3 ms·

Gift cards are a great idea. But who are the #1 users of gift cards right now? Scammers who found in gift cards a good way to conceal their identity and financi

Gift cards are a great idea. But who are the #1 users of gift cards right now? Scammers who found in gift cards a good way to conceal their identity and financial info. Today, thousands of elderly people will be scammed by idiots that spend their entire day preying on older people. Elderly people that will lose everything and end up homeless. Fuck the current implementation of gift cards. They cause more problems than they fix. We can't have nice things because there are people out there who are fucking disgusting. Therefore we need accountability built into each technology. Why? because there's a lot of people that fucking suck that's why. Build a simple application that allows people to share plain text and figure out what happens next. Harassment, death threats, organized crime, and all sorts of horrible things. Technocrats and tech enthusiasts are often too idealistic to think about the real world consequences of technology. The person that was having fun implementing convolutional neural networks and decided to publish their research for the benefit of the world would never have imagined that years later the chinese would take that research and build a mass surveillance system that tracked the entire population in real time enslaving billions of people. The people that built Tor would never have imagined the caliber of fucked up shit that now takes place there. And the same with every technology.

mdp2021 4y ago
> gift cards ... accountability built into the technology It depends on what you mean with that «accountability built into the technology». Related case, as you are also speaking of cards: this friend of mine wanted to buy a foreign book (less available in bookstores, where you pay cash). So he purchased an anonymous pre-paid credit card. He found out that during the mess of the past three years, somebody has made it very difficult to keep those cards anonymous: they now request a telephone number to activate them, and in regions where, "coincidentally", telephone numbers are to be associated to legal identities. Now: as you should know, you can bet your life that if our transactions were recorded, we would strictly avoid commerce. (Just like, pretty similarly, we would strictly avoid a non anonymous Internet.) So: your call for accountability should work within the boundaries of what is acceptable. > too idealistic Don't worry, we grow up, and some of us restrain production - exactly in the awareness of what may happen.
- 29athrowaway 4y ago
  I much rather prefer a tourist to be inconvenienced than thousands of elderly people losing their livelihood every year. Imagine working all your life so that then everything gets taken away by some jerk.
  - mdp2021 4y ago
    You probably misread it: tracked commerce would be the end of commerce; tracked Internet would be the end of Internet - when you speak of «accountability», take into account who would accept which implementation.

mdp2021 4y ago

> gift cards ... accountability built into the technology It depends on what you mean with that «accountability built into the technology». Related case, as you are also speaking of cards: this friend of mine wanted to buy a foreign book (less available in bookstores, where you pay cash). So he purchased an anonymous pre-paid credit card. He found out that during the mess of the past three years, somebody has made it very difficult to keep those cards anonymous: they now request a telephone number to activate them, and in regions where, "coincidentally", telephone numbers are to be associated to legal identities. Now: as you should know, you can bet your life that if our transactions were recorded, we would strictly avoid commerce. (Just like, pretty similarly, we would strictly avoid a non anonymous Internet.) So: your call for accountability should work within the boundaries of what is acceptable. > too idealistic Don't worry, we grow up, and some of us restrain production - exactly in the awareness of what may happen.

29athrowaway 4y ago
I much rather prefer a tourist to be inconvenienced than thousands of elderly people losing their livelihood every year. Imagine working all your life so that then everything gets taken away by some jerk.
- mdp2021 4y ago
  You probably misread it: tracked commerce would be the end of commerce; tracked Internet would be the end of Internet - when you speak of «accountability», take into account who would accept which implementation.