What's Up Wednesday #13 - The Problem with 3rd-party Encryption, Happiness and Power, Changing the Status Quo
🔓Using a third-party VPN or whatever to be more secure might be less private. This year it was revealed that a Swiss encryption company actually belongs to the CIA and Germany’s BND. Of course, the Swiss intelligence knew about it as well. Not sure how many politicians knew about this, but I assume most would have remained silent. Now, a member of the Swiss Green Party said this: “This banana republic behavior is unworthy of a constitutional state and must have political and personnel consequences.” Maybe he just wanted to pull Switzerland out of the puddle they fell into. But what if countries would stop spying on people? Nobody would at least not having to fear misuse of the data or any exposure of their secrets - or their terroristic, anti-democratic plans. There is always a downside. A party loyal to democracy and humanity reading all the data might not be that bad overall. It might just be really hard to ensure that it will stay loyal and can never misuse any information.
😃 Humans are bad at converting power into happiness. We are 1000x more powerful than people in the Stone-age. However, we don’t even know if we are happier. Maybe a bit. But not 1000x times happier. - Yuval Noah Harari
💻 The logic behind Apple’s transition to Intel processors in 2006 boiled down to an old axiom: If you can’t beat them, join them. The logic behind Apple’s transition now to Apple Silicon (their own processor) is this: If you can beat them handily, do it.
💡“The Idea is great too, but it’s the people.“
💬How to change a Status Quo in a society? E.g., if everyone would be vegan, there would be less animal cruelty, less wasted energy (the loss of efficiency of e.g. cows turning their food into meat), we would be a healthier population and in this process emit quit a lot less CO2 and Methane. So a vegan population would make much sense. Still, in the minds of many people veganism is just not normal. Further, living as a vegan is more inconvenient. It’s nearly impossible to order a vegan meal in a German Restaurant. To change this, both, the acceptance and the inconvenience need to be tackled. I hope that for important problems like climate change, politicians are aware of this and can help with public acceptance. They could also tax meat higher, or tax plant-based products less to make veganism more attractive.