than in the US) same as parking fines get thrown out if the "no-parking" sign isn't properly visible.

You see, the problem you have pointed out is not a problem with red-light cameras, it's a problem with the Law over there, so it's the Law that needs fixing not the red-light cameras.

Cameras specifically to catch people running red-lights will only take a photo when a car crosses a red light rather than run continuously.

They'll only have you "under surveillance" if and when you're breaking the law by running a red light.

So if you're so worried about "surveillance" from those cameras, don't run red-lights.

Hablamos en Español si lo prefieres, campeón. De verdad que es la actitud más imbécil posible asumir que cualquiera que te contradice es un astroturfer

Vindo de alguem que acusa aqueles que duvidam de inquéritos que mostram 90%+ de taxa de aprovação do governo num país de "Partido único" de serem "ocidentais com o cérebro lavado pela propaganda ocidental" é uma ironia de ir para o Livro de Recordes do Guiness.

Se fores mesmo Espanhol, sugiro que fales com pessoas que viveram no tempo do Franco para veres como as coisas funcionam em sistemas onde o Estado controla a informação e tem poder arbitrário.

Alternativamente, vai trabalhar para grandes empresas durante uma décade ou duas e aprende como é que os jogos de poder e a pressão funcionam até mesmo em ambientes muito mais pequenos que um país: as pessoas quando já são crescidinhos e têm de se preocupar com por comida na boca dos filhos absolutamente não dizem certas coisas abertamente se pensam que estão a ser vigiadas e podem sofrer consequencias por isso.

Não leves a mal mas tu soas como alguns dos jovens no pequeno partido de Esquerda de que sou membro no meu país - ignorante e com uma visão simplística do mundo e da política.

I very much doubt it's an authoritarian nightmare (that would be North Korea or China back in the days of Mao).

China does however have a system of "social points", so people are well aware that if they don't do and say the right things, it might negativelly impact their lives (you don't set up such a system for anything other than push people to behave in certain ways).

Further, only an idiot would deny that during about 3 decades (though that was mainly over about a decade ago) China has pulled up from poverty more people than the rest of the World combined, by a huge margin, even while in the West social mobility went into reverse and inequality started growing (especially after 2008).

Equally only an idiot would deny that in a single party system being openly critical of the Party is likely to have negatives consequences for that person and even the mere concern that it might happen will make people just say nothing, just in case. (I mean, shit, people will naturally just do this at work in supposedly free countries with work-at-will legislation were they can just be fired for no reason, so it takes quite a lot of naivety to think people will not "keep their mouths shut, just in case" when it's actual authorities with no independent oversight over them keeping a keen eye on a persons sayings and doings, as they have the power to fuck your life up far more than merelly firing you).

Finally, it takes are a very (very, VERY) special kind of idiot to think that there are only two ways to govern a country and if you're critical of one of them, then you must be a brainwashed tribalist supporting the "other" one. There is no bigger kind of political moron because the very mental architecture the use to judge things hyper-simplistic and ultra reductive.

If people's life was amazing, the authorities there wouldn't need a Great Firewal of China, a social points system or a giant civil society surveillance system, just like in the supposedly free West you see the increase in civil society surveillance and the Propaganda machine (around here using immigrants and even people with non-normative sexuality as scapegoats) going into overdrive, all coinciding (by "an amazing coincidence") with the time when quality of life stopped improving and started going down and the first generation in a century who is expected the have a worse life than their parents started coming of age.

(Against, this kind of shit should be familiar to Spaniards, at least those who were adults during the days of Franco, because very similar tools were used).

Those kind of mechanisms aren't deployed against a people which supports by 90%+ the current government, and they're generic rather than a China-only thing and some are just as much used in supposed Democracies as in Autocracies - similar techniques, just with different excuses justifying their use.

Whilst the country is not an absolute dictatorship, Chinese "we love the Party" data is highly poluted by a "it's best not to say certain things, just in case" concern, information control and internal Propaganda in a similar way to, say, the public opinion in Hungary is shaped by that regime's control of the Press and a certain insecurity so if you work for the State over there you won't be critical of Orban and his party because that's just not good for your career (and a similar thing happens in, for example, Turkey) so their data on it is going to be highly poluted (unsurprisingly, if you personally know people form those countries, its the more well informed people who think worse of the government, hence typically even with all the information control and even iron first, they have worst polling in the larger cities)

What shocks me is that somebody supposedly from a country which had a dictatorship until 75 can't recognize certain kinds of mechanisms which I'm pretty sure their parents or grandparents are familiar with and their impact.

That doesn't mean that most people in China aren't content, what it does mean is that poll data showing a 90%+ stated approval of the government must be taken with a large pinch of salt.

I happen to live next door to Spain, in Portugal, and I did ask my parents and older friends (some of which who are very leftwing and were Communists back in the days of the Revolution) and back then in our own Fascism (which ran parallel to Spain's) nobody would tell their true opinion about the government to a stranger, much less a stranger claiming to be doing a poll for some university in a country which is viewed and views itself as an adversary of your own country.

Hell, in such a setup people would loudly tell the foreigner (or local working for those foreigners) just how great their government was just in case that was some kind of sting operation by the secret police or what you said leaked out: back when even your neighbours could rat you out to the secret police for saying something critical of the regime, criticizing the regime to somebody claiming to be doing a "poll" like this was a good way to end up a political prisioner (and, unlike those hailing from the middle class, politicial prisioners from poorer families didn't get the velvet glove treatment, and most people were poor and working class).

So, it's strange you didn't ask such things from older people in the country you claim to hail from...

That and given how you phrased...

You, as a westerner, believe your western propaganda that China is an antidemocratic autocracy where people can’t give their political opinions freely. Chinese people simply don’t feel that way as per any serious study, and your opinion can be safely ignored because it’s based on your misunderstandings as a misled westerner.

all sounds a lot like you're not a Spaniard. Which would make your earlier statement:

As a Spaniard, it’s hard to conceive 90+% of the population being satisfied with the central government

a lie.

Guess who would try and pass themselves as a "westerner" to seem more trustworthy in a forum mostly frequented by "westerners" when defending China?

A propaganda astroturfer.

(Funilly enough, there's a ton of anti-China propaganda in the West, especially in the US, it's just that this time you seriously overplayed that as a card when you tried to whitewash your own propaganda with it)

PS: Oh and just to point out how much that "westerner bias" bollocks applies to me, just after I made that previous comment on your bullshit, I made an equally critical comment on some other muppet from the "other" side talking about "China's attrocities", and that comment of mine definitelly sounds like pro-China to any simpleton tribalist moron or propaganda sockpuppet.

My biggest "bias" in this is against Hipocrisy and Propaganda.

In a field of shit, pointing at a specific turd and shouting "Look at that shit" is at best redundant, at worst sleazy propagandistic and hipocrite bollocks.

China's present day level of support for atrocity is nothing compared with most of the West's active support (diplomatic, economic and even with weapons) for the the present day equivalent of the Nazis committing a Genocide in Gaza.

Even what Russia is doing in Ukraine (with the support of China) is nowhere close to that shit if measured in terms of civilian casualties as a percentage of the population (even if including military casualties, it's still well below the levels of bloodshed in Gaza).

We would need to go back to the time of Mao to find China supporting atrocities at such a level.

That "atrocities" flag is best waved from the top of the moral high ground, not from the top of a pile of Palestinian children's bones.

Yeah, oil used to be the cheapest energy source for most situations (with the notable exception of mass power generation, were coal - an environmental even worse fossil fuel - was cheaper), but over the last couple of decades due to pressure on both the supply side (the easilly and cheaply extractable stuff gone) and from competing energy sources (like solar and wind-generation) oil stopped being one of the cheapest energy sources and it was pushed into just those uses were its high energy density gave it an advantage (i.e. transportation).

With better battery technology even that advantage is being lost (so electric cars are becoming the standard), which leaves only some chemical synthesis processes as places were oil is the best option.

Coal was kind pushed out of most of its markets long ago (hence you don't see that many steam trains around) so it is mainly used in power generation, and the falling cost of solar is making coal uncompetitive in it.

Gas is a little behind oil, with its main uses being domestic heating and cooking - now transiting to electric - and power generation - where renewables are now cheaper.

The trend for fossil fuels has been obvious for decades but there is naturally a TON of inertia in the pricing changes actually resulting in the needed infrastructure changes to transition away from them plus the Economic interests which extract rents in those areas are very literally paying politicians to delay this change as much as possible hence phenomenons like many more rightwing political parties pushing anti-renewables policies.

How about this: "a functioning market economy" is only possibly with strong overshight of a greater authority than "the Market", which puts the interests of citizens above the interests of businesses.

If left to their own devices the Free Market only ever exists in low barriers to entry and low economies of scale markets, like teddy bears or soap, not in markets were it's much harder for new entrants and being bigger is always better - and energy generation until recently was very capital intensive and required big power plants or dams located in very specific places so was not a flat-playing-field size-agnostic market and tended towards monopolies and cartels.

Even nowadays with solar, even in those countries were personal generation is viable unless governments have intervened and force it to be otherwise there are barriers for individuals and small companies to sell their self-generated power (for example were I live they get 1/4 of the price selling than they do buying), which are a mix of cost barriers to entry (the cost of a proper converter on top of the cost of the additional panels if you want to go beyond self-consumption), financial structures dominated by and best suited for large companies (mainly the wholesale and consumer markets being separate, with the large companies sitting in the middle and extracting rents from being an intermediary) and even regulatory barriers to entry (the product of governments activelly legislating and regulating to benefit the large energy companies).

Also to add to what you wrote, another reason is that their North Sea oil reserves became pretty much depleted in the last decade or two with gas following it, which has pushed gas prices higher and hence pushed people to user more electricity (gas prices in Britain were famously low) and along with exporting all industry to places like China and Bangladesh that has naturally brought down Britain's direct CO2 emissions.

Yet another reason is that the Crown makes money from licensing space for offshore wind farms since they're the ones who officially own the seabed around Britain.

I used to live as an immigrant in Britain and, still today, it still never ceases to amaze me how so many of them keep falling for the "Britain is leading..." bullshit they're constantly fed by the media and politicians over there, not just in this but in pretty much everything (Brexit didn't happen in a vacuum).

Even my shitty shit country - Portugal - has long been beating Britain in this (as it's a much poorer country, badly managed and with lots of problems) purelly because even in the time of Salazar (the Fascist dictator) there was a lot of investment in Hydro-generation, which continued after the Revolution in 74 and expanded into Wind-generation (actual in-shore wind, because unlike in Britain the NIMBYs don't have the power to just push it to be the much more expensive offshore kind) and later Solar, so whilst Britain was mismanaging their North Sea reserves and burning oil and gas like there's no tomorrow (part of the reason why Norway has a massive sovereign fund and the UK does not - the Norwegians didn't just burn it like crazy and wasted the money of whatever was sold) my country was already generating a lot of its power from hydro and it just became more so since.

Shitty shit Portugal is now in the 75%+ bracket on renewables.

The idea that Britain is leading anybody in renewables adoption is hilariously wrong.