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Joined 3 years ago
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Cake day: June 12th, 2023

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  • I don’t know that I agree with the null hypothesis. Why is the default assumption surveillance prevents terrorism.

    Surveillance is often a response to terrorism, but do we have great examples of how our current surveillance systems have actually prevented terror? And while it goes hand in hand with policing, how much prevention can we directly attribute to surveillance.

    And this is the more positive attitude. General data collection for building intelligence and selling ads does not appear to prevent terror.

    I think that surveillance in general is a pragmatic cost of society but we desperately need to look at the systems we have in place. Is flock actually making people safer? Is mass facial recognition making people safer? How much crime is prevented because law enforcement (and advertisers) have near instant access to purchase metadata every time I swipe my card.

    By the same token, community safety groups and neighborhood watch don’t make me innately uncomfortable. Nor is it surprising some people have cameras on their property or the bank needs to keep tabs on who’s entering and leaving.

    I don’t entertain the idea that more surveillance = less terrorism. US Law Enforcement fusion centers haven’t really impacted white supremacy, but sure did make it easier to target and track protesters.

    I think the important discussion here is more nuanced than “surveillance is good and we should lose privacy to be safe”.




  • Tbh it’s just hard to see the value proposition in the age of cloud computing. I think aspects of the underlying technology are cool but basically every crypto project that comes to mind has been an actual scam. Sure there’s eth and RDNR that was built on top of it but why should i spend what will ultimately be more money in periods of high demand (gas goes up when more people use the network) when i can just plug my credit card into amazon or microsoft AND get the benefit of infosec regulation like PCI-DSS. Crypto just doesn’t ever inspire confidence because bad actors consistently shit in the punch bowl while providing no extra utility over existing cloud providers.

    When distilled down crypto-compute just seems like cloud compute with extra steps, which is already just using a computer with extra steps.

    We already can rent GPUs to run AIs with tokens - those tokens are just managed by govt instead of some random.



  • I have 3 siblings, for a grand total of 6 in my family. Only my mom and I have passports. At present, despite all of us being born in the states and naturalized, only two of us have passports. So only two of us have standardized federal IDs that prove our citizenship. RealIDs are becoming more common, but nowhere near as common as a standard state driving license which does not prove citizenship.

    So the requirement is going to require people to grab their birth certificates and social security cards which are not always available to every family member.

    For example, my parents live out of state and have all the important family documents so 2 of siblings are screwed unless they make sure to grab those relatively sensitive documents and be prepared to carry them out and about then hang on to them for several hours.

    It’s impractical, and it wasn’t a problem for the years leading up to my birth (96), wasn’t a problem in '00 for bush, or '04 for bush, or '08 and '12 for Obama. It’s suddenly become a problem because the GOP is getting called out for election shenanigans and they generally know unless they can make voting more difficult or less representative (through gerrymandering and goofy election maps) they will lose.

    It does sound reasonable, but the existing mechanisms of enforcement and fraud detection have been, and continue to be, robust enough to keep voter fraud from having any meaningful statistically significant impact.

    It only stands to make voting more difficult for most people.