321–330 of 901 posts
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Cory Doctorow has talked about how "they" test these kinds of things on captive "audiences" - mainly children and prisoners - before expanding to the rest of us. I tend to add marginalized groups to that list. Even when a person can nominally be held accountable, it doesn't matter if you can't reach them, protected by an administrative or institutional barrier of some kind. Standardized testing and remote learning mo…
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> all I never said "all". Some years back, and acquaintance of mine detailed how he gamed the system. He'd work until he met the minimum number of employed weeks to qualify for unemployment, then he'd do a lousy job so he'd get laid off. He'd then go on unemployment. Being unemployed required him to look for a job, so he'd look for a job, and flunk the job interview. When the unemployment compensation ran out, then h…
This whole post could be summed up as "I make up stories from people that don't exist to justify my selfish world view", and frankly these "people are saying" anecdotes with no facts backing them up don't work well on a site where people research things instead of taking them at face value. If you want that kind of echo chamber, may I recommend Facebook or something similar? 70% (approximately) of people on welfare a…
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Not the devs, they have no agency in the decision. Management, for sure, post their name and LinkedIn profile.
> they have no agency in the decision Everyone has agency. “Just following orders” is not an excuse. If someone asks you to implement something that crosses an ethical line for you, you ALWAYS have the agency to refuse. It’s hard, but it’s critical that we never give away our own agency and control of our own actions. You may not be able to stop an implementation from going forward, but you ALWAYS have the ability to…
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Lots of discussion in the comments here about how ingrained banks are into our current system. I do honestly see Bitcoin as a way out of that, but at this early stage of it, you'd probably have to get help from someone who is not debanked in order to interact with our heavily banked system. If you are honestly interested in this, take a close look at Strike.
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If you know of better ones please chime in
Earlier quoted context omitted.
> all I never said "all". Some years back, and acquaintance of mine detailed how he gamed the system. He'd work until he met the minimum number of employed weeks to qualify for unemployment, then he'd do a lousy job so he'd get laid off. He'd then go on unemployment. Being unemployed required him to look for a job, so he'd look for a job, and flunk the job interview. When the unemployment compensation ran out, then h…
My first instinct was to post a detailed takedown, and I started to go into Washington State's unemployment system eligibility and benefit criteria... but on reflection I don't think most of those things you just told us actually happened. There is a history of anti-welfare activists lying about the facts they have observed and those lies forming immortal zombie collective memories. Numerous examples in Reagan speech…
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This whole post could be summed up as "I make up stories from people that don't exist to justify my selfish world view", and frankly these "people are saying" anecdotes with no facts backing them up don't work well on a site where people research things instead of taking them at face value. If you want that kind of echo chamber, may I recommend Facebook or something similar? 70% (approximately) of people on welfare a…
Take a look at a graph of the US poverty rate over the years. It went down until around 1968, where it bottomed out and started going back up. What happened in 1968? Johnson's Great Society program.
https://www.eia.gov/dnav/pet/hist/LeafHandler.ashx?n=PET&s=M...
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There's a very obvious utility in the US which should be able to prevent this: The US Postal Service. It's federally required to exist, and services all Americans already. Basic banking services should be one of the things it is expanded to provide in a minimal, safe fashion (i.e. no loans or lending, but guaranteed electronic banking and funds transfer services).
I don’t see the connection between the Postal Service and banking. Is it just it was historically there? If that’s the case, you could attach it to any department.
The U.S. Constitution, Article 1, Section 8, explicitly gives Congress the power "To establish Post Offices and post Roads." A few lines earlier the same article grants Congress the power "To borrow Money on the credit of the United States." Would it then seem odd for the Congress to be assumed to have the power to create postal bonds, so common in much of the world?
[Addendum]
Might not be such a stretch then to imagine a Postal Savings System or something similar with great reach in the US, potentially encompassing much of what commercial banks handle today. The advantages including stability and availability, and perhaps even efficiency. Perhaps Hyman Minsky might have wished for things to... go postal?
[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Postal_savings_system
[2] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/United_States_Postal_Savings_S...
[3] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Japan_Post_Bank
[4] https://www.lapostegroupe.com/en/banking-accessibility-la-po...
I'm somewhat surprised no one here views this as an automated decisionmaking problem It's increasingly clear that automating important decisions like this is causing a lot of harm while removing most forms of recourse available to those affected. Coupled with the way automated decisions are used to perform and then launder fraud on a massive scale, maybe we should target laws at the automation itself: Require decisio…
Yeah we need strong anti-Kafka laws so that individuals can always find out what they've been "charged" with and that there always need to be an "appeal" process and businesses are strictly denied the ability to claim that they can't reveal their methods.
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Not the devs, they have no agency in the decision. Management, for sure, post their name and LinkedIn profile.
> they have no agency in the decision Everyone has agency. “Just following orders” is not an excuse. If someone asks you to implement something that crosses an ethical line for you, you ALWAYS have the agency to refuse. It’s hard, but it’s critical that we never give away our own agency and control of our own actions. You may not be able to stop an implementation from going forward, but you ALWAYS have the ability to…
depends on your safety barrier. In some very high profile cases, depends on your life. I commend people like Snowden but I certainly wouldn't choose to spend my entire life running from the US government in an attempt to be ethical. I have too many selfish personal goals to try and attempt to sway the masses like that.
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BTC or BCH?
I mostly agree with krupan's answer below, but it depends on use-case. BTC for investment or long-term store of value. BCH, or various other alternatives (Litecoin, XRP, Stellar, cough Nano cough ), for making payments. But if you can use the Lightning network, then BTC works for payments as well (arguably - in this space anything and everything is highly arguable). If you're seriously looking down the track at using…