191–200 of 727 posts
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The bartender also doesn't sell your behavioral profile to every other bar in town. I mean, unless you're a total asshole and it's a small town, but then they tend to volunteer it.
SF bartenders united to try and ban this serial check-skipper: https://www.tiktok.com/@ktvu2/video/7459844103635733803
The issue is that American media/discourse paints a very distorted view of what life under authoritarian rule is like. The truth is in many countries, unless you’re some kind of minority, politically active, or in legal trouble, day-to-day life is mostly similar to life in the west. But people don’t want to hear that, because we want to feel better than them. Like we wouldn’t tolerate that kind of life. Of course the…
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You can always move to new town and start again. The problem with all these social credit systems is that they're designed to follow you wherever you go forever. There is also zero recourse if a mistake was made; at least you can try and smooth things over with a bartender.
Yeah, automation and information sharing prevents people slipping through the cracks, and that also prevents leniency, diversity, and reason. I was musing over something, though. We have creeping Orwellian things like face recognition and the policing of chat histories. But some of this is private, as in, not done by the state. Even when done by the state, it isn't in most places to prop up the regime and prevent dis…
Big Brother does exist: it's money. If there were some single named entity, people would rebel against it, so it's diluted and realized through financialization of one's interactions with other humans. Big Brother is invisible to individuals because it's us, and no individual thinks “I'm Big Brother” when it's their point of view looking out. It's an illusion that creates and enforces scarcity but only works if everyone else also believes (power word: “Full Faith and Credit”).
Check out “Wishes and Rainbows” from The Federal Reserve Bank of Boston for a primer on our road to rootα: https://www.bostonfed.org/publications/economic-education/wi... (favorite panel, top-right on page fifteen: ◀ 1̵1̵ + 9 ／ = 20 ▷)
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Like credit scores events can be made to decay overtime.
What I've seen with these large services like Google is that once they deem you undesirable (either on purpose or by accident) then they're just done with you forever. They have so many customers and so many bad actors that it's just not worth it to give anyone a second chance. It's pretty horrible for people caught in that situation. We would need some kind of legislation around this. No company is looking to decay…
Bear in mind that you can mitigate a lot of risk by operating as a business instead of establishing a relationship in an individual capacity.
And people, much like businesses, need disaster recovery plans. We advise people to have escape plans from their homes; similarly, they should have escape plans for their critical information. Almost nothing in this world is risk-free.
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I live in the free and morally righteous West and I self censor all the time. Every single day. My beliefs would have me ostracized from communities and fired from my job.
> My beliefs would have me ostracized from communities and fired from my job. but not landed you in prison or disappeared, I take it?
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Not entirely true. People living authoritarian worry about what they say, they self-censor out of fear, they defer to those in power (even at a local level), they accept a hierarchy of power rather than rights. I do not entirely disagree without, but lack of freedom does intrude into day to day life to some extent.
Even if you live in a western country you do all of that anyway. Self-censor at work and online so I don’t get fired or banned from w/e. Accept elected officials whose policies don’t match up with popular opinion and accept standard employment hierarchy.
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You're right that the private vs. public is a very important distinction here. On the other hand, "private" has the downside of falling into unaccountable monopolies/duopolies. You don't have a individual choice about having a credit score, or whether banks can use it, or with which companies. You have no control, there's no accountability. If credit scores were run by the government, then in theory democratic proces…
Your "in theory" is doing a lot of work there. So much work. Have you heard about no-fly lists? The latest ICE actions? The Red Scare? Giving the government MORE power is almost never the answer.
I've also heard of food safety regulation, airline safety, public schools, libraries, science funding, workplace safety regulation, building safety regulation, the list goes on.
Giving the government more power is quite often the answer. Sometimes it's the best solution, sometimes it isn't. But it's definitely not "almost never", that much we can be sure of.
The issue is that American media/discourse paints a very distorted view of what life under authoritarian rule is like. The truth is in many countries, unless you’re some kind of minority, politically active, or in legal trouble, day-to-day life is mostly similar to life in the west. But people don’t want to hear that, because we want to feel better than them. Like we wouldn’t tolerate that kind of life. Of course the…
> unless you’re some kind of minority, politically active, or in legal trouble, day-to-day life is mostly similar to life in the west Okay but that is exactly why I would prefer a western liberal government. It is better and that is ideal is worth criticizing authoritarians for, and fighting to keep in the west.
The issue is that American media/discourse paints a very distorted view of what life under authoritarian rule is like. The truth is in many countries, unless you’re some kind of minority, politically active, or in legal trouble, day-to-day life is mostly similar to life in the west. But people don’t want to hear that, because we want to feel better than them. Like we wouldn’t tolerate that kind of life. Of course the…
And do you think American media really distorts the "other" side more than Chinese or Russian media distorts what life in the west is like?
There's a reason: I used to be a real asshole troll, in the UseNet days (Don't listen to the folks with rose-colored glasses, telling you that things were better in those days; it was really bad).
I feel that I need to atone for that. I'm not particularly concerned whether anyone else gives me credit (indeed, it seems to have actually earned me more enemies, here, than when I was a combative jerk).
I do it because I need to do it for myself. I feel that we are best able to be "Productive members of Society," when we do things because we have developed a model of personal Integrity.