Is the answer to this question no?

The breach pierced the education technology company PowerSchool – used by 80% of school districts in North America – and “put at risk the security of 60 million children and 10 million teachers,” the Justice Department said.

With threats to expose social security numbers, dates of birth, family information, grades, and even confidential medical information, the breach cornered PowerSchool into paying millions of dollars in ransom.

I don’t know: their getting caught may indicate less skill & more ease to break in due to irresponsible information security practices. Maybe companies like PowerSchool are shit & ought to have no business carrying that sort of information for 80% of public school districts. Maybe government is irresponsible for entrusting that information to these businesses with lax standards. Seems like institutional irresponsibility all around.

Organized criminals see easy exploits & easy useful idiots to assume the legal risk of their ventures.

Next step: 0 parties!

Aye, comrade. It is the only way! *tankie salute*

Yet another one who doesn’t understand primaries or getting better candidates on the ballot of a major party. Not believing this one simple trick: confirmed.

Reality is not all rainbows & butterflies. Systems operate according to rules we don’t control no matter how much we stubbornly refuse to accept them until we work the system to change it. Denying the system exists doesn’t change it.

Fact: the US voting system (plurality voting) lacks the sincere favorite criterion^[1]. Fact: that means strategy exists to optimize outcomes, and not following it with protest(-non)-voting can functionally help elect the candidate you like least, directly backfire, and cause worse real-world outcomes for your own values. Fact: that means lesser-evil voting is necessary in close, high-stakes races to minimize losses.

Voting in a way that backfires has real-world consequences. Denying it is like denying the consequences of pulling the trigger when a loaded gun is aimed at your nuts. If you have to vote for the only viable candidate who will realistically refrain from pulling the trigger & don’t (in a cute little protest), then you’re still getting nuts blown off. Protest(-non)-voting to blast your nuts off every time doesn’t lead anywhere.

There are viable ways to reform the system: lobby legislation with enough organization & support, elect your candidates to other offices (local, congressional, etc) to build popular support, get your candidate to run as a major party in national partisan races, vote lesser-evil in national partisan elections until your candidate is on the ballot as a major party.

Anything else is blasting yourself in the nuts. Worse, it’s blasting off your neighbors’ nuts & ovaries, too. Your neighbors don’t want to vote lesser-evil either, but they’re not stupid enough to pretend that other moves won’t blast off their nuts.

How is denying the right of the people to reelect whoever they want to office more democratic than fulfilling their right? Claiming democracy restricting such liberty is somehow more democratic is impressive mental gymnastics. Even with modern democracy the guiding philosophy is to restrict government to promote & protect individual liberty, not undermine liberty of the people.

That’s news to their earliest founding document

That whenever any Form of Government becomes destructive of these ends, it is the Right of the People to alter or to abolish it, and to institute new Government

right to revolution

But when a long train of abuses and usurpations, pursuing invariably the same Object evinces a design to reduce them under absolute Despotism, it is their right, it is their duty, to throw off such Government

is a duty. So, their declaration of independence is illegal?

To each their own, but I personally think Lemmings aren’t much better. Some people over here can’t understand that sensitive questions can be asked without bad intent. People are way too defensive about their opinions.

Yep, they can get awfully histrionic, prematurely judgmental, self-indulgent with the recreational outrage, vainly uncritical in their ideological thinking, and generally unchill. Nonetheless, it beats dealing with Reddit’s opaque & hostile moderator system.

Cool vibes, lack of data, & copium.

Specifically billionaires/unchecked capitalists

The easy scapegoat oversimplifies the problem, which goes beyond & predates capitalism. Though exterminating all of humanity is one way to achieve sustainability, it doesn’t necessarily require it. So far, however, humanity has reached living standards beyond subsistence only by consuming resources at unsustainable levels faster than the planet can replenish, and that has been true regardless of economic system. Even when living at subsistence levels, humanity has likely caused mass extinction events.

From a comment to a similar post

People here tend to fixate on their pet theories that scapegoat capitalism for everything including that humanity’s drain on ecological resources exceeds Earth’s rate of regeneration without acknowledging that their alternatives don’t address the problem, either.

Although governments are far more able than individuals and firms acting singly to take action to protect the environment, they often fail to do so. The centrally planned economies of Eastern Europe, where governments controlled production, had a particularly poor record on pollution control. Per capita mortality from air pollution in Eastern Europe (outside the EU) and China remains high relative to the EU and North America.

In particular, the Soviet economy—with constitutional guarantees to continuously improve living standards & steadily grow productive forces—caused disproportionately worse ecological damage than the US’s. All economic systems have the same capacity to degrade the environment & deplete stocks of natural resources. Without adequate policies to protect the environment, improving & maintaining living standards with the continuous economic growth necessary to do that threatens the environment.

Moreover, human activity before capitalism has led to extinctions of megafauna, plants, & animals dependent on those plants. The quaternary megafauna extinction was likely driven by overhunting by humans. Those extinctions & increased fires coinciding with the arrival of humanity to Australia transformed the ecosystem from mixed rainforest to drier landscapes. Aboriginal landscape burning

may have caused the extinction of some fire-sensitive species of plants and animals dependent upon infrequently burnt habitats

More recently, they killed off the elephant bird likely due to major environmental alterations & overconsumption of their eggs.

Until humanity starts living sustainably, they are the problem.

From earlier comment on similar post

Moreover, human activity before capitalism has led to extinctions of megafauna, plants, & animals dependent on those plants. The quaternary megafauna extinction was likely driven by overhunting by humans. Those extinctions & increased fires coinciding with the arrival of humanity to Australia transformed the ecosystem from mixed rainforest to drier landscapes. Aboriginal landscape burning

may have caused the extinction of some fire-sensitive species of plants and animals dependent upon infrequently burnt habitats

More recently, [indigenous people] killed off the elephant bird likely due to major environmental alterations & overconsumption of their eggs.

and I see like before the same OP still won’t do the decency to support fellow humans by following web accessibility. That sums up our conviction of humanity.

yes

I grew up in a city where I was told if you look at someone the wrong way they’ll beat your ass.

Who’s rude in that situation? Pretty sure anyone who beats people over nothing is a universal dickhead.

Staring isn’t rude. People are awfully self-conscious. People can just be. Weird is fine.

Exactly: society is full of dickheads, then people fuss when they’re treated as who they are like they’re entitled to more.

I think next step should be developing a test that can predict how someone will react to it.

Unnecessary: foolish people always gonna fool. Anyone that far gone in the lacking judgement department demands far more help than anyone can reasonably be expected to provide, and attempting to “foolproof” for them will only drag everyone else down while doing nothing for them. Likewise, just because some people overeat junk food doesn’t mean we need to devise some test to decide who can safely get junk food: it’s a personal choice, the risks of bad judgement are reasonably understood, & that bullshit’s beyond paternalistic.

Does it help to frame it in a different light for you if you think of it as those companies exploiting vulnerable peoples’ disorders to extract money from them?

Not at all: we don’t go winning lawsuits against any of those companies promoting themselves to appeal to the consumer because of how the dysfunctional among us may overconsume it. Liberty comes with accepting responsibility for reasonably foreseeable consequences/risks of our choices or no one will be able to realize liberty when someone makes their responsibility everyone else’s duty. Society can’t reasonably be expected to cater to everyone’s irrational/dysfunctional manifestations & whims. The legal standard is reasonable person, not dysfunctional ones. Moreover, the existence of children doesn’t imply we need to childproof all of society: people are still entitled liberty to their adult activity & vices.

When risks are open & obvious, such as the overconsumption of certain foods & legal substances, that’s generally viewed as a matter of personal choice rather than unreasonably dangerous product defect. Even when kids grow obese from overeating junk food, blame primarily lies in whoever provides them that food rather than the product itself no matter how appealing the design of the food, the design on the container, or its advertisements. Especially with the latest wave of moral panic over social media, the risks & dysfunctions of obsessively overconsuming social media or any information service to the extent it impairs us are open & obvious. Parents giving their children these devices, observing excessive attachment, and not cutting them off bear considerable responsibility.

Information & devices to view it are generally benign & noncoercive. People use these services, because some find them useful & engaging to their interests. Those features that effectively meet user demand for engaging information offer legitimate utility to a reasonable person without impairing them. Such features aren’t defects, and “fool-proofing” them would hamper utility to functional adults who can deal with the “dangers” of attention-grabbing information.

However, even supposing such features defectively make the system unreasonably dangerous in a reasonably foreseeable manner, that only demands that service providers provide fair warning. Once duty to warn has been met, users are reasonably aware of risks and responsibility shifts to risk-takers or parents who give children access despite reasonably knowing the risk.

Telling those people to just have self control is like telling someone with depression to just stop being sad.

We can’t rearrange all of society just because some people have depression. Liberty means not imposing on others issues we should be dealing with ourselves or through appropriate services specifically for that.

I don’t know. Seems like self-control issues. People can get addicted to anything: shopping, sex, internet use, work, gaming, exercise. I also disagree with prohibitions on gambling, drug use, prostitution: it’s their money, their body, etc.

Penalizing systems of communication & information delivery seems overreach. The harm seems phony & averted by basic self-control.