...It's like they have no idea what "Evidence" actually means, or frankly what the hell Snowden actually did; it wasn't selling hacking tools on the black market!
Nothing about the impending IoT seems planned, standardized, and remotely designed with the consumer's best interest in mind. That being said, consumers for their part seem almost eager to throw their money away for truly dubious improvements. What isn't a bad idea from the get go is often a good idea ruined with careless implementation.
Apart from the fridge that, once upon a time could show you your Google calendar[0], I have yet to see any IoT device that actually requires a cloud service for its functionality.
Why can't things be built to just use local TCP/IP connections? Those work just fine on my local network, and they work just fine if I flip my VPN on when I'm not on my local network. Anything that actually needs some kind of server piece should have a server that can run locally.
> Why can't things be built to just use local TCP/IP connections? Those work just fine on my local network...
Simplicity, possibly. Vendor lock-in, probably.
I'm in the same boat. I wanted a weather station that didn't cost several hundred units of currency but also let me query it directly instead of having to hit Weather Underground or (FSM help us) a vendor's web site with no API. Only a handful of them do this so I wound up rigging up what I wanted using a Raspberry Pi, a USB-connected weather station, some extra sensors, and several lines of PHP.
Why I'd want to subject my light bulbs or coffee pot to that is beyond me.
The Amazon Echo makes sense to require an Internet connection.
There is nothing that the Nest cam does, apart from offsite backup, that requires it to contact the company's servers. Everything else can be local only with VPN for remote access.
Similar story here, from the POV of someone with moderate anxiety, and very mild depression (probably as a result of the anxiety). Medication made me feel less, which was preferable to anxiety, but CBT was a set of tools I've continued to use. I had so little insight into my own thought processes, and the ways in which I was unintentionally reinforcing my own anxieties. It's taken a lot of effort, over a lot of years, but with that basic set of tools I don't need medication and I don't have anxiety or panic attacks. Ever.
Still, if you did have that set of tools going in, but for whatever biological reason it didn't matter, then I would guess that CBT would be dust in the wind for you.
I think the immense amount of constant work is the biggest challenge. It may be that the use case for CBT is a lot narrower than current practice is selling it as. For mild to moderate anxiety though, it's pretty amazing if you stick with it, especially since the alternatives are all basically chemical.
A lot of what we today consider fallacies are in fact very reasonable heuristics if you live in the conditions of our ancestors from before civilization. Though with illusion of control, people are pretty good if inventing it for themselves if no external placebo is provided. Consider rain dances, or various folk beliefs around curing diseases...
Oh the folk cures are the best! The ancient Greek ones were literally and figuratively, batshit. IIRC To treat epilepsy it was recommend that you eat the heart of a black donkey beneath the light of the moon on some specific night.
The social consequences of committing a crime are enormous in Japan, and very long-term (like, the rest of your live). It makes answering the "Have you ever been convicted of a felony" section in the US look like a happy joke. That's part of it. The other is that most Japanese people would be really horrified at the idea of stealing someone's stuff, left that way. Finally, no bystander effect there, not for a crime like that.
I think it's more pragmatic. What are you going to do with a stolen phone in a country where everyone already has the exact phone that they want? Bag snatching (ひったくり) used to be a regular enough occurrence that most people would know a friend it had happened to, but the occurrence of that has dropped too (90% since the year 2000 in Osaka [0]).
I would attribute the drop to the fact that most things people carry around now simply aren't worth stealing. Why risk jail over things that you can only flip for a few hundred bucks at most? There is almost no poor underclass here who would do that to survive, a side effect of Japan not being a desirable place for poor people to immigrate to.
That's a good point, but it definitely relates to what I'm saying as well; you're just describing the benefit side of the cost:benefit analysis any criminal has to do. A lot of the cost in Japan, even for the pettiest of crimes, is that you either have to absolutely get away with it, or be branded a criminal.
All of what you said applies too, and it's all connected to the tighter community-oriented culture. There is after all, nothing impractical about choosing not to commit a petty crime, when as you say the benefit is minor and the risks are enormous.
I think you dont really understand the culture in Japan. There is no calculation going on. Stealing would not even cross 99.99% peoples mind in the first place.
It's not really that the original relates to this blog post, as much as it's just one of the best essays written in the English language in a long time. (big IMO)
Yup: girlfriend is an MD, I learnt the hard way to deactivate Google Image before any medical search. I would ban any relation to dermatology from GI if I could.
