The only thing that’s going to stop every random company you have an account with from trying to extort a fee just to make sure an account is actually you is going to be regulation.
https://www.experian.com/consumer-products/identity-theft-an...
Granted, I know there’s a free plan that covers everything you mentioned. I just thought it was funny that it’s over double the price you mentioned.
If you have a real account and pay for verification, and someone else has a fake one, it's easy to see that one is "verified" and one isn't.
If you don't have an account and the only ones on the site are fake ones claiming to you... seems you're screwed?
In the extra-crazy future you will be able to pay to not have an account but still have them take down fakes, maybe?
Was talking to a lawyer recently (making a will; I'm old), and he saw my email address was firstname@lastname.net (my lastname is almost globally unique), and he asked if I had bought up "the rest" i.e. lastname.com, .org, .com.au, .org.au, .net.au, .id. I told him my paranoia had met it's match in my laziness, and he looked at me like I was an idiot about to have his identity stolen.
If you die without a will, the state ends up determining what happens with your possessions. That usually means that they'll go down a list of relatives and ask them "hey, this person died, do you want to inherit their belongings". If they find absolutely nobody (this happens a lot with people that die with a lot of debt, since you also inherit the debt), the will instead falls to the state.
The order makes some sense (first is spouse, then kids, then siblings, then direct family and finally extended family), but it's of course something left up to the present state of the law and depending on how that might change, something could occur you're not happy with.
One specific example of this (albeit not for your case) is in the event you're gay; gay people often had to prepare their will specifically because the state wouldn't acknowledge them as the spouse (this was even with the "civil arrangements"), so the state would just skip over their spouse for inheritance and relinquish stuff to their family instead.
This doesn't apply of course if you're not married, but it's one simple example in how that default order might have some asterisks that are easily avoidable if you just have a will.
Basically it's useful to have one to avoid a lot of complications in the event of an untimely death (which can happen for all sorts of reasons).
I paid zero of that debt when she died. Just ignored it. It was all in her name. I might have also been fully ptsd’d.
But my credit is fine, the probate period is LONG (10+ years) gone, etc…
Sure my evidence is anecdotal but no - debt is not “transferred” to your name like you inherit it.
Note that all this stuff can get very complex in a hurry especially when taxes are involved (and they usually are) so you should definitely hire the help of a professional when dealing with this for anything exceeding a few thousand.
Thanks for your detailed answer. You haven't convinced me it is important either way, but I at least know now that I havent missed something important.
Regardless, if you like the standard list of inheritors, it's still worth writing it down. That means that the executor of your will knows that that is the order you prefer. Laws can be changed at any point and it could say, be changed in order to prioritize your parents over your siblings; if you don't care at all about what happens with your belongings after your death, yeah fair, there's nothing I could do to convince you, but for anyone else that's worth taking into account. Having it explicitly spelled out in your will ensures that that doesn't change, even if the law does.
Gay people was just an example of what might seem sensible on paper could still have a strange asterisk attached to it.
If you're married then pretty much everything goes to the spouse by default. Kids, likewise, are usually a default inheritor as well. Can get messy if you have a bunch of kids, but the default is usually an even split.
But what happens if you don't have a spouse or kids? Do you want that cash to go to a charity? To your shitty relative who you don't like? You gotta make it explicit.
For me personally, I am not attached to the concept of cash/assets enough to really care what happens with excess assets after I am gone. It is something entirely different if you have offspring, and want to pass accumulated assets to them, I get that. However, given how much money was printed recently, all the cash I leave behind might as well be burnt, I really dont care either way. If I have friends in need, I might as well pass some of it on to them before I go.
I won't call you an idiot, but I will say you're significantly increasing the risk of social engineering. I had a vanity domain email and someone use another TLD and tried to switch my bank accounts using it. The bank customer service agents are very willing to believe in the equality and authenticity @lastname.com and @lastname.net. If you go to a HN post on vanity email, there are countless stories about customer service agents not understanding how email addresses work.
I do own (or have a family member buy) most of the common lastname.tld's that exist. I'm just hoping that the confusion of uncommon tld's are a good defense. Eg. I hope CS agent won't easily believe login@vineyardmike.com should be login@vineyardmike.club or .wiki
I do like your idea of trying to trademark the name (and I considered it too) but my name is common enough (and a word in a European language) that others have tried already, and its already in use with a handful of businesses across the world.
I briefly looked into trademarking my personal name (legal to do in Australia) but its cost prohibitive (vs verifying for multiple online platforms).
I even thought briefly about legally changing my name to include a new middle-name that was my PGP short key id. But Australia does not permit the use of numeric symbols in names. (Though I guess you could shift the hex string by 10 so 0-F maps to A-P. That wouldn't break the rules.)
By now it’s become pretty clear that it’s not possible to preemptively defend against this. There are a bazillion gTLDs and on large social media sites display names are not unique.
Social media should be considered one giant deepfake.
There is also the 'unhook' extension:
https://chrome.google.com/webstore/detail/unhook-remove-yout...
https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/addon/youtube-recom...
Yeah, I'd like these companies to fuck off too.
Edit: Looks like they also publish guides on how to do it yourself, that's actually kind of helpful. I guess the high price is to have someone continually checking and submitting removal requests on your behalf.
If you don't renew your account, they just delete your data.
Where are the good things at? Where did we die?
Funnily enough I was saying the same thing tonight. Here in the UK I think it became all out screw people over when Margret Thatcher and the City of London had their 1980's yuppie boom.
I under stand why the older generation in the former Soviet Union harp back to the good old days of the soviet union, life was simpler and more stable for many people.
Now we have to navigate recessions about about 7-10years, have so many financial products in order to not get screwed over because the state is no longer up to the job. Life has become a bit of a free for all, and the extent and deviousness of some people to get money or manipulate people is off the scale imo.
I also understand why we had to come off the gold standard, if we were every really on it, because it was/is arguably holding back the economy and innovation, so with fiat its easier to print money and keep the plates spinning, but in a global world, 3rd world country's have the cost advantage which is why so much is offshored to 3rd world countrys. When looking at central bank digital currency, the fact that digital money can be expired unless its spent, I think is a poor attempt to reduce the risk of boom and bust, good times and recessions. It also shows how money is being used by govt's and central banks to manipulate people like holding a carrot out in front of a donkey.
Its a legal insult in some ways.
The one constant in all of it is the dehumanizing and scapegoating of the hated "others". It's not a new thing either, it's been pretty well documented from our earliest history. I would have thought The United Kingdom has a long tradition of doing just that, stretching way back before 1980, before the industrial revolution, even before feudalism.
Religions are not by nature inherently sexist, see veneration toward the Mother Mary or toward Mahadevi. But there are countless examples.
All religions (a.k.a governments) that have lasted the test of time put men and women in a complementary position, as opposed to the modern state-mandated one, which actually is incredibly sexist, and seeks to scapegoat and demonize men in a frantic and irrational way.
Or is Satan a representation of the health of the individual and knowledge obtained by crypto haters? For example, the missionary's have a position which is highly recommended to increase histidine and histamine. That can put people especially teenage boys in awkward situations.
Or we could look at the garden of eden and the apple, knowing the effect the ursolic acid found in fruit peel (Victorian Xmas Pudding) like apple skin and some herbs can have on the body. We know about health effects of old style apples, not necessarily the new breeds found in food malls and stores, because of old proverbs like the Pembrokeshire Proverb.
>Religions are not by nature inherently sexist
Who are you trying to kid? Just look at their hierarchical structure and history of employment and storytelling. I'll tell you know the Roman Catholic church is massively sexist, because AFAIK there has never been a female pope! Ergo Catholics are sexist if not overtly, certainly subconsciously with their beliefs. Same goes for a lot of other religions.
> see veneration toward the Mother Mary
Ah yes, the immaculate conception, so putting aside how the immaculate conception was inspected, I think the Japanese have a word pertaining to this form of unusual insemination, its called bukkakeru.
> opposed to the modern state-mandated one, which actually is incredibly sexist, and seeks to scapegoat and demonize men in a frantic and irrational way.
I think the modern state-mandated one are trying to address the sexism in society, which is a great form of psychological warfare against males, which the military will love because they are always looking to undermine insurgents and terrorists, whilst not recognising their own actions are radicalising individuals in society.
What goes around, comes around, aka Karma.
1) it doesn’t take very long to understand the motivations of Satan: see “Dante’s Inferno”.
2) No
3) wtf?
4) that’s not very bhuddist of you
I'd argue we've always been dead in that way, as a species. The internet just makes it seem more apparent.
Capitalism just happens to be the least shitty system we have that's been proven at scale thus far.
For two centuries, we have had exponentially increasing consumption, exponentially increasing production, and exponentially increasing waste.
Unbounded exponential growth is impossible in a finite planet. But capitalism requires unlimited exponential growth to function - "return on investment" is literally exponentiation.
Unfortunately, there is a multi decade lag between the causes and the effects.
Already, disaster is baked into the amount of carbon dioxide we have pumped into the atmosphere, and we aren't turning around. There are trillions of dollars of commitments for fossil fuel generation plants that will be still operating in 30 years and more.
The idea that people today will give up their standard of living so that their grand children will not experience catastrophe turns out to be completely unreasonable. No one will ever give up their standard of living. Technology will continue to advance, and this will continue to accelerate the growth of resource consumption and waste production.
> authoritarianism, monarchy, or feudalism.
I too find those systems enraging and unfair, but future historians will say, "They did not decimate the biosphere - only capitalism did that."
> the failure to distribute covid vaccines
The fact that we even have COVID vaccines in such a short time is an amazing accomplishment.
> mass hunger
Capitalism has proven way more capable at avoiding famine than planned economics
> mass homeless
Homelessness in wealthy countries in an issue of drug addiction and mental health, not inability to build housing.
I’d argue homelessness is heavily tied to an inability to build housing, but that’s a regulatory failure (zoning and building codes) not a market one.
As for Poland, it is thoroughly a capitalist country. All of the largest coal mining companies and energy companies there are publicly traded (although some, including PGE is majority [58%] owned by the state). It is safe to say that Poland’s continuing carbon emissions are more then happy to continue under a capitalist rule.
What do you base this on? Greenhouse effect was scientifically established in the 1800s and evidence of CO2 induced global warming in the mid 1900s. The IPCC was set up in 1988. The Soviet Union collapsed in 1991.
> and engage in a mass disinformation campaign to keep increasing pollution at the cost of our climate. I’m sure they would have, but they’re government collapsed before they were able,
USSR may have have believed they would be a strategic winner in warming temperatures. At best they would not have been particularly inclined to sacrifice their energy and industrial development when their rivals were not.
> so, so far the climate crisis is a uniquely capitalist problem.
No it's not, even if you strangely ignore USSR's massive past contribution to atmospheric CO2. China emits more CO2 than all western countries combined, and plans to continue increasing output. You'll say China is capitalist to some degree, but its heavy industry, electricity generation, and fossil fuel industries (and more) are all under absolute control of the communist dictatorship.
The climate crisis is your average every day human problem, formally documented in feudal England (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tragedy_of_the_commons) but certainly the same condition existed pre-history.
The IPCC published their first report on climate change in 1990, the Rio conference took place in 1992, and the first real UN climate deceleration wasn’t until 1997 with the Kyoto protocol (I say real because this is the one where government promised to limit their greenhouse emissions; and then proceeded to fail). So I say that even thought the climate crises starts with the industrial revolution, 1997 is the year we start seeing the climate failure that will doom us all.
Just to state the obvious, if governments would have acted in 1997 like they promised to, then climate change probably wouldn’t have reached this catastrophic proportions which we are observing today. We had recently saved the ozone layer using similar measure, so there is no reason the Kyoto protocol failed other then the profit motive of fossil fuel companies which successfully lobbied against following through with the promises. The efforts of ignoring the Kyoto protocol were led by the USA which failed to ratify it. I believe there was significant lobbying involved from fossil fuel companies that influenced the senate’s decision to not even vote on it.
Bringing capitalism into it is just silly. "Capitalism" is not to blame, removing capitalism does not fix it, and people don't need to give up capitalism to improve global warming. It seems to be bringing an unrelated personal bias against capitalism in and tying it to global warming, which is really anti-scientific misinformation.
My statements was about fossil fuel companies internal scientists discovering the link, which resulted in them thinking only about their shareholders’ profits when it came time to react. You have no proof a similar situation ever happened inside the soviet union.
Off course there were scientists within the soviet union which knew about the link, and even some that realized the scale of the human impact before the political collapse. But stating how the soviet leadership would have acted in the wake of the Kyoto protocol is pure fiction that has nothing to do with the world we live in.
Communists certainly contributed to the climate disaster, and continue to do so today, but by the time push came to shove, and we were set up to enact the essential international agreements to prevent it becoming a disaster, it were capitalist countries, and capitalist countries alone, that resisted.
> Communists certainly contributed to the climate disaster, and continue to do so today, but by the time push came to shove, and we were set up to enact the essential international agreements to prevent it becoming a disaster, it were capitalist countries, and capitalist countries alone, that resisted.
Also incorrect. China is a strong resister. Of course they like treaties that puts restrictions on the west and allows them to continue increasing emissions, which is what they push for.
Western nations are responsible for the majority of historic emissions, and have gotten rich at the cost of everyone else’s future. They have the financial capacity to build out the required infrastructure with the money they have already made off of their pollution. This is the logic behind the exceptions to the Kyoto protocol. The US (or rather the oil lobby) touted this as unfair (which it isn’t) and instead continued to pollute at an accelerated rate. It was also always understood that the Kyoto protocol was a start which would get stronger in a later agreement, so China was never going to be exempt forever, and they knew that.
When the US killed the Kyoto protocol they killed every future prospects with it as well. The disagreement was always about this issue you point out, but COP after COP, non-western nations (including China) proposed a reduction (e.g. in COP 2009 China promised a 40-45% reduction from 2005 by 2020; this puts China in the same category as Europe with governments that promise action but fail to deliver) but COP after COP it was always the USA that brought up this as a disagreement and we continued to not make an agreement (COP-15 resulted in a non-binding agreement and China missed this target).
But this is all irrelevant when discussing capitalism as the only culprit of the climate disaster because most (all?) of China’s pollution companies are publicly traded either in Hong Kong Stock Exchange, or in the New York Stock Exchange, or both, with the Chinese state as its majority owner, for over a decade now. These companies operate for the profits of their share holders, not for the benefits of their workers like a communist entity would. These are firmly capitalist entities, one might call them state capitalist.
Sorry, I'm just not going to buy it. It just looks like you have a hatred of capitalism and trying to pin things to it. Better tighten up your argument a whole lot before you try it out on somebody else.
We've another comment replying to this one that bemoans Maggie Thatcher when I'd be willing to bet they weren't alive in the 80s and display a complete ignorance of, well, basically all recorded history prior to that. I'd say you couldn't make it up but it's actually very easy to parody and predict.
I'll leave you with Ray Davies singing a rendition of how his record company, manager, and agent ripped him off - sorry, exploited him as a worker, comrade - in the 1960's. Yes, grift and centralising of power to prey on the weak and ignorant are new inventions, if you were born yesterday!
In answer to your question, I think we died as a race when we gave up the nomadic life. We stopped moving around, got comfortable and started accumulating property.
>Company offers you means to pay.
>^^
Which is it?
(Though the truth has always been that you’re part customer, part product, of course.)
Remember the backlash when Eric Schmidt was pushing for identity verification for Google+. This is the flip side of that coin; we can't have it both ways.
No, that was a separate problem: Google+, and later YouTube, both pushed for having to always use a verified identity *without* the option to be anonymous, pseudonymous, or to otherwise assume a fictional identity - especially in venues where people would have many legitimate reasons to not use their real-identity that aren't nefarious, criminal or misleading at all: anything from teenagers with abusive parents, forums like Erowid; Google has enough furries and otaku in their own ranks who'd be opposed to this policy anyway - and there is genuine democratic value in being able to speak anonymously - I'm surprised it isn't an enumerated constitutional right in more places, really.
With Facebook/Instagram/Twitter's Verified-identity-costs-money feature the problem is that it seems the onus is on the individual to stump-up to avoid having their identity hijacked or misrepresented by someone else.
What the Internet clearly needs is the good-parts-of-both: no-one should be forced to use their single real-life identity on the Internet, but also that no-one should be allowed to hijack another real-life identity - and that, ideally, no-one should have to pay to have to protect their own real-life identity from hijacking or misrepresentation either. These are not mutually-exclusive or otherwise incompatible goals - and paying for identity verification is not unethical in itself either.
Yeah, I would be absolutely devastated if I were required to link a "real life" identity, especially since I do not identify with that. Species dysphoria makes me uncomfortable. I need spaces to express myself. Not the body I happen to be trapped in.
(Basically agreeing with you and confirming that these people totally exist.)
I'm pretty sure thinking you're not "supposed to be" human is a mental illness and you should be seeking treatment for it, not leaning into it.
What’s ridiculous is the types who want to force this play on others, especially the aggressive trans types, who claim any misgendering is basically violence, or want biological males in female changing rooms, because that’s the game they want to play. It’s extremely damaging narcissistic behaviour and wanting to control others.
It could be the opposite. I was given a computer with internet access around age 5 and allowed to experiment all I wanted. I was a faceless entity at first, but after around a decade, I started exploring animal roleplay and eventually animal identities as I saw others doing those things.
Found a form that I felt like I identified with... and now that's my honest identity.
> as long as you are doing this with similar people and in a community, who cares, be happy.
I am <3 species euphoria is great, when I can express myself~
> What’s ridiculous is ...
Please don't.
Most identity experimentation games happen from age 2-3, and much of it depends on parent and environment feedback. Sitting at your computer "experimenting" is highly unlikely to be what our psychology and evolution needs for us to become fully mature adults. It's much more about direct feedback and interaction with parents, siblings and others.
Except when your coping mechanism has negative implications for other people. As soon as you are forcing others or damaging them (note: easy to see how that works with alcohol for example), then it's not ok. Find a way to cope, fine. Just don't expect me to play along with it (we have interventions for alcoholics for a reason).
What are you implying? Does not wanting to link my accounts to a real-life body have negative implications somehow?
That's not what I meant by "dysphoria". I use "dysphoria" to mean that I feel a mismatch between my inner identity and outer body. It doesn't mean that I think the body is somehow wrong or incorrect, but rather that I'd prefer to be inside a different one and I am uncomfortable with this one.
I never think "I was supposed to be born as something else", because that isn't true. I was born exactly how I was supposed to be. Autism and ADHD are merely genetic differences. But one can grow to dislike their own existence and desire a different one, and that's not necessarily a mental illness in itself. I don't have delusions of transformation or rebirth or religion. I just feel like I identify as something else.
It's similar to how some people feel gender dysphoria or gender euphoria. HRT and SRS exist for gender/sex transitions, but unfortunately transhumanism or "species transition" isn't really possible. So I have to tough it out and try to make myself as comfortable as possible despite that.
This includes expressing myself online the way I want to instead of a way mandated by the laws of "reality". Having to identify online using the body would indeed be very dysphoria-inducing because I don't identify that way and I don't want to be seen that way online.
Going through ADHD treatment is helping me significantly (and with other mental illnesses too), because some of my discomfort probably stems from executive dysfunction (i.e. the body not listening to me when I tell it to do certain things), but I will never not be otherkin; take that as you will.
I was being sincere, yeah.
(I... usually forget to put emotion into my text here. I'm always self-conscious about my comments getting reported somehow if I act too playful or anything. I try to be more serious and informative.)
Tying real world identities to online accounts is bad, and Google+ did a lot to create the problem. Before that, it was unrealistic to believe that the name of an account was particularly meaningful
You’re fine if you say no. If you say you don’t have social media and they find you do, of course that’s fraud. But I know several couples off social who were asked, explained, and then showed photos off their camera roll and were fine.
Anyone who sets up a Facebook account has chosen to do so because they find value in it. If they ever stop finding value in it they can delete it.
I don’t see a problem with them offering an option for people who want it to validate themselves for a fee. Seems like a direct copy of Elon Musk’s idea for Twitter which I also don’t see an issue with.
Have you ever had a bank account? Gotten a credit card? A mortgage? Missed a student loan payment?
When I got my very first credit report, which I was entitled to by law, the reporting agencies asked me to very information they already had about my life and financial history dating back to my early teenage years.
Especially important if sharing properties as a student.
>When I got my very first credit report, which I was entitled to by law, the reporting agencies asked me to very information they already had about my life and financial history dating back to my early teenage years
Thats because they dont know if the data supplied to them is genuine or not. Postal addresses were also a problem, I know of programmers who would boast about how quickly they could clean millions of records a second in the 90's (in memory rather than disk), but the credit reference companies main issue is getting clean data. A bank might have one address for you, and another bank or loan company might have a different address for you, both work in that the post office deliver the mail but the addresses are different.
example House Name House No, Street Town/City Postcode(zip code)
House No, Street Town/City Postcode(zip code)
House Name Street Town/City Postcode(zip code)
Post office should deliver to all 3 addresses, but a computer program see's differences, ergo cleaning data and recognising these differences were one and the same involved a lot of time.
Other examples is the name of someone. A.N. Surname Arthur N Surname A. Name Surname
All the same person, 3 different but legal ways to do a name on paperwork.
>The credit reporting agencies keep track of you without your consent by providing services to other companies and agencies.
The contracts signed with banks and lenders of sort have blanket clauses where they can share their data with whoever they like. You have no control over this. So they do have consent and they sometimes use this for "fraud detection", so either dont deal with them, go cash and/or crypto.
Actually I can’t delete my Facebook account. I forgot the password years ago, and I get the recovery questions incorrect (I have to recognise people in photos from extended social graph and I don’t know them!). I’m not sure I even have the email account any more. I can’t delete the account.
For example, I’ve always seen something like this in my credit agreements:
> You agree that we will give information about the Account to credit reporting agencies. We will tell a credit reporting agency if you fail to comply with any term of this Agreement. This may have a negative impact on your credit report.
https://www.consumerfinance.gov/about-us/newsroom/cfpb-repor...
After that though you can't even really rent an apartment without a credit check so I'm not sure what you would do (I guess if you have a partner that handles it for you).
There are plenty of places that rent without credit checks. Where do you think all the people with no credit (or no SSN!) live? It might not be on the nice side of the tracks, though.
As long as there is price transparency, people will vote with their feet.
Now - the 'sleight of hand' thing where you buy one thing and the later they change their structure, that's a hustle for sure - but otherwise, for 'new customers', I view this as just part of the pricing structure. And BTW I think they will mostly drop it because people won't like it and won't see a lot of value in it.