While your presentation is probably getting you downvoted, this is the real problem. They use this information to control/influence government officials or people with power.
Because money doesn't buy happiness, and a lot of the increase in purchasing power is pointless stuff like the fact that you can buy an iPad that's twice as powerful for half the cost, or get YouTube for free instead of paying $50 for cable, while the things that really matter like housing go up in price relative to wages.
If you want to feel richer, look on Amazon/AliExpress and try to remember what stuff like that used to cost decades ago. It's not BS, it's very real. It's amazing how cheap random knickknacks are now.
But, you're right -- it's a pyrrhic victory because I'd rather own my own home and have a tough time affording a breadmaker and blender than rent forever and easily afford having all the gadgets that I do, and I think most people feel similarly.
Well mostly I was fixating on the health insurance, and how health insurance's growth rate has slowed, but healthcare costs have gone way up in general and health insurance covers almost nothing anymore while deductibles have also gone up (for me). But again it's about rates, and I guess when I look at Figure 3 again it just seems deceptive.. a personal computer purchase for me includes a GPU and those prices did not decline (the total cost of a gaming PC like tripled over that time period). Overall this just seems like it's cheer-leading industries that are shrink-flating: health insurance that covers nothing, shit tvs, cheap crappy PCs, airline fares (ever shrinking leg room?).
Edit: Also probably because I remember when the dollar had WAY more purchasing power, so my baseline is skewed already. But this "increase" in purchasing power is just a return to more normal levels. This data feels more relatable.. slightly less purchasing power since 2019 https://www.bls.gov/cpi/factsheets/purchasing-power-constant...
Yes, agreed, healthcare is another great example alongside housing. Healthcare, housing, and education have famously gone up far faster than wages for decades, while gadgets and knickknacks and furniture, etc, have gone down. Hindsight is 20/20 but most people would rather have more security (which is what healthcare, housing, education give) and less luxury (knickknacks, gadgets) than the other way around
Your link examines the purchasing power of "a dollar", not the purchasing power of the average person. Inflation is always supposed to be positive because deflation is far worse for the economy than inflation is. Average wages have also increased since 2019, hence average purchasing power of people increasing. Inequality has increased, but real purchasing power is still increasing for people at the 75th percentile, so generally almost everybody is getting more wealthy in real terms.
Housing and healthcare costs are outpacing wage increases, it's true. The CPI (which is used to determine real purchasing power) weights them at about ~44% and ~7%, respectively [1]. So together, these constitute about half of the CPI, and yet average real purchasing power is still increasing.
The big factor is where you live. If you live near a wealthy coastal city, you're getting railed by NIMBYs into far higher housing costs than the average American. You're also more likely to be in the minority of Americans who don't already live in a home they own (65% of Americans own their own home), so housing price increases are even worse for you. This group is likely over-represented on HN, but it's not exactly "average".
Cold comfort I'm sure... but migration is a potential solution.
>Banking is the first industry where I encountered KYC, and it strikes me as being obviously good there.
This is not obvious to me as my experience has been largely negative post-KYC/9-11 vs pre-KYC/9-11. I am a legal law abiding citizen [and voter!] and it's just added extra hassle on various occasions and then the background anxiety of knowing an institution with crappy security track records hold a photocopy of my ID. And yet all the things KYC was supposed to prevent still continue unabated: money laundering, terrorist financing, identity theft, and financial fraud.
I'm curious to hear why you think it's obviously good and if you were using these services before KYC.
The people who donated to the Canadian truckers' protest had their accounts frozen by the Trudeau regime because of KYC.
The problem is that there are no checks and balances preventing banks from freezing assets because they want to or the government told them to.
Banking needs to be a right, and unless someone is convicted of a crime involving the bank account's assets, banks and governments should not be able to freeze them. There can be exceptions for fraud like FTX where there will be a significant financial harm to other individuals if the assets aren't frozen, but what we have today is unchecked government financial terrorism against individuals they do not like, and now they want to extend that terrorism to speech.
I am familiar with KYC from a banker's perspective (at least that of a close relative who was a bank manager).
KYC helped them by deny-listing abusive clients between branches, or by allowing the bank to develop heuristics for things like allowing customers to bypass cheque clearing times.
From an end-user perspective, I've had no hangups personally but I do share your grievances about yet-another-shoddy institution holding a photocopy of my ID. My bank truncates passwords when setting them, and when logging in, without telling the user. It boggles the mind.
Thanks for replying I appreciate the insight, although as someone else mentioned the most obvious use (to me) for KYC is censorship / de-banking and I think that was it's intended purpose all along because there's nothing about KYC that specifically enables the two things you mentioned that couldn't be done by a bank on it's own.
The bank can choose to require such identification of their customers for their own business purposes independent of any regulation requiring them to do so.
Here's my experience.. got a Vive, ZERO motion sickness, was developing some games and toys with it for 6 months or so. Played about 20 minutes of some Resident Evil game on PSVR and got REALLY motion sick around the 10 minute mark and just powered through for another 10 minutes. I had to lay down and it took a good hour to fully recover. Now I can't play VR at all without getting sick, start getting the sweats and nausea as soon as I put my vive headset on. completely ruined VR for me, never finished my game I was working on, VIVE just collecting dust. Fuck the PSVR, I'm still mad about it.
Damn I guess we shouldn't do any small step to improve society somewhat unless we can overhaul systems entirely all at once!
Personally, I'd prefer to see us fight for successively smaller and smaller blast radii than simply hoping and praying the blasts disappeared entirely.
Small steps get us things like pop ups on every webpage or TSA. You'll just slowly create a bureaucratic dystopia. We need giant sweeping reform of privacy laws in the US and a restoration of the 4th amendment.
Not in the context of the government buying the data, they'll just buy it from google instead of shadowgovt.databroker.com. It's a red herring, a feel good feature that just limit's googles competition and doesn't really change the information collected on us.
Unless you're somehow claiming that your browsing history was used to train an AI for identifying tanks or terror connections, in which case for the former that makes no sense and for the latter the data is so emulsified that it can't really be considered your data any more than you could lay claim to a cat recognizer that was trained on a billion cat photos, some of which happen to be from your blog.
(And that's even assuming one accepts the premise that Google's cache of browsing data was used to train the AI that the Israeli government is using. In reality, that information is deeply firewalled and doesn't see the light of day for other applications).
You're arguing in bad faith, making this about browser history, this is about data collection of the sensor array that is your smart phone device, two very different things. It's hilarious to claim that what google is doing by disabling app access matters at all when google created the problem and profits from it in a really shady way all the while pretending to be doing you a service by protecting you from those 'shady' apps (and 3rd party app stores like say.. f-droid). And then using that data to _literally_ kill people. I'm not saying those apps aren't shady, I'm saying google pretending to protect you is shady.
Sorry; I just don't follow. Google isn't "protecting" me from F-droid; I have it on my Android right now. Nor is Google using cellphone telemetry to kill people. Nor is Google (AFAIK; if there's evidence to the contrary I'd be interested to see it) providing cellphone data to nations that are targeting them for death (Google doesn't even own a cell tower deployment). Nor is geotargeting people based on cellphone data a system limited to Google's architecture; that's a feature of cellphones, because they're little radios we carry in our pockets that continuously broadcast to a mesh network in an attempt to allow connection to it.
I don't think I'm arguing in bad faith, but I am trying to argue with someone who seems to be operating from a source of facts I don't have access to. You seem to be upset that Google makes cellphones? What am I missing here?
>Sorry; I just don't follow. Google isn't "protecting" me from F-droid
Yes, they give you a warning to scare off normal users and you have to enable installing from 3rd party sources. My point isn't that they're "protecting" you at all, my point is it's security theater.
>Nor is Google (AFAIK; if there's evidence to the contrary I'd be interested to see it) providing cellphone data to nations that are targeting them for death
Various subsystems on android are controlled by Google and they enable Google to collect and consolidate all of the telemetry/usage data etc (effectively google is root on your phone).
This information is used to select targets and kill people:
"Since 2002, and routinely since 2009, the U.S. government has carried out deliberate and premeditated killings of suspected terrorists overseas. In some cases, including that of Anwar Al-Aulaqi, the targets were placed on “kill lists” maintained by the CIA and the Pentagon. According to news accounts, the targeted killing program has expanded to include “signature strikes” in which the government does not know the identity of individuals, but targets them based on “patterns” of behavior that have never been made public. The New York Times has reported that the government counts all military-age males in a strike zone as combatants unless there is explicit intelligence posthumously proving them innocent."
You're not bringing much evidence to the table to single out Google for your frustration. Targeted tracking of individuals with cellphones is enabled by every cellphone, by virtue of the fact that it's a radio and signal strength and connection is logged and forwarded by the towers themselves; there's nothing special Google is doing to modify that process. So I don't know why we should focus on Google and not, say, T-Mobile or AT&T or TracFone or the entire cellular infrastructure.
You seem to be alleging that Google is brokering third-party access to data stored on the phone or generated by the phone (beyond the telemetry that's natural to every cellphone), but there's no evidence to support that hypothesis. Have I misunderstood what you're alleging?
Google's value in tracking is in providing services to users with the tracked data and (in the ads arm) linking advertisements to potential interested users (which is a system they broker internally).
They don't hand data to third-parties; third-parties hand data to Google, and Google might kick out answers to questions, but it does not kick out answers to questions like "Hey, is this person a terrorist?" There's no program for that. Hell, Google doesn't even kick out answers to questions like "Would Bob like to buy my shoes," the entire ad network is architected to minimize the ways an advertiser could glean the identity of a specific user who saw their ad.
LOL - people have said shit like this to my face my whole life, including some CS admissions guy at CMU but he had the nerve to throw in a derogatory remark about ADD too. Just normal shit that happened in the 90's I guess.
I think you're on the right track here.. corporate death, shares voided, assets frozen in perpetuity, buildings, land, machinery. Everything frozen forever to stand as a warning to the next executive or employee before doing something like this.
You can even start with corporate jail. No business operations of any kind allowed for weeks/months, be that preforming services for clients, servicing debts, contracts or payroll. And if that results in an existential threat to the company or a lot of lawsuits for failing to perform their obligations, then that would be the just results of the company's decisions.
It would be as existentially threatening and crippling to a company as it currently is to the average member of society.
