Granted, Taco Bell was never going to be good for you, but I'd assumed most of the risk of eating there was just medical.
152 sats \ 0 replies \ @OriginalSize 8 Apr
I used cash religiously at fast food for years for two reasons. One is I wanted to keep cash alive. The other is out of this surveillance fear, specifically that my health insurance would go up if they saw my fast food intake.
Truth of the medical matter aside, I don't like being tracked all the time. Sadly Covid changed my habit but I still notice they take cash so I'm taking this post as a reminder, not that they won't implement license plate scanners or some other way to dox me.
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72 sats \ 5 replies \ @elvismercury 8 Apr
I think we need to get used to thinking of this as a general property of modernity, like the dark face of btc: since it technically can be done, and can't realistically be prevented, and there's some upside to doing it, people will do it.
How to act based on that understanding is another question, though.
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182 sats \ 4 replies \ @StillStackinAfterAllTheseYears OP 8 Apr
Yeah, I think you're absolutely correct that it's a part of modernity. I think it's crossing the bridge from "this may be happening" to "this is absolutely happening" that's a big thing for lots of folks (myself included). I'm always assuming a general state of surveillance (as well as a surveillance state), but the specifics of "that vending machine" or "Taco Bell" weren't ones I'd really thought about.
(Or, to be more precise, I'd assume any surveillance was at the economic level, not necessarily the physical one.)
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297 sats \ 3 replies \ @elvismercury 8 Apr
Yeah, it's hard to stretch your mind to restructure around these new affordances.
This is a v similar feeling I had at the time of the Snowden revelations -- I know how TCP/IP works and how the broader internet architecture is laid out, so the fact that the mass surveillance was technically possible was not a surprise, any technical person had known that for literally decades. But the cultural norms around it, the sheer amount of bullshit that would have to be done to make it practical, made it seem ridiculous.
And yet, as I mentioned above: it was technically possible, there was a benefit to doing it, so someone did it.
Snowden changed how I thought about everything. In particular, I think there's a giant frying pan headed for the faces of bitcoiners more broadly. If a world arrives where btc is 10x more valuable, modern cultural norms and institutions will be woefully insufficient to prevent a Latin American hellscape of kidnappings and organized crime (technically possible, check; benefit to doing it, check).
We desperately need new norms and institutions as a herd immunity. Failing that, we won't like the world we find ourselves in, even if we're rich. I made a post about that here.
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326 sats \ 1 reply \ @atl 9 Apr
Is this not the case for a citadel? Bitcoiners protecting bitcoiners? Kidnapping becomes a social norm, plus it’s easier than trying to manage a 9-5 in a Mandibles-esque world. The only people you might be able to trust are other bitcoiners with significant wealth.
Let’s assume that we fail to create new social norms. “This is happening.” The incentives to commit crime are too powerful. What do we do? Maybe the citadel is the only answer that might bring us a decent quality of life in this dystopian hellscape that you describe. I hope that we as bitcoiners can infect the culture around the world, turning bitcoiners into leaders or vice versa. Just my 2 sats.
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100 sats \ 0 replies \ @elvismercury 9 Apr
A citadel would help with this danger, so long as you never wanted to leave it for the untamed outside world. But that seems pretty unlikely to me. On the other hand, I think the idea of normalizing the security measures and access practices described in that post is being severely overlooked in this (and the original) discussion.
Bitcoiners have converged on things like "not your keys, not your coins" and the importance of UTXO management and other bons mots of that sort; they could similarly campaign for practices that would prevent the reality I describe from taking place, but they'd have to think it through sufficiently first, and most seem unwilling or unable to.
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64 sats \ 0 replies \ @StillStackinAfterAllTheseYears OP 8 Apr
That (the post and the comments on it) was a good and also bleak read, and one I'm glad I read. Definitely stuff everyone needs to be thinking about.
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10 sats \ 2 replies \ @Bell_curve 8 Apr
Use cash ?
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20 sats \ 1 reply \ @StillStackinAfterAllTheseYears OP 8 Apr
Sadly, a lot of this surveillance isn't the bank account transaction kind, but video and face recognition on location.
(As an aside, though, I've noticed a lot of vending machines that no longer accept cash.)
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0 sats \ 0 replies \ @Bell_curve 8 Apr
Part of it’s security
I don’t believe we should get rid of all surveillance cameras
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10 sats \ 0 replies \ @grayruby 8 Apr
Just what the world needed vending machines with facial recognition.
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0 sats \ 0 replies \ @IamSINGLE 9 Apr
Say hello to already tracked ways of eating. I wonder if they will surveillance our poop and pee someday.
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0 sats \ 0 replies \ @john_doe 8 Apr
I have never been to America so it may be naive to say that but it sounds like there are a lot of fast food restaurants over there.
In Japan it is with the corona virus story that I have for the first time realized that in small convenient stores, when we look at the roof, it was full of surveillance cameras. I didn't measure but I would say 1 camera per 2 or 3m^2. To avoid it I started using a hat (these cameras are used for facial recognition as well).
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