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Comment by bigbuppo | Hacker News Reader

They probably meant "know your customer", you know, where you have to submit to an anal probe to think about getting a bank account and withdrawing more than $8 of cash at a time will trigger a suspicious activity report for money laundering/tax evasion while the Epstein class are getting away with the most heinous crimes possible.

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I'm still waiting for the first password manager to incorporate biometrics and security questions, as predicted decades ago by Douglas Adams:

There were so many different ways in which you were required to provide absolute proof of your identity these days that life could easily become extremely tiresome just from that factor alone, never mind the deeper existential problems of trying to function as a coherent consciousness in an epistemologically ambiguous physical universe. Just look at cash point machines, for instance. Queues of people standing around waiting to have their fingerprints read, their retinas scanned, bits of skin scraped from the nape of the neck and undergoing instant (or nearly instant-a good six or seven seconds in tedious reality) genetic analysis, then having to answer trick questions about members of their family they didn't even remember they had, and about their recorded preferences for tablecloth colours. And that was just to get a bit of spare cash for the weekend. If you were trying to raise a loan for a jetcar, sign a missile treaty or pay an entire restaurant bill things could get really trying.

Hence the Ident-i-Eeze. This encoded every single piece of information about you, your body and your life into one all-purpose machine-readable card that you could then carry around in your wallet, and therefore represented technology's greatest triumph to date over both itself and plain common sense.

The saying is "every accusation is a confession". If the political class claims to be preventing us from doing something that we obviously are not doing, we should assume they're doing that thing until proven otherwise.

KYC is generally a force for good because it prevents fraud. While it is not reasonable for Discord to collect your identity that is a fair requirement for a bank account because money laundering is a serious problem worth preventing.

The reason the 'Epstein class' are able to get away with crimes is because in recent US elections the US voted to elect politicions that intentionally are not investigating those crimes and even pardoned some criminals convicted of them.

Don’t pardoned people by definition need to have been convicted of a crime whether real or in some select instances otherwise? Can you pardon someone not convicted of a (federal) crime?

Yes, the last president pardoned himself and his family on his way out.

I’m not sure if that has precedent. It’s unusual to grant a pardon before a case is brought to court.

In any event, my point was all presidents who grant pardons grant them to people convicted of a crime; it’s not a recent development. But that was framed as being upsetting precedent.

Preemptive pardons have been used in recent history.

https://www.criminallawlibraryblog.com/amp/preemptive-pardon...

Not according to Ex parte Garland (1866).

> 9. The power of pardon conferred by the Constitution upon the President is unlimited except in cases of impeachment. It extends to every offence known to the law, and may be exercised at any time after its commission, either before legal proceedings are taken or during their pendency, or after conviction and judgment. The power is not subject to legislative control.

https://tile.loc.gov/storage-services/service/ll/usrep/usrep...

Basically you can't pardon acts that haven't happened yet, but you can pardon before any legal action has been taken on prior acts.

>KYC is generally a force for good because it prevents fraud

Now replace KYC with CCTV surveillance because thats what it really is. Complete Monetary surveillance and control to fight a boogeyman scapegoat it doesn't even actually effect.

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