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cody.d. wrote:

 Matt Swain wrote:

 Grey Templar wrote:

 Matt Swain wrote:


So while I'm neutral on the idea covid was created to impose a cashless society, i'm fairly sure that some people would be willing to use it to accelerate plans for one.

Thats what I think. COVID is a naturally occuring disease that people have simply opportunistically used to advance certain agendas. Thats not a CT, its just evil being evil. I don't think a cashless society conspiracy is involved, but there are plenty of other brazen attempts to limit other things.

There are enough real shady things being done without needing to worry about some made up cashless conspiracy.

TBH i am at least 50% sure the cashless society bit isn't a theory but a real conspiracy.

Is this related to China stepping the Yuan down as it's primary currency for a bitcoin of some variety? (goodness knows if that will go forward proper)

Well, china is absolutely the most authoritarian, anti human rights society on earth now, a point i wont even debate anymore than i'd debate a flat earther. Their recent omniversal surveillance and judgement state proves that beyond any reasonable doubt. Then add in their persecution of ethnic minorities that simply maintain an identity asides from that of Chinese subjects, their persecution of religion and anything else that creates a sense of identity outside of being a good loyal little chinese government subjects and yes I would say that if the chinese government is doing it it must be bad.

But again, that article i linked to above shows what a cashless society would be like and it's awful.

As to a society where all your spending can be tracked, how would you like it if your corporate overlord asked you give them access to your spending data? Of course you would be free to choose not to let them, they could not legally force you to let them have it. Just check the box saying "No, I choose to terminate my employment and forfeit any severance and accumulated benefits.."

So you choose to give them access to your spending data. Then you make a donation to a group your owner doesn't like. 5 minutes later you get a pink slip text.

Some credit cards companies refuse to let you send donations to groups like wikileaks, for example. At least you can use a check or money order to send donations to groups the credit card CEO's don't like. In a cashless society, you couldn't.

So yeah, a cashless society would be the end of privacy and freedom.

The book "Towers of utopia" by Mack Reynolds explored this, how a true cashless society makes the individual essentially incapable of escaping the surveillance and therefore the power of the government's law enforcement. In the book the example was a murderer. But it woiulod also apoply to anyone who displeased the system in any way, by, say, having an opinion of his own, ceiling for change, etc.

One thing Reynolds got wrong tho. In his books he forsaw a lot accurately, the "phone tv credit card video camera" which really was just the modern smartphone and the "TV library booster" that was an internet termninal. He had people taking education courses on their tv libraries. He really forsaw the internet and smartphones pretty clearly.

The one thing he got wrong was the government having to make it illegal to be without your tv phone credit card video camera machine. he actually believed people would have to be forced by law to carry them, he never guessed people would do so so willingly as they do today.

He wrote "Towers of utopia" in 1975.

Yeah but just imagine how convenient everything would be...

 queen_annes_revenge wrote:
Yeah but just imagine how convenient everything would be...

Convenience, ah yes the sugar torwards authorithairian systems.
imagine how convenient the job for politicians would be if they allways could have their way without beeing forced to negotiate or voted out or voted on policy.

With someone taking a cut of every transaction, prices go up.
If one system is preferred, that's one hell of a powerful company.
Just think if the systems crashed, or were hacked....

It’s also far more secure, and comes with greater consumer protection.

I get real time updates on my bank account, so long as I’m on 4g5g/WiFi.

I can lock my debit card if I find it missing, and unlock it should I find it my wallet in the fridge again (true story!).

It also makes it harder for fraudsters, and easier to prosecute them.

Example? If I pinch £200 cash from your wallet? First, you’ll need CCTV of me actually taking it, to show it was me in the first place. Then you’ll have to reasonably prove you had said £200 in the first place. I can also take my time spending that cash, as I’ve already got it.

But, if I pinch your debit or credit card? Well, I’ll need to know your PIN. I’ve also got an indeterminate amount of time between pinching it, and you reporting it pinched. So I need to get going as soon as possible - and ideally avoid CCTV etc.

There is of course far more to it than that where cards are concerned, but those are trade secret type levels of knowledge.

But clearly, cashless is just Big Brother Big Brothering.

 Mad Doc Grotsnik wrote:
It’s also far more secure, and comes with greater consumer protection.

debatable.

I get real time updates on my bank account, so long as I’m on 4g5g/WiFi.

debatable.

I can lock my debit card if I find it missing, and unlock it should I find it my wallet in the fridge again (true story!).

I don't even... WHY?

It also makes it harder for fraudsters, and easier to prosecute them.

Wirecard says hello...

Example? If I pinch £200 cash from your wallet? First, you’ll need CCTV of me actually taking it, to show it was me in the first place. Then you’ll have to reasonably prove you had said £200 in the first place. I can also take my time spending that cash, as I’ve already got it.

But, if I pinch your debit or credit card? Well, I’ll need to know your PIN. I’ve also got an indeterminate amount of time between pinching it, and you reporting it pinched. So I need to get going as soon as possible - and ideally avoid CCTV etc.

Au contraire, it actually makes it easier, to even wash the money.
Pinch credit card, buy f.e. game keys, resell on G2A. There, washed money. Further. in case of handys etc, any and all internet capable devices you open yourself up to a world of pain in regards to internet dangers.

There is of course far more to it than that where cards are concerned, but those are trade secret type levels of knowledge.

But clearly, cashless is just Big Brother Big Brothering.

Big brothers. There is also a gak town of knowledge going to companies which then will use said infor targeted marketing, not to mention that it can easily lead to some rather nasty issues for your privacy. But sure all that don't agree with it are just afraid of big brother, nvm people having issues with big coorperations barging into their privacy sphere, not to mention that certain suppliers for these devices come out of countries with active genocides going on.

handys = smartphones?

Not Online!!! wrote:

 queen_annes_revenge wrote:
Yeah but just imagine how convenient everything would be...

Convenience, ah yes the sugar torwards authorithairian systems.
imagine how convenient the job for politicians would be if they allways could have their way without beeing forced to negotiate or voted out or voted on policy.

I was being facetious there. I abhor the idea of a compulsory cashless society too. I hate how much I use my card now...

 Skinnereal wrote:
handys = smartphones?

ya, last century combined with foreign language use.
handy is used colloquially over here to include everything from the old nokia bricks of doom to smartphones of any kind.

Not Online!!! wrote:


Big brothers. There is also a shittown of knowledge going to companies which then will use said infor targeted marketing, not to mention that it can easily lead to some rather nasty issues for your privacy. But sure all that don't agree with it are just afraid of big brother, nvm people having issues with big coorperations barging into their privacy sphere, not to mention that certain suppliers for these devices come out of countries with active genocides going on.

This. I'd rather just lose the amount of hard cash I happened to have in my wallet than be subject to all those other things as a mandatory requirement.

GDPR is a thing.

And frankly, the points I mentioned simply aren’t debatable. At all. They are simple (if simplified for sake of conversation) facts.

Chargeback, Section 75, all genuine protections.

 Mad Doc Grotsnik wrote:
GDPR is a thing.

And China accepts that as a fact? Or Secret services?

And frankly, the points I mentioned simply aren’t debatable. At all. They are simple (if simplified for sake of conversation) facts.

Chargeback, Section 75, all genuine protections.

You know that if you know what you have in a purse all the time you allways have oversight without accessing a seperate site which is doubly usefull if you have no electricity or internet access at that moment .

And sure, chargeback etc, exist, and yet we have stuff i brought up like wirecard, or the G2A key reseller money washing explode in recent years.

So yes, the postives are very much debatable, you puttung hands over your ears because it is addmittedly enormly convenient doesn't change that.

Oh and it goes a bit deeper, we now have our bloody gaming consoles hooked up with our cards, which then leads to such great things as child gambling etc. Because parents don't really teach their children how to handle money, respectively for utter lazyness lose controll of payment methods.

There are MASSIVE issues with wireless paying, beyond security of prviacy, the fact that online criminality has alone in switzerland from 2015 -2018 trippled should give you serious thought for pause. And that is not going into issues with malware.

Stores can also get a lot of data from cash purchases. Store cards let them track individual spending patterns for a start even if every transaction is cash.

Meanwhile behind the scenes large firms owning many smaller ones is an easy way to get around data exchange between different companies. You don't have to worry about trading laws if you already own multiple businesses which let you swap the data between them.


In the end tracking has always happened, its just shifting in scale. From "Old Ted" who runs the corner shop who knows you like to buy the odd beer on a weekend or whenever the wife is away visiting her mother; to now a guy in an office somewhere in a big city who knows that a portion of the population does this and thus targets them with advertising on the weekend.

The line is hard to draw and I'm sure that at some point we'll have some kind of automated data blocking system in place that starts to allow you to make digital purchases, whilst protecting your data. Most likely something that doesn't stop the data being harvested, but simply disallows its use/trade.

It is a concern for many. That said if someone in an office knows I spend my money on Warhammer and computer games and the odd book on birds/flies/moths I'm not really sure what they can do with that data that's nefarious save for showing me an add for a new book or game.

Controll.
Simple as.

Take a look at chinas social credit system.
Buy the wrong book? Drop down.
Behave admirably for the state: Pts go up.

Geographically as well, went regularly to Hong Kong during protests, DOWN you go.
etc .

Do you or I live in China?

No? Then it’s a conspiracy theory.

 Mad Doc Grotsnik wrote:
Do you or I live in China?

No? Then it’s a conspiracy theory.

HAHAHAHAHAHAHA

https://neweconomics.org/2018/07/whats-your-score

https://www.theguardian.com/world/commentisfree/2018/jul/12/algorithm-privacy-data-surveillance


What's your score then?

My credit score?

 Mad Doc Grotsnik wrote:
My credit score?

you find this not concerning?

I do, however, care that a program exists that will determine my eligibility for a loan by how often I call my mother. I care if landlords are using tools to rank their tenants by compliant behaviour, to create a giant, shared platform of desirable tenants, who never complain about black mould and greet each rent increase with a basket of muffins. I care if the police in Durham are using Experian credit scores to influence their custodial decisions, an example – as you may have guessed by its specificity – that is already real. I care that the same credit-rating company has devised a Mosaic score, which splits households into comically bigoted stereotypes: if your name is Liam and you are an “avid texter”, that puts you in “disconnected youth”, while if you’re Asha you’re in “crowded kaleidoscope”. It’s not a privacy issue so much as a profiling one, although, as anyone who has ever been the repeated victim of police stop-and-search could have told me years ago, these are frequently the same thing.

Or this one?

In the US, algorithms have replaced nurses in determining how many hours of home care visits a patient is entitled to. In some places, funding dropped by as much as 42% as a result and when service users tried to understand why their hours had been cut, the state refused to share the algorithm’s decision-making process. Similar calculations sift through survey data to create a ranking of ​‘deservingness’ for housing waiting lists in places like Los Angeles.

Both nice exemples allready.
Housing benefits are also tied to this over yonder.

Another area where technology is effectively crushing personal freedom and basically humanity is algorithmic employee control.

Why replace workers with robots when you can force them to work like robots by robotizing the management, eliminating and pesky, inefficient humanity that might get in the way of maximum profit?

https://www.theverge.com/2020/2/27/21155254/automation-robots-unemployment-jobs-vs-human-google-amazon

Not Online!!! wrote:

 Skinnereal wrote:
handys = smartphones?

ya, last century combined with foreign language use.
handy is used colloquially over here to include everything from the old nokia bricks of doom to smartphones of any kind.

And over here it would refer to certain services procured in a back alley.

 Mad Doc Grotsnik wrote:
I can lock my debit card if I find it missing, and unlock it should I find it my wallet in the fridge again (true story!).

I can't help but wonder why no-one has asked you to expand upon why your wallet has ended up in your fridge - and more than once, at that.

I mean, that was the key point of that post, right?

 Dysartes wrote:

 Mad Doc Grotsnik wrote:
I can lock my debit card if I find it missing, and unlock it should I find it my wallet in the fridge again (true story!).

I can't help but wonder why no-one has asked you to expand upon why your wallet has ended up in your fridge - and more than once, at that.

I mean, that was the key point of that post, right?

If he has a horizontal fridge he has to lean over to get stuff out of the bottom of his wallet could have fallen out into it as he leaned over if he puts it in his front pocket like i do.

Alcoholism is a serious illness. Please get treatment, Mad Doc.

 Matt Swain wrote:

 Dysartes wrote:

 Mad Doc Grotsnik wrote:
I can lock my debit card if I find it missing, and unlock it should I find it my wallet in the fridge again (true story!).

I can't help but wonder why no-one has asked you to expand upon why your wallet has ended up in your fridge - and more than once, at that.

I mean, that was the key point of that post, right?

If he has a horizontal fridge he has to lean over to get stuff out of the bottom of his wallet could have fallen out into it as he leaned over if he puts it in his front pocket like i do.

Oddly unlikely. UK kitchens tend to be 'intimate' by design. As Nanny Ogg might say, not enough space to swing a cat, unless its a very patient cat that doesn't mind a few knocks on the head.
Unless he's got an odd custom build, a horizontal fridge seems unlikely, even if he could find one to put in it.

Can't say I've seen many english kitchens. The one in "An american werewolf in london" was a bit snug as i recall.

I don't recall small ones on dr. who or the young ones, but maybe those had to be big to get the cast into.

English Kitchens also depend if he's country or urban. Urban its snug; country in an old build it will be bigger with room to swing two cats.

Heck these days a lot of "flats" and some houses/apartments have kitchen/dining/living room combos where its basically a jumble of furniture in one room

 Dysartes wrote:

 Mad Doc Grotsnik wrote:
I can lock my debit card if I find it missing, and unlock it should I find it my wallet in the fridge again (true story!).

I can't help but wonder why no-one has asked you to expand upon why your wallet has ended up in your fridge - and more than once, at that.

I mean, that was the key point of that post, right?

About 20 years ago, I was home alone and really fancied a Pizza. Spent an hour hunting for my wallet, which is usually kept in my jeans pocket or next to my bed.

Couldn’t find it, so resigned to seeing what was to eat in the fridge. Opened the door, lo and behold, my wallet.

No idea how it got in there!

 Mad Doc Grotsnik wrote:

 Dysartes wrote:

 Mad Doc Grotsnik wrote:
I can lock my debit card if I find it missing, and unlock it should I find it my wallet in the fridge again (true story!).

I can't help but wonder why no-one has asked you to expand upon why your wallet has ended up in your fridge - and more than once, at that.

I mean, that was the key point of that post, right?

About 20 years ago, I was home alone and really fancied a Pizza. Spent an hour hunting for my wallet, which is usually kept in my jeans pocket or next to my bed.

Couldn’t find it, so resigned to seeing what was to eat in the fridge. Opened the door, lo and behold, my wallet.

No idea how it got in there!

Probably that infernal Beer Monkey!

Brownies.

It's always the brownies. Always borrowing stuff when you aren't using it and putting it down where you have no idea how it got there.