FWIW all of the obfuscation techniques make it easier to track you through the store. Then, unless you use a different card each time you go, or only use cash and never use the wegmans rewards stuff, then you pwn yourself immediately.
Better to just avoid altogether, however every possible store is using this (I was pitching this to Target as early as 2016) and govt reps are active supporters of this tech.
There aren’t really any alternatives that aren’t “grow your own food.” Even local retailers can use these systems and are increasingly cloud-SaaS
This is defeatist. You imply that local retailers are in on this as well, I know for a fact that my local co-op is not. Neither is the local farm stand or the local salvage grocery store. If you aren’t in a huge metro, shop local and you’ll do fine.
Why do you want everyone to give up? Don’t be evil.
I want people to finally get mad enough that they do something about it instead of sitting here with half ass solutions and just bitching about it.
Humans do not and have never proactively solved existential threats, it’s just does not exist in the history of humanity. Humans are exclusively reactionary when it comes to major existential threats.
So something needs to happen to cause the reaction and all the frogs are already half cooked
Didn’t expect a reply, so thanks for replying. Getting people active may be your intent, but it comes off like a demoralization campaign. I don’t know who is involved in it or why (although I can guess), but there is a lot of intentional demoralization in these surveillance and privacy threads. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Demoralization_(warfare)
If you really want people to fight, it’s better to use fighting words, to cheer on allies who are fighting, or to give examples of how you have successfully fought back. This also counters attempts at demoralization.
Comfortable people don’t start, maintain or complete revolutions.
Shit’s gonna have to get really really bad really really quickly for anybody to actually seriously mobilize against the reality of the insanity that you live inside.
It’s just so fundamentally corrupt and broken at every possible level
Anyone suggesting that we need some kind of relatively small skin procedure when the patient has stage four skin cancer is still living in a dream world
There is a difference between agitation and demoralization. Demoralization often has the opposite of the intended effect. People shut down and stop resisting, they defect to the other team, they abuse substances or in extreme cases they self-harm, all because they are convinced that resistance is impossible. None of this advances your revolutionary goals. Demoralization is collaboration with the enemy.
I reject this concept that there’s some kind of intentional demoralization happening here
If people feel demoralized it’s because they can’t generate the rage necessary to turn information into physical action
If someone is overwhelmed by it then that is a indictment that should give people pause and ask “why is my response to fear to freeze fawn or flight instead of fight”
Ultimately if the plurality of humans roll over and die when encountered with overwhelming force, then so be it and that’s the result, and they will go the way of Neanderthal
If people are not enraged then they are being intentionally ignorant and ultimately theres nothing to save
Your very competent opponents have studied this problem and found that people can be manipulated through careful application of psychological warfare techniques.
Ultimately your position boils down to “I would rather lose than alter my tactics because humans don’t behave as I’d like them to.” Your opponents will happily oblige you.
You claim that you’re trying to wake people up. I think you should be more honest with yourself. You’re mocking the people for their own failures as they go under.
My hope is that people wake up but I do not have any confidence that that is actually going to happen, as I stated
You use the word “mocking” but it’s inappropriate here - a better word to use would be “challenging” or “agitating.”
Ultimately if my life is surrounded by a bunch of robots who can do all the things that are necessary in order to move the epistemological foundations of reality forward that’s more than I could say for any collection of humans.
After over 40 years of experience as a human I can tell you definitively the humans are the number one problem in the world.
Well I guess we have the same hopes and frustrations, the difference is that I try to encourage people who are aligned with me. Motivated people with encouragement and a positive mindset can accomplish much. Demotivated people retreat to their homes and wither away.
I think the reaction to COVID in which we not only haven't improved our behavior regarding the problem of infectious disease but have regressed even further has shown that accelerationism is not a viable strategy for dealing with long-term problems whose effects are often not immediately and directly visible and which require inconvenience to solve.
Well we know that education didn’t work so that’s not a solution
We know that command economies don’t work so that’s not a solution
We know that formal hierarchies don’t work so that’s not a solution
Have any solutions?
Humans can only really coherently plan at the global scale required on the order of months into the future
However our activities, even at the individual level (burning a tire for example) have extreme impacts and costs on extant populations globally and future populations.
It’s like we completely stopped talking about climate change and how the ecological collapse is about to punch everybody in the throat.
This is a mathematical formula that does not have a solution
The only possible solution is to change the properties of the atomic unit which is individual human actor
Since we cannot change the foundational biology of humanity then there is a impossible to solve problem here if there is a desire to retain the human element in the future. I stopped desiring a human future about 30 years ago because it makes no sense.
The biological limitations of the human species is now the single weakest link of all possible futures.
That was not true before (insert your preferred period, upper paleolithic, neolithic, industrial revolution etc…) but has only been accelerating since.
Unless some absolutely foundational things change, like the foundational functioning of human systems, then we will continue this cycle of destruction forever.
They always show me my total before the cars swipe, so as long as the obfuscation works until the card swipe, at least it would prevent dynamic pricing.
I mean that assumes that you can’t assign the highest price to non-facially recognized people.
Part of the dynamic pricing is that you don’t need to have specific individual targets to do cluster based pricing
So if I am running the dynamic price tuning, then I’ll just jack up prices if faces are obfuscated.
You have to understand the moment you walk into any private establishment that’s a business, you are quite literally walking into a Skinner box at this point.
I'll share this here now that I only drive EVs, but I suppose cashiers and random people at King Soopers(major grocer in Colorado, associated with Kroger's) would enter 555-555-5555 as their phone number for their rewards, and every time I would pump gas at their stations I would get $1/gallon off.
I largely thought this wouldn’t work, but having tried it at several grocery store chains while traveling with a 100% success rate so far I’m not complaining. (Nothing worse then being told you can’t sign up because customer service is closed, and you have to sign up to get the pricing, and there’s no generic store card they can scan as a curtesy ).
- this has worked for me in Rhode Island, Connecticut, Virginia, West Virginia, Michigan, and Wisconsin.
Was just about to make the same point. Even cash could be tricky if you got it from a bank because you'd be using your debit card and obviously the bank knows all your info.
> Even cash could be tricky if you got it from a bank because ...
Cash would only be an issue if a merchant associated tender used in each sale with the customer. In this scenario, the business is actively working against their customer's interests and would need to be thought of as such.
EDIT:
Assume for a moment a merchant did try to associate tender used with each customer and that all cash transactions are made by people who did a cash withdrawal from only a bank (which is definitely not the case in real life).
How would the merchant establish the identity of each person?
Ask every bank within a 20 mile radius if one of their tellers or ATMs issued each note used?
And what would happen to financial institutions which produced this information?
> Ask every bank within a 20 mile radius if one of their tellers or ATMs issued each note used?
For at least ten years, Bank of America ATMs have accepted cash deposits. They claim that cash funds deposited at one of their ATMs are immediately available for withdrawal, so BofA must have very high confidence in the accuracy of their bill scanners. I expect that these bill scanners are not the exclusive property of BofA. From this information, a few things seem likely to me:
1) Now that you have those highly-reliable bill scanners, it wouldn't be much work to make them scan and report the serial numbers on each bill.
2) It wouldn't be much work to add those scanners for bills that leave the ATM.
Given that the ATM knows from whose account the cash withdrawal is being made, that's the ATM arm of the automated surveillance system fairly well buttoned up.
It has been ages since I've stepped inside a bank branch, but I remember tellers sometimes using bill counters to double-check their hand counts. If they still do that, then a bank simply orders the tellers to always use the counters and there's where you capture the serial numbers for teller-counter cash withdrawals.
As for data distribution, just use data brokers.
> And what would happen to financial institutions which produced this information?
Nothing? It seems substantially in line with the spirit of lots of existing anti-money-laundering regulations.
The problem is not if a bank can track individual legal tender and associate it with an account holder, but instead if a company which is not a bank (such as a grocery store) could determine same.
In other words, how would a merchant be able to establish a specific $20 USD bill was used by a specific person?
No bank would share this information with an entity other than law enforcement and likely would require a court ordered subpoena to do so.
Better to just avoid altogether, however every possible store is using this (I was pitching this to Target as early as 2016) and govt reps are active supporters of this tech.
There aren’t really any alternatives that aren’t “grow your own food.” Even local retailers can use these systems and are increasingly cloud-SaaS