See the canonical example of this going wrong: the Reddit 'investigation' of the Boston Bomber, where someone was misidentified, doxxed, and their family was harassed.

Of course, law enforcement is capable of making the same mistakes. But ideally they have better safeguards, and victims of their negligence have much better recourse.

One day we will attempt to roll out such a system. We'll pay McKinsey billions to develop and operate it, set no targets, and they will take the money and disappear for 10 years, and then deliver some unusable website developed by one offshore developer.

Nobody ever thinks of the poor banks!

I like the approach of making downtowns walkable and having a bit of parking at the periphery of downtown, along with good public transit. Encourages people to use public transit to get to town in the first place. Downtown residents can use transit or a zipcar or equivalent when the need to get out of town, instead of devoting a ton of space downtown for storing their cars.

Not sure if that approach is really practical, but if it can be made to work it is much nicer.

Trying to create an elaborate regulatory regime to decide who is justified to live in a rural area is absurd and a waste of money. Especially considering that most people living in rural areas are either employed in a necessary industry that needs to be rural, or work in professional or service industries either directly supporting said rural industry (e.g. tractor repair) or indirectly supporting it's workforce.

Furthermore, the marginal cost of providing broadband to all those "slightly-less-necessarily-rural" people is minuscule. Skipping every other house doesn't save you much when the majority of the cost is building infra to get broadband to the town/road in the first place.

This is assuming there isn't a good reason why we might want some percentage of the population to be rural. To have farms and ranches, for example.

The economic benefit of making those people available as consumers, lowering barriers to their engagement in markets, is enormous and certainly pays for itself.

"Corporation says they aren't doing a bad thing so any assertion to the contrary is crazy."

Corporations actually tend to lie when they are engaged in illegal or repugnant behavior.

> The exact same concerns could be articulated for Google/AWS/Azure,

The leadership of those corporations aren't publicly supporting the dissolution of democracy to impose neo-feudalism, so that's a big difference.

To quote:

> I no longer believe that freedom and democracy are compatible.

- Peter Thiel

But the "This is what ChatGPT said..." stuff feels almost like "Well I put it into a calculator and it said X." We can all trivially do that, so it really doesn't add anything to the conversation. And we never see the prompting, so any mistakes made in the prompting approach are hidden.

From the wikipedia article on "Soft error", if anyone wants to extrapolate.

That's a bar that only a handful of humans have met in the entirety of history.