Wednesday, June 11, 2025

Surveillance pricing: How your data determines what you pay

 “Working as an American philosopher has turned out to be much more of an adventure than I ever could have anticipated” — Alison Jaggar’s 2019 Dewey Lecture


Waymo False Flag: Militarizing America Through Psychological Warfare

MindWar: The Psychological War on Democracy – “As tanks are sent en masse to the nation’s capital, complete with revolutionary insignia, for a propaganda event this Saturday, one of the president’s top advisors is accusing the government of the State of California of aiding and abetting “an invasion”—a condition for a charge of treason—while the “Border Czar” threatens to arrest the governor.

 What we’re seeing is a clumsy, transparent psychological warfare campaign being executed by the federal government against American citizens. 

It is, of course, totally illegal and unconstitutional, but regardless, Los Angeles is being used as an example and as psychological conditioning for a national rollout of this strategy. As I wrote, the raids by ICE were a PSYACT, a psychological action, designed to provoke a reaction—the peaceful protests on Friday night.

That reaction, protests, was met by another PSYACT, the completely unnecessary deployment of National Guard troops to the streets of Los Angeles against the will of the Mayor and the Governor. This provocation was designed to provoke another reaction—even bigger protests. And so on. Added to the mixture, like a constant flow of kerosene, is the massive propaganda platform controlled by the federal government with the cooperation of the majority of the media, which portrayed LA as consumed by fire, as an out-of control insurrection, worthy of state violence or, as the president’s son suggested, vigilanteism. Nonsense…”

 

Surveillance pricing: How your data determines what you pay

Proton VPN blog: “Surveillance pricing, also known as personalized or algorithmic pricing, is a practice where companies use your personal data, such as your location, the device you’re using, your browsing history, and even your income, to determine what price to show you. It’s not just about supply and demand — it’s about you as a consumer and how much the system thinks you’re able (or willing) to pay. 

Have you ever shopped online for a flight, only to find that the price mysteriously increased the second time you checked? Or have you and a friend searched for the same hotel room on your phones, only to find your friend sees a lower price? 

This isn’t a glitch — it’s surveillance pricing at work. In the United States, surveillance pricing is becoming increasingly prevalent across various industries, including airlines, hotels, and e-commerce platforms. 

It exists elsewhere, but in other parts of the world, such as the European Union, there is a growing recognition of the danger this pricing model presents to citizens’ privacy, resulting in stricter data protection laws aimed at curbing it. The US appears to be moving in the opposite direction. In this article we’ll look at:



  1. “Any sign of struggle on my part seemed to be taken as evidence that, perhaps, I was not cut out for intellectual life and did not care enough about philosophy” — an interview with Vanessa Wills
  2. King Lawrence the Lion and Maple the Meerkat navigate tricky philosophical questions in a new BBC series for kids — “Fantastic Philosophy” is narrated by Stephen Fry
  3. “You can leave the country and stay with the struggle or stay in the country and not participate in the struggle, and to be blunt, the majority of people in the US are not participating” — Rebecca Solnit enters the debate over academics leaving the US
  4. “Wealth concentration has fallen—not risen—over the past century… The dominant quantitative fact of the century is… a dramatic wealth equalization propelled by mass asset ownership” — an economist on the risks of “misreading inequality”
  5. “‘A philosopher!’ said the doctor; ‘Can yon screw your head off and on.’ ‘No, sir’ I said. ‘Oh, then, you are no philosopher.’” — Jeremy Bentham is “interviewed” by Richard Marshall
  6. “Nihilism” is the word of the week at NPR — owing to the bombing of a fertility clinic in California
  7. “I became more and more interested in the role probability plays in thinking about… how strong something is as a reason for believing something else” — Brandon Fitelson and Sean Carroll discuss probability
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