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scarecrowbob 10 hours ago [-]
I understand that folks here think that the general anti-AI sentiments that can be found in some of US culture are often misguided.
It's likely projection on my part but I have a deep suspicion that people understand that mass surveillance by the state is the main use case for all these LLMs, camera systems, and increasing large data centers.
That certainly is my own worry, at least.
MomsAVoxell 9 hours ago [-]
>mass surveillance
Its not mass surveillance by the state, exclusively.
Its also the potential for mis-use and corruption by criminal networks.
Plus, there's that whole degradation of culture factor. Sure, you trust your government today. But do you trust the government of tomorrow?
Anyone who thinks this is misguided is probably seeking to profit from it at some point.
And that is precisely the problem.
pizzly 5 hours ago [-]
Also add corporations. Insurance companies, Banks, Potential Employers, etc will definitively use mass surveillance and AI generated predictions based on that mass surveillance.
lenerdenator 7 hours ago [-]
> Sure, you trust your government today.
Most Americans really, really don't. Gallup puts Americans' trust in major institutions, including several parts of the government, at around 30% [0]
In OECD countries, trust in government sits at around 39% [1]
I would say that most people in Western nations don't trust their government. Whether they agree with what all their governments are doing is another issue-by-issue matter, but I would guess they don't love that on the whole, either.
They say that and then act the opposite. The cognitive dissonance is astonishing. Consider the MAGA deep state narrative and how it literally now exists because of them.
kmoser 6 hours ago [-]
Distrust of the government comes in different levels: you can be just distrustful enough to be skeptical yet accepting, and so distrustful that you actively try to vote the bums out. I don't think the polls distinguish between them.
pessimizer 6 hours ago [-]
Trump didn't bring the CIA and MI6 into existence. That's liberal cope from the years they spent yelling about how secret police were actually good now, because they didn't like Trump. Well now they like Trump - happy?
woodgala 6 hours ago [-]
lol. Talk about cope. You just invented a strawman and assumed it was my position so that you could claim victory. I guess you don’t know many progressives because by and large the CIA has been considered problematic forever. But it wasn’t celebrated the way MAGA cheers for ICE.
quickthrowman 3 hours ago [-]
I would encourage you to refrain from saying things like ‘lol. Talk about cope.’ here, let your argument stand on its own without baiting the other person into responding emotionally.
I’m not offering this advice because I’m perfect either, I find it difficult sometimes to be respectful of someone I disagree with. You can take it or leave it, I’ll just say editing those sorts of things out of my own posts has been helpful.
ilinx 6 hours ago [-]
Which “liberals” are you talking about? My circle of leftists complained about the CIA just as much during the Obama administration.
MomsAVoxell 6 hours ago [-]
Its one thing to not trust ones government.
Its another to do something truly effective about it.
Alas, the American people seem to be utterly paralyzed. Catatonic, even.
When all it really needs is civic responsibility and an understanding that the government derives its power from the people, and thus the people always get the government they deserve.
lenerdenator 6 hours ago [-]
> When all it really needs is civic responsibility and an understanding that the government derives its power from the people, and thus the people always get the government they deserve.
You've had people being apologists for all manner of bad forms of government around the world for at least the past 25 years. This shouldn't be surprising.
deepsquirrelnet 6 hours ago [-]
It's also clearly the wrong question for this decade. Private / public sector cooperation and all of the barriers between them that have been degraded and chipped away has left us with a very broken economic system that looks less and less like capitalism every day.
b112 9 hours ago [-]
In Norway, as an act of sensibility and kindness, prior to WWII, registers were kept at all town halls as to your religion. The point was, people wanted to be buried in the proper cemetery. It was a plus, people registered willingly.
Then the Nazis rolled in. And you can imagine what happened with those registers.
So it doesn't even have to be about your own government. And with digital access being a world away, it can indeed be a threat.
euroderf 9 hours ago [-]
Think about it the way the US thought about them pesky Rooskies during the Cold War:
Don't look at intentions. Look at capabilities.
mywittyname 5 hours ago [-]
Government agencies (foreign and domestic) will just be just a few of the many buyers of this information.
Private companies buy up this information like mad. It's so cheap - five figures gets you a database of every person over 18 in the USA and their addresses. Another five figures gets work history for them. Another five figures gets you property information. Another gets you social media feeds. Etc. Some vendors even sell it ad hoc with little up-front cost.
For less than a million a year, any company can build an extensive profile on every person in the USA. These companies are just adding to that list.
throwway120385 10 hours ago [-]
There's a self-serving aspect of Libertarianism where we dismantle the government so we can build our own government out of corporations with zero accountability to any of the people they govern. A kind of modern feudalism. And a lot of people in this camp envision themselves the count or duke or king or whatever in this feudalism, when in reality we'll likely all end up renting everything we own from the 6 people who own all the companies in the world. There seems to be a motte and bailey where the motte is "oh we should just remove all the governmental controls and let private enterprise flourish!" and then the bailey is "don't you see how little freedom you have from government" when it's made apparent what private enterprise has done in the modern world.
lowbloodsugar 7 hours ago [-]
Libertarianism is entirely self-serving. I am rich and have property, so my ideal government is one whose only job is to create property registries and allow their enforcement with violence. Ideally, the poor people are taxed (not me of course) to fund a government violence force to enforce the rules on the poor people, as is the case in the USA.
Communism is similarly self-serving. I own no property, and so my ideal government has no concept of property and assigns resources to everyone.
wyre 7 hours ago [-]
How is communism self-serving when, you said it yourself, the main concept is assigning resources to everyone?
bigfishrunning 6 hours ago [-]
If "assigning resources to everyone" is a net gain (IE the voter doesn't have resources), then yes it is self serving.
jst1fthsdys 6 hours ago [-]
Pretty much everything is self serving using that definition. Clean up trash in a park? Self serving. Donate money to the poor? Self serving.
bigfishrunning 6 hours ago [-]
I think you misunderstand me -- perspective matters. If you have 12 cookies, and I have 2 cookies, and i say "it would be more fair if we each had 7 cookies", then i pretty transparently just want you to give me 5 cookies.
"Clean up trash" and "Donate money to the poor" are not as unevenly beneficial. Also "Donate money to the poor" is a far cry from "Seize money and give that to the poor".
1659447091 53 minutes ago [-]
> and i say "it would be more fair if we each had 7 cookies", then i pretty transparently just want you to give me 5 cookies.
But under the context of "government has no concept of property and assigns resources to everyone" it is not you (or any single person) that decides that, it's the contextual Communist government saying and doing that. Just because it benefits random governed person does not make it directly self serving.
The nuance is, in this version of Communism, the Communism itself it is not self serving it trys to equalize -- Libertarianism, in this context, enforces self serving ideals
krupan 9 hours ago [-]
You seem to be describing our current corrupt democracy that produces crony capitalism that gives favors to big businesses and enables the business owners to become one of the 6 people that own everything.
A major point of libertarianism is to tear down the government structure that enables that crony capitalism and restores real competition in the market.
bcrosby95 8 hours ago [-]
So we're going to make government weaker, and by doing so, they will stand up to corporations that are now stronger than them?
If that's true then Libertarians have a rosier view of government than I do. A regular David vs. Goliath situation. Biblical stories aside, my money is on Goliath.
AnthonyMouse 7 hours ago [-]
> So we're going to make government weaker, and by doing so, they will stand up to corporations that are now stronger than them?
It's not about the amount of physical force they can assert.
Suppose you have a constrained set of things the government is allowed to do. They prohibit fraud, non-consensual physical harm (e.g. violence, pollution) and market consolidation. Market consolidation is given a rigid definition in the nature of any organization having more than 15% market share in any market, a rigid consequence in the nature of that organization being fully atomized, and a right for customers and suppliers to bring a private case against them with the same consequence if they're over the threshold and the government prosecutor won't do it. Every citizen has the constitutional right to smash corporations in consolidated markets into smithereens.
Meanwhile the government is prohibited from enacting more specific economic rules. They lack the authority to enact things like certificate of need laws, zoning density restrictions, price controls, anything that acts as a constraint on adversarial interoperability, etc. Micromanaging the population is not allowed.
How do these constraints benefit large incumbents? What benefit is there in giving the government the authority to do things that history has consistently shown to be anti-competitive and inefficient?
judemelancon 5 hours ago [-]
Such a scheme absolutely explodes in complexity as it comes to each level of additional detail.
This requires a magically flexible definition of "market" at very best.
The smallest number of competitors that can split market share such that none exceed 15% is 7, and that cuts it absurdly close for an existential risk.
Do non-profit organizations count for this rule? If not, how would corporate structures that intentionally obfuscate these distinctions, e.g. IKEA, be handled?
If there's not some extremely tricky qualifiers, these markets seem likely to be a problem, just for starters: medicines†, operating systems, utilities to a specific house or even city, spy satellites, chemicals that are difficult or dangerous to synthesize, combat aircraft, crewed spacecraft, EUV lithography, armored fighting vehicles, cellular telecommunications services, samples of organisms restricted to high biosafety level labs, and literally any new product category.
† Imagine a serious condition getting its first drug treatment approved and the company saying "Only every seventh patient is eligible." Also, no one could offer a specific specialized surgical procedure until seven or more independent organizations in the same geographic area have qualified staff and equipment, which would be especially hard for any novel techniques; if the problem it addressed was rare, they'd also effectively be forced into a cartel to allocate the patients evenly.
There's also separately and unavoidably the massive problem of transitioning from the current situation to one compliant with these restrictions.
Edit: Switch to using a dagger for the footnote to avoid a formatting issue.
krupan 5 hours ago [-]
Government will not give any help to any corporation and we, the masses, will be empowered to stand up to corporations ourselves. And to be clear, when we talk about Power here we aren't talking about enforcing our will with violence (like the government ultimately does) but with the lifeblood of corporations: money. Deny them that and they quickly die.
throwway120385 36 minutes ago [-]
Okay great. Let's say you have a dispute with your neighborhood electricity provider. They run the power plant 3 blocks down and vent smog into your house. By your logic the only recourse you have is to stop paying them. How do you handle that externality while still maintaining your electricity and also avoid having to learn how to run your own electricity grid?
sylos 7 hours ago [-]
David and goliath is not a story of a little man defeating an impossible giant. It's the story of a technologically advanced crack pistol shot vs a guy a with a knife and a hundred yards to cover
preg_match 5 hours ago [-]
In order to make competition flourish, you require a strong government which squishes anti-competitive behavior.
Markets, left to their own accord, naturally tend to monopolies and cooperation. Cooperation just works better than competition. Competition is, really, a zero-sum game, a race to the bottom for companies. Cooperation is optimal, it’s “everybody wins”.
Even if companies didn’t just buy up each other (why wouldn’t they? We need laws against that), they would certainly work together to set prices as high as the market can bear. Which is then, effectively, a monopoly.
I mean, imagine a perfect market with hundreds of thriving competitors. What happens over time? As the industry matures, competitors buy each other up and consolidate capital. Then, newcomers can’t break in, because they don’t have the capital. And any newcomers who have a new innovative process or product, just get bought out before they threaten the market share. Then, eventually, there are only a handful of companies left. It’s trivial for them to move in lock-step and everyone wins… except the consumer.
Look at any domain in the US - they’re all like this. The only exceptions are new domains, like AI. That will change, too, we’ve seen this pattern thousands of times.
There’s two moats here: regulation, and capital. You can eliminate the regulation moat with libertarianism, sure, but not the capital moat. And, you strengthen the capital moat when you remove the regulation. So nothing changes. Best case scenario, the situation is the same. Worst case, it’s accelerated.
WalterBright 4 hours ago [-]
> Markets, left to their own accord, naturally tend to monopolies and cooperation
No, they don't. To become a monopoly, they need the collusion of government to outlaw competition.
The poster boy of monopolies, Standard Oil, never had a monopoly. During its rise, it dropped the consumer price of kerosene 70%. Its market share dropped steadily during the years of the anti-trust trial.
> It’s trivial for them to move in lock-step and everyone wins… except the consumer.
Ever wonder what happened to IBM?
stopping 56 minutes ago [-]
Are you saying that it's impossible for a company to become a monopoly purely under its own power?
WalterBright 3 hours ago [-]
You might want to read "Titan" by Chernow before telling me I am wrong.
FireBeyond 8 hours ago [-]
What of observed human history gives you any hope that such a thing will happen?
All of these systems function well ... "in theory". Even the ones you may not agree with. Socialism and communism are perfectly fine theoretical systems, until you introduce humans into the equation with desires for power, wealth, etc.
I have seen no hint that Libertarianism is somehow above this and will be the panacea. I also have no idea how you come to the conclusion that collusion will not be a problem in a libertarian world.
WalterBright 8 hours ago [-]
> I have seen no hint that Libertarianism is somehow above this and will be the panacea.
The US has been the closest any country has come to libertarianism. And the US thrived on it.
anigbrowl 8 hours ago [-]
The US would have thrived on any system because it started the game with a continent whose indigenous population was small, pluralistic, nomadic and technologically backward, and whose natural resources were abundant or completely untouched. The colonists had access to the technology of the leading power in the world at the time, and had imported slaves in bulk from another technologically backward continent to jump-start their economy by the time the US was established.
WalterBright 4 hours ago [-]
Why did Mexico and S America fail to thrive?
coldtea 7 hours ago [-]
Not to mention their main competitor self-destructed twice in 1914 and 1939
WalterBright 4 hours ago [-]
You're overlooking the 19th century.
Germany did not self-destruct. It was destroyed by the Allied powers.
preg_match 5 hours ago [-]
The US arguably would’ve thrived regardless, we had 50% of the world GDP post-WWII. That percentage pie has only declined, as other nations developed. Nations with disparate economic systems, some being top-down centrally controlled communist states. In fact, said states are the only ones who threatened the US economically.
And, the US is not the most libertarian country, it’s not even close. The US is developed, so it’s automatically more centrally controlled than most nations. There are plenty of underdeveloped nations that are, effectively, much more libertarian. Because their governments don’t have the capital to enforce much of anything. Those nations are doing quite poorly, hence why they are underdeveloped.
You will notice a pattern in the development of nations: as nations develop, the government has more stake in the macro economics of said nation. Because of course they do: they want the economics to go well, and they have the economics to enforce that, or try to. The US government does not “sit out” when things are going poorly, the opposite is true.
WalterBright 4 hours ago [-]
When I wrote "has been" I meant the 19th century.
> the US is not the most libertarian country, it’s not even close.
I would argue that the 1950's and 1960's, which I've heard called a "golden age," was an age where we kept corporations in their place with a 90% corporate tax rate and we broke any corporation up who had an oversized market share. How is this "close to libertarianism?" If anything that suggests to me that the US was better off when corporations were weak and local, state and the federal government maintained lots of in-house expertise for their functions instead of outsourcing everything to consultants and contractors.
paulryanrogers 8 hours ago [-]
Doubt. Arguably the US thrived because it is too far from Europe for their wars to cause too much devastation. Unregulated industrialization also gave us child labor, 12h days, 6d work weeks, and company scrip.
After WW2 the US stood alone and enacted a lot of socialist ideas. Then spent a few decades slowly erroding those worker rights and sensible regulations in favor of corporate interests.
WalterBright 4 hours ago [-]
> Unregulated industrialization also gave us child labor, 12h days, 6d work weeks, and company scrip.
Do you think children did not work in colonial America? or Europe? In what contemporary country did children not work? Same for the hours and days of work.
There's a good reason why children have always worked prior to 1900. The economy was not productive enough to enable them to not work. The same for hours worked.
When productivity rose sufficiently, child labor disappeared, as did the long hours.
throwway120385 32 minutes ago [-]
No it didn't. People went on strike and middle class people fought for those things. Eliminating child labor was a major feather in the Progressive movement's cap. Don't pretend like any of that was spontaneous.
krupan 5 hours ago [-]
The US stood alone and enacted socialist ideas? You have heard of the USSR, haven't you? If the US was enacting socialist ideas it definitely wasn't alone in doing so.
Next I wonder what "a lot of socialist ideas" were. The New Deal during the Great depression was fairly socialist with the government making up work it could pay people to do and such, but I'm pretty sure after WWII is when anti-socialist (anti-Soviet) sentiment peaked in the US
7 hours ago [-]
tombert 8 hours ago [-]
That seems a bit reductive; I don't even know that you're "wrong", but there are a lot of factors that might have led to the United States' success. We have a lot of natural resources and a lot of our land is readily habitable.
Yes, the US also has relatively liberal economics [1], and maybe that's why the US has done well, but I think there are too many confounding variables to conclude it's purely because of economic liberalism.
[1] I mean liberal in the academic sense, not as a synonym for Democrat.
WalterBright 4 hours ago [-]
Russia is chock full of natural resources. But Russia was never prosperous. Ditto for Mexico and S America.
nrr 3 hours ago [-]
Is this true? I ask because the metric for determining the distance from the US's construction at any point in time to the libertarian ideal is unclear. Like, given an assertion of closest, it should be quantifiable[0].
It should also be falsifiable and admit a counterfactual.
1. The US was within some epsilon of being libertarian;
2. The US became rich;
3. Therefore, the prosperity of the US was a direct consequence of libertarianism.
It's 2. here that I scratch my head at because, uh, the US has through its entire history, even pre-1776, been rich. It wasn't liquid wealth in the financial sense, but the US has had oodles of arable land, navigable waterways[1], natural resources, and favorable geography. It's only within the last 250 years that we've realized wealth in the form of bonkers huge internal markets and (at least, before recently) high levels of immigration.
In fact, going back to 1., if we consider the laissez-faire dimension alone and compare it against the rate of wealth growth the US has sustained at least over my lifetime, the relationship is inverted[2]: we've somehow managed to accumulate more wealth as we've become less laissez-faire. This is a confounding variable that needs to be controlled for before we can draw a causal inference either way.
I'd also argue that broader land policy, education, formal banking institutions, infrastructure, immigration policy, patents and other forms of economic protectionism, and research and development all belong in that causal model since they also tend to be things I look at when analyzing risk and uncertainty.
--
0: I'm still unsure if this quantification is even appropriate. Libertarian-ness admits a whole-ass vector space of institutional characteristics, and it isn't obvious to me how the norm would fall down to aggregate all of them as a single scalar for the purposes of making this argument.
1: The fact that pre-Columbian civilizations didn't have the wheel was often a justification for how backwards they were. As it turns out, when you have as many rivers as North America has, getting around without the wheel is no big deal. It's just pre-Columbian YAGNI.
2: Well, kinda. Both "wealth" and "laissez-faire-ness" minimally need operational definitions and some kind of partial order to be comparable like this.
WalterBright 3 hours ago [-]
> It wasn't liquid wealth in the financial sense, but the US has had oodles of arable land, navigable waterways[1], natural resources, and favorable geography. It's only within the last 250 years that we've realized wealth in the form of bonkers huge internal markets and (at least, before recently) high levels of immigration.
So has Russia, South America, Africa, Asia, etc. The high levels of immigration came from poor people in un-free countries coming to the US to make their fortunes. Free markets is what has distinguished the US from other countries.
And every country that has tried free markets since has prospered accordingly, regardless of their natural resources, waterways, etc. Like, what natural resources does Taiwan have?
nrr 2 hours ago [-]
> The high levels of immigration came from poor people in un-free countries coming to the US to make their fortunes. Free markets is what has distinguished the US from other countries.
I accept that free markets is only one possible answer here. A lot of folks moved here because the US had all of that land that I'd mentioned. There were also some unusually high wages here compared to most of Europe in the 1700's[0, 1]. The political institutions here also allowed certain freedoms that weren't available in Europe (of particular note for me personally is the Münster rebellion), and by the time the earliest members of my family moved here in the 1860's, there were already immigrant communities to lean on.
This goes notwithstanding that the US had developed a bonkers huge continental economy with relatively abundant capital.
My argument isn't that markets didn't make this possible. My argument is that drawing a causal inference based on markets alone is intellectually dishonest.
> And every country that has tried free markets since has prospered accordingly, regardless of their natural resources, waterways, etc.
Can we identify the countries that "tried" a free market approach? Can we identify which of those subsequently prospered? Is the relationship between those two things consistent enough to support the consequent of prospering accordingly?
I think the first is perhaps most obvious, but I'm at a loss for how to answer the latter two.
> Like, what natural resources does Taiwan have?
I'm honestly left scratching my head a little at what about Taiwan meets the bar for being a free market or where the comparison is here.
Taiwan has historically had heavy-handed state-directed industrial domestic policy. Like, the favoring of semiconductors wasn't an accident of the market figuring out what to do there. The domestic capital markets at the time of TSMC's founding were too small to finance the construction of a fabrication plant, so the government stepped in to assume the risk[2].
From a risk management perspective, though, Taiwan does tend to eschew a lot of the economic protectionism that we see elsewhere. Tariffs are less of a problem there, and the state will tend to sell its interests in businesses that don't do well abroad, so there isn't a sort of pathological "Weekend at Bernie's" or "too big to fail" kind of situation.
Taiwan's government also tends to fund research and development much more heavily.
--
0: Lindert, Peter H. and Jeffrey G. Williamson. "American Colonial Incomes 1650-1774." NBER Working Paper Series, no. 19861. January 2014.
1: Lindert, Peter H. and Jeffrey G. Williamson. "American Incomes 1774-1860." NBER Working Paper Series, no. 18396. September 2012.
2: This condenses a lot of the history of TSMC. It actually starts with ITRI in 1973 and the edict from above that research should focus on semiconductor development. Morris Chang then built on a lot of expertise developed via RCA and devised the foundry model, which then led to TSMC's founding. In some sense, it could be argued that the state deliberately constructed the market surrounding the semiconductor manufacturing industry.
WalterBright 2 hours ago [-]
> the US had developed a bonkers huge continental economy with relatively abundant capital
The US created that economy and created the capital. Colonial America had much of nothing.
> Taiwan
I asked Google "is taiwan a free market country?"
yielding:
"Taiwan has a highly developed free-market economy where prices are set by supply and demand with little government control."
nrr 45 minutes ago [-]
> Colonial America had much of nothing.
I'm unsure that I'd draw that conclusion. Why else would the Crown want to tax the colonials so heavily?
> "Taiwan has a highly developed free-market economy where prices are set by supply and demand with little government control."
Forgive me. Was this in dispute? I was asking what causal work the label "free market" was doing with respect to Taiwan and how the country's economic development was adequately explained by laissez-faire economics.
The patient is healthy now, so the treatment that produced the health must have been "being healthy."
8 hours ago [-]
wyre 7 hours ago [-]
How is that not No True Scotsman? You disagree with the outcome of the described libertarian structures so it can't be actual libertarianism?
The government is inevitably going to do business with the market. Where do you draw the line between a government contract and favors to big business?
What is libertarianism's answer when there are 6 people that own everything, or more realistically, how the richest people in the world, already deeply entrenched and leading their respective industries from continuing to accrue resources until everything is owned by a small group of people and/or taking advantage of their market advantages to shut out any competition.
krupan 5 hours ago [-]
It is troublesome that libertarianism isn't super well defined, but no version of libertarianism has the government "doing business" with anyone. It only enforces laws, it doesn't buy and sell anything, and it certainly doesn't do anything to insulate anyone from market forces (like governments do now with regulations, subsidies, tax breaks, etc.).
wyre 4 hours ago [-]
So then what will the government due about supplying their military, offices, supplying technology, constructing the buildings that they work out of, purchasing or renting the land those buildings are on, or any other of the material goods that it needs to do the bare minimum of enforcing laws.
I don't see how libertarian can ever be well defined when it seemingly is always based in ideology and the arguments supporting it always seem to be fallacious.
2 hours ago [-]
throwway120385 8 hours ago [-]
Does it though? We've been living through that experiment with elimination of anti-trust and with other libertarian goals being met -- reduction of taxes, introduction of private industry into the public sphere, collection of tolls from public infrastructure, austerity, and general reduction of the size of government. All we've gotten is a replacement of the government with private enterprise. IOW there are a lot of companies out there that provide "public goods" for profit that are some combination of more expensive or lower-quality than the equivalent public services were in the heyday of the US. I think you should agree that without any kind of regulation at all companies are merging into uncontrollable behemoths, and without the ability to meaningfully "vote with our wallets" one of the central tenets of libertarian capitalism is pretty broken. I disagree that the US federal government is responsible for this state of affairs. Rather, the US federal government is taking a pretty strong stance of irresponsibility for this.
krupan 5 hours ago [-]
We in the US are so very far still from meeting the goals of libertarianism. Even farther than before with our current administration!
The current US government helps big business through a combination of tax breaks, burdensome regulations that small companies can't cope with, buying services (see: SpaceX, Boeing, Palantir, etc.), direct subsidies, tariffs, etc., etc.
With a libertarian government all of that goes away.
WalterBright 4 hours ago [-]
> and general reduction of the size of government
What? Seriously? The size of city government, state government, and federal government grows every year in scope, regulations, and spending.
WalterBright 8 hours ago [-]
That isn't remotely what libertarianism is.
coldtea 7 hours ago [-]
Doesn't matter what it is in principle.
WalterBright 4 hours ago [-]
It certainly is not feudalism.
wyre 9 hours ago [-]
Remember Cambridge Analytica and PRISM?
I don't think it's unrealistic for state or another party to be taking the decades of data on individuals they have and feeding it into their large hyperscale data centers and using the platforms they own to predict our actions and propagandize us.
Unfortunately, I don't think most people understand it's about mass surveillance yet, but about the misappropriation of resources in lower income communities to power LLMs and/or the intellectual theft and profits off the data used to train LLMs.
AnimalMuppet 9 hours ago [-]
Mass surveillance? You could be right.
Government? As others have said, government may well contract it out to private companies. But surveillance by private companies who have the government's ear isn't much better.
People understand? You're almost certainly wrong there.
_def 9 hours ago [-]
They understand that they don't need to care as long as there are enough others getting eaten before them.
pessimizer 6 hours ago [-]
> But surveillance by private companies who have the government's ear
It's the opposite that is true. Governments can selectively enforce laws against companies based on whether they comply or not, and pay them for whatever they want them to do.
The wealthy and their companies own Congress and the Executive because those positions rely on publicity to be elected, and they own the judiciary because the judges are both aligned with political parties and completely bribeable. They do not, however, exactly own the secret police funded by secret budgets - that's where the real executive lies, and that's where efforts are coordinated and conflicts between powerful blocs are adjudicated.
The performance we get is meaningless. The only important parts of the show we get to watch are following where the money is going and watching who state power is currently killing.
> People understand? You're almost certainly wrong there.
People certainly do understand. The media and the upper-middle class have made it almost a religion to spend their entire political life calling those people crazy. Why have upper-middle class people chosen such a stupid religion? Because a lot of money has been dumped into their stock portfolios.
iso1631 8 hours ago [-]
> But surveillance by private companies who have the government's ear isn't much better
No its much worse. At least democratic governments have some semblance of democratic accountability and of course some inability to work at scale. At worse they can just pay the private company, they generally will have lower capabilities unless they can hit an infinite money glitch (in which case they can use that to pay private companies)
3 hours ago [-]
gjsman-1000 9 hours ago [-]
> are often misguided
Dude, they're literally watching Flock Cameras go up in their neighborhood, being told they use AI, and anyone with a brain who can add 2+2 (or read Larry Ellison on "best behavior") concludes these data centers are not merely for ChatGPT.
In which case, they see noise pollution, water pollution, construction pollution, property value damage, utility bill cost explosions; and what's the reward? Surveillance and white-collar job loss, possibly culminating in home loss. With the added irony of corporations saying data centers will create jobs, simultaneously as they run record-breaking layoffs and increase outsourcing. "Misguided."
scarecrowbob 7 hours ago [-]
I agree with you.
Maybe consider my conciliatory rhetoric ("folks here think") in the original post as statement about what I think the vicious and hyper-authoritarian tech bros here believe, namely everything from obviously dumb crap ranging from
- "it's ccp propaganda"
- or "you don't have a right to provacy in public"
- or "the environmental concerns are overblown"
- or "you already have a cellphone so why you bitchin"
- or "it's a private company so you don't have to worry about the gov"
to less arguable but widely held neoliberal premises like "the state has a perogative to do what it wants so if you're not able to participate in the [typically closed] {city council|senate|NSA} decisions that lead here then you have no right to take direct action".
Thus you might understand what I am writing here is an attempt to not trigger the VC bros and to get them to consider that all us unwashed masses might have some kind of point?
I am often not the clearest writer, but the first sentence literally is about what I understand a lot of people on the site to believe, not a statement about what I belive.
People on this site have a highly propagandized view of what (they think of as) the proles think, and I'd like the folks of the site to consider that people really do understand the vicious ends to which these technologies are put, hence the rhetoric.
To be clear, on some level, I think my average no-kings/Tucker-Carson-stan-ing friends can accept the argument that cops will use this tech to give worms to ex-girlfriends. While that should be enough of a reason to reject the tech it really doesn't go far enough into why that tech is objectionable: forcing warrants for the mass-survellience network aren'r really sufficient to remedy my own worries.
From my position, that idea of tech/policy-as-solution is indeed misguided because my deeper worry is that the state will use it for "counter-insurgency". Considering oneself a potential insurgent is foreign to about anyone in US mainline politics. It is, however, what I feel deeply when think about how folks might indeed be "misguided", and I am not sure if you'd agree with that or not. I can read that into a lot of the posts responding above. But that more radical concern not what I wrote about when I wrote that post.
So sure, you're 100% correct and I agree with your point.
I do not think the idea that "folks undrstand the survellience aspect of all this tech" is generally legible to the fascists and other anti-leftist US "centrists" who populate this specific message board- I think the conversation in this thread supports that view.
It's hard to make that point into something they are able to read. I'd still like them to consider it.
fc417fc802 6 hours ago [-]
Be careful with the shallow dismissals. There's often truth in the isolated statement while it misses the mark in context. Thus dismissing it directly will easily make you look like you don't know what you're talking about.
For example:
> you don't have a right to provacy in public
You don't. That much is simple enough to work out given various highly entrenched cultural and legal values that have stood the test of time. The problem is that a network of surveillance cameras isn't remotely the same thing as an unrelated individual snapping a wide angle photograph of a street that you just so happen to be walking down.
So it's more like we need (but currently don't have) a legally recognized right not to be systematically surveilled in public spaces. Or better yet to make blanket surveillance outright illegal (which would also resolve many of the issues surrounding adtech).
> the environmental concerns are overblown
In many cases they are. In a few they aren't. As usual some businesses in some cases are exploiting holes in the regulations.
ActorNightly 8 hours ago [-]
The problem is, people who are the most spoken about personal freedom are the ones also voting conservative all the time. The libertarian square is still on the right.
By the time the government overreach starts being used on them, its gonna be too late.
Age old story in human history.
exolymph 9 hours ago [-]
It's projection on your part. The general public (excluding the "very online" subset thereof) is barely even aware of mass surveillance.
krupan 9 hours ago [-]
Not true. The major rallying cry in my home state is "no more surveillance data centers!"
scarecrowbob 7 hours ago [-]
I mean... Ken Paxton?
Animats 8 hours ago [-]
Interstate transportation of marijuana is illegal in the US.[1]
But why is DHS doing this? Stopping interstate drug trafficking is DEA's job, and DEA is in the Justice Department, not Homeland Security. Homeland Security should be looking for illegal aliens and labor contractors who move them.
Because they want the money. The reason drug crimes are so heavily enforced is because they come with large fines and fees and monetary rewards for the department that arrests them and the courts that prosecute them. They use it as a funding source.
Look at what fines and fees a court gets when they successfully prosecute a murder versus a drug crime. Look at the grants the feds give towards police drug enforcement departments.
DHS wants that easy cash.
sailfast 7 hours ago [-]
They already have a multi 100 billion dollar slush fund from Congress. If they’re doing it for the money then things have really gotten out of hand with internal DHS budgets.
abirch 6 hours ago [-]
Don't forget about civil forfeiture where the government sues the alleged drug money.
woodgala 7 hours ago [-]
Or punish the companies that hire them knowingly. Why punish the immigrants at all? If they weren’t given jobs they wouldn’t come.
pessimizer 6 hours ago [-]
"Homeland Security" isn't about homeland security, that's a meaningless propaganda name. It's the result of an evil initiative to coordinate all of America's Federal police and secret police agencies that was created after 9/11. It's not CBP/ICE, it sits above them (and everything else.)
It was something that had been warned against by everyone from the beginning of the US having secret police forces, and 9/11 was the excuse to do it. Before DHS, the FBI and the CIA (for example) had to go through protocols to share information with each other. This was good because the CIA aren't allowed to do some things that the FBI is allowed to do, and vice versa. Now they're really all one organization, although they have internal turf battles caused by power struggles between ambitious individuals.
someothherguyy 11 hours ago [-]
> Putting one of those participant’s phone numbers into WhatsApp reveals a profile picture of a law enforcement patch. A pawn with wings sits in the center, surrounded by lightning bolts. The patch reads, “Laredo Sector Tech Ops PITT,” indicating there is also a Predictive Intelligence Targeting Team in the Laredo Sector.
I get the vibe they're using ALPRs to identify drivers, and then going from there to find crime? Seems like criminal investigations should start with an actual crime. At the minimum, I would think that there would need to be some suspicion of criminal involvement to obtain a warrant to get financial records. Apparently this administration considers driving down the interstate suspicious enough to toss the constitution out the window.
ryandrake 8 hours ago [-]
We've long since transitioned away from "identify the crime and find the person" Law Enforcement to "target the person and find a crime" Law Enforcement.
mapontosevenths 7 hours ago [-]
At long last we have achieved equality. Now everyone can know what it's like to be pulled over for DWB!
avs733 9 hours ago [-]
>I get the vibe they're using ALPRs to identify drivers, and then going from there to find crime?
This has gone on for a LONG time, but the change to empower it with AI tools that are presumed accurate is the new amplification.
xhkkffbf 9 hours ago [-]
The article doesn't seem to explain why the BP targeted these folks and not other license plates gathered by the reader. Presumably there's some pattern, right?
theahura 7 hours ago [-]
Sci-Fi Author: In my book I invented the Torment Nexus as a cautionary tale.
Tech Company: At long last, we have created the Torment Nexus from classic sci-fi novel Don't Create The Torment Nexus.
asdff 7 hours ago [-]
Everyone's 401k: 100% TNEX
miohtama 9 hours ago [-]
The violation of privacy and government breaking the social contract is why we must keep developing encryption and cryptocurrencies.
CodeWriter23 7 hours ago [-]
What social contract with those who have chosen to circumvent the Jurisdiction of The United States are you referring to?
scarecrowbob 7 hours ago [-]
You mean the government that has been kidnapping the neighbors with whom I do have a real "social contract"?
I mean, I don't generally think that it's a very useful contact, but of all the things I've studied in my life, taking a long, hard look at the material history of the US government has done teh most to make me think that social relations and responsibilities have nothing do with formal governance.
thenatureboy 6 hours ago [-]
[flagged]
notaustinpowers 6 hours ago [-]
They kidnapped and confiscated the phone of a previous coworker of mine who was born here as a US citizen for a week after arresting 7 other people at his workplace. His mom had no idea where he was or if he was safe until he called her a week later asking to help him get home from a detention center 3 states away.
So, yes, they are kidnapping our neighbors.
pessimizer 5 hours ago [-]
Who hold dual citizenship in countries who are themselves virulently racist, and have far tougher immigration laws and enforcement than the US. Mexicans, Nigerians, Somalis and Indians are some of the most racist and tribalist cultures on the planet. Somalis have groups that look more West African who have lived in Somalia for centuries, and are legally barred from office.
They only talk about racism here because the US has a complex because it never compensated its slaves and never will, and knows this is wrong. Elite white children want to somehow make up for that, but also want to continue not doing anything for black people, so they've now made immigrants into a hobby/personality.
They're proud of not being to tell a Black American from a Somali immigrant "You're both welcome here" they say. Meanwhile, all that woke white person's relatives came over between 1880-1920 specifically to drown the black vote, their last name is entirely consonants; and the black person's family has American roots tracing back to the 1600s and they're blood-related to three "Founding Fathers."
"You're welcome here," the magnanimous anti-Trump crusader says to the black American, or the Somali. "Immigrants built this country," while talking about an immigrant who definitely has no connection to this country. An immigrant is an immigrant, black people are fungible, the real racism is against people who got here five minutes ago, I am very enlightened.
gjsman-1000 9 hours ago [-]
In what universe does using encryption to evade the government function as a survival strategy?
Real life doesn't work that way. The government always has the $5 wrench. Or, well, the ability to just shut down your ISP.
miohtama 9 hours ago [-]
It is obviously working when the government says it is working too well:
Shutting down the isp doesnt let them read what you've sent. There wouldn't be intensive government efforts to eliminate private encryption if it wasn't effective.
bigyabai 9 hours ago [-]
If you're at the point where the CIA is beating you with a $5 wrench, your encryption is working excellently.
triceratops 8 hours ago [-]
That's cold comfort if you'd rather avoid a wrench beating.
jjk166 8 hours ago [-]
Did you know they can just beat you with a wrench anyways?
The "maybe if we do what they say and don't make a fuss they'll be appeased and stop" strategy fails when matched up against those who will never be appeased and stop.
triceratops 7 hours ago [-]
> maybe if we do what they say and don't make a fuss
I never suggested that. Encryption is necessary but not sufficient.
Encrypt your shit. But above all vote, be engaged, and defend your rights like hell. If you're relying on encryption alone to protect you, it's already too late.
RHSeeger 6 hours ago [-]
Your wording was ambiguous
> In what universe does using encryption to evade the government function as a survival strategy?
Could be read as either
- It functions as a full and complete survival strategy
or
- One of it's functions is as a survival strategy
The former is saying it's all that is needed, the later is saying it's something that can be used in that way (but not saying it's enough). Kind of like saying that food is a human necessity vs saying it is _the_ human necessity.
triceratops 6 hours ago [-]
That was someone else, not me.
RhythmFox 7 hours ago [-]
I mean we can't help it if metal wrenches are cold... I guess we could ask them to hit them with a blowtorch first?
Triphibian 10 hours ago [-]
This tells me you should always pay cash if you are having a beer.
sfdlkj3jk342a 10 hours ago [-]
And that's why need to keep using cash and non-KYC'd crypto.
phyzome 7 hours ago [-]
I pay with cash for pretty much all in-person transactions. It's great! Minimal friction, very little tracking risk, works even when the ISP connection or the merchant network is down. You can even use it to pay people who don't use the same apps you do.
I even get discounts for it most places. Highly recommended.
charlieyu1 10 hours ago [-]
KYC should not be legal to begin with.
Borealid 10 hours ago [-]
KYC stands for Know Your Customer, the regulations that require institutions moving money between two parties to positively identify each of those two parties.
I think the intellectual position "it should be illegal for institutions transmitting money between two parties to identify either of those parties" might require some kind of logical argument behind it. Are you saying all financial transactions should be anonmyous by law? How would banks function if they were required to be blind to their customers? How would the government prosecute money laundering if all cash-trails went cold after the first time they passed a bank?
I understand people often like to express extreme positions on the Internet, but I think it's pretty easy to see an ideal society has rules somewhere in between "you're not allowed to know your customers" and "you can't accept a penny unless the giver does a blood draw in front of you and is confirmed to be in a central register of DNA".
nostrademons 10 hours ago [-]
Explaining the intellectual position without saying that I accept it (my actual views on this are "it's complicated"):
Arguments against KYC usually go hand-in-hand with the belief that AML statutes are a constitutional overreach and grant the federal government powers that they should not have. The logic is that the government's only role is to provide a stable currency and enforce contracts, and that anything else is involving the government in business that it has no business being in. What's done between two consenting parties should remain between two consenting parties.
Note that such a position usually doesn't have a problem with banks having information on their customers, for the purpose of judging credit risks. But it holds that such information should only be used for judging credit risks, ie if you are just depositing and withdrawing money that has already been earned, the bank should be agnostic to this. And they also object to this information being shared with a central clearinghouse where it can be used to cut off all access to the banking system rather than just one specific bank who objects to the source of funds.
pjc50 10 hours ago [-]
> I understand people often like to express extreme positions on the Internet, but I think it's pretty easy to see an ideal society has rules somewhere in between "you're not allowed to know your customers" and "you can't accept a penny unless the giver does a blood draw in front of you and is confirmed to be in a central register of DNA".
Yeah. This often results in ludicrous positions.
On the other hand, EFT flattens scale. Physical cash gets harder to handle in large quantities. Electronic money does not. It's equally easy to transfer a billion as a cent. So it's hard to get situations where small amounts have privacy and large amounts have scrutiny.
jjk166 7 hours ago [-]
> I think the intellectual position "it should be illegal for institutions transmitting money between two parties to identify either of those parties" might require some kind of logical argument behind it.
This is both a straw man position and begs the question. KYC laws aren't the option to identify either party, it's the requirement to identify both. The default throughout pretty much the whole of human history across cultures has been not having KYC laws. A logical and compelling argument must be made for implementing and unholding such laws.
> Are you saying all financial transactions should be anonmyous by law?
The anti-KYC position is that it should be possible for some financial transactions to be anonymous by law.
> How would banks function if they were required to be blind to their customers?
While they would not be required to be blind, most have been and by default would like to be. Maintaining identity records reliably tying people to transactions is a significant burden for banks for exactly the same reason it would be an incredible burden on you to keep track of which atm/cashier/couch cushion every dollar in your wallet came from.
Some banks may nevertheless consider the option a net positive, and require their customers to provide identification. People would be able to choose if they want to use those banks or not. If the benefits get passed along to the consumer, many likely would choose to.
> How would the government prosecute money laundering if all cash-trails went cold after the first time they passed a bank?
Presumably by going after the criminal infrastructure handling the money before it passed a bank. Giving up privacy rights tends to make law enforcement easier, but it is a common and reasonable opinion that we should not be trying to maximize the ease of law enforcement at the expense of privacy.
charlieyu1 8 hours ago [-]
Call me old school, but money should be as free as the bank note - untraceable and anyone getting it could use it freely.
lkt 10 hours ago [-]
You know exactly what he means.
antonvs 10 hours ago [-]
> the regulations that require institutions moving money between two parties to positively identify each of those two parties.
There is much more to it than that. If that were all KYC was, it wouldn't need regulations, because banks would need to do it anyway.
I've had banks straight out ask me, on the phone, what a wire transfer that I executed via their online system was for. And unlike, say, a traffic stop where when the cop starts fishing for things unrelated to the stop, you can exercise your right to remain silent, in the banking scenario the consequences for that can be losing access to your account, losing funds, and everything that follows from that.
Some of the info required by KYC:
* Why the customer wants an account
* Expected types of transactions
* Expected source and approximate volume of funds
* For businesses, the nature of the business and expected banking activity
* Source of funds
This can all translate into very invasive questions, especially when you do something that a computer system or middle manager thinks is suspicious, like sending money to your mother in another country.
anonymars 7 hours ago [-]
> I've had banks straight out ask me, on the phone, what a wire transfer that I executed via their online system was for
Wire transfers are also a common source of fraud; it's common for banks to ask about them so their customers don't unwittingly send their money into a black hole
antonvs 7 hours ago [-]
That might make sense if the bank wasn't also acting as an agent for the government, with potentially severe, life-changing consequences if they hear something they don't like.
If the question was purely for my protection, then I could simply answer "I don't wish to share that information."
But I can't actually answer like that, because it's too risky.
There's also no option to opt out of such investigations. I didn't request the bank to protect me from my own actions. When there's a credit card transaction that they suspect is fraudulent, they ask "did you authorize that transaction?" That's fine, and that's all they need to know. Asking me who I'm paying and why, with implied duress, is a completely unwarranted violation of my privacy.
There's also a serious issue with an assumption of guilt in these cases. Look at the case of Donald Trump right now, suing Capital One because they closed over 300 Trump business accounts due to suspected money laundering. In Trump's case, I can well believe that there was some kind of corruption, money laundering, or other criminal activity going on. The man is a documented criminal. But the bank is making a decision to penalize someone, potentially severely, without any meaningful due process. Guilty until proven innocent. For someone without the resources Trump has to challenge something like that, what chance do they have of getting a fair outcome?
This is all completely unacceptable in a supposedly civilized society, and you should not be defending it.
zmgsabst 10 hours ago [-]
I suspect the argument is more the particular KYC required by American law, eg, as long as your bank can identify you as a particular customer, they shouldn’t be required to collect certain information by law.
Though if I were going to rant, it would be about how constructive surveillance, such as requiring banks keep certain records and then claiming those records aren’t protected from search because they’re third party business records and not those of a private citizen, would be a much higher priority to fix.
Terr_ 7 hours ago [-]
Right: We must distinguish between:
1. "The business-model of being an anonymous fence of stolen goods is prohibited."
2. "You have to give us access to all your records at any time on the flimsiest of pretexts, and we'll charge you with a crime if you don't keep it ultra-secret that we even approached you."
logicchains 10 hours ago [-]
"regulations that require institutions moving money between two parties to positively identify each of those two parties"
Any such kind of regulation is not compatible with financial privacy. Maybe you could argue corporations don't deserve financial privacy, but an individual should have the right to send money to someone without being spied on the same way they should have the right to send a private communication to someone without being spied on.
AngryData 7 hours ago [-]
I agree. If I gave my mother $1000 cash nobody is expecting receipts and records. But if I send it through a bank or payment processor? Now all of a sudden im under suspicion of some bs terrorist or drug law violation.
sofixa 10 hours ago [-]
KYC is necessary because you do not want for money laundering to be easy. Nor sanctions avoiding, nor terrorist sponsoring.
miohtama 9 hours ago [-]
The criminal money and money laundering has been researched since 19th century. It has stayed at constant 2-5% of world GDP. However the cost of compliance has gone up exponentially.
Today banks use $250B/year on KYC checks. You could fix the world hunger and still have $50B leftover money with this amount.
cousinbryce 7 hours ago [-]
The board of directors recognizes the cost savings and immediately start solving world hunger. Meanwhile a gangster in Moldova intrinsically knows that world money laundering has hit 5% GDP and decides not to.
rapatel0 9 hours ago [-]
It's not a fair comparison. Money laundering controls likely have also been implemented since the 19th century in some way shape or form. Therefore, that 2-5% figure also includes the effect of those controls. This might just the natural equilibrium below which the juice is no longer worth the squeeze.
Access to information and interconnectedness have also increased exponentially so it might make sense that the costs have increased proportionately.
Finally 200B/year would not solve world hunger if nefarious actors grift away most of that money (especially because you wouldn't be able to track them with out some form of KYC)
ryandrake 8 hours ago [-]
You also have to ask if money laundering is bad enough of a crime to warrant all of the overkill responses to it. At some point the medicine becomes worse than the disease. Lawmakers tend to get into these inescapable loops:
Crime X exists -> Try solution Y -> Crime X still exists -> Try harsher solution Y0 -> Crime X still exists -> Try harsher solution Y1 -> Crime X still exists -> Try harsher solution Y2...
bdangubic 8 hours ago [-]
> Crime X exists -> Try solution Y ...
I think the problem here might be that while Crime by its definition might be the same, the way that it is executed changes drastically so Solution Y/Y0/Y1/Y2 are not required to exist in terms of severity (very likely solution Y was severe enough if you were tried and convicted of the crime) but they are needed because the way Crime X is executed changes (especially this Crime X)
AngryData 7 hours ago [-]
Hard disagree, low level crimes should not be so heavily enforced. A bit of blackmarket activity is not only beneficial but neccessary for any stable economy. It can't be allowed at mass scale, but you can't effectively micromanage every transaction and account for every situation for every single good or dollar.
charlieyu1 8 hours ago [-]
Why should our rights be restricted when law enforcement is impotent?
newspaper1 10 hours ago [-]
Who decides who we're sanctioning and who is a "terrorist"? Not me, that's for sure! My money is my business and I don't need the state nanny watching who I send it to.
miohtama 9 hours ago [-]
Southern Poverty Law Center decides:
> Government should require regular, mandatory reporting by technology service providers to document abuse of their systems including financial support of violence, harassment, and terrorism.This includes implementation of mandatory financial abuse reporting requirements for internet services operating in the United States, including social media services, infrastructure providers, banking institutions, cryptocurrency exchanges, crowdfunding sites, video streaming platforms, and the like.
> [These companies] should be required to investigate and report the details of harms and abuse of their service. There should be … penalties applied to services that refuse these tracking and reporting responsibilities.
I just tried to pay my elderly neighbors cell phone bill here in California. I will spare you the details. Is all of this really required?
It reminds me of a time when credit and credit cards were flying fast. Large losses started appearing on consumer credit accounts by the tens of thousands. A casual look into it indicated that it was the employees and leaders of the sector, who read and understood the credit agreement that put liability ultimately on the company. The actual credit card employees, adjacent accountants, quick witted cons, all siphoning money from credit cards in very large numbers. Why say this? Actual customers with increasing security requirements were largely not at all involved with the growing fraud. It was the participants in the credit industry seizing the opportunity to steal, with relative impunity. Things have changed and changed again since then with scale, local rules, fraud detection systems etc.
The point of the rant is that ordinary people's rights are squeezed, privacy vanishes, routine humiliating document production and security, required because the people in the industry that created those is cheating.
Yes of course there is cheating on taxes over tip money, or no-show jobs for relatives.. but what kind of society is being built with constant oversight into ordinary people's activity ?
cash indeed
zmgsabst 10 hours ago [-]
In practice, KYC does little to stop any of that — but does do a lot to enable mass surveillance and oppression.
HighGoldstein 10 hours ago [-]
> In practice, KYC does little to stop any of that
Source? The fact that it's not infallible doesn't mean that it's ineffective.
miohtama 9 hours ago [-]
Here is a good book on the topic of ineffectiveness of anti-money laundering:
They route through all kinds of intermediaries that handle the banking by proxy — eg, as we saw in the Panama Papers and similar leaks.
Reporting $600 in CashApp isn’t about stopping cartels, terrorists, etc; it’s about harassing sex workers and street dealers, profiling side businesses, etc.
ratelimitsteve 9 hours ago [-]
when terrorism can be defined as "having a book" and can result in indefinite detention without charge or access to an attorney maybe i'm not 100% gung-ho by default on everything labelled anti-terrorism
I want crypto to work like cash so bad, but in practice it's too complicated for your average person and I'm not sure anyone has the incentive to make it simple.
asdff 7 hours ago [-]
You know Zelle and venmo already won the arms race when every person selling meat cooked over open flame on the side of the road is set up for that and not crypto.
Cider9986 8 hours ago [-]
Monero works like cash and there's nothing complicated to get the privacy. With QR codes it's not bad but sync time and 20 minute confirmation is a convenience proble.
Cider9986 8 hours ago [-]
With Monero it doesn't matter for future transaction privacy if it's KYCed just like it doesn't matter for cash. Financial institutions know you have purchased Monero like if you withdrew cash from an ATM, but then it goes off their radar.
asdff 7 hours ago [-]
I wonder if we are at the point its safer to just cash your entire paycheck? I mean people's cards get skimmed or numbers leaked all the time. Maybe not under your mattress but some other hidy spot a thief will never find your cash, but the risk is probably nonzero for every debit/creidt card holder that they will not experience some fraud. Muggings are also simpler if you are cashed based. You get mugged with cash on you, that's it, that's the extent of the damage just whatever bills you had on you. You get mugged with your cards on you, good luck cancelling them quickly with that banking app on your phone the thief also stole off you.
jimt1234 9 hours ago [-]
I'm increasingly finding businesses that simply don't accept cash. Want a beer at the Clippers game? Can't pay with cash. Even a local bar near my house stopped accepting cash about a year ago - a bar!
Civil asset forfeiture is banned in Maine, Montana, New Mexico, and North Carolina from a quick search.
dabinat 3 hours ago [-]
In the UK they passed laws a few decades ago allowing people to be surveilled, called RIPA. It was marketed as something necessary to catch terrorists and major criminals, that would only be used for those purposes.
Within a few years local councils were using it for highly trivial things like fly-tipping, littering, and checking people lived in school catchment areas.
This kind of stuff always trickles down.
polskibus 10 hours ago [-]
Minority Report anyone?
buellerbueller 10 hours ago [-]
unquestionably, which is weird, because you asked a question!
6 hours ago [-]
tyingq 4 hours ago [-]
The Precogs don't see what you're gonna do, they see what you're gonna do if you're not stopped.
11 hours ago [-]
cucumber3732842 10 hours ago [-]
I remember back in ye olde dark ages when "big data" was the hot buzzword people of a certain bent couldn't get enough of this kind of stuff. Everyone was jacking off nonstop to the idea that we could just hoover up everyone's data ad then "efficiently" or "proactively" dispatch enforcement resources. People talked all sorts of big talk about stuff like cross referencing people's Home Depot spend with permit requirements, identifying small businesses that don't have healthy enough financials to be fully compliant, cross referencing invoices and delivery receipts to identify overloaded trucks, and generally finding all sorts of ways to fine the crap out of people for the pettiest of petty deviance. They considered this a noble goal.
Everyone's head was too far up their asses to look at the magic crystal ball called "history" and realize that such systems and tactics would be used to go after <checks notes> weed dealers and brown people.
Be careful what you wish for I guess.
antonvs 10 hours ago [-]
The people you're talking about probably still consider that a noble goal, though. In fact some of the people like that are CEOs of tech companies.
BoggleOhYeah 3 hours ago [-]
Garry Tan's dream coming true.
lbrito 10 hours ago [-]
This comes straight out of Shoshana Zuboff's Surveillance Capitalism book. If you haven't: read it.
4b11b4 7 hours ago [-]
OpenAI swarm incident is just good practice
clumsysmurf 10 hours ago [-]
> The DHS document obtained by 404 Media shows that Border Patrol is analyzing the financial activity of Americans to find people to pull over...
> It is not clear how exactly Border Patrol is monitoring Americans’ financial activity.
Can anyone take a guess how they are monitoring financial activity?
eloisius 10 hours ago [-]
Buying it from CapitalOne like everyone else?
kart23 9 hours ago [-]
spending taxpayer money on buying the taxpayers data from credit card companies.
imagine paying someone to buy your own information to spy on you, pretty incredible system that we've come up with
mrguyorama 8 hours ago [-]
Explicitly bypasses your rights too! Cops don't need a warrant if they can buy it with your money.
pauldavis 5 hours ago [-]
This is exactly "information retrieval charges" from the film "Brazil"
convolvatron 9 hours ago [-]
I worked a little on a finsec program in the early 90s. I had an anonymized dataset with bank account deposits and withdrawals and credit card transactions. I don't know how complete it was, but dividing by the US population the total number of records made it pretty feasible that it was the whole thing.
maxrev17 8 hours ago [-]
I saw a film about this…
madaxe_again 10 hours ago [-]
I live in Europe.
I’ve been under investigation for money laundering twice in the last three years - not because I’ve laundered a single dime, but because I have no discernible employment and move large capital sums around the globe almost constantly, and my bank accounts and tax returns inarguably look fucking weird. All 100% above board - I just made some good investments a while back.
I even had the feds come knocking because they decided they needed to check I wasn’t trafficking narcotics. We had a nice chat, they decided they didn’t need to search the place, and six months later I got a letter confirming the case had been archived. Like one of the folks in the article, I had weed on me when they rocked up. Thankfully, in Europe, that’s basically just a “shrug” by law enforcement, unless you’ve got clear intent to distribute. From how it all went, they had quite clearly decided this was a waste of their fucking time before they even arrived.
None of this is a good thing, and none of it is terribly new, either - reporting on finances has been going on for decades, but the integration is getting tighter.
The main problem as I see it is that it has a horrendous false positive rate, and you end up with innocent folks like yours truly having to waste their time and energy proving that they are innocent of a crime that a machine dreamt up.
taybin 9 hours ago [-]
It does sound like you should have been investigated though. Like, this sounds like the (or a) system working. What would the alternatives be? Don't investigate for money laundering? Or have so much info that they can eliminate you as interesting without even having a visit?
iamnothere 6 hours ago [-]
Wait for actual evidence of a crime (or even an anonymous tip) instead of going on a fishing expedition targeting anyone with an unusual lifestyle or weird spending habits?
I’m sure we could just put always-on cameras in every house to catch criminals too, but that doesn’t mean it’s a good idea.
RHSeeger 6 hours ago [-]
> I’m sure we could just put always-on cameras in every house to catch criminals too, but that doesn’t mean it’s a good idea.
I use this type of point all the time, and every time to blank stares.
Me> The Flock surveillance network is bad - it is an invasion of privacy and gives way too much power to people that should not have that power. It _can_ be used to solve crimes, and does. But so could not allowing anyone out of their house without a permit. But that, too, would be stupid and harm society
Them> _blank stare_ But.. it saved a child once.
RHSeeger 6 hours ago [-]
False positives are never a _should_ thing, they're a "best we can do, and worth the cost" thing (or not). It's entirely reasonable to push for a better system, one with fewer false positives (and false negatives).
taybin 2 hours ago [-]
I think finding better systems with fewer false negatives and fewer false positives is very difficult and might even be impossible for many things. It might be my lack of imagination, but I often think about the measures taken to prevent child abuse. As I see it, you’re either going to get kids left in abusive situations or you’re going to have kids unjustly removed. Both are terrible. I’m not going to argue where the action bias should be. We live in an imperfect world.
I think preventing other crimes is similar. There will always be injustice on some side of the issue. And I’m not trying to argue that that means the status quo is great! But I don’t think we will eventually hone in a perfect system. Maybe just circle around some imaginary point, refining rules and processes until the whole thing breaks down.
RHSeeger 2 hours ago [-]
Even if we can't find ways to improve, we should continue to try.
madaxe_again 2 hours ago [-]
The actual money launderers don’t leave honking great big digital footprints everywhere, and so aren’t found by these systems.
ratelimitsteve 9 hours ago [-]
"We're proud to announce today that we're rolling out a trial phase of the Torment Nexus, as made famous in the scifi novel and accompanying film entitled 'Whatever You Do, Do Not Create the Torment Nexus'."
11 hours ago [-]
Havoc 10 hours ago [-]
One more reason the bail on the Visa/MC network asap
AnimalMuppet 9 hours ago [-]
To what? Straight cash? Or do you have an alternate network?
asdff 7 hours ago [-]
Cash is still king. You have to figure all potential networks are backdoored by intelligence. They have things they could do with cash too but its a lot more real work no one has the budget to scale out compared to what you can do at scale in the digital space, thanks to the fact that it is a fungible physical entity already set loose on all corners of the earth.
carpe171 10 hours ago [-]
palantir?
atian 8 hours ago [-]
it's called malfeasance
2OEH8eoCRo0 9 hours ago [-]
Buy something or get out! /s
buellerbueller 11 hours ago [-]
[flagged]
0xdeadbeefbabe 10 hours ago [-]
The practice of reporting? They optimize for the least costly words for the most clicks. It's more about what's possible than what is reasonable.
buellerbueller 10 hours ago [-]
The practice of unconstitutional parallel construction in law enforcement.
tiahura 11 hours ago [-]
Feds send out bulletin to local cops - BOTL suspected drug dealer. Fed’s suspect b/c of suspicious financial transactions.
Seems reasonable and not newsworthy.
11 hours ago [-]
siliconc0w 11 hours ago [-]
I think the problem is the parallel construction and lack of warrant
iAMkenough 10 hours ago [-]
Who gets to review financial transactions (without a search warrant) and determine them as suspicious and actionable? Every time your bank flags a transaction, a police officer shows up at your door?
Seems like there's no way to administer this warrantless surveillance without violating the Fourth Amendment of the U.S. Constitution.
toomuchtodo 10 hours ago [-]
This is unconstitutional (fourth amendment) parallel construction. Combined with a corporate surveillance state
panopticon, this is "Show me the man and I'll show you the crime."
> Edit: YESSSS -4 points; those are rookie numbers! Help me pump them up, HN technofascists! Prove my point for me!
Whilst talking about the downvotes is uninteresting I will give in to the urge to observe that -4 is the lowest a comment can go. But sneering at the community is also against the guidelines, so a comment like this will attract flags by people who actually agree with you.
buellerbueller 10 hours ago [-]
I am sneering at only the technofascists in the community, who deserve the derision of those who are anti fascist within the community, or really anyone who is saddened by the way the technofascists are sullying the name of the tech community.
But good to know that -4 is rock bottom.
If a community prevents you from sneering at fascism, that community is a problem.
toomuchtodo 10 hours ago [-]
Don't bother, it isn't an effective use of time. Just go organize and vote, that moves the needle, nothing here does. Midterms are coming. This place is just a unique coffee shop. Participate in it for what it is.
buellerbueller 6 hours ago [-]
When my votes are between the democrat who supports Israeli fascism or the republican who supports American fascism, it doesn't really feel like voting matters.
6 hours ago [-]
righthand 10 hours ago [-]
[flagged]
politician 10 hours ago [-]
Another headline to trigger the comrades.
Do you not realize that all countries monitor capital movement so that, for example, the rulings of their judiciaries are enforced?
bigfishrunning 6 hours ago [-]
Wouldn't the comrades want financial activity to be monitored, to make sure that nobody is getting more then everyone else? (unless they're a party official, of course)
stanleykm 6 hours ago [-]
i have a feeling neither of you actually know what the comrades want
MeetingsBrowser 9 hours ago [-]
Do you not realize last remnants of privacy died years ago?
If you want to keep a secret, you must also hide it from yourself.
tiahura 10 hours ago [-]
FUD - the article literally says they don’t where the data came from.
majorchord 7 hours ago [-]
Why should we not fear the government using data (any data, but especially incorrect data) to make up thought crimes?
tiahura 7 hours ago [-]
Maybe we read different articles? This one suggests a drug dealer’s money laundering set off alarms that he was a drug dealer.
It's likely projection on my part but I have a deep suspicion that people understand that mass surveillance by the state is the main use case for all these LLMs, camera systems, and increasing large data centers.
That certainly is my own worry, at least.
Its not mass surveillance by the state, exclusively.
Its also the potential for mis-use and corruption by criminal networks.
Plus, there's that whole degradation of culture factor. Sure, you trust your government today. But do you trust the government of tomorrow?
Anyone who thinks this is misguided is probably seeking to profit from it at some point.
And that is precisely the problem.
Most Americans really, really don't. Gallup puts Americans' trust in major institutions, including several parts of the government, at around 30% [0]
In OECD countries, trust in government sits at around 39% [1]
I would say that most people in Western nations don't trust their government. Whether they agree with what all their governments are doing is another issue-by-issue matter, but I would guess they don't love that on the whole, either.
[0] https://news.gallup.com/poll/712436/confidence-institutions-...
[1] https://www.oecd.org/en/publications/oecd-survey-on-drivers-...
I’m not offering this advice because I’m perfect either, I find it difficult sometimes to be respectful of someone I disagree with. You can take it or leave it, I’ll just say editing those sorts of things out of my own posts has been helpful.
Its another to do something truly effective about it.
Alas, the American people seem to be utterly paralyzed. Catatonic, even.
When all it really needs is civic responsibility and an understanding that the government derives its power from the people, and thus the people always get the government they deserve.
You've had people being apologists for all manner of bad forms of government around the world for at least the past 25 years. This shouldn't be surprising.
Then the Nazis rolled in. And you can imagine what happened with those registers.
So it doesn't even have to be about your own government. And with digital access being a world away, it can indeed be a threat.
Don't look at intentions. Look at capabilities.
Private companies buy up this information like mad. It's so cheap - five figures gets you a database of every person over 18 in the USA and their addresses. Another five figures gets work history for them. Another five figures gets you property information. Another gets you social media feeds. Etc. Some vendors even sell it ad hoc with little up-front cost.
For less than a million a year, any company can build an extensive profile on every person in the USA. These companies are just adding to that list.
Communism is similarly self-serving. I own no property, and so my ideal government has no concept of property and assigns resources to everyone.
"Clean up trash" and "Donate money to the poor" are not as unevenly beneficial. Also "Donate money to the poor" is a far cry from "Seize money and give that to the poor".
But under the context of "government has no concept of property and assigns resources to everyone" it is not you (or any single person) that decides that, it's the contextual Communist government saying and doing that. Just because it benefits random governed person does not make it directly self serving.
The nuance is, in this version of Communism, the Communism itself it is not self serving it trys to equalize -- Libertarianism, in this context, enforces self serving ideals
A major point of libertarianism is to tear down the government structure that enables that crony capitalism and restores real competition in the market.
If that's true then Libertarians have a rosier view of government than I do. A regular David vs. Goliath situation. Biblical stories aside, my money is on Goliath.
It's not about the amount of physical force they can assert.
Suppose you have a constrained set of things the government is allowed to do. They prohibit fraud, non-consensual physical harm (e.g. violence, pollution) and market consolidation. Market consolidation is given a rigid definition in the nature of any organization having more than 15% market share in any market, a rigid consequence in the nature of that organization being fully atomized, and a right for customers and suppliers to bring a private case against them with the same consequence if they're over the threshold and the government prosecutor won't do it. Every citizen has the constitutional right to smash corporations in consolidated markets into smithereens.
Meanwhile the government is prohibited from enacting more specific economic rules. They lack the authority to enact things like certificate of need laws, zoning density restrictions, price controls, anything that acts as a constraint on adversarial interoperability, etc. Micromanaging the population is not allowed.
How do these constraints benefit large incumbents? What benefit is there in giving the government the authority to do things that history has consistently shown to be anti-competitive and inefficient?
This requires a magically flexible definition of "market" at very best.
The smallest number of competitors that can split market share such that none exceed 15% is 7, and that cuts it absurdly close for an existential risk.
Do non-profit organizations count for this rule? If not, how would corporate structures that intentionally obfuscate these distinctions, e.g. IKEA, be handled?
If there's not some extremely tricky qualifiers, these markets seem likely to be a problem, just for starters: medicines†, operating systems, utilities to a specific house or even city, spy satellites, chemicals that are difficult or dangerous to synthesize, combat aircraft, crewed spacecraft, EUV lithography, armored fighting vehicles, cellular telecommunications services, samples of organisms restricted to high biosafety level labs, and literally any new product category. † Imagine a serious condition getting its first drug treatment approved and the company saying "Only every seventh patient is eligible." Also, no one could offer a specific specialized surgical procedure until seven or more independent organizations in the same geographic area have qualified staff and equipment, which would be especially hard for any novel techniques; if the problem it addressed was rare, they'd also effectively be forced into a cartel to allocate the patients evenly.
There's also separately and unavoidably the massive problem of transitioning from the current situation to one compliant with these restrictions.
Edit: Switch to using a dagger for the footnote to avoid a formatting issue.
Markets, left to their own accord, naturally tend to monopolies and cooperation. Cooperation just works better than competition. Competition is, really, a zero-sum game, a race to the bottom for companies. Cooperation is optimal, it’s “everybody wins”.
Even if companies didn’t just buy up each other (why wouldn’t they? We need laws against that), they would certainly work together to set prices as high as the market can bear. Which is then, effectively, a monopoly.
I mean, imagine a perfect market with hundreds of thriving competitors. What happens over time? As the industry matures, competitors buy each other up and consolidate capital. Then, newcomers can’t break in, because they don’t have the capital. And any newcomers who have a new innovative process or product, just get bought out before they threaten the market share. Then, eventually, there are only a handful of companies left. It’s trivial for them to move in lock-step and everyone wins… except the consumer.
Look at any domain in the US - they’re all like this. The only exceptions are new domains, like AI. That will change, too, we’ve seen this pattern thousands of times.
There’s two moats here: regulation, and capital. You can eliminate the regulation moat with libertarianism, sure, but not the capital moat. And, you strengthen the capital moat when you remove the regulation. So nothing changes. Best case scenario, the situation is the same. Worst case, it’s accelerated.
No, they don't. To become a monopoly, they need the collusion of government to outlaw competition.
The poster boy of monopolies, Standard Oil, never had a monopoly. During its rise, it dropped the consumer price of kerosene 70%. Its market share dropped steadily during the years of the anti-trust trial.
> It’s trivial for them to move in lock-step and everyone wins… except the consumer.
Ever wonder what happened to IBM?
All of these systems function well ... "in theory". Even the ones you may not agree with. Socialism and communism are perfectly fine theoretical systems, until you introduce humans into the equation with desires for power, wealth, etc.
I have seen no hint that Libertarianism is somehow above this and will be the panacea. I also have no idea how you come to the conclusion that collusion will not be a problem in a libertarian world.
The US has been the closest any country has come to libertarianism. And the US thrived on it.
Germany did not self-destruct. It was destroyed by the Allied powers.
And, the US is not the most libertarian country, it’s not even close. The US is developed, so it’s automatically more centrally controlled than most nations. There are plenty of underdeveloped nations that are, effectively, much more libertarian. Because their governments don’t have the capital to enforce much of anything. Those nations are doing quite poorly, hence why they are underdeveloped.
You will notice a pattern in the development of nations: as nations develop, the government has more stake in the macro economics of said nation. Because of course they do: they want the economics to go well, and they have the economics to enforce that, or try to. The US government does not “sit out” when things are going poorly, the opposite is true.
> the US is not the most libertarian country, it’s not even close.
Please give an example.
After WW2 the US stood alone and enacted a lot of socialist ideas. Then spent a few decades slowly erroding those worker rights and sensible regulations in favor of corporate interests.
Do you think children did not work in colonial America? or Europe? In what contemporary country did children not work? Same for the hours and days of work.
There's a good reason why children have always worked prior to 1900. The economy was not productive enough to enable them to not work. The same for hours worked.
When productivity rose sufficiently, child labor disappeared, as did the long hours.
Next I wonder what "a lot of socialist ideas" were. The New Deal during the Great depression was fairly socialist with the government making up work it could pay people to do and such, but I'm pretty sure after WWII is when anti-socialist (anti-Soviet) sentiment peaked in the US
Yes, the US also has relatively liberal economics [1], and maybe that's why the US has done well, but I think there are too many confounding variables to conclude it's purely because of economic liberalism.
[1] I mean liberal in the academic sense, not as a synonym for Democrat.
It should also be falsifiable and admit a counterfactual.
1. The US was within some epsilon of being libertarian;
2. The US became rich;
3. Therefore, the prosperity of the US was a direct consequence of libertarianism.
It's 2. here that I scratch my head at because, uh, the US has through its entire history, even pre-1776, been rich. It wasn't liquid wealth in the financial sense, but the US has had oodles of arable land, navigable waterways[1], natural resources, and favorable geography. It's only within the last 250 years that we've realized wealth in the form of bonkers huge internal markets and (at least, before recently) high levels of immigration.
In fact, going back to 1., if we consider the laissez-faire dimension alone and compare it against the rate of wealth growth the US has sustained at least over my lifetime, the relationship is inverted[2]: we've somehow managed to accumulate more wealth as we've become less laissez-faire. This is a confounding variable that needs to be controlled for before we can draw a causal inference either way.
I'd also argue that broader land policy, education, formal banking institutions, infrastructure, immigration policy, patents and other forms of economic protectionism, and research and development all belong in that causal model since they also tend to be things I look at when analyzing risk and uncertainty.
--
0: I'm still unsure if this quantification is even appropriate. Libertarian-ness admits a whole-ass vector space of institutional characteristics, and it isn't obvious to me how the norm would fall down to aggregate all of them as a single scalar for the purposes of making this argument.
1: The fact that pre-Columbian civilizations didn't have the wheel was often a justification for how backwards they were. As it turns out, when you have as many rivers as North America has, getting around without the wheel is no big deal. It's just pre-Columbian YAGNI.
2: Well, kinda. Both "wealth" and "laissez-faire-ness" minimally need operational definitions and some kind of partial order to be comparable like this.
So has Russia, South America, Africa, Asia, etc. The high levels of immigration came from poor people in un-free countries coming to the US to make their fortunes. Free markets is what has distinguished the US from other countries.
And every country that has tried free markets since has prospered accordingly, regardless of their natural resources, waterways, etc. Like, what natural resources does Taiwan have?
I accept that free markets is only one possible answer here. A lot of folks moved here because the US had all of that land that I'd mentioned. There were also some unusually high wages here compared to most of Europe in the 1700's[0, 1]. The political institutions here also allowed certain freedoms that weren't available in Europe (of particular note for me personally is the Münster rebellion), and by the time the earliest members of my family moved here in the 1860's, there were already immigrant communities to lean on.
This goes notwithstanding that the US had developed a bonkers huge continental economy with relatively abundant capital.
My argument isn't that markets didn't make this possible. My argument is that drawing a causal inference based on markets alone is intellectually dishonest.
> And every country that has tried free markets since has prospered accordingly, regardless of their natural resources, waterways, etc.
Can we identify the countries that "tried" a free market approach? Can we identify which of those subsequently prospered? Is the relationship between those two things consistent enough to support the consequent of prospering accordingly?
I think the first is perhaps most obvious, but I'm at a loss for how to answer the latter two.
> Like, what natural resources does Taiwan have?
I'm honestly left scratching my head a little at what about Taiwan meets the bar for being a free market or where the comparison is here.
Taiwan has historically had heavy-handed state-directed industrial domestic policy. Like, the favoring of semiconductors wasn't an accident of the market figuring out what to do there. The domestic capital markets at the time of TSMC's founding were too small to finance the construction of a fabrication plant, so the government stepped in to assume the risk[2].
From a risk management perspective, though, Taiwan does tend to eschew a lot of the economic protectionism that we see elsewhere. Tariffs are less of a problem there, and the state will tend to sell its interests in businesses that don't do well abroad, so there isn't a sort of pathological "Weekend at Bernie's" or "too big to fail" kind of situation.
Taiwan's government also tends to fund research and development much more heavily.
--
0: Lindert, Peter H. and Jeffrey G. Williamson. "American Colonial Incomes 1650-1774." NBER Working Paper Series, no. 19861. January 2014.
1: Lindert, Peter H. and Jeffrey G. Williamson. "American Incomes 1774-1860." NBER Working Paper Series, no. 18396. September 2012.
2: This condenses a lot of the history of TSMC. It actually starts with ITRI in 1973 and the edict from above that research should focus on semiconductor development. Morris Chang then built on a lot of expertise developed via RCA and devised the foundry model, which then led to TSMC's founding. In some sense, it could be argued that the state deliberately constructed the market surrounding the semiconductor manufacturing industry.
The US created that economy and created the capital. Colonial America had much of nothing.
> Taiwan
I asked Google "is taiwan a free market country?"
yielding:
"Taiwan has a highly developed free-market economy where prices are set by supply and demand with little government control."
I'm unsure that I'd draw that conclusion. Why else would the Crown want to tax the colonials so heavily?
> "Taiwan has a highly developed free-market economy where prices are set by supply and demand with little government control."
Forgive me. Was this in dispute? I was asking what causal work the label "free market" was doing with respect to Taiwan and how the country's economic development was adequately explained by laissez-faire economics.
The patient is healthy now, so the treatment that produced the health must have been "being healthy."
The government is inevitably going to do business with the market. Where do you draw the line between a government contract and favors to big business?
What is libertarianism's answer when there are 6 people that own everything, or more realistically, how the richest people in the world, already deeply entrenched and leading their respective industries from continuing to accrue resources until everything is owned by a small group of people and/or taking advantage of their market advantages to shut out any competition.
I don't see how libertarian can ever be well defined when it seemingly is always based in ideology and the arguments supporting it always seem to be fallacious.
The current US government helps big business through a combination of tax breaks, burdensome regulations that small companies can't cope with, buying services (see: SpaceX, Boeing, Palantir, etc.), direct subsidies, tariffs, etc., etc.
With a libertarian government all of that goes away.
What? Seriously? The size of city government, state government, and federal government grows every year in scope, regulations, and spending.
I don't think it's unrealistic for state or another party to be taking the decades of data on individuals they have and feeding it into their large hyperscale data centers and using the platforms they own to predict our actions and propagandize us.
Unfortunately, I don't think most people understand it's about mass surveillance yet, but about the misappropriation of resources in lower income communities to power LLMs and/or the intellectual theft and profits off the data used to train LLMs.
Government? As others have said, government may well contract it out to private companies. But surveillance by private companies who have the government's ear isn't much better.
People understand? You're almost certainly wrong there.
It's the opposite that is true. Governments can selectively enforce laws against companies based on whether they comply or not, and pay them for whatever they want them to do.
The wealthy and their companies own Congress and the Executive because those positions rely on publicity to be elected, and they own the judiciary because the judges are both aligned with political parties and completely bribeable. They do not, however, exactly own the secret police funded by secret budgets - that's where the real executive lies, and that's where efforts are coordinated and conflicts between powerful blocs are adjudicated.
The performance we get is meaningless. The only important parts of the show we get to watch are following where the money is going and watching who state power is currently killing.
> People understand? You're almost certainly wrong there.
People certainly do understand. The media and the upper-middle class have made it almost a religion to spend their entire political life calling those people crazy. Why have upper-middle class people chosen such a stupid religion? Because a lot of money has been dumped into their stock portfolios.
No its much worse. At least democratic governments have some semblance of democratic accountability and of course some inability to work at scale. At worse they can just pay the private company, they generally will have lower capabilities unless they can hit an infinite money glitch (in which case they can use that to pay private companies)
Dude, they're literally watching Flock Cameras go up in their neighborhood, being told they use AI, and anyone with a brain who can add 2+2 (or read Larry Ellison on "best behavior") concludes these data centers are not merely for ChatGPT.
In which case, they see noise pollution, water pollution, construction pollution, property value damage, utility bill cost explosions; and what's the reward? Surveillance and white-collar job loss, possibly culminating in home loss. With the added irony of corporations saying data centers will create jobs, simultaneously as they run record-breaking layoffs and increase outsourcing. "Misguided."
Maybe consider my conciliatory rhetoric ("folks here think") in the original post as statement about what I think the vicious and hyper-authoritarian tech bros here believe, namely everything from obviously dumb crap ranging from
- "it's ccp propaganda"
- or "you don't have a right to provacy in public"
- or "the environmental concerns are overblown"
- or "you already have a cellphone so why you bitchin"
- or "it's a private company so you don't have to worry about the gov"
to less arguable but widely held neoliberal premises like "the state has a perogative to do what it wants so if you're not able to participate in the [typically closed] {city council|senate|NSA} decisions that lead here then you have no right to take direct action".
Thus you might understand what I am writing here is an attempt to not trigger the VC bros and to get them to consider that all us unwashed masses might have some kind of point?
I am often not the clearest writer, but the first sentence literally is about what I understand a lot of people on the site to believe, not a statement about what I belive.
People on this site have a highly propagandized view of what (they think of as) the proles think, and I'd like the folks of the site to consider that people really do understand the vicious ends to which these technologies are put, hence the rhetoric.
To be clear, on some level, I think my average no-kings/Tucker-Carson-stan-ing friends can accept the argument that cops will use this tech to give worms to ex-girlfriends. While that should be enough of a reason to reject the tech it really doesn't go far enough into why that tech is objectionable: forcing warrants for the mass-survellience network aren'r really sufficient to remedy my own worries.
From my position, that idea of tech/policy-as-solution is indeed misguided because my deeper worry is that the state will use it for "counter-insurgency". Considering oneself a potential insurgent is foreign to about anyone in US mainline politics. It is, however, what I feel deeply when think about how folks might indeed be "misguided", and I am not sure if you'd agree with that or not. I can read that into a lot of the posts responding above. But that more radical concern not what I wrote about when I wrote that post.
So sure, you're 100% correct and I agree with your point.
I do not think the idea that "folks undrstand the survellience aspect of all this tech" is generally legible to the fascists and other anti-leftist US "centrists" who populate this specific message board- I think the conversation in this thread supports that view.
It's hard to make that point into something they are able to read. I'd still like them to consider it.
For example:
> you don't have a right to provacy in public
You don't. That much is simple enough to work out given various highly entrenched cultural and legal values that have stood the test of time. The problem is that a network of surveillance cameras isn't remotely the same thing as an unrelated individual snapping a wide angle photograph of a street that you just so happen to be walking down.
So it's more like we need (but currently don't have) a legally recognized right not to be systematically surveilled in public spaces. Or better yet to make blanket surveillance outright illegal (which would also resolve many of the issues surrounding adtech).
> the environmental concerns are overblown
In many cases they are. In a few they aren't. As usual some businesses in some cases are exploiting holes in the regulations.
By the time the government overreach starts being used on them, its gonna be too late.
Age old story in human history.
But why is DHS doing this? Stopping interstate drug trafficking is DEA's job, and DEA is in the Justice Department, not Homeland Security. Homeland Security should be looking for illegal aliens and labor contractors who move them.
[1] https://federal-criminal.com/drugs/marijuana-cross-border-tr...
Look at what fines and fees a court gets when they successfully prosecute a murder versus a drug crime. Look at the grants the feds give towards police drug enforcement departments.
DHS wants that easy cash.
It was something that had been warned against by everyone from the beginning of the US having secret police forces, and 9/11 was the excuse to do it. Before DHS, the FBI and the CIA (for example) had to go through protocols to share information with each other. This was good because the CIA aren't allowed to do some things that the FBI is allowed to do, and vice versa. Now they're really all one organization, although they have internal turf battles caused by power struggles between ambitious individuals.
https://www.aviatorgear.com/p-52057-laredo-sector-tech-ops-p...
This has gone on for a LONG time, but the change to empower it with AI tools that are presumed accurate is the new amplification.
Tech Company: At long last, we have created the Torment Nexus from classic sci-fi novel Don't Create The Torment Nexus.
I mean, I don't generally think that it's a very useful contact, but of all the things I've studied in my life, taking a long, hard look at the material history of the US government has done teh most to make me think that social relations and responsibilities have nothing do with formal governance.
So, yes, they are kidnapping our neighbors.
They only talk about racism here because the US has a complex because it never compensated its slaves and never will, and knows this is wrong. Elite white children want to somehow make up for that, but also want to continue not doing anything for black people, so they've now made immigrants into a hobby/personality.
They're proud of not being to tell a Black American from a Somali immigrant "You're both welcome here" they say. Meanwhile, all that woke white person's relatives came over between 1880-1920 specifically to drown the black vote, their last name is entirely consonants; and the black person's family has American roots tracing back to the 1600s and they're blood-related to three "Founding Fathers."
"You're welcome here," the magnanimous anti-Trump crusader says to the black American, or the Somali. "Immigrants built this country," while talking about an immigrant who definitely has no connection to this country. An immigrant is an immigrant, black people are fungible, the real racism is against people who got here five minutes ago, I am very enlightened.
Real life doesn't work that way. The government always has the $5 wrench. Or, well, the ability to just shut down your ISP.
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=49499394
The "maybe if we do what they say and don't make a fuss they'll be appeased and stop" strategy fails when matched up against those who will never be appeased and stop.
I never suggested that. Encryption is necessary but not sufficient.
Encrypt your shit. But above all vote, be engaged, and defend your rights like hell. If you're relying on encryption alone to protect you, it's already too late.
> In what universe does using encryption to evade the government function as a survival strategy?
Could be read as either
- It functions as a full and complete survival strategy
or
- One of it's functions is as a survival strategy
The former is saying it's all that is needed, the later is saying it's something that can be used in that way (but not saying it's enough). Kind of like saying that food is a human necessity vs saying it is _the_ human necessity.
I even get discounts for it most places. Highly recommended.
I think the intellectual position "it should be illegal for institutions transmitting money between two parties to identify either of those parties" might require some kind of logical argument behind it. Are you saying all financial transactions should be anonmyous by law? How would banks function if they were required to be blind to their customers? How would the government prosecute money laundering if all cash-trails went cold after the first time they passed a bank?
I understand people often like to express extreme positions on the Internet, but I think it's pretty easy to see an ideal society has rules somewhere in between "you're not allowed to know your customers" and "you can't accept a penny unless the giver does a blood draw in front of you and is confirmed to be in a central register of DNA".
Arguments against KYC usually go hand-in-hand with the belief that AML statutes are a constitutional overreach and grant the federal government powers that they should not have. The logic is that the government's only role is to provide a stable currency and enforce contracts, and that anything else is involving the government in business that it has no business being in. What's done between two consenting parties should remain between two consenting parties.
Note that such a position usually doesn't have a problem with banks having information on their customers, for the purpose of judging credit risks. But it holds that such information should only be used for judging credit risks, ie if you are just depositing and withdrawing money that has already been earned, the bank should be agnostic to this. And they also object to this information being shared with a central clearinghouse where it can be used to cut off all access to the banking system rather than just one specific bank who objects to the source of funds.
Yeah. This often results in ludicrous positions.
On the other hand, EFT flattens scale. Physical cash gets harder to handle in large quantities. Electronic money does not. It's equally easy to transfer a billion as a cent. So it's hard to get situations where small amounts have privacy and large amounts have scrutiny.
This is both a straw man position and begs the question. KYC laws aren't the option to identify either party, it's the requirement to identify both. The default throughout pretty much the whole of human history across cultures has been not having KYC laws. A logical and compelling argument must be made for implementing and unholding such laws.
> Are you saying all financial transactions should be anonmyous by law?
The anti-KYC position is that it should be possible for some financial transactions to be anonymous by law.
> How would banks function if they were required to be blind to their customers?
While they would not be required to be blind, most have been and by default would like to be. Maintaining identity records reliably tying people to transactions is a significant burden for banks for exactly the same reason it would be an incredible burden on you to keep track of which atm/cashier/couch cushion every dollar in your wallet came from.
Some banks may nevertheless consider the option a net positive, and require their customers to provide identification. People would be able to choose if they want to use those banks or not. If the benefits get passed along to the consumer, many likely would choose to.
> How would the government prosecute money laundering if all cash-trails went cold after the first time they passed a bank?
Presumably by going after the criminal infrastructure handling the money before it passed a bank. Giving up privacy rights tends to make law enforcement easier, but it is a common and reasonable opinion that we should not be trying to maximize the ease of law enforcement at the expense of privacy.
There is much more to it than that. If that were all KYC was, it wouldn't need regulations, because banks would need to do it anyway.
I've had banks straight out ask me, on the phone, what a wire transfer that I executed via their online system was for. And unlike, say, a traffic stop where when the cop starts fishing for things unrelated to the stop, you can exercise your right to remain silent, in the banking scenario the consequences for that can be losing access to your account, losing funds, and everything that follows from that.
Some of the info required by KYC:
* Why the customer wants an account
* Expected types of transactions
* Expected source and approximate volume of funds
* For businesses, the nature of the business and expected banking activity
* Source of funds
This can all translate into very invasive questions, especially when you do something that a computer system or middle manager thinks is suspicious, like sending money to your mother in another country.
Wire transfers are also a common source of fraud; it's common for banks to ask about them so their customers don't unwittingly send their money into a black hole
If the question was purely for my protection, then I could simply answer "I don't wish to share that information."
But I can't actually answer like that, because it's too risky.
There's also no option to opt out of such investigations. I didn't request the bank to protect me from my own actions. When there's a credit card transaction that they suspect is fraudulent, they ask "did you authorize that transaction?" That's fine, and that's all they need to know. Asking me who I'm paying and why, with implied duress, is a completely unwarranted violation of my privacy.
There's also a serious issue with an assumption of guilt in these cases. Look at the case of Donald Trump right now, suing Capital One because they closed over 300 Trump business accounts due to suspected money laundering. In Trump's case, I can well believe that there was some kind of corruption, money laundering, or other criminal activity going on. The man is a documented criminal. But the bank is making a decision to penalize someone, potentially severely, without any meaningful due process. Guilty until proven innocent. For someone without the resources Trump has to challenge something like that, what chance do they have of getting a fair outcome?
This is all completely unacceptable in a supposedly civilized society, and you should not be defending it.
Though if I were going to rant, it would be about how constructive surveillance, such as requiring banks keep certain records and then claiming those records aren’t protected from search because they’re third party business records and not those of a private citizen, would be a much higher priority to fix.
1. "The business-model of being an anonymous fence of stolen goods is prohibited."
2. "You have to give us access to all your records at any time on the flimsiest of pretexts, and we'll charge you with a crime if you don't keep it ultra-secret that we even approached you."
Any such kind of regulation is not compatible with financial privacy. Maybe you could argue corporations don't deserve financial privacy, but an individual should have the right to send money to someone without being spied on the same way they should have the right to send a private communication to someone without being spied on.
Today banks use $250B/year on KYC checks. You could fix the world hunger and still have $50B leftover money with this amount.
Access to information and interconnectedness have also increased exponentially so it might make sense that the costs have increased proportionately.
Finally 200B/year would not solve world hunger if nefarious actors grift away most of that money (especially because you wouldn't be able to track them with out some form of KYC)
Crime X exists -> Try solution Y -> Crime X still exists -> Try harsher solution Y0 -> Crime X still exists -> Try harsher solution Y1 -> Crime X still exists -> Try harsher solution Y2...
I think the problem here might be that while Crime by its definition might be the same, the way that it is executed changes drastically so Solution Y/Y0/Y1/Y2 are not required to exist in terms of severity (very likely solution Y was severe enough if you were tried and convicted of the crime) but they are needed because the way Crime X is executed changes (especially this Crime X)
> Government should require regular, mandatory reporting by technology service providers to document abuse of their systems including financial support of violence, harassment, and terrorism.This includes implementation of mandatory financial abuse reporting requirements for internet services operating in the United States, including social media services, infrastructure providers, banking institutions, cryptocurrency exchanges, crowdfunding sites, video streaming platforms, and the like.
> [These companies] should be required to investigate and report the details of harms and abuse of their service. There should be … penalties applied to services that refuse these tracking and reporting responsibilities.
https://www.bitsaboutmoney.com/archive/nonprofit-indicted-ba...
It reminds me of a time when credit and credit cards were flying fast. Large losses started appearing on consumer credit accounts by the tens of thousands. A casual look into it indicated that it was the employees and leaders of the sector, who read and understood the credit agreement that put liability ultimately on the company. The actual credit card employees, adjacent accountants, quick witted cons, all siphoning money from credit cards in very large numbers. Why say this? Actual customers with increasing security requirements were largely not at all involved with the growing fraud. It was the participants in the credit industry seizing the opportunity to steal, with relative impunity. Things have changed and changed again since then with scale, local rules, fraud detection systems etc.
The point of the rant is that ordinary people's rights are squeezed, privacy vanishes, routine humiliating document production and security, required because the people in the industry that created those is cheating.
Yes of course there is cheating on taxes over tip money, or no-show jobs for relatives.. but what kind of society is being built with constant oversight into ordinary people's activity ?
cash indeed
Source? The fact that it's not infallible doesn't mean that it's ineffective.
https://www.amazon.com/dp/B0DVLLL1X3?lv=shuf&channelId=500&p...
Podcast if you do not want to buy the book:
https://www.bloomberg.com/news/videos/2026-09-08/odd-lots-wh...
Reporting $600 in CashApp isn’t about stopping cartels, terrorists, etc; it’s about harassing sex workers and street dealers, profiling side businesses, etc.
https://schwartzcohenlaw.com/can-police-lawfully-seize-your-...
Within a few years local councils were using it for highly trivial things like fly-tipping, littering, and checking people lived in school catchment areas.
This kind of stuff always trickles down.
Everyone's head was too far up their asses to look at the magic crystal ball called "history" and realize that such systems and tactics would be used to go after <checks notes> weed dealers and brown people.
Be careful what you wish for I guess.
> It is not clear how exactly Border Patrol is monitoring Americans’ financial activity.
Can anyone take a guess how they are monitoring financial activity?
imagine paying someone to buy your own information to spy on you, pretty incredible system that we've come up with
I’ve been under investigation for money laundering twice in the last three years - not because I’ve laundered a single dime, but because I have no discernible employment and move large capital sums around the globe almost constantly, and my bank accounts and tax returns inarguably look fucking weird. All 100% above board - I just made some good investments a while back.
I even had the feds come knocking because they decided they needed to check I wasn’t trafficking narcotics. We had a nice chat, they decided they didn’t need to search the place, and six months later I got a letter confirming the case had been archived. Like one of the folks in the article, I had weed on me when they rocked up. Thankfully, in Europe, that’s basically just a “shrug” by law enforcement, unless you’ve got clear intent to distribute. From how it all went, they had quite clearly decided this was a waste of their fucking time before they even arrived.
None of this is a good thing, and none of it is terribly new, either - reporting on finances has been going on for decades, but the integration is getting tighter.
The main problem as I see it is that it has a horrendous false positive rate, and you end up with innocent folks like yours truly having to waste their time and energy proving that they are innocent of a crime that a machine dreamt up.
I’m sure we could just put always-on cameras in every house to catch criminals too, but that doesn’t mean it’s a good idea.
I use this type of point all the time, and every time to blank stares.
Me> The Flock surveillance network is bad - it is an invasion of privacy and gives way too much power to people that should not have that power. It _can_ be used to solve crimes, and does. But so could not allowing anyone out of their house without a permit. But that, too, would be stupid and harm society
Them> _blank stare_ But.. it saved a child once.
I think preventing other crimes is similar. There will always be injustice on some side of the issue. And I’m not trying to argue that that means the status quo is great! But I don’t think we will eventually hone in a perfect system. Maybe just circle around some imaginary point, refining rules and processes until the whole thing breaks down.
Seems reasonable and not newsworthy.
Seems like there's no way to administer this warrantless surveillance without violating the Fourth Amendment of the U.S. Constitution.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Parallel_construction
https://www.nacdl.org/Media/Parallel-Construction-Discover-G...
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Give_me_the_man_and_I_will_giv...
Whilst talking about the downvotes is uninteresting I will give in to the urge to observe that -4 is the lowest a comment can go. But sneering at the community is also against the guidelines, so a comment like this will attract flags by people who actually agree with you.
But good to know that -4 is rock bottom.
If a community prevents you from sneering at fascism, that community is a problem.
Do you not realize that all countries monitor capital movement so that, for example, the rulings of their judiciaries are enforced?
If you want to keep a secret, you must also hide it from yourself.