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In our cashless society, we need to take digital jail seriously

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Re: In our cashless society, we need to take digital jail seriously

#471

Post by TeeMassive »

pkd wrote: post #434
wolpoli wrote: post #229

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The order is retroactive. It simply specifies that institutions have a duty to cease dealings with people involved. https://orders-in-council.canada.ca/attachment.php?attach=41...

I don't see what makes you think it's retroactive in the act. The government has also said it's not going to be applied retroactively. https://www.macleans.ca/politics/ottawa/what-ottawa-can-do-n...

Except most mainstream news said that the frozen accounts were made for donations made retro-actively before the Emergency Act. This is a matter of public notoriety as this point.

Re: In our cashless society, we need to take digital jail seriously

#472

Post by jlpom »

throwaway22032 wrote: post #3

The simple answer is to reject the cashless society. In the medium to long term it's simply incompatible with any reasonable definition of freedom. Surveillance is bad enough, but a system that allows governments to arbitrarily "turn off" thousands or millions of people at the push of a button is too powerful to not be abused. Even the mere existence of such a system has a chilling effect. Which I suspect is precisel…

> But yeah, if you want to seize assets, get a court order and go and lock someone in a box and take their things

You really wouldn't says that if you've been locked, it's one of the worst thing in the world, even more so when it's unfair -- this is a progress.

Re: In our cashless society, we need to take digital jail seriously

#473

Post by da39a3ee »

walterbell wrote: post #213
mortenjorck wrote: post #206

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> The writing is on the wall; barring some sort of major social upheaval, cashless will be more dominant in the future. It's just too convenient. In classic HN fashion, everyone disagreeing with this is focused on their own solipsistic perception of the relative merits, technical and otherwise, of cash versus electronic payments. But convenience always wins. The not-yet-evenly-distributed future is represented by App…

> convenience always wins Until people discover that the next place they wave their watch has customized the transaction based on the previous place they waved their watch. It's all fun and games until a voice speaks behind the one-way mirror, shattering illusions of payment neutrality, e.g. the incident in Canada which prompted the original article.

But that's exactly the point people are making in this thread: people don't care enough, or don't have their shit together enough, to fight back even if they are being surveilled and manipulated and used for profit.

Re: In our cashless society, we need to take digital jail seriously

#474

Post by ksec »

throwaway22032 wrote: post #3

The simple answer is to reject the cashless society. In the medium to long term it's simply incompatible with any reasonable definition of freedom. Surveillance is bad enough, but a system that allows governments to arbitrarily "turn off" thousands or millions of people at the push of a button is too powerful to not be abused. Even the mere existence of such a system has a chilling effect. Which I suspect is precisel…

>The simple answer is to reject the cashless society.

Oh How the tide have turned.

You may be surprised for half a decade from 2014 to ~2019 most on HN were "for" cashless society. Over the dozens of threads and thousands of comments. 90% of HN were happy when Tim Cook in 2015 declare Cash will be dead in the next decade. Apple Pay will make the society better. Tim Cook and Apple reiterate in 2016 and 2017 they want to kill off cash.

Something happened in post 2019. I dont what it is. But I guess it is better late than never.

Re: In our cashless society, we need to take digital jail seriously

#475

Post by throwaway_fbfh »

adriand wrote: post #272
nathanaldensr wrote: post #159

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It is utterly amazing to me that despite all of human history being filled with stories of egregious human rights violations, lies, and propaganda coming from governments all across the political spectrum and world that people still trot out the "look, read this official information. This is proof!" excuse. How many more examples do we need before the opposite is assumed?

> It is utterly amazing to me that despite all of human history being filled with stories of egregious human rights violations, lies, and propaganda coming from governments all across the political spectrum and world that people still trot out the "look, read this official information. This is proof!" excuse. Shouldn't we be talking about what actually happened, though, instead of buying into a false narrative that i…

We are arguing that government is lying as it has done over and over and 1000 * over and that it did freeze accounts of random donors. Maybe they call them influencers lol because they have a IM account and 100 followers

Re: In our cashless society, we need to take digital jail seriously

#476

Post by walterbell »

walterbell wrote: post #50
forty wrote: post #42

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Also as noted in the article, things like electricity, internet and other utility cannot be paid in cash either here.

US Postal Service money orders can be purchased with cash and used the same way as a certified check. This works for utility payments. Mobile phone companies take cash as payments, in both their dedicated retail stores and a large network of affiliated airtime merchants. In some countries, there's a mini-economy for the trade of airtime minutes within cellphone networks, based on physical stores that can convert cash…

On the topic of convenience: utility companies love prepayments.

One post office trip per quarter: one money order per vendor, one batch of envelopes mailed.

Monthly online bills will have a negative balance to indicate the credit.

Zero data leaked to payment middlemen.

Re: In our cashless society, we need to take digital jail seriously

#477

Post by klabb3 »

beloch wrote: post #287

The most concerning thing about Trudeau's use of the Emergencies Act is that it was both unnecessary and, despite the protests being quelled, ongoing . First, the police in Ottawa chose not to enforce even basic laws in the area of the protest for several weeks. The result was lawlessness and a total lack of respect for the police. They were being jeered at for putting threatening flyers under windshield wipers one d…

It was suspicious from the get go. Trudeau insulting a movement which are peacefully against specific government programs (legit by any democratic standard), virtually disappearing (modulo sporadic casual insults) and then refusing to re-assess the mandates, or even talk to the organizers – despite the pandemic getting better and research showing vaccines being close to worthless for preventing spread. It's not uncommon that politicians are so tonedeaf and insulated from the people they govern, but with Trudeau's background, I find it hard to believe he would misjudge and respond to the situation so badly, if he genuinely wanted a resolution. It almost seems like they were welcoming civil unrest in order to suddenly show up as saviors once regular people with no dog in the fight got tired enough, and use the opportunity to expand their authority – a "bring it on" mindset. In either case, the timing of such reckless politics couldn't be worse, given the toll the pandemic has had on all of us.

Re: In our cashless society, we need to take digital jail seriously

#478

Post by visiblink »

JamisonM wrote: post #441
visiblink wrote: post #359

I don't generally agree with these protestors, but the government's approach to shutting them down is a major threat to freedom in Canadian society. Freezing their bank accounts when they have not been proven guilty of any crime is an abuse of power. Interfering with the social funding drives of a political resistance movement sets a precedent that might affect all political protest in the future. I don't know what t…

Freezing bank accounts when you have not been convicted of a crime happens all the time and is the way things have to work. If you let money flow freely in the banking system contingent on criminal convictions any old drug cartel could pay you a million bucks after you serve your time to let 100 million flow through your accounts or whatever. If you can't freeze accounts without an arrest that is already too slow. It…

>Freezing bank accounts when you have not been convicted of a crime happens all the time and is the way things have to work. >It is the way the banking system already works.

Okay, sure. So your argument boils down to that's the way it is and it's practical.

>There is no "staged media campaign" to smear people, the media was reporting on the fact that having kids in the red zone had become illegal with the emergency orders.

At the point when the reporting on kids began on every network, there were no emergency orders.

>it is not remotely comparable to church, women's centres, or union picnics. If you brought your kids to walk the line with you on a wildcat strike that might be comparable..

Fair. Point taken.

>In my most generous moments I sometimes can forgive the OPS for thinking that this wasn't that big a deal at the start.

I remember the police presence at Oka, Gustafsen Lake, and the WTO in Montreal. It seems like these protesters got a lot more leeway.

Re: In our cashless society, we need to take digital jail seriously

#479

Post by walterbell »

da39a3ee wrote: post #473
walterbell wrote: post #213

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> convenience always wins Until people discover that the next place they wave their watch has customized the transaction based on the previous place they waved their watch. It's all fun and games until a voice speaks behind the one-way mirror, shattering illusions of payment neutrality, e.g. the incident in Canada which prompted the original article.

But that's exactly the point people are making in this thread: people don't care enough, or don't have their shit together enough, to fight back even if they are being surveilled and manipulated and used for profit.

> people don't care enough, or don't have their shit together enough, to fight back even if they are being surveilled and manipulated and used for profit.

Yet. Some fintech/crypto/CBDC proposals on the table are orders of magnitude more intrusive than anything in the history of money. Let's see how current events impact public perception. How many people have seen this clip from the IMF meeting in Oct 2020, where Swiss BIS director Carstens commented on CBDCs, https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=mVmKN4DSu3g&t=1451s

> With cash, we don't know who is using the 100 dollar bill today ... a key difference with CBDC is that the central bank will have absolute control on the rules and regulations that determine the expression of that central bank liability .. also we will have the technology to enforce that ... if an advanced economy issues a CBDC, and someone in a 3rd country wants to use it, it will require the consent of the central bank of the residence of that person, therefore the degree of control will be far bigger.

On a topic of interest to children everywhere, a June 2021 comment, https://www.msn.com/en-gb/money/other/bank-of-england-tells-...

> Tom Mutton, a director at the Bank of England, said during a conference on Monday that programming could become a key feature of any future central bank digital currency ... what happens if one of the participants in a transaction puts a restriction on [future use of the money]? ... Sir Jon Cunliffe, a deputy Governor at the Bank, said digital currencies could be programmed for commercial or social purposes ... “You could think of giving your children pocket money, but programming the money so that it couldn’t be used for sweets. There is a whole range of things that money could do, programmable money, which we cannot do with the current technology.”

Re: In our cashless society, we need to take digital jail seriously

#480

Post by throwaway_fbfh »

beloch wrote: post #287

The most concerning thing about Trudeau's use of the Emergencies Act is that it was both unnecessary and, despite the protests being quelled, ongoing . First, the police in Ottawa chose not to enforce even basic laws in the area of the protest for several weeks. The result was lawlessness and a total lack of respect for the police. They were being jeered at for putting threatening flyers under windshield wipers one d…

It is crystal clear. Ride the wedge issue, silence and brutalize opposition.

CPC according to him are Nazi supporters after all.

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