61–70 of 203 posts
To summarize: there is a trade-off between amount of fraud and ease of doing business. Zero fraud means doing legitimate business becomes too cumbersome. Seems like the same point we have with security in computer systems and ease of use.
Corollary: the more trustworthy people are the less expensive everything is.
But this logic is only applicable for things that on both ends measure in money.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
The problem is that the people in the USA who think "national ID" is code for "they want to put us all into pods and use our bodies as batteries" really really don't want national unified identification, and the people who aren't crazy don't consider it anywhere near their top 10 issues that would sway their vote. So no politician with any actual power is going to push for it. There's tons of issues like this, where…
The answer isn’t as clear as you think. https://www.aclu.org/documents/5-problems-national-id-cards
The way you can tell this article is crazy is by noticing lines like this:
> When a police officer or security guard scans your ID card with his pocket bar-code reader, for example, will a permanent record be created of that check, including the time and your location?
This is already what happens. The police officer logs your interaction alongside your drivers license (or non-driver ID) number. Transposing a nationally-unified ID scheme for the current state-based scheme doesn't increase the amount of logging, it substitutes one log for another.
I think most people understand that a risk-free society is a poor society. Take driving: the safest way to drive is to not get in the car at all. Similarly, the best way to save yourself from credit card fraud is not to have a credit card. But does this justify driving like a maniac, or being careless with your personal information? Of course not.
In other words, the article simply points out that categorical thinking (1 or 0) is useless in this context (as it is in most contexts, to be honest). The meaningful question is what degree of fraud we should be willing to accept, and in what contexts.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
The answer isn’t as clear as you think. https://www.aclu.org/documents/5-problems-national-id-cards
It seems pretty clear. That article is just an example of the craziness I was describing. Notably: having a unified ID structure has a ton of upsides, and "preventing terrorism" seems fully orthogonal. Additionally, we already have IDs that register humans into databases and are tracked when people travel, it's just that the databases are disjoint and thus even more error prone because they're run individually by sta…
Error-prone-ness is a feature for people who want the state to be less powerful.
Personally I think that for purely practical reasons national ids are good infrastructure.
I don't think in 2023 a "weak" national identity system offers much protection against an adversarial government.
The monetary system doesn't care about fraud. Banks, credit card companies, and the rest of the financial sector make money from transactions, with no regard for who spends the money, who owns it, or if the transaction was legitimate. Bad actors need banking too, and their transactions are just as valuable as the ones your grandmother makes.
Here we find the sharp divide that fraud controls try to bridge. The social cost of fraud is extremely high. Yet the proportional value, defined in a capitalist sense, of fraud is close to 1. A transaction that happens to be fraud is almost if not as valuable as a transaction that happens to be legitimate. For a bank, the optimal amount of fraud is not just non-zero, it's basically as much as possible.
Eventually, they started forcing 3DS (which shifts liability from you to the card issuer, and apparently card issuers don’t like paying!). Revenue didn’t decline, but fraud rates did go indeed to zero.
Just like everything. The optimal amount of crime, unemployment, accidents, deaths, etc... is not zero. For example, when building a road, there is a certain chance that an accident will happen, that some people will die, and that could have been prevented. For example, by installing a guard rail, enforcing speed limits, or by taking a different path. But installing that guard rail for a one in a million chance that…
> But installing that guard rail for a one in a million chance that something bad happens is money better spent elsewhere Just for clarity -- guard rails, where we choose to place them, probably cost $500k to $2M per life saved over their lifetime, while the value of a statistical life in the US is >$10M. This comparison ignores costs of non-fatal outcomes (injuries, disability). It seems like we should be deploying…
Take the wealthiest top 10,000 Americans out of the equation, and what’s the value of a statistical life in the US?
$10M seems to be a weird number in my mind.
Edit: Well that was a fascinating rabbit hole: https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Value_of_life#:~:text=In%20W....
Anti-fraud departments have apparently not gotten the memo, and the whole situation has gotten obscene in the last few years. I regularly travel for work and it's impossible for me to make any purchases on major sites like Walmart, Best Buy, Target, Costco, etc. They all will accept an order, charge my card, and then randomly cancel the order some hours to days later, and refund me. Similarly when traveling internati…
Ditto to this. My experience has been very similar to yours. The amount of incompetence involved with payment processing and banking is just mind boggling. KYC/AML is very quickly turning into bizarro big brother. But not an all-knowing AI big brother. A stupid 2005-era IP address detecting one. You do a little too much traveling? Poof. There goes a month of your life to banking jail. A simple two-factor mechanism li…