"by failing to collect sales tax on books." Amazon was acting in accordance with existing laws. Collecting taxes it was not legally required to collect would have been dishonest.

Agreed, and also let's be pretty limited with the definition of public figure. Politicians? Sure. Writers who sold five books on Kindle? No. (This may sound obvious, but some big tech companies have a history of stretching the rules)

Fred Brooks writes in one of his books about how he was working on a VR gizmo to help chemists visualize and "walk around" large organic molecules hovering in a holodeck thing.

The chemist trying it out likes it for about 15 minutes and then says, "can I have a chair to sit down?"

The whole time I've been in computers and I.T. -- the problem of securing systems and networks from hackers has been around. But a huge part of it is just plain old social engineering. There's not much technical to learn there, really. Just a basic understanding that a lot of people out there will lie and come up with clever excuses to get people to turn over their secure credentials to things.

When you look at some of the biggest, high-profile credit card leaks from companies? It's typically been an inside job, likely from people who were trusted with access at some point or who managed to obtain passwords of others they knew had access to what they wanted. Maybe in some cases, they simply paid another employee off to hand over the data?

It seems like ever since cybersecurity was formalized as a career option, it's mainly been a position where you're paid well to be the "fall guy" for the day when a major breech happens. They need someone to pin it on and that's their security expert they hired. Meanwhile, my experience as a sysadmin or a support analyst over the years has been, these guys cause as many problems as they solve when they're hired and given power to enforce changes. They always wind up making it more difficult for everyday workers to get their work done and it hurts productivity. (It's analogous to hiring an expert to secure your home, but you wind up with every window glued shut permanently and a door with 6 locks with different keys and PIN code to deal with every time you want to go in or out. The neighbor who didn't bother with any of that and just got a dog winds up in a better overall position.)

I was asked, once, to sit on a panel of "experts in the field" to help develop curriculum for a tech school's cybersecurity program. It was honestly a big joke. Students were going to pay so much for classes that mostly told "example" stories that you could read for free from library books and a lot of memorization of buzzwords. Some of the basic tools were taught for packet inspection and the like, too. But again, people with a true interest will gravitate towards finding and playing with these programs on their own anyway.

I'd rather see security just taught from a perspective of ensuring it's part of your software development if you go into coding.
 

The Circle and Ready Player Two seem highly relevant. Any other dystopian books to recommend?

But I agree with the FP's sentiments. (And I still think the most promising solution approach for all corporate cancers would be a pro-freedom anti-greedom tax system. Let's make the path to higher retained earnings lead to smaller companies!)

I think the plan is to establish new taxes based on an estimate of how much CO2 is emitted by companies. Hitting them at the wallet is a strong incentive for change.

But in order to push a tax, a standard way of evaluating CO2 emissions has to be set up at the company level. And this standard way has to be certified by some authority, so you can't just fire up Excel and start calculating CO2 emissions by yourself: even if your calculation were factually correct, it would take too much expertise for the tax office to verify whether the result is accurate or not.

By forcing companies to pay for a $4000/month piece of CO2 calculation software, they are just doing the same thing they already did for accounting here in Europe: those days you need to buy certified software to manage the accounting of your company, otherwise you can end up in legal trouble even if you are not cooking the books. They are, in a nutshell, offsetting the cost of validating to the companies.

Yeah, true. And now Faux News is the biggest news channel (with the most viewers) in the USA, and the viewers haven't caught on to the hypocrisy at all. For example the talking heads on the white power hour constantly rail against masks and vaccines, while Fox has a mask mandate and a vaccine mandate for its own employees. Fucker Carlson and all his ilk are all vaccinated, and they have to mask when they're not doing a show!

So yeah, the MSM is extra corrupt... since Fox became the MSM. Ironically Fox Business News conflicts with Fox News constantly because businesspeople need actual information, but the Fox fans haven't caught onto that either.

Seriously, I don't actually trust any big media outlets to give me unvarnished reports on what is happening in the world, but you never could do. You've always had to play various news sources off against one another to get a complete story, and even then you're going to miss things. That's why there's books written about complex events.

Wow, really, read a bit of history! There were whole scores of printing machines dedicated to reprinting books without compensation of the author. Weirdly enough, only the German, Dutch and Swedish Wikipedia have an article about it, so I guess you'll have to consult Google translate for an English version.