When WhatsApp was banned for a day, people immediately migrated to Telegram. This is not an excuse.
246 karma · joined July 17, 2018
For example, it appears that the "barrier of entry" for repairs was lowered, and I could pick many examples to try and demonstrate that, but just from a personal anecdote: I usually don't work on my car unless it's something simple that requires a solution I can instantly think of, but just the other day I had my engine temperature light pop up at a rather inconvenient time and place, so instead of calling assistance, towing the car to a mechanic, and having them work on it for I don't know how much time and money, I took a look at the usual suspects (radiator, hoses, coolant tank, etc.), pointed the camera at them, and started talking to ChatGPT which instructed me on how to troubleshoot, find the defective part, buy a new one (which I did by phone and got it delivered to me), and replace it on-site. And now I feel more confident in doing just that for bigger problems from now on, which, granted, is probably a bad idea, but I digress.
The Marxian perspective says the repair I did on my car is an effort that will never express itself as value because I do not intend on selling my car as a commodity in a market, so it's not labor per se. It literally replaced the living labor, the value-producing activity of a mechanic, and added nothing back in its place. So indirectly, that also contributes to the reduction in overall new value production, which can only be created through living labor. But the consequences of that will not happen instantly, because the demand will lower in one sector (e.g. mechanic shops) and increase in another (e.g. I spend the money I saved in a diner or something). But there might not be enough room to absorb the displaced workers in another sector, and even if there is, the wages will tend to be lower for the inexperienced newcomer (say, if the mechanic chooses to work in a kitchen now).
That just seems like a terrible spiral. Think about it: this time, I chose to do the fix myself because of time constraints, but what if I were the one getting caught up in one of these traps? What if I had been laid off or had been displaced to a lower-wage position and couldn't really afford to bring my car to a mechanic? Then it's EVEN MORE pressure to not opt to use services and try an AI-assisted fix.
Anyway, I might be way off here, but it's an interesting topic.
I’m not sure how that’s even relevant to the point I was trying to make which is: you are monitored by a foreign and openly hostile government through its privately owned collaborators. That’s worse than your own government using transactional data to monitor money laundering and tax evasion activities that detracts from your direct quality of life. And again, it’s naive to think Brasil has no control over the internet backbone in its own territory, you must not understand how it even works to say something like that.
> Lack of capabilities limit the scope of government tyranny. It used to be that the government didn't have the manpower required to audit everyone and everything, so only the bank transactions above some threshold would be monitored. With pix, they are monitoring 100% of transactions now. This is a massive gain in capability that should not be ignored.
And yet here you are arguing against something that decreases the amount of potential bad actors who can gain direct access to your data. It’s the digital age for a while now, there is a general privacy tradeoff in anything you do online. If that’s a concern, use money. My issue with you is that, again, you seem to prefer to hand over your data to foreigners that have no incentive to use it for anything other than extracting as much value as possible out of your country AND with the additional criminally flagrant behavior of inflicting their interests on judicial and political decisions AND make your pay a 3 fucking percent charge over it.