I am a scientist by education, banker at JPMorgan for a few years, then mature PhD student in Chemical Biology at Oxford under the supervision of Christofer Schofield (FRS) and Peter Ratcliffe (Nobel laureate in medicine in 2019). Founder and tech investor focusing on media and education. I care about science, learning and Democracy which are good bedfellows.
Thank you for the great work! I'd love to translate part of your last issue that echoes rising concerns here in France about technology supply chains and our (European) reliance on two US firms for mobile operating systems. Would you allow me to do so? (with due references and backlinks of course).
1. I'm sure anyone in the UK would be amazed that creating an "army" of 300,000 people to undertake contact tracing would be considered to be difficult. Out government recently put out a call for unpaid volunteers to help the health service (primarily with admin, deliveries, etc.) and got 500,000 volunteers signing up within 24 hours. The USA has 5x the UK's population and >10 million people out of work. Surely it would be easy?
2. Not a critical point to your argument about identity and privacy, but it's simply not correct to say that "The UK [has] nonetheless instituted credit bureaus assigning credit score to all their citizens." There are private companies which compile credit reports for individuals using a variety of sources, and they all tout your "credit score" as something you should be interested in, but that's just simplified marketing: the reality is that these "credit scores" are not consistent and have no meaning or usage beyond that agency. Lenders make lending decisions based on information they can glean from these agencies and elsewhere, but they don't use (and nobody else uses) these "credit scores". It's just marketing fluff, it's nothing to do with the government and it's nothing to do with anyone's sense of identity.
Thank you for the great work! I'd love to translate part of your last issue that echoes rising concerns here in France about technology supply chains and our (European) reliance on two US firms for mobile operating systems. Would you allow me to do so? (with due references and backlinks of course).
A couple of observations from a UK perspective...
1. I'm sure anyone in the UK would be amazed that creating an "army" of 300,000 people to undertake contact tracing would be considered to be difficult. Out government recently put out a call for unpaid volunteers to help the health service (primarily with admin, deliveries, etc.) and got 500,000 volunteers signing up within 24 hours. The USA has 5x the UK's population and >10 million people out of work. Surely it would be easy?
2. Not a critical point to your argument about identity and privacy, but it's simply not correct to say that "The UK [has] nonetheless instituted credit bureaus assigning credit score to all their citizens." There are private companies which compile credit reports for individuals using a variety of sources, and they all tout your "credit score" as something you should be interested in, but that's just simplified marketing: the reality is that these "credit scores" are not consistent and have no meaning or usage beyond that agency. Lenders make lending decisions based on information they can glean from these agencies and elsewhere, but they don't use (and nobody else uses) these "credit scores". It's just marketing fluff, it's nothing to do with the government and it's nothing to do with anyone's sense of identity.
Keep up the good work!