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>I don't have much sympathy for the kind of industries that couldn't stand up to scrutiny In practice, what this means is that a great many industries (restaur

>I don't have much sympathy for the kind of industries that couldn't stand up to scrutiny In practice, what this means is that a great many industries (restaurants, construction, anything where immigrant labor is popular and viable, etc) have found a way to elide our — I'm speaking from a US perspective here, this may be different in the UK — sclerotic bureaucracy. Many things would become much more expensive with the introduction of a CBDC. Also, this means that you're trusting the government to perfectly delineate the bounds of an acceptable life. I don't...

rich_sasha 4y ago
> Also, this means that you're trusting the government to perfectly delineate the bounds of an acceptable life. I don't... So my main point is, I trust the government's inertia and inefficiency much more than its good intentions. Let's say the govt has some evil plan to control people's spending, or try to eke out illegal transactions by sifting through their detailed accounts. Who is going to implement this, as in code up? In Europe at least, some underpaid coders who enjoy a 30h week instead. It will be designed and assessed by multiple committees, be hampered by legacy databases, lack of CPU time, and anyway the people actually in charge will not understand the technology, and have their own objectives, which will presumably be to move on from an IT project. This is not meant to be mean to people who work on such projects, I'm sure there are many talented and dedicated people there but I think this is the environment they contend with. Of course in US this might get outsourced to Palantir or someone like it and they would just maximise the true positive rate at all costs...
- int_19h 4y ago
  What this means in practice is that it won't eke out all illegal transactions. It just means that the thunder will strike at random, still increasing the risk (and thus the costs) for everyone involved, and deterring a lot more people than those who are immediately affected. It will also cause problems for people who aren't even doing anything shady due to false positives. We'll rant about it like we did about the no-fly list, but once the system is in place, it will be impossible to remove it. So it'll just gradually become more and more pervasive and oppressive over time as various politicians come up with different strawmen to attack.

rich_sasha 4y ago

> Also, this means that you're trusting the government to perfectly delineate the bounds of an acceptable life. I don't... So my main point is, I trust the government's inertia and inefficiency much more than its good intentions. Let's say the govt has some evil plan to control people's spending, or try to eke out illegal transactions by sifting through their detailed accounts. Who is going to implement this, as in code up? In Europe at least, some underpaid coders who enjoy a 30h week instead. It will be designed and assessed by multiple committees, be hampered by legacy databases, lack of CPU time, and anyway the people actually in charge will not understand the technology, and have their own objectives, which will presumably be to move on from an IT project. This is not meant to be mean to people who work on such projects, I'm sure there are many talented and dedicated people there but I think this is the environment they contend with. Of course in US this might get outsourced to Palantir or someone like it and they would just maximise the true positive rate at all costs...

int_19h 4y ago
What this means in practice is that it won't eke out all illegal transactions. It just means that the thunder will strike at random, still increasing the risk (and thus the costs) for everyone involved, and deterring a lot more people than those who are immediately affected. It will also cause problems for people who aren't even doing anything shady due to false positives. We'll rant about it like we did about the no-fly list, but once the system is in place, it will be impossible to remove it. So it'll just gradually become more and more pervasive and oppressive over time as various politicians come up with different strawmen to attack.