This is unconstitutional (fourth amendment) parallel construction. Combined with a corporate surveillance state
panopticon, this is "Show me the man and I'll show you the crime."
Who gets to review financial transactions (without a search warrant) and determine them as suspicious and actionable? Every time your bank flags a transaction, a police officer shows up at your door?
Seems like there's no way to administer this warrantless surveillance without violating the Fourth Amendment of the U.S. Constitution.
> Edit: YESSSS -4 points; those are rookie numbers! Help me pump them up, HN technofascists! Prove my point for me!
Whilst talking about the downvotes is uninteresting I will give in to the urge to observe that -4 is the lowest a comment can go. But sneering at the community is also against the guidelines, so a comment like this will attract flags by people who actually agree with you.
> Putting one of those participant’s phone numbers into WhatsApp reveals a profile picture of a law enforcement patch. A pawn with wings sits in the center, surrounded by lightning bolts. The patch reads, “Laredo Sector Tech Ops PITT,” indicating there is also a Predictive Intelligence Targeting Team in the Laredo Sector.
I remember back in ye olde dark ages when "big data" was the hot buzzword people of a certain bent couldn't get enough of this kind of stuff. Everyone was jacking off nonstop to the idea that we could just hoover up everyone's data ad then "efficiently" or "proactively" dispatch enforcement resources. People talked all sorts of big talk about stuff like cross referencing people's Home Depot spend with permit requirements, identifying small businesses that don't have healthy enough financials to be fully compliant, cross referencing invoices and delivery receipts to identify overloaded trucks, and generally finding all sorts of ways to fine the crap out of people for the pettiest of petty deviance.
Everyone's head was too far up their asses to look at the magic crystal ball called "history" and realize that these systems would be used to go after <checks notes> weed dealers and brown people.
I'm increasingly finding businesses that simply don't accept cash. Want a beer at the Clippers game? Can't pay with cash. Even a local bar near my house stopped accepting cash about a year ago - a bar!
I want crypto to work like cash so bad, but in practice it's too complicated for your average person and I'm not sure anyone has the incentive to make it simple.
You know Zelle and venmo already won the arms race when every person selling meat cooked over open flame on the side of the road is set up for that and not crypto.
With Monero it doesn't matter for future transaction privacy if it's KYCed just like it doesn't matter for cash. Financial institutions know you have purchased Monero like if you withdrew cash from an ATM, but then it goes off their radar.
I wonder if we are at the point its safer to just cash your entire paycheck? I mean people's cards get skimmed or numbers leaked all the time. Maybe not under your mattress but some other hidy spot a thief will never find your cash, but the risk is probably nonzero for every debit/creidt card holder that they will not experience some fraud. Muggings are also simpler if you are cashed based. You get mugged with cash on you, that's it, that's the extent of the damage just whatever bills you had on you. You get mugged with your cards on you, good luck cancelling them quickly with that banking app on your phone the thief also stole off you.
I no longer have a credit card (nor cell phone [nor email]), so everything is cash or crypto (USA forty-something male). Semi-retired datacenter electrician.
As for "wrench attacks," mine is mostly held in offsite multi-signatures, so good luck (to us both!) on your attack. Multiple hidden guns might help here.
I pay with cash for pretty much all in-person transactions. It's great! Minimal friction, very little tracking risk, works even when the ISP connection or the merchant network is down. You can even use it to pay people who don't use the same apps you do.
I even get discounts for it most places. Highly recommended.
I understand that folks here think that the general anti-AI sentiments that can be found in some of US culture are often misguided.
It's likely projection on my part but I have a deep suspicion that people understand that mass surveillance by the state is the main use case for all these LLMs, camera systems, and increasing large data centers.
There's a self-serving aspect of Libertarianism where we dismantle the government so we can build our own government out of corporations with zero accountability to any of the people they govern. A kind of modern feudalism. And a lot of people in this camp envision themselves the count or duke or king or whatever in this feudalism, when in reality we'll likely all end up renting everything we own from the 6 people who own all the companies in the world. There seems to be a motte and bailey where the motte is "oh we should just remove all the governmental controls and let private enterprise flourish!" and then the bailey is "don't you see how little freedom you have from government" when it's made apparent what private enterprise has done in the modern world.
You seem to be describing our current corrupt democracy that produces crony capitalism that gives favors to big businesses and enables the business owners to become one of the 6 people that own everything.
A major point of libertarianism is to tear down the government structure that enables that crony capitalism and restores real competition in the market.
Does it though? We've been living through that experiment with elimination of anti-trust and with other libertarian goals being met -- reduction of taxes, introduction of private industry into the public sphere, collection of tolls from public infrastructure, austerity, and general reduction of the size of government. All we've gotten is a replacement of the government with private enterprise. IOW there are a lot of companies out there that provide "public goods" for profit that are some combination of more expensive or lower-quality than the equivalent public services were in the heyday of the US. I think you should agree that without any kind of regulation at all companies are merging into uncontrollable behemoths, and without the ability to meaningfully "vote with our wallets" one of the central tenets of libertarian capitalism is pretty broken. I disagree that the US federal government is responsible for this state of affairs. Rather, the US federal government is taking a pretty strong stance of irresponsibility for this.
We in the US are so very far still from meeting the goals of libertarianism. Even farther than before with our current administration!
The current US government helps big business through a combination of tax breaks, burdensome regulations that small companies can't cope with, buying services (see: SpaceX, Boeing, Palantir, etc.), direct subsidies, tariffs, etc., etc.
With a libertarian government all of that goes away.
So we're going to make government weaker, and by doing so, they will stand up to corporations that are now stronger than them?
If that's true then Libertarians have a rosier view of government than I do. A regular David vs. Goliath situation. Biblical stories aside, my money is on Goliath.
David and goliath is not a story of a little man defeating an impossible giant. It's the story of a technologically advanced crack pistol shot vs a guy a with a knife and a hundred yards to cover
> So we're going to make government weaker, and by doing so, they will stand up to corporations that are now stronger than them?
It's not about the amount of physical force they can assert.
Suppose you have a constrained set of things the government is allowed to do. They prohibit fraud, non-consensual physical harm (e.g. violence, pollution) and market consolidation. Market consolidation is given a rigid definition in the nature of any organization having more than 15% market share in any market, a rigid consequence in the nature of that organization being fully atomized, and a right for customers and suppliers to bring a private case against them with the same consequence if they're over the threshold and the government prosecutor won't do it. Every citizen has the constitutional right to smash corporations in consolidated markets into smithereens.
Meanwhile the government is prohibited from enacting more specific economic rules. They lack the authority to enact things like certificate of need laws, zoning density restrictions, price controls, anything that acts as a constraint on adversarial interoperability, etc. Micromanaging the population is not allowed.
How do these constraints benefit large incumbents? What benefit is there in giving the government the authority to do things that history has consistently shown to be anti-competitive and inefficient?
Such a scheme absolutely explodes in complexity as it comes to each level of additional detail.
This requires a magically flexible definition of "market" at very best.
The smallest number of competitors that can split market share such that none exceed 15% is 7, and that cuts it absurdly close for an existential risk.
Do non-profit organizations count for this rule? If not, how would corporate structures that intentionally obfuscate these distinctions, e.g. IKEA, be handled?
If there's not some extremely tricky qualifiers, these markets seem likely to be a problem, just for starters: medicines†, operating systems, utilities to a specific house or even city, spy satellites, chemicals that are difficult or dangerous to synthesize, combat aircraft, crewed spacecraft, EUV lithography, armored fighting vehicles, cellular telecommunications services, samples of organisms restricted to high biosafety level labs, and literally any new product category.
† Imagine a serious condition getting its first drug treatment approved and the company saying "Only every seventh patient is eligible." Also, no one could offer a specific specialized surgical procedure until seven or more independent organizations in the same geographic area have qualified staff and equipment, which would be especially hard for any novel techniques; if the problem it addressed was rare, they'd also effectively be forced into a cartel to allocate the patients evenly.
There's also separately and unavoidably the massive problem of transitioning from the current situation to one compliant with these restrictions.
Edit: Switch to using a dagger for the footnote to avoid a formatting issue.
> This requires a magically flexible definition of "market" at very best.
The definition of a market is the set of goods or services which are fungible substitutes for one another.
The only thing that's hard about this at all is determining how fungible they have to be in order to be considered substitutes, e.g. two restaurants that are 3000 miles apart are obviously not substitutes for each other, but what if they're 30 miles apart? That one could go either way depending on how aggressive you want to be.
But it doesn't really matter how the coin flips like that turn out because the things that are close to the line aren't the markets where consolidation is causing major trouble, and conversely causing some local shops to not merge with each other so it stays unambiguous that the local market isn't consolidating is likewise not a big issue.
> Do non-profit organizations count for this rule?
Yes. If a non-profit has more than 15% market share then it has to be broken into multiple non-profits that each have less than 15% market share, the same as anyone else.
> Imagine a serious condition getting its first drug treatment approved and the company saying "Only every seventh patient is eligible."
You're assuming that there are still patents. If there are then that obviously doesn't count during the patent term because that's what patents are, but then you count only the patented invention and any sort of tying is entirely prohibited. You shouldn't be able to patent a connector and use that to monopolize the market for replacement razor blades.
Whereas if there aren't patents then you don't have this problem to begin with because you get a dozen different companies all producing the new medicine right away.
> operating systems
Operating systems are easy. Microsoft would be atomized because they have too much market share and then a dozen different companies would have the full rights to make derivatives of Windows. None of them would ever be allowed to have majority market share again, so now it's in everyone's interests to standardize APIs so that the same software will run on each company's Windows distribution, and the same APIs would end up being supported by (or consolidated with) non-Windows operating systems as well.
The OS then becomes fungible as intended and most likely ends up being open source since there's not a lot of margin in fungible commodities. And software licensed to allow the entire public to modify and redistribute it has an unlimited number of suppliers and would never exceed the market share threshold.
> utilities to a specific house or even city
If you're a utility company and you know you're going to get broken up if you have more than 15% market share, what do you do?
The sensible thing to do is to build your infrastructure differently. You're digging up the road once, but instead of installing one big pipe, you install a conduit with 10 smaller ones inside it. Then you sell off nine out of ten to nine other companies so that you each have ~10% market share and if one of you ends up with 14% and another 6% you're still not over the threshold.
Then if a natural disaster damages the infrastructure, in theory they could each employ their own repair crews and each send one to each damaged location, but that seems pretty inefficient when there is another option. You have multiple independent repair companies and the utility companies pay whichever one gives them the best rate for a given job, which will tend to be the one already sending someone to that site, i.e. the same repair crew usually repairs all 10 damaged pipes and gets paid by all 10 utility companies. Meanwhile a different repair company puts in the best bid for a different site.
The status quo takes the assumption that everything has to be vertically integrated, but it doesn't, and it's a lot easier to have competition when each new entrant doesn't h...
Government will not give any help to any corporation and we, the masses, will be empowered to stand up to corporations ourselves. And to be clear, when we talk about Power here we aren't talking about enforcing our will with violence (like the government ultimately does) but with the lifeblood of corporations: money. Deny them that and they quickly die.
Okay great. Let's say you have a dispute with your neighborhood electricity provider. They run the power plant 3 blocks down and vent smog into your house. By your logic the only recourse you have is to stop paying them. How do you handle that externality while still maintaining your electricity and also avoid having to learn how to run your own electricity grid?
If this isn't the complete anarchy form of libertarianism then the government can still enforce laws against air pollution. And there would be no way for a government official to make an underhanded executive branch "policy" change that let's the company get around that law.
If this is the more extreme form of libertarianism then surely my neighbors agree with me that the pollution sucks and we all stop paying them. Yeah, maybe we go without power for a short time, but then that company changes their ways or goes out of business. No long court battles, nobody single entity for the electric company to bribe, no writing your congressman and hoping there's a change. Vote directly with your wallet.
Or, there's the libertarian idea that another corporation is responsible for (essentially is hired as a caretaker of) the air we breathe and the electric company pays them for anything they emit into that air, so they are punished/disincentivized that way
How is that not No True Scotsman? You disagree with the outcome of the described libertarian structures so it can't be actual libertarianism?
The government is inevitably going to do business with the market. Where do you draw the line between a government contract and favors to big business?
What is libertarianism's answer when there are 6 people that own everything, or more realistically, how the richest people in the world, already deeply entrenched and leading their respective industries from continuing to accrue resources until everything is owned by a small group of people and/or taking advantage of their market advantages to shut out any competition.
It is troublesome that libertarianism isn't super well defined, but no version of libertarianism has the government "doing business" with anyone. It only enforces laws, it doesn't buy and sell anything, and it certainly doesn't do anything to insulate anyone from market forces (like governments do now with regulations, subsidies, tax breaks, etc.).
So then what will the government due about supplying their military, offices, supplying technology, constructing the buildings that they work out of, purchasing or renting the land those buildings are on, or any other of the material goods that it needs to do the bare minimum of enforcing laws.
I don't see how libertarian can ever be well defined when it seemingly is always based in ideology and the arguments supporting it always seem to be fallacious.
Ok, maybe I went too far. There are the total anarchist libertarians that don't want any form of government. Personally I'm not sure I want to go that route. So my libertarian government will need a police force of some sort. That could be a collection of small local private businesses that small local governments do business with, giving them jurisdiction over the small local area. And there could be some hierarchy so that eventually they all are accountable to the central government. Like, city police contractors report to a state contractor, and the state contractors report to the federal contractor.
I totally just made that up, so I'm sure we could work out details and make it better, but the overall point of minimizing government power and distributing it could be preserved as much as possible.
No system is going to be perfect, but there is so much more we could do to take power, and therefore the temptation of corruption, away from the people we allow to rule over us. Giving fallible human individuals more power is never the right solution.
Giving private businesses the monopoly on violence seems like a great idea ;p
What happens to the business when it isn't small anymore? What does that accountability even look like? Paperwork isn't accountability.
I agree that details can be worked out and systems can be made better, and the government is corrupt (especially now, but also the past two decades I've been old enough to be politically conscious), but I don't think ideological free market libertarianism is the right path to get there. I think there is a lot of merit to a free market and I agree people deserve their own autonomy to not be ruled over, but right now corporations hold way too much power and wealth inequality is too large and only accelerating for me to accept libertarianism as a solution to modern society.
I think another issue is the word libertarianism can easily mean so many different things. There are anarchist libertarians on the left and right, with social libertarians and market libertarians taking up the space between anarchists, and between the four of them there is no solidarity because they all want different things regarding the structure of society.
Hey, I was working hard to not make it a monopoly! Lol! All those different local police forces and each level of the hierarchy are different corporations. But seriously, of we could achieve a peaceful society without giving anyone permission to do violence it would be amazing!
Sure, there are different ideas about how to implement libertarianism but the general idea is singular: Maximize individual liberty and private property rights.
Accountability always comes down to individual liberty. The question isn't, "is the corporation too big?" The question is, "is it taking away personal property or individual liberty?"
The absolute hardest part of libertarianism that all of you opponents miss is that it requires people to always be evaluating that in their choices. It requires people to avoid making everything Someone Else's Problem and wishing for Government to Just Take Care of It. People complain that corporations are too big or people are starving or I don't like what my neighbor is doing with their yard and libertarians answer with, "well, your going to have to do something about that yourself instead of giving up rights and liberty so that someone else can try and force a fix down all our throats." It just blows people's minds! You mean I have give to the poor myself of my own free will? I jave talk to my neighbor about this myself? I need to stop giving that big evil corporation my money of my own accord? If I want more people to do these same things I have to gently persuade them instead of asking the police to just shoot them if they don't comply? The horrors!!
In order to make competition flourish, you require a strong government which squishes anti-competitive behavior.
Markets, left to their own accord, naturally tend to monopolies and cooperation. Cooperation just works better than competition. Competition is, really, a zero-sum game, a race to the bottom for companies. Cooperation is optimal, it’s “everybody wins”.
Even if companies didn’t just buy up each other (why wouldn’t they? We need laws against that), they would certainly work together to set prices as high as the market can bear. Which is then, effectively, a monopoly.
I mean, imagine a perfect market with hundreds of thriving competitors. What happens over time? As the industry matures, competitors buy each other up and consolidate capital. Then, newcomers can’t break in, because they don’t have the capital. And any newcomers who have a new innovative process or product, just get bought out before they threaten the market share. Then, eventually, there are only a handful of companies left. It’s trivial for them to move in lock-step and everyone wins… except the consumer.
> Markets, left to their own accord, naturally tend to monopolies and cooperation
No, they don't. To become a monopoly, they need the collusion of government to outlaw competition.
The poster boy of monopolies, Standard Oil, never had a monopoly. During its rise, it dropped the consumer price of kerosene 70%. Its market share dropped steadily during the years of the anti-trust trial.
> It’s trivial for them to move in lock-step and everyone wins… except the consumer.
Nothing is impossible, but it's really difficult. If some greedy entrepreneur is raking in the cash with some product or service then of course another greedy entrepreneur will see that and start competing with the first guy. The evil corporations you are worried about are not going to cooperate with another corporation. They're evil! At best they'll fake it for a while and then backstab each other.
And if they aren't evil backstabbers and they are actually friendly and good at cooperating then it's a win for all of us!
Hmm. Why should the word monopoly only refer to the legal mechanism by which market exclusivity is enforced rather than referring to the resulting market structure or market power?
If I'm not legally prohibited from competing with a firm, but that firm's position nonetheless also makes it unprofitable for me to enter or compete, what is that market structure called?
Responding to you generally and not to this comment.
I want to thank you for explaining economic principles even if the OP doesn't understand them. As someone who has less econ background then they'd like — your explanations are clear.
How hard would it be for you to look up whether Apple does any government lobbying, or if there are any laws, regulations, or tax codes that (whether intentionally or not) give Apple an advantage over a start up that wants to compete with them. Don't ignore things like copyright laws, patent protections, international trade agreements, corporate tax structures, insider trading by politicians, etc., etc.
To expand, I believe the idea here is that what libertarianism is in principal matters less than what it collapses to in practice, similar to the difference in communism.
And there's a central tension that libertarianism, as far as I'm aware of, doesn't resolve in how to promote individual freedom across a highly economically unequal society.
Trusting those with all the capital to act in anything other than their own best interest doesn't seem a solid foundation.
In a true libertarian society, since it's small government, the government wouldn't help rich people stay rich. You could just declare yourself owner of Tesla, and nobody would stop you except the former owner of Tesla, if he can afford to stop you. Nobody believes in true libertarianism.
If communism is whatever the USSR did, and feudalism is whatever medieval England did, I see no problem asserting that libertarianism is whatever the USA does.
Libertarianism is entirely self-serving. I am rich and have property, so my ideal government is one whose only job is to create property registries and allow their enforcement with violence. Ideally, the poor people are taxed (not me of course) to fund a government violence force to enforce the rules on the poor people, as is the case in the USA.
Communism is similarly self-serving. I own no property, and so my ideal government has no concept of property and assigns resources to everyone.
What if my grandmother was a bicycle? None of these change the fact that voting for a system to move resources from others to yourself is self serving.
You can debate whether it's justifiable or not, but it is self serving by definition.
Oh, I fully agree! Unfortunately many people reduce other people's inner thoughts to the boolean decision "if someone has below-average resources, their decision must be motivated by moving resources from others to themselves", because they assume the "homo economicus" model to apply to most individuals.
As my examples show, such a model breaks down for trivial cases. In the real world, people have much more complicated and layered reasons motivating their vote for any system. Though I'd like to ask anyone subscribing to the homo economicus view - what do you think about the position of people with above-average wealth who would vote for capitalism? Their choice is equally as self-serving, no?
You seem to be missing the point. The person you originally replied to said that those who vote for communism for their own personal gain are self serving. Let's call those people Group A.
You then listed a bunch of people who might vote for it for some non-self-serving reason, let's call them Group B.
Your comment implies that the existence of Group B makes Group A not-self-serving, when in fact it is as irrelevant to Group A's motives as my grandmother being a bicycle.
> Btw, it's a bit rude to pattern-match a thought-terminating cliche followed by declaring your point of view to be objectively true.
> If "assigning resources to everyone" is a net gain (IE the voter doesn't have resources), then yes it is self serving.
It is not possible to state more clearly that:
Voter has below-average resources -> voting for communism must be self-serving.
I have explained that this is wrong. To stick with your example, when you choose group A based on factor X and then broadly assign motivation Y to everyone in the group, you're creating a false narrative, because group A is a superset of the people you've described.
It's laughably naive to think that any significant number of people who vote for a system they think will personally benefit them are in fact doing so purely out of principle, and not at all because it will benefit them. However, as long as one such person exists, Group A is indeed a superset of self-serving people, and you are therefore correct in the most technical and irrelevant sense. Congratulations.
All politics is self-serving in one way or another. If you disagree you are likely lying to yourself about your motivations.
The important thing is not to ignore your self-serving motivations, but to understand them and think long term rather than short term. Things quickly fall apart when everyone pushes for short term gain.
> There's a self-serving aspect of Libertarianism where we dismantle the government so we can build our own government out of corporations with zero accountability to any of the people they govern. A kind of modern feudalism. And a lot of people in this camp envision themselves the count or duke or king or whatever in this feudalism
So much this.
People forget that for all its fault, democratic government is democratic to some degree.
Corporations are democratic to zero degree. (And before someone brings up shareholders: institutional investors and dual-class shares)
In Norway, as an act of sensibility and kindness, prior to WWII, registers were kept at all town halls as to your religion. The point was, people wanted to be buried in the proper cemetery. It was a plus, people registered willingly.
Then the Nazis rolled in. And you can imagine what happened with those registers.
So it doesn't even have to be about your own government. And with digital access being a world away, it can indeed be a threat.
In the Netherlands the Nazis were able to exterminate Jews much more thoroughly than they had in Germany, because the Netherlands kept such meticulous records of the name and address of every Jew.
And everyone else, but the Nazis were after the Jews.
Most Americans really, really don't. Gallup puts Americans' trust in major institutions, including several parts of the government, at around 30% [0]
In OECD countries, trust in government sits at around 39% [1]
I would say that most people in Western nations don't trust their government. Whether they agree with what all their governments are doing is another issue-by-issue matter, but I would guess they don't love that on the whole, either.
They say that and then act the opposite. The cognitive dissonance is astonishing. Consider the MAGA deep state narrative and how it literally now exists because of them.
Distrust of the government comes in different levels: you can be just distrustful enough to be skeptical yet accepting, and so distrustful that you actively try to vote the bums out. I don't think the polls distinguish between them.
Trump didn't bring the CIA and MI6 into existence. That's liberal cope from the years they spent yelling about how secret police were actually good now, because they didn't like Trump. Well now they like Trump - happy?
lol. Talk about cope. You just invented a strawman and assumed it was my position so that you could claim victory. I guess you don’t know many progressives because by and large the CIA has been considered problematic forever. But it wasn’t celebrated the way MAGA cheers for ICE.
I would encourage you to refrain from saying things like ‘lol. Talk about cope.’ here, let your argument stand on its own without baiting the other person into responding emotionally.
I’m not offering this advice because I’m perfect either, I find it difficult sometimes to be respectful of someone I disagree with. You can take it or leave it, I’ll just say editing those sorts of things out of my own posts has been helpful.
The Trump (read: Russell Vought et al.) playbook is transparently self-serving:
1. Complain loudly about weaponization of institutions
2. Use public support to "reform" those institutions
3. Weaponize those institutions against opponents
4. (Implied) Everyone forgets those institutions were previously less corrupt
The entire reason Trump spent so much time talking about the swamp was that his band always had every intention of furthering government corruption, albeit to his own ends.
That's a lot easier if you've first degraded public trust in institutions.
Its another to do something truly effective about it.
Alas, the American people seem to be utterly paralyzed. Catatonic, even.
When all it really needs is civic responsibility and an understanding that the government derives its power from the people, and thus the people always get the government they deserve.
> When all it really needs is civic responsibility and an understanding that the government derives its power from the people, and thus the people always get the government they deserve.
You've had people being apologists for all manner of bad forms of government around the world for at least the past 25 years. This shouldn't be surprising.
> When all it really needs is civic responsibility and an understanding that the government derives its power from the people, and thus the people always get the government they deserve.
Look I encourage people to vote and participate in government and politics as much as possible, but it's extremely clear at this point that this is more and more untrue every day. The government derives it's power from billionaires now, and thus the people always get the government billionaires want. It may not be exactly the route they want, but it's the same end results.
Look no further for proof than the endless slew of city and county governments that capitulate to big tech and sign sweeping data center contracts without even notifying their constituents, intentionally ignoring the feedback they get, or simply silencing the dissenters when they speak at meetings. Even local government has been sold to the highest bidder.
This has frequently been true in American history though.
Think folks were thrilled with the robber barons of the railroad area also owning newspapers?
Imho, the core thing that worsened was the election system. Specifically, closed primaries and gerrymandering. Both because they disincentivize centrists and compromise.
Ranked choice, mandatory opening of party primaries, and a Supreme Court definition of unacceptable gerrymandering (mathematically-based) would get us better government.
It's also clearly the wrong question for this decade. Private / public sector cooperation and all of the barriers between them that have been degraded and chipped away has left us with a very broken economic system that looks less and less like capitalism every day.
Also add corporations. Insurance companies, Banks, Potential Employers, etc will definitively use mass surveillance and AI generated predictions based on that mass surveillance.
I don't think it's unrealistic for state or another party to be taking the decades of data on individuals they have and feeding it into their large hyperscale data centers and using the platforms they own to predict our actions and propagandize us.
Unfortunately, I don't think most people understand it's about mass surveillance yet, but about the misappropriation of resources in lower income communities to power LLMs and/or the intellectual theft and profits off the data used to train LLMs.
Dude, they're literally watching Flock Cameras go up in their neighborhood, being told they use AI, and anyone with a brain who can add 2+2 (or read Larry Ellison on "best behavior") concludes these data centers are not merely for ChatGPT.
In which case, they see noise pollution, water pollution, construction pollution, property value damage, utility bill cost explosions; and what's the reward? Surveillance and white-collar job loss, possibly culminating in home loss. "Misguided."
Maybe consider my conciliatory rhetoric ("folks here think") in the original post as statement about what I think the vicious and hyper-authoritarian tech bros here believe, namely everything from obviously dumb crap ranging from
- "it's ccp propaganda"
- or "you don't have a right to provacy in public"
- or "the environmental concerns are overblown"
- or "you already have a cellphone so why you bitchin"
- or "it's a private company so you don't have to worry about the gov"
to less arguable but widely held neoliberal premises like "the state has a perogative to do what it wants so if you're not able to participate in the [typically closed] {city council|senate|NSA} decisions that lead here then you have no right to take direct action".
Thus you might understand what I am writing here is an attempt to not trigger the VC bros and to get them to consider that all us unwashed masses might have some kind of point?
I am often not the clearest writer, but the first sentence literally is about what I understand a lot of people on the site to believe, not a statement about what I belive.
People on this site have a highly propagandized view of what (they think of as) the proles think, and I'd like the folks of the site to consider that people really do understand the vicious ends to which these technologies are put, hence the rhetoric.
To be clear, on some level, I think my average no-kings/Tucker-Carson-stan-ing friends can accept the argument that cops will use this tech to give worms to ex-girlfriends. While that should be enough of a reason to reject the tech it really doesn't go far enough into why that tech is objectionable: forcing warrants for the mass-survellience network aren'r really sufficient to remedy my own worries.
From my position, that idea of tech/policy-as-solution is indeed misguided because my deeper worry is that the state will use it for "counter-insurgency". Considering oneself a potential insurgent is foreign to about anyone in US mainline politics. It is, however, what I feel deeply when think about how folks might indeed be "misguided", and I am not sure if you'd agree with that or not. I can read that into a lot of the posts responding above. But that more radical concern not what I wrote about when I wrote that post.
So sure, you're 100% correct and I agree with your point.
I do not think the idea that "folks undrstand the survellience aspect of all this tech" is generally legible to the fascists and other anti-leftist US "centrists" who populate this specific message board- I think the conversation in this thread supports that view.
It's hard to make that point into something they are able to read. I'd still like them to consider it.
Be careful with the shallow dismissals. There's often truth in the isolated statement while it misses the mark in context. Thus dismissing it directly will easily make you look like you don't know what you're talking about.
For example:
> you don't have a right to provacy in public
You don't. That much is simple enough to work out given various highly entrenched cultural and legal values that have stood the test of time. The problem is that a network of surveillance cameras isn't remotely the same thing as an unrelated individual snapping a wide angle photograph of a street that you just so happen to be walking down.
So it's more like we need (but currently don't have) a legally recognized right not to be systematically surveilled in public spaces. Or better yet to make blanket surveillance outright illegal (which would also resolve many of the issues surrounding adtech).
> the environmental concerns are overblown
In many cases they are. In a few they aren't. As usual some businesses in some cases are exploiting holes in the regulations.
I think public sentiment about surveillance is complicated.
People have a lot of fears about being done injury by rogue antisocial actors. Ranging from nuisances like dog shit everywhere, stolen Amazon packages and car break-ins to life-defining traumas like sexual assault. Broader surveillance, in some form, is the first step towards getting traction on these kinds of problems. Leftist commentators prefer the more "grass-roots" varieties like cell phone videos and word-of-mouth name-and-shame campaigns, but, in general, disseminating awareness of antisocial behavior and coordinating a punitive response of some kind is the goal.
I think this internal tension in public opinion pre-dates LLMs, and my personal opinion is that the surveillance applications of AI are secondary drivers of the bipartisan anti-AI sentiment, which is more about revulsion at the possibility of a future where not only "artist" but "mathematician" may be lost as vocations.
Government? As others have said, government may well contract it out to private companies. But surveillance by private companies who have the government's ear isn't much better.
People understand? You're almost certainly wrong there.
> But surveillance by private companies who have the government's ear isn't much better
No its much worse. At least democratic governments have some semblance of democratic accountability and of course some inability to work at scale. At worse they can just pay the private company, they generally will have lower capabilities unless they can hit an infinite money glitch (in which case they can use that to pay private companies)
Like say, selling $40T of sovereign debt and running a budget deficit year after year? :) Inflation prevents infinite money printing, but the US Government has what is functionally an infinite money glitch, for the reasons I stated above.
> But surveillance by private companies who have the government's ear
It's the opposite that is true. Governments can selectively enforce laws against companies based on whether they comply or not, and pay them for whatever they want them to do.
The wealthy and their companies own Congress and the Executive because those positions rely on publicity to be elected, and they own the judiciary because the judges are both aligned with political parties and completely bribeable. They do not, however, exactly own the secret police funded by secret budgets - that's where the real executive lies, and that's where efforts are coordinated and conflicts between powerful blocs are adjudicated.
The performance we get is meaningless. The only important parts of the show we get to watch are following where the money is going and watching who state power is currently killing.
> People understand? You're almost certainly wrong there.
People certainly do understand. The media and the upper-middle class have made it almost a religion to spend their entire political life calling those people crazy. Why have upper-middle class people chosen such a stupid religion? Because a lot of money has been dumped into their stock portfolios.
The problem is, people who are the most spoken about personal freedom are the ones also voting conservative all the time. The libertarian square is still on the right.
By the time the government overreach starts being used on them, its gonna be too late.
Government agencies (foreign and domestic) will just be just a few of the many buyers of this information.
Private companies buy up this information like mad. It's so cheap - five figures gets you a database of every person over 18 in the USA and their addresses. Another five figures gets work history for them. Another five figures gets you property information. Another gets you social media feeds. Etc. Some vendors even sell it ad hoc with little up-front cost.
For less than a million a year, any company can build an extensive profile on every person in the USA. These companies are just adding to that list.
No one who works for DHS or with them deserves your respect. Fuck these coward officers and their disrespect for The Constitution, the 4th amendment and people’s overall rights. I hope something tragic happens to them.
Deny, Defund, Depose the federal terrorist groups: DHS, ICE, CBP, PITT etc.
I’ve been under investigation for money laundering twice in the last three years - not because I’ve laundered a single dime, but because I have no discernible employment and move large capital sums around the globe almost constantly, and my bank accounts and tax returns inarguably look fucking weird. All 100% above board - I just made some good investments a while back.
I even had the feds come knocking because they decided they needed to check I wasn’t trafficking narcotics. We had a nice chat, they decided they didn’t need to search the place, and six months later I got a letter confirming the case had been archived. Like one of the folks in the article, I had weed on me when they rocked up. Thankfully, in Europe, that’s basically just a “shrug” by law enforcement, unless you’ve got clear intent to distribute.
None of this is a good thing, and none of it is terribly new, either - reporting on finances has been going on for decades, but the integration is getting tighter.
The main problem as I see it is that it has a horrendous false positive rate, and you end up with innocent folks like yours truly having to waste their time and energy proving that they are innocent of a crime that a machine dreamt up.
It does sound like you should have been investigated though. Like, this sounds like the (or a) system working. What would the alternatives be? Don't investigate for money laundering? Or have so much info that they can eliminate you as interesting without even having a visit?
Wait for actual evidence of a crime (or even an anonymous tip) instead of going on a fishing expedition targeting anyone with an unusual lifestyle or weird spending habits?
I’m sure we could just put always-on cameras in every house to catch criminals too, but that doesn’t mean it’s a good idea.
> I’m sure we could just put always-on cameras in every house to catch criminals too, but that doesn’t mean it’s a good idea.
I use this type of point all the time, and every time to blank stares.
Me> The Flock surveillance network is bad - it is an invasion of privacy and gives way too much power to people that should not have that power. It _can_ be used to solve crimes, and does. But so could not allowing anyone out of their house without a permit. But that, too, would be stupid and harm society
I’m not sure that informants are the way to go either. More often than not in history, this has just been used as a tool to mess with the lives of people you do not like.
False positives are never a _should_ thing, they're a "best we can do, and worth the cost" thing (or not). It's entirely reasonable to push for a better system, one with fewer false positives (and false negatives).
I think finding better systems with fewer false negatives and fewer false positives is very difficult and might even be impossible for many things. It might be my lack of imagination, but I often think about the measures taken to prevent child abuse. As I see it, you’re either going to get kids left in abusive situations or you’re going to have kids unjustly removed. Both are terrible. I’m not going to argue where the action bias should be. We live in an imperfect world.
I think preventing other crimes is similar. There will always be injustice on some side of the issue. And I’m not trying to argue that that means the status quo is great! But I don’t think we will eventually hone in a perfect system. Maybe just circle around some imaginary point, refining rules and processes until the whole thing breaks down.
Cash is still king. You have to figure all potential networks are backdoored by intelligence. They have things they could do with cash too but its a lot more real work no one has the budget to scale out compared to what you can do at scale in the digital space, thanks to the fact that it is a fungible physical entity already set loose on all corners of the earth.
I worked a little on a finsec program in the early 90s. I had an anonymized dataset with bank account deposits and withdrawals and credit card transactions. I don't know how complete it was, but dividing by the US population the total number of records made it pretty feasible that it was the whole thing.
State law in Tennessee requires all alcohol transactors to be ID'd; many retail stores have begun "scanning" the 2D barcode on the state ID's reverse (also for lighters, cough syrup, &c).
If you have a US Passport Card, there is no 2D barcode and your address isn't visible – yet it is still valid ID. I have also had success with placing an "I VOTED" sticker over TN_ID's 2D barcode; if the cashier looks puzzled I'll usually just say "I don't want my ID scanned so I'll just go put this back" – and then I can usually purchase alcohol (without scanless passport).
I always use cash for reasons, even if that is only to not become thousands-more datapoints for some soulless corporate bureucrats' annual dividends.
I get the vibe they're using ALPRs to identify drivers, and then going from there to find crime? Seems like criminal investigations should start with an actual crime. At the minimum, I would think that there would need to be some suspicion of criminal involvement to obtain a warrant to get financial records. Apparently this administration considers driving down the interstate suspicious enough to toss the constitution out the window.
The article doesn't seem to explain why the BP targeted these folks and not other license plates gathered by the reader. Presumably there's some pattern, right?
We've long since transitioned away from "identify the crime and find the person" Law Enforcement to "target the person and find a crime" Law Enforcement.
Wouldn't the comrades want financial activity to be monitored, to make sure that nobody is getting more then everyone else? (unless they're a party official, of course)
The comrades in the US want the existing system removed. So, for now, while it remains, they want no policing, no oversight, no enforcement because weak governance advances their goals. Later, when the system is replaced with their preferred system, they will want maximum policing, maximum enforcement, maximum purges of undesirable elements because strong governance advances their goals.
Did you know they can just beat you with a wrench anyways?
The "maybe if we do what they say and don't make a fuss they'll be appeased and stop" strategy fails when matched up against those who will never be appeased and stop.
> maybe if we do what they say and don't make a fuss
I never suggested that. Encryption is necessary but not sufficient.
Encrypt your shit. But above all vote, be engaged, and defend your rights like hell. If you're relying on encryption alone to protect you, it's already too late.
> In what universe does using encryption to evade the government function as a survival strategy?
Could be read as either
- It functions as a full and complete survival strategy
or
- One of it's functions is as a survival strategy
The former is saying it's all that is needed, the later is saying it's something that can be used in that way (but not saying it's enough). Kind of like saying that food is a human necessity vs saying it is _the_ human necessity.
Shutting down the isp doesnt let them read what you've sent. There wouldn't be intensive government efforts to eliminate private encryption if it wasn't effective.
You mean the government that has been kidnapping the neighbors with whom I do have a real "social contract"?
I mean, I don't generally think that it's a very useful contact, but of all the things I've studied in my life, taking a long, hard look at the material history of the US government has done teh most to make me think that social relations and responsibilities have nothing do with formal governance.
They kidnapped and confiscated the phone of a previous coworker of mine who was born here as a US citizen for a week after arresting 7 other people at his workplace. His mom had no idea where he was or if he was safe until he called her a week later asking to help him get home from a detention center 3 states away.
Who hold dual citizenship in countries who are themselves virulently racist, and have far tougher immigration laws and enforcement than the US. Mexicans, Nigerians, Somalis and Indians are some of the most racist and tribalist cultures on the planet. Somalis have groups that look more West African who have lived in Somalia for centuries, and are legally barred from office.
They only talk about racism here because the US has a complex because it never compensated its slaves and never will, and knows this is wrong. Elite white children want to somehow make up for that, but also want to continue not doing anything for black people, so they've now made immigrants into a hobby/personality.
They're proud of not being to tell a Black American from a Somali immigrant "You're both welcome here" they say. Meanwhile, all that woke white person's relatives came over between 1880-1920 specifically to drown the black vote, their last name is entirely consonants; and the black person has been here since the 1600s and is blood-related to three "Founding Fathers."
"You're welcome here," they say. "Immigrants built this country," while talking about an immigrant who definitely has no connection to this country. An immigrant is an immigrant, black people are fungible, the real racism is against people who got here five minutes ago, I am very enlightened.
"We're proud to announce today that we're rolling out a trial phase of the Torment Nexus, as made famous in the scifi novel and accompanying film entitled 'Whatever You Do, Do Not Create the Torment Nexus'."
Interstate transportation of marijuana is illegal in the US.[1]
But why is DHS doing this? Stopping interstate drug trafficking is DEA's job, and DEA is in the Justice Department, not Homeland Security. Homeland Security should be looking for illegal aliens and labor contractors who move them.
Because they want the money. The reason drug crimes are so heavily enforced is because they come with large fines and fees and monetary rewards for the department that arrests them and the courts that prosecute them. They use it as a funding source.
Look at what fines and fees a court gets when they successfully prosecute a murder versus a drug crime. Look at the grants the feds give towards police drug enforcement departments.
They already have a multi 100 billion dollar slush fund from Congress. If they’re doing it for the money then things have really gotten out of hand with internal DHS budgets.
The point is to get workers for low costs, the purpose of the system is what it does. They need the workers, and they need the workers to be scared. If they had no workers they'd have no workers, and if the workers weren't scared they'd have to pay proper wages.
"Homeland Security" isn't about homeland security, that's a meaningless propaganda name. It's the result of an evil initiative to coordinate all of America's Federal police and secret police agencies that was created after 9/11. It's not CBP/ICE, it sits above them (and everything else.)
It was something that had been warned against by everyone from the beginning of the US having secret police forces, and 9/11 was the excuse to do it. Before DHS, the FBI and the CIA (for example) had to go through protocols to share information with each other. This was good because the CIA aren't allowed to do some things that the FBI is allowed to do, and vice versa. Now they're really all one organization, although they have internal turf battles caused by power struggles between ambitious individuals.
198 comments
[ 0.80 ms ] story [ 15.3 ms ] threadSeems reasonable and not newsworthy.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Parallel_construction
https://www.nacdl.org/Media/Parallel-Construction-Discover-G...
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Give_me_the_man_and_I_will_giv...
Seems like there's no way to administer this warrantless surveillance without violating the Fourth Amendment of the U.S. Constitution.
Whilst talking about the downvotes is uninteresting I will give in to the urge to observe that -4 is the lowest a comment can go. But sneering at the community is also against the guidelines, so a comment like this will attract flags by people who actually agree with you.
https://www.aviatorgear.com/p-52057-laredo-sector-tech-ops-p...
Everyone's head was too far up their asses to look at the magic crystal ball called "history" and realize that these systems would be used to go after <checks notes> weed dealers and brown people.
Be careful what you wish for I guess.
https://schwartzcohenlaw.com/can-police-lawfully-seize-your-...
As for "wrench attacks," mine is mostly held in offsite multi-signatures, so good luck (to us both!) on your attack. Multiple hidden guns might help here.
I even get discounts for it most places. Highly recommended.
It's likely projection on my part but I have a deep suspicion that people understand that mass surveillance by the state is the main use case for all these LLMs, camera systems, and increasing large data centers.
That certainly is my own worry, at least.
A major point of libertarianism is to tear down the government structure that enables that crony capitalism and restores real competition in the market.
The current US government helps big business through a combination of tax breaks, burdensome regulations that small companies can't cope with, buying services (see: SpaceX, Boeing, Palantir, etc.), direct subsidies, tariffs, etc., etc.
With a libertarian government all of that goes away.
What? Seriously? The size of city government, state government, and federal government grows every year in scope, regulations, and spending.
If that's true then Libertarians have a rosier view of government than I do. A regular David vs. Goliath situation. Biblical stories aside, my money is on Goliath.
It's not about the amount of physical force they can assert.
Suppose you have a constrained set of things the government is allowed to do. They prohibit fraud, non-consensual physical harm (e.g. violence, pollution) and market consolidation. Market consolidation is given a rigid definition in the nature of any organization having more than 15% market share in any market, a rigid consequence in the nature of that organization being fully atomized, and a right for customers and suppliers to bring a private case against them with the same consequence if they're over the threshold and the government prosecutor won't do it. Every citizen has the constitutional right to smash corporations in consolidated markets into smithereens.
Meanwhile the government is prohibited from enacting more specific economic rules. They lack the authority to enact things like certificate of need laws, zoning density restrictions, price controls, anything that acts as a constraint on adversarial interoperability, etc. Micromanaging the population is not allowed.
How do these constraints benefit large incumbents? What benefit is there in giving the government the authority to do things that history has consistently shown to be anti-competitive and inefficient?
This requires a magically flexible definition of "market" at very best.
The smallest number of competitors that can split market share such that none exceed 15% is 7, and that cuts it absurdly close for an existential risk.
Do non-profit organizations count for this rule? If not, how would corporate structures that intentionally obfuscate these distinctions, e.g. IKEA, be handled?
If there's not some extremely tricky qualifiers, these markets seem likely to be a problem, just for starters: medicines†, operating systems, utilities to a specific house or even city, spy satellites, chemicals that are difficult or dangerous to synthesize, combat aircraft, crewed spacecraft, EUV lithography, armored fighting vehicles, cellular telecommunications services, samples of organisms restricted to high biosafety level labs, and literally any new product category. † Imagine a serious condition getting its first drug treatment approved and the company saying "Only every seventh patient is eligible." Also, no one could offer a specific specialized surgical procedure until seven or more independent organizations in the same geographic area have qualified staff and equipment, which would be especially hard for any novel techniques; if the problem it addressed was rare, they'd also effectively be forced into a cartel to allocate the patients evenly.
There's also separately and unavoidably the massive problem of transitioning from the current situation to one compliant with these restrictions.
Edit: Switch to using a dagger for the footnote to avoid a formatting issue.
The definition of a market is the set of goods or services which are fungible substitutes for one another.
The only thing that's hard about this at all is determining how fungible they have to be in order to be considered substitutes, e.g. two restaurants that are 3000 miles apart are obviously not substitutes for each other, but what if they're 30 miles apart? That one could go either way depending on how aggressive you want to be.
But it doesn't really matter how the coin flips like that turn out because the things that are close to the line aren't the markets where consolidation is causing major trouble, and conversely causing some local shops to not merge with each other so it stays unambiguous that the local market isn't consolidating is likewise not a big issue.
> Do non-profit organizations count for this rule?
Yes. If a non-profit has more than 15% market share then it has to be broken into multiple non-profits that each have less than 15% market share, the same as anyone else.
> Imagine a serious condition getting its first drug treatment approved and the company saying "Only every seventh patient is eligible."
You're assuming that there are still patents. If there are then that obviously doesn't count during the patent term because that's what patents are, but then you count only the patented invention and any sort of tying is entirely prohibited. You shouldn't be able to patent a connector and use that to monopolize the market for replacement razor blades.
Whereas if there aren't patents then you don't have this problem to begin with because you get a dozen different companies all producing the new medicine right away.
> operating systems
Operating systems are easy. Microsoft would be atomized because they have too much market share and then a dozen different companies would have the full rights to make derivatives of Windows. None of them would ever be allowed to have majority market share again, so now it's in everyone's interests to standardize APIs so that the same software will run on each company's Windows distribution, and the same APIs would end up being supported by (or consolidated with) non-Windows operating systems as well.
The OS then becomes fungible as intended and most likely ends up being open source since there's not a lot of margin in fungible commodities. And software licensed to allow the entire public to modify and redistribute it has an unlimited number of suppliers and would never exceed the market share threshold.
> utilities to a specific house or even city
If you're a utility company and you know you're going to get broken up if you have more than 15% market share, what do you do?
The sensible thing to do is to build your infrastructure differently. You're digging up the road once, but instead of installing one big pipe, you install a conduit with 10 smaller ones inside it. Then you sell off nine out of ten to nine other companies so that you each have ~10% market share and if one of you ends up with 14% and another 6% you're still not over the threshold.
Then if a natural disaster damages the infrastructure, in theory they could each employ their own repair crews and each send one to each damaged location, but that seems pretty inefficient when there is another option. You have multiple independent repair companies and the utility companies pay whichever one gives them the best rate for a given job, which will tend to be the one already sending someone to that site, i.e. the same repair crew usually repairs all 10 damaged pipes and gets paid by all 10 utility companies. Meanwhile a different repair company puts in the best bid for a different site.
The status quo takes the assumption that everything has to be vertically integrated, but it doesn't, and it's a lot easier to have competition when each new entrant doesn't h...
If this is the more extreme form of libertarianism then surely my neighbors agree with me that the pollution sucks and we all stop paying them. Yeah, maybe we go without power for a short time, but then that company changes their ways or goes out of business. No long court battles, nobody single entity for the electric company to bribe, no writing your congressman and hoping there's a change. Vote directly with your wallet.
Or, there's the libertarian idea that another corporation is responsible for (essentially is hired as a caretaker of) the air we breathe and the electric company pays them for anything they emit into that air, so they are punished/disincentivized that way
The government is inevitably going to do business with the market. Where do you draw the line between a government contract and favors to big business?
What is libertarianism's answer when there are 6 people that own everything, or more realistically, how the richest people in the world, already deeply entrenched and leading their respective industries from continuing to accrue resources until everything is owned by a small group of people and/or taking advantage of their market advantages to shut out any competition.
I don't see how libertarian can ever be well defined when it seemingly is always based in ideology and the arguments supporting it always seem to be fallacious.
I totally just made that up, so I'm sure we could work out details and make it better, but the overall point of minimizing government power and distributing it could be preserved as much as possible.
No system is going to be perfect, but there is so much more we could do to take power, and therefore the temptation of corruption, away from the people we allow to rule over us. Giving fallible human individuals more power is never the right solution.
What happens to the business when it isn't small anymore? What does that accountability even look like? Paperwork isn't accountability.
I agree that details can be worked out and systems can be made better, and the government is corrupt (especially now, but also the past two decades I've been old enough to be politically conscious), but I don't think ideological free market libertarianism is the right path to get there. I think there is a lot of merit to a free market and I agree people deserve their own autonomy to not be ruled over, but right now corporations hold way too much power and wealth inequality is too large and only accelerating for me to accept libertarianism as a solution to modern society.
I think another issue is the word libertarianism can easily mean so many different things. There are anarchist libertarians on the left and right, with social libertarians and market libertarians taking up the space between anarchists, and between the four of them there is no solidarity because they all want different things regarding the structure of society.
Sure, there are different ideas about how to implement libertarianism but the general idea is singular: Maximize individual liberty and private property rights.
Accountability always comes down to individual liberty. The question isn't, "is the corporation too big?" The question is, "is it taking away personal property or individual liberty?"
The absolute hardest part of libertarianism that all of you opponents miss is that it requires people to always be evaluating that in their choices. It requires people to avoid making everything Someone Else's Problem and wishing for Government to Just Take Care of It. People complain that corporations are too big or people are starving or I don't like what my neighbor is doing with their yard and libertarians answer with, "well, your going to have to do something about that yourself instead of giving up rights and liberty so that someone else can try and force a fix down all our throats." It just blows people's minds! You mean I have give to the poor myself of my own free will? I jave talk to my neighbor about this myself? I need to stop giving that big evil corporation my money of my own accord? If I want more people to do these same things I have to gently persuade them instead of asking the police to just shoot them if they don't comply? The horrors!!
Markets, left to their own accord, naturally tend to monopolies and cooperation. Cooperation just works better than competition. Competition is, really, a zero-sum game, a race to the bottom for companies. Cooperation is optimal, it’s “everybody wins”.
Even if companies didn’t just buy up each other (why wouldn’t they? We need laws against that), they would certainly work together to set prices as high as the market can bear. Which is then, effectively, a monopoly.
I mean, imagine a perfect market with hundreds of thriving competitors. What happens over time? As the industry matures, competitors buy each other up and consolidate capital. Then, newcomers can’t break in, because they don’t have the capital. And any newcomers who have a new innovative process or product, just get bought out before they threaten the market share. Then, eventually, there are only a handful of companies left. It’s trivial for them to move in lock-step and everyone wins… except the consumer.
No, they don't. To become a monopoly, they need the collusion of government to outlaw competition.
The poster boy of monopolies, Standard Oil, never had a monopoly. During its rise, it dropped the consumer price of kerosene 70%. Its market share dropped steadily during the years of the anti-trust trial.
> It’s trivial for them to move in lock-step and everyone wins… except the consumer.
Ever wonder what happened to IBM?
And if they aren't evil backstabbers and they are actually friendly and good at cooperating then it's a win for all of us!
If I'm not legally prohibited from competing with a firm, but that firm's position nonetheless also makes it unprofitable for me to enter or compete, what is that market structure called?
I want to thank you for explaining economic principles even if the OP doesn't understand them. As someone who has less econ background then they'd like — your explanations are clear.
You can’t have trillion dollar companies without going to dinner with the President of the banana republic to kiss his ass and line his pockets.
And there's a central tension that libertarianism, as far as I'm aware of, doesn't resolve in how to promote individual freedom across a highly economically unequal society.
Trusting those with all the capital to act in anything other than their own best interest doesn't seem a solid foundation.
Which they always could, given the vastly different economic starting positions.
Communism is similarly self-serving. I own no property, and so my ideal government has no concept of property and assigns resources to everyone.
What if the voter has very few resources, but soon they'll likely gain lots of resources, and still vote for communism?
What if the voter prefers a social safety net to having lots of resources, because they're really afraid of ending up broke?
You can debate whether it's justifiable or not, but it is self serving by definition.
As my examples show, such a model breaks down for trivial cases. In the real world, people have much more complicated and layered reasons motivating their vote for any system. Though I'd like to ask anyone subscribing to the homo economicus view - what do you think about the position of people with above-average wealth who would vote for capitalism? Their choice is equally as self-serving, no?
You then listed a bunch of people who might vote for it for some non-self-serving reason, let's call them Group B.
Your comment implies that the existence of Group B makes Group A not-self-serving, when in fact it is as irrelevant to Group A's motives as my grandmother being a bicycle.
> Btw, it's a bit rude to pattern-match a thought-terminating cliche followed by declaring your point of view to be objectively true.
I don't even know what you're trying to say here.
> If "assigning resources to everyone" is a net gain (IE the voter doesn't have resources), then yes it is self serving.
It is not possible to state more clearly that:
Voter has below-average resources -> voting for communism must be self-serving.
I have explained that this is wrong. To stick with your example, when you choose group A based on factor X and then broadly assign motivation Y to everyone in the group, you're creating a false narrative, because group A is a superset of the people you've described.
The important thing is not to ignore your self-serving motivations, but to understand them and think long term rather than short term. Things quickly fall apart when everyone pushes for short term gain.
So much this.
People forget that for all its fault, democratic government is democratic to some degree.
Corporations are democratic to zero degree. (And before someone brings up shareholders: institutional investors and dual-class shares)
Its not mass surveillance by the state, exclusively.
Its also the potential for mis-use and corruption by criminal networks.
Plus, there's that whole degradation of culture factor. Sure, you trust your government today. But do you trust the government of tomorrow?
Anyone who thinks this is misguided is probably seeking to profit from it at some point.
And that is precisely the problem.
Then the Nazis rolled in. And you can imagine what happened with those registers.
So it doesn't even have to be about your own government. And with digital access being a world away, it can indeed be a threat.
And everyone else, but the Nazis were after the Jews.
Most Americans really, really don't. Gallup puts Americans' trust in major institutions, including several parts of the government, at around 30% [0]
In OECD countries, trust in government sits at around 39% [1]
I would say that most people in Western nations don't trust their government. Whether they agree with what all their governments are doing is another issue-by-issue matter, but I would guess they don't love that on the whole, either.
[0] https://news.gallup.com/poll/712436/confidence-institutions-...
[1] https://www.oecd.org/en/publications/oecd-survey-on-drivers-...
I’m not offering this advice because I’m perfect either, I find it difficult sometimes to be respectful of someone I disagree with. You can take it or leave it, I’ll just say editing those sorts of things out of my own posts has been helpful.
That's a lot easier if you've first degraded public trust in institutions.
Its another to do something truly effective about it.
Alas, the American people seem to be utterly paralyzed. Catatonic, even.
When all it really needs is civic responsibility and an understanding that the government derives its power from the people, and thus the people always get the government they deserve.
You've had people being apologists for all manner of bad forms of government around the world for at least the past 25 years. This shouldn't be surprising.
Look I encourage people to vote and participate in government and politics as much as possible, but it's extremely clear at this point that this is more and more untrue every day. The government derives it's power from billionaires now, and thus the people always get the government billionaires want. It may not be exactly the route they want, but it's the same end results.
Look no further for proof than the endless slew of city and county governments that capitulate to big tech and sign sweeping data center contracts without even notifying their constituents, intentionally ignoring the feedback they get, or simply silencing the dissenters when they speak at meetings. Even local government has been sold to the highest bidder.
Think folks were thrilled with the robber barons of the railroad area also owning newspapers?
Imho, the core thing that worsened was the election system. Specifically, closed primaries and gerrymandering. Both because they disincentivize centrists and compromise.
Ranked choice, mandatory opening of party primaries, and a Supreme Court definition of unacceptable gerrymandering (mathematically-based) would get us better government.
> Its also the potential for mis-use and corruption by criminal networks.
But you repeat yourself
I don't think it's unrealistic for state or another party to be taking the decades of data on individuals they have and feeding it into their large hyperscale data centers and using the platforms they own to predict our actions and propagandize us.
Unfortunately, I don't think most people understand it's about mass surveillance yet, but about the misappropriation of resources in lower income communities to power LLMs and/or the intellectual theft and profits off the data used to train LLMs.
Dude, they're literally watching Flock Cameras go up in their neighborhood, being told they use AI, and anyone with a brain who can add 2+2 (or read Larry Ellison on "best behavior") concludes these data centers are not merely for ChatGPT.
In which case, they see noise pollution, water pollution, construction pollution, property value damage, utility bill cost explosions; and what's the reward? Surveillance and white-collar job loss, possibly culminating in home loss. "Misguided."
Maybe consider my conciliatory rhetoric ("folks here think") in the original post as statement about what I think the vicious and hyper-authoritarian tech bros here believe, namely everything from obviously dumb crap ranging from
- "it's ccp propaganda"
- or "you don't have a right to provacy in public"
- or "the environmental concerns are overblown"
- or "you already have a cellphone so why you bitchin"
- or "it's a private company so you don't have to worry about the gov"
to less arguable but widely held neoliberal premises like "the state has a perogative to do what it wants so if you're not able to participate in the [typically closed] {city council|senate|NSA} decisions that lead here then you have no right to take direct action".
Thus you might understand what I am writing here is an attempt to not trigger the VC bros and to get them to consider that all us unwashed masses might have some kind of point?
I am often not the clearest writer, but the first sentence literally is about what I understand a lot of people on the site to believe, not a statement about what I belive.
People on this site have a highly propagandized view of what (they think of as) the proles think, and I'd like the folks of the site to consider that people really do understand the vicious ends to which these technologies are put, hence the rhetoric.
To be clear, on some level, I think my average no-kings/Tucker-Carson-stan-ing friends can accept the argument that cops will use this tech to give worms to ex-girlfriends. While that should be enough of a reason to reject the tech it really doesn't go far enough into why that tech is objectionable: forcing warrants for the mass-survellience network aren'r really sufficient to remedy my own worries.
From my position, that idea of tech/policy-as-solution is indeed misguided because my deeper worry is that the state will use it for "counter-insurgency". Considering oneself a potential insurgent is foreign to about anyone in US mainline politics. It is, however, what I feel deeply when think about how folks might indeed be "misguided", and I am not sure if you'd agree with that or not. I can read that into a lot of the posts responding above. But that more radical concern not what I wrote about when I wrote that post.
So sure, you're 100% correct and I agree with your point.
I do not think the idea that "folks undrstand the survellience aspect of all this tech" is generally legible to the fascists and other anti-leftist US "centrists" who populate this specific message board- I think the conversation in this thread supports that view.
It's hard to make that point into something they are able to read. I'd still like them to consider it.
For example:
> you don't have a right to provacy in public
You don't. That much is simple enough to work out given various highly entrenched cultural and legal values that have stood the test of time. The problem is that a network of surveillance cameras isn't remotely the same thing as an unrelated individual snapping a wide angle photograph of a street that you just so happen to be walking down.
So it's more like we need (but currently don't have) a legally recognized right not to be systematically surveilled in public spaces. Or better yet to make blanket surveillance outright illegal (which would also resolve many of the issues surrounding adtech).
> the environmental concerns are overblown
In many cases they are. In a few they aren't. As usual some businesses in some cases are exploiting holes in the regulations.
People have a lot of fears about being done injury by rogue antisocial actors. Ranging from nuisances like dog shit everywhere, stolen Amazon packages and car break-ins to life-defining traumas like sexual assault. Broader surveillance, in some form, is the first step towards getting traction on these kinds of problems. Leftist commentators prefer the more "grass-roots" varieties like cell phone videos and word-of-mouth name-and-shame campaigns, but, in general, disseminating awareness of antisocial behavior and coordinating a punitive response of some kind is the goal.
I think this internal tension in public opinion pre-dates LLMs, and my personal opinion is that the surveillance applications of AI are secondary drivers of the bipartisan anti-AI sentiment, which is more about revulsion at the possibility of a future where not only "artist" but "mathematician" may be lost as vocations.
Government? As others have said, government may well contract it out to private companies. But surveillance by private companies who have the government's ear isn't much better.
People understand? You're almost certainly wrong there.
No its much worse. At least democratic governments have some semblance of democratic accountability and of course some inability to work at scale. At worse they can just pay the private company, they generally will have lower capabilities unless they can hit an infinite money glitch (in which case they can use that to pay private companies)
Like say, selling $40T of sovereign debt and running a budget deficit year after year? :) Inflation prevents infinite money printing, but the US Government has what is functionally an infinite money glitch, for the reasons I stated above.
It's the opposite that is true. Governments can selectively enforce laws against companies based on whether they comply or not, and pay them for whatever they want them to do.
The wealthy and their companies own Congress and the Executive because those positions rely on publicity to be elected, and they own the judiciary because the judges are both aligned with political parties and completely bribeable. They do not, however, exactly own the secret police funded by secret budgets - that's where the real executive lies, and that's where efforts are coordinated and conflicts between powerful blocs are adjudicated.
The performance we get is meaningless. The only important parts of the show we get to watch are following where the money is going and watching who state power is currently killing.
> People understand? You're almost certainly wrong there.
People certainly do understand. The media and the upper-middle class have made it almost a religion to spend their entire political life calling those people crazy. Why have upper-middle class people chosen such a stupid religion? Because a lot of money has been dumped into their stock portfolios.
Don't look at intentions. Look at capabilities.
By the time the government overreach starts being used on them, its gonna be too late.
Age old story in human history.
Private companies buy up this information like mad. It's so cheap - five figures gets you a database of every person over 18 in the USA and their addresses. Another five figures gets work history for them. Another five figures gets you property information. Another gets you social media feeds. Etc. Some vendors even sell it ad hoc with little up-front cost.
For less than a million a year, any company can build an extensive profile on every person in the USA. These companies are just adding to that list.
Deny, Defund, Depose the federal terrorist groups: DHS, ICE, CBP, PITT etc.
I’ve been under investigation for money laundering twice in the last three years - not because I’ve laundered a single dime, but because I have no discernible employment and move large capital sums around the globe almost constantly, and my bank accounts and tax returns inarguably look fucking weird. All 100% above board - I just made some good investments a while back.
I even had the feds come knocking because they decided they needed to check I wasn’t trafficking narcotics. We had a nice chat, they decided they didn’t need to search the place, and six months later I got a letter confirming the case had been archived. Like one of the folks in the article, I had weed on me when they rocked up. Thankfully, in Europe, that’s basically just a “shrug” by law enforcement, unless you’ve got clear intent to distribute.
None of this is a good thing, and none of it is terribly new, either - reporting on finances has been going on for decades, but the integration is getting tighter.
The main problem as I see it is that it has a horrendous false positive rate, and you end up with innocent folks like yours truly having to waste their time and energy proving that they are innocent of a crime that a machine dreamt up.
I’m sure we could just put always-on cameras in every house to catch criminals too, but that doesn’t mean it’s a good idea.
I use this type of point all the time, and every time to blank stares.
Me> The Flock surveillance network is bad - it is an invasion of privacy and gives way too much power to people that should not have that power. It _can_ be used to solve crimes, and does. But so could not allowing anyone out of their house without a permit. But that, too, would be stupid and harm society
Them> _blank stare_ But.. it saved a child once.
I think preventing other crimes is similar. There will always be injustice on some side of the issue. And I’m not trying to argue that that means the status quo is great! But I don’t think we will eventually hone in a perfect system. Maybe just circle around some imaginary point, refining rules and processes until the whole thing breaks down.
It's late and slow but everyone is realizing that it's a good idea to move away from the US
> It is not clear how exactly Border Patrol is monitoring Americans’ financial activity.
Can anyone take a guess how they are monitoring financial activity?
imagine paying someone to buy your own information to spy on you, pretty incredible system that we've come up with
If you have a US Passport Card, there is no 2D barcode and your address isn't visible – yet it is still valid ID. I have also had success with placing an "I VOTED" sticker over TN_ID's 2D barcode; if the cashier looks puzzled I'll usually just say "I don't want my ID scanned so I'll just go put this back" – and then I can usually purchase alcohol (without scanless passport).
I always use cash for reasons, even if that is only to not become thousands-more datapoints for some soulless corporate bureucrats' annual dividends.
Do you not realize that all countries monitor capital movement so that, for example, the rulings of their judiciaries are enforced?
If you want to keep a secret, you must also hide it from yourself.
This behavior isn't a flaw, it's a feature.
Real life doesn't work that way. The government always has the $5 wrench. Or, well, the ability to just shut down your ISP.
The "maybe if we do what they say and don't make a fuss they'll be appeased and stop" strategy fails when matched up against those who will never be appeased and stop.
I never suggested that. Encryption is necessary but not sufficient.
Encrypt your shit. But above all vote, be engaged, and defend your rights like hell. If you're relying on encryption alone to protect you, it's already too late.
> In what universe does using encryption to evade the government function as a survival strategy?
Could be read as either
- It functions as a full and complete survival strategy
or
- One of it's functions is as a survival strategy
The former is saying it's all that is needed, the later is saying it's something that can be used in that way (but not saying it's enough). Kind of like saying that food is a human necessity vs saying it is _the_ human necessity.
I mean, I don't generally think that it's a very useful contact, but of all the things I've studied in my life, taking a long, hard look at the material history of the US government has done teh most to make me think that social relations and responsibilities have nothing do with formal governance.
So, yes, they are kidnapping our neighbors.
They only talk about racism here because the US has a complex because it never compensated its slaves and never will, and knows this is wrong. Elite white children want to somehow make up for that, but also want to continue not doing anything for black people, so they've now made immigrants into a hobby/personality.
They're proud of not being to tell a Black American from a Somali immigrant "You're both welcome here" they say. Meanwhile, all that woke white person's relatives came over between 1880-1920 specifically to drown the black vote, their last name is entirely consonants; and the black person has been here since the 1600s and is blood-related to three "Founding Fathers."
"You're welcome here," they say. "Immigrants built this country," while talking about an immigrant who definitely has no connection to this country. An immigrant is an immigrant, black people are fungible, the real racism is against people who got here five minutes ago, I am very enlightened.
But why is DHS doing this? Stopping interstate drug trafficking is DEA's job, and DEA is in the Justice Department, not Homeland Security. Homeland Security should be looking for illegal aliens and labor contractors who move them.
[1] https://federal-criminal.com/drugs/marijuana-cross-border-tr...
Look at what fines and fees a court gets when they successfully prosecute a murder versus a drug crime. Look at the grants the feds give towards police drug enforcement departments.
DHS wants that easy cash.
See also: US healthcare (typically) being tied to your employer.
...you're not going anywhere, worker.
It was something that had been warned against by everyone from the beginning of the US having secret police forces, and 9/11 was the excuse to do it. Before DHS, the FBI and the CIA (for example) had to go through protocols to share information with each other. This was good because the CIA aren't allowed to do some things that the FBI is allowed to do, and vice versa. Now they're really all one organization, although they have internal turf battles caused by power struggles between ambitious individuals.
Tech Company: At long last, we have created the Torment Nexus from classic sci-fi novel Don't Create The Torment Nexus.