This statement is exactly the bollocks that got us here. Just because you have a social media account, or fucking "likes", does not qualify you to speak about pandemics, or vaccinations, or gravity, etc.
Yeah but not all " independent creators covering a variety of topics " are that experienced, and certainly not all the retards in the Covid facebook groups giving their opinion.
I'm not sure the point you wanted to make on the first place but you seemed to oppose the fact that some people should stfu a little on the internet because they know nothing.
History demonstrates the problem that governments can not be trusted to protect private data once they collect it and they can not be trusted to relinquish any power to monitor citizens once they have it.
>In the case of a pandemic, any entity collecting private user tracking data, even if they distribute that data anonymously to alert a user that they have been in close contact with an infected person, can de-anonymise that data.
>I do notice other countries who are a week or two ahead of us
It is being reported that South Korea is testing 10k per day. The USA is still having an issue in even delivering test kits where required. That's months ahead, not weeks.
Why is it that almost every company that provides a service with the potential to be in perpetuity, like insurance, always fee creep their customers to the point that you switch because you know you're being fucked compared to what the market "intro rate" for new customers is? You switch only to be back what you were paying before the switch after three months or another time lapse.
When there are few providers in any market, they are colluding to fuck consumers, that are forced into a musical chairs game for little savings.
Bank fees are a good example. To you and I, an extra $3 bank fee is annoying but not worth allocating enough of our attention to avoid it. We aren't in the business of spending our whole damn day minimizing random bank fees.
But bank administrators are in that business. They spend their whole day trying to figure out how to maximize thieir profit and when they roll out a fee they can apply to millions of customers. There are enough customers hit by this they could summon enough total attention to push back, but the attention is divided among all those people and easily conquered. Meanwhile, the bank's effort to apply that fee is concentrated among a small number of people whose very job it is to do stuff like this.
So banks and other businesses discover cases like this where the quantity of attention they are willing to devote to something is larger than what any individual customer is, and that's where they squeeze.
Because someone ran an analysis that says you can make $X more by doing one thing that doesn't cost you anything. Many companies just look at the numbers and say "sounds good."
It helps that since they are insurers, they know how make this analysis with a large degree of confidence.
I imagine it's because these are almost always public companies that need to show earnings growth. They are always trying to improve margins and their stock price. That's much easier than actually figuring out a great marketing plan to acquire new customers. And also far cheaper, too.
Engaging in such a strategy used to be illegal, and was known as predatory pricing.
The Sherman Act and the Clayton Act are no longer enforced in the post Citizens United world, i.e. legal US corruption: kochtopus, dark money, super-pac, 501-c-3 foundations and institutes, etc.
