661–670 of 717 posts
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Pointing to a guy who’s been dead 50 years seems like weak evidence for the claim that government agencies are widely incentivized to undermine political candidates by… selectively leaking their grocery shopping habits?
If the very first director of the FBI immediately abused his position to blackmail everyone around, what do you think has been going on in the intervening 75 years?
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Cash only places probably turn away more customers than card only places these days. People just like the convenience, and cash is on its way out.
> People just like the convenience, and cash is on its way out. My favorite question that many of the people on this site love to ignore, what about natural disasters? Do you believe CC terminals still work when the rest of the infrastructure has failed? Cash is far from on the way out, you’re being naive.
I also don't live in a place where natural disasters (like hurricanes) are very common. I imagine people in Florida or coastal Texas would have a very different view on things.
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Same with postal service, etc. Uh, guys, this is not true. This is not how any of this works. Don't let these people on HN mislead you. Even the postal service cannot knowingly deliver a bomb to a target and claim immunity. It doesn't work like that. If you know they are committing a crime, then you have to stop them. Or at a minimum try to stop them.
I agree that a postal carrier would be criminally liable for knowingly delivering a live bomb, but I think you’re wrong on the end part. There is no legal obligation to try to stop crimes you know about. In most cases there isn’t even an obligation to report them.
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Because arresting people requires evidence and due process, which is work.
It's not just work, it's accountability. That's what they're trying to avoid.
And frankly, you can’t run a business meeting the judicial bar required to really he sure, not that the courts are usefully right here either. Did OJ Simpson murder Nicole Simpson and Ronald Goldman? That depends on which court you ask, and how many asterisks you’re willing to allow on the answers. And that took 10’s to 100’s of millions to get there.
The banks get the ‘privilege’ of being fined for transactions that occurred and were later judged ‘bad’ based on the results of a in-depth, very expensive investigation after the fact that determined they didn’t try to ‘know’ well enough who they were dealing with.
Pretty cozy for regulators. Pretty impossible position for banks.
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Don’t forget ‘what happens when the gov’t changes to someone who doesn’t like you’
I usually chalk that up to "if that happens I have bigger issues" because such a government could just seize my bank accounts and suddenly I have nothing. I say that as someone whose government currently doesn't like them.
Many of the arguments for privacy focused technologies is not that it should be impossible for the government to infiltrate or disrupt your life, but that it should be somewhat impossible for the government to infiltrate or disrupt millions of people's lives for the tiny cost of some compute cycles. The former is necessary for law enforcement. The latter is a recipe for genocide.
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Having any access to paying for the necessities of life should NEVER be in the hands of a system that can be corrupted.
Every system can be corrupted. Feels like Americans are so afraid of the slippery slope at every turn, instead of accepting it is there always and the onus is on the people to manage them correctly and participate in the policy decision making that does that.
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I make nearly 300k a year and I can’t afford a house. I’m upper middle class at best. That’s an order of magnitude away from wealthy.
I seriously doubt that. I might bot be able to afford the exact house you most desire in the exact location that you desire. But if you restrict the definition of "rich" to only include people that can, then it's a very odd set that's left. I'm sure Elon desires a house on Mars, and he can't afford that either.
There’s a huge difference between being rich (or wealthy, not the same) and simply having more than someone else.
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If you don’t have evidence or due process, then you don’t know it’s for human trafficking.
And yet, people know things all the time without evidence and due process.
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I usually chalk that up to "if that happens I have bigger issues" because such a government could just seize my bank accounts and suddenly I have nothing. I say that as someone whose government currently doesn't like them.
The big difference is that in a cashless society where everyone is on the same digital banking system, an abusive leader can delete large minorities of people from participation in the system with the stroke of a key. If they wanted to do that today, it would require a much larger commitment of resources that's going to be harder to justify and execute on, and more easily fought against. Many of the arguments for pri…
Also, thinking of it from a systems reliability perspective it’s a massive Single Point of Failure.
That system stops working (due to kleptocracy, or shitty rules, or a mistake) and literally the largest economy in the world grinds to a halt nearly instantly.
It would make the days of dealing with cash (which has it’s hassles) seem like Utopia.