Vietnam to collect biometrics – even DNA – for new ID cards

> Vietnam’s future identity cards will incorporate the functions of health insurance cards, social insurance books, driver's licenses, birth certificates, and marriage certificates, as defined by the amendment.

The project of digital file-sharing across administrations, all being tied to a single social security number, became a scandal and was made illegal for a reason !

Employment, credit, medical care, access to shelter, transportation, utilities are all hard-gated behind 'voluntarily' giving up your personal information to firms that will either sell, or share, or leak it.

(I just got a notification that Delta Dental is very sorry it lost mine, I guess I should add dental care to that list.)

In the US the political zeitgeist is to rail against any kind of government overreach, while closing both eyes and plugging both ears to overreach or abuse done by anyone who has a profit motive.

Not really. Giving up democracy for stability is increasingly a theme in South Asia, too. The West had their turn at it, too, in the 1940s; Asians don't have a monopoly over less-democratic governments. In fact I daresay the stereotypical nondemocratic example that comes to mind is Nazi Germany, which is distinctly Western.

People have a tendency to give up democracy for stability and improved quality of life when they've been trampled over, told they are inferior to other people with reduced melanin production, and generally not given opportunities to thrive.

Both China and India have massive inferiority complexes, and not without reason—they want a say in the world stage, and they'll get it by hook or crook. Together they have nearly two-fifths of the world population.

Ah, the only parts of Vietnam poorer than Gia Lai.

Fair enough.

> Gia Lai isn't that rural

On QL14c and AH17 it isn't, but in between those two highways it definetly is (think dirt roads, wooden shanties like you'd see in neighboring Mondulkiri/Ratanakiri).

> ID cards aren't going to stop anything.

If you are distributing social assistant payments, you need identification.

If you leave identification to local PD (who are paid too little to care about being competent), it's not that difficult to bribe them to either add or remove you from a registry, or create multiple ghost identities in order to siphon social assistance payments (probably at the behest of the local party official).

The only true form of identification that is tamper-proof is biometric.

> ALL of the borders are porous

Agreed, but Laos and Cambodia are significantly more impoverished than Vietnam, especially the portions of Cambodia and Laos neighboring VN. It's hard for someone there to migrate to Thailand like how Cambodians in Siem Reap or Laotians around Vientiane do.

------

If civil libertarians want to be taken seriously, there needs to be an actual attempt at sympathizing with the plight of the poor, and then actually working on implementing a solution that works both ways.

Think low-tech or simplified solutions with minimal moving parts. Complexity is the enemy of privacy.

Instead, it's a bunch of blowhards who'd give their mother's SSN if an MPS type even threated to raise their hand at them.

There is always a need for identification. Go implement a low tech solution with minimal moving pieces that provides privacy and identification at the same time.

On top of that, does anonymity fall under privacy? If yes, then it's inherently impossible to implement privacy and identitification concurrently.

I think the important thing is to always treat hierarchy as a cost. So whenever things need to be organized, you look at that cost versus the benefits to see whether it is justifiable at all; but even if it is, you still try to minimize the cost to achieve the requisite outcome. Broadly speaking, in the context of governance in general, it means loose confederations with power mostly flowing "bottom up", but with mechanisms in place that still do allow to tackle those aforementioned emergencies like AGW that require top-down enforced coordination.

In practice I'm not sure the proletariat ever held this power (as a class; individuals may have).

Yes, if you have a toilet and think cleaning toilets is yucky but you value having a clean toilet, you'll have to ask someone to clean it for you and they'll likely not want this to be a one-sided relationship unless you're literally phyiscally or mentally disabled to the point people want to take care of you because you can't do so yourself. That does not require capitalism.

Heck, you could even have money without having capitalism. The question is what money can buy. Under feudalism for example - not that feudalism is preferable to capitalism unless you think you'd get to be the king (and arguably not even then) - all the money in the world wouldn't have turned a peasant into a king because the lord would have just had his guards confiscate the money, kill the peasant and flay their corpse as a warning against not knowing your place in the hierarchy.

Saying "if I don't pay people to clean the toilet, it'll just be dirty forever" not only betrays your own suspect attitudes to hygiene but also a complete detachment from how 99% of human interactions operate, namely based on a shared interest of not wanting to be taken advantage of and helping when you can.

Some people genuinely like cleaning toilets. Some people don't mind cleaning their own toilets. Some people would really rather not have to clean their own toilets and are willing to do other things for other people. Some people are filthy slobs and would rather have a dirty toilet than clean it themselves or help others.

And yes, the obvious answer to "what about jobs that will literally kill you" is: then why should anyone want to do those jobs? If the jobs are vital to the survival of the group, those sound like some pretty damn prestiguous jobs that would lead to whoever does it being held in very high regard and treated as a saint. If the jobs are largely useless to the group, they simply won't be done unless we can find a way to do it that won't kill you. The difference is that under exploitative systems we either literally force people to do so at gunpoint or we treat the workers as disposable drones and only compensate them (or invest in their safety and care) as little as we can get away with.

But I understand that all of this might sound like fanciful prose if you can only ever envision systems working if they rely on exploiting some 90% of the population even though they're only held together by those 90%'s misplaced compassion.

Not really. Most communists agree that communism is a "state-less, class-less society". Sometimes they also add "money-less". The differences you are thinking of are between the various ideas of how to get there. "Anarcho-communism" is also a bit of a red herring. Anarchism is by definition communist - if anything an anarchist society would be a subset of communist societies because it requires the abolition of even more hierarchies. You'll find people on the left using the word "communism" in an inflationary way the same way the modern right throws it at anything to the left of conversvatism but even the Soviet Union never claimed to have achieved communism even if it was generally called "communist". There's an obvious difference between communism (which is narrowly defined, i.e. the end state) and a communist (a person who claims to want to achieve communism some way or another).

> Capitalism seems to obviously work great for me cause I get paid in fiat currency to work on startups that are likely to fail, and I have no risk.

Capitalism means you already have all the risk by existing within the system. Everything you "own" is entirely conditional on your continued ability to pay bills. Not just rent, mortgage or debt but also all the resources you need to actually use what you have: electricity, gas, water, waste water management. And of course any food you want to eat, any costs of replacing or repairing what you have and so on. If you don't keep making money, you will run out of it.

You may have a social support network - a friend you can crash at if your house burns down, a family that will take you back and feed you if all goes wrong. But those exist despite capitalism not as part of it. And those again require you to luck into a situation where you have a loving family or dependable friends who can afford an extra mouth to feed.

As the saying goes, under capitalism, most people are "one bad week away from poverty". Especially if they don't luck into generational wealth, a high paying and stable career and good insurances (which still may not cover everything life can throw at you).

If you want strenuous software metaphors, communism is pure functional programming, capitalism is class-based OOP and most of the world right now is running C#.

This is why in capitalism, wages are not determined by some subjective measurement about a job (difficulty, desirability, etc) but a simple balance between supply and demand. The reason janitors are paid poorly is because there's lots of supply, but not nearly as much demand. The same's true in high skill positions. Post-docs are some of the most highly skilled individuals who often have years of specialized education in very specific fields. Yet there's lots of post-docs but not much demand, so their pay isn't that far removed from that of a janitor.

Automation feels hand-wavey to me on these topics, because it's not realistically coming anytime soon for many of these jobs. While we take janitorial work for granted, think about how absurdly difficult it would be for a robot to be able to clean an arbitrarily designed bathroom, which may be defouled in an equally arbitrary number of ways, and also possibly depending on an arbitrary selection of third party tools/replacements. In all reality I think it's extremely safe to say that's not happening in our lifetimes.

There's also an economic issue that the jobs automation replaces needs to be substantially cheaper than a human doing the same work. Stuff with moving parts breaks down and tends to need regular maintenance, while wages for most low skill work are very low. We could largely automate something like fast food production, but economically it's still cheaper to just use humans.