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The irony is that the same companies pushing us toward login-only everything are also the ones best positioned to survive it

There's a point where "privacy" flips into distinctiveness

What I'd really like to see is more honesty: "we store X because feature Y needs it, here's the risk we're accepting," instead of pretending every service needs emails, analytics, and cookies by default

This is what the GDPR requires.

Most people fixate on network-level anonymity and completely underestimate how badly a "tuned" browser leaks identity

People also tend to have very poor OPSEC which undermines their efforts in spite of the tools they used.

https://grugq.github.io/blog/2013/11/06/required-reading/

Unlinking one's identity from one's activity is only getting harder as surveillance gets more and more pervasive. Effective OPSEC essentially turns one's life into a living hell and it's only getting hotter with time.


Even if you don't want to live entirely on the anonymous web, it's useful to see how many products claim privacy while being structurally incapable of delivering it

What's most depressing is that people like you did the right thing (took the time to investigate and report) and still hit a wall

The fact that families have to crowdfund lifesaving care creates the vulnerability but it doesn't force anyone to build an industrialized scam on top of it

    Local man embezzles $20,000 meant to keep 200 orphans from being crushed in the orphan-crushing machine.

Orphan crushing machine operator: "If I don't do it, someone else will"

Orphan crushing proponent: "Why should I pay for orphans not to be crushed??"

There's money to be made on arbitration of orphan crushing! If I don't do it someone else will.

Introducing “The Automatic Orphan Crusher 9000” complete with conveyor belt fed chutes and titanium jaws, no orphan can escape! Just place a piece of candy…”

Does it have AI?

That would be part of our Orphan Industries plan for managing output of your 9000s on the industrial floor. Sure. Monitor throughput and TTK right there from the app.

there is no trolley

This framing is disingenuous. We're meant to say "tear down the orphan-crushing machine!" But in this case there's no machine, only human mortality. You're substituting a simple question ("why are we crushing orphans?") for a complex one ("who should pay for poor children's healthcare?")

Also, the scale seems much larger than $20k.


> doesn't force anyone to build an industrialized scam on top of it

The incentives are there. Our economy runs on incentives. Create a vulnerable group and the sharks smell blood in the water.


Incentives don’t remove agency. They might have incentives… but these are awful scum who deserve nothing but contempt

No but it provides a framework to begin thinking about ways we can protect the vulnerable from these contemptible but totally predictable bad actors.

For example, families forced to publicly beg for money to provide their sick children with treatment. What societal structures enable this situation to occur? Who is profiting off of this structure?


You'd have to be inconscionably crass to profiteer off charities treating kids for cancer ... https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Donald_J._Trump_Foundation "Granting money to charities that rented Trump Organization facilities".

Well, that's a pretty bold stance. Scammers who steal from dying children are bad people? Geez...

No-one is hoarding a free and easy supply of treatments. They're all hard-won advancements. The vulnerability is there by default.

Whether taxes, health insurance, the Church, or gofundme, technically all life saving care is mostly crowd-funded. Maybe not in some Wild West dystopia, but generally the pooling of funds seems to work better than solo funding.

Involuntary, progressive crowdfunding through government threat of violence (taxes) seems to work better than the other methods and most consider it humane. Americans have shown little interest historically in doing the humane thing, unfortunately.


Taxes: the price one must pay for civilization.

>but it doesn't force anyone to build an industrialized scam on top of it

I mean almost the entirety of the US healthcare system is a industrialized scam engineered by middlemen


Whether sentencing should reflect that is a hard question, but pretending all fraud is morally equivalent seems like willful blindness

The fact that the website is suspended while the donation machinery was clearly active is… not a great sign

If BBC journalists can donate $5 and see the counter move, how are these campaigns not triggering internal red flags?

These campaings? I've paid some minimal cursory attention to 2 pretty randomly chosen charities - once i donated an old car, and another time i thought may be to subscribe to do math tutoring to children, the tutors were unpaid volunteers, and i just looked into what financial info was available for that non-profit ... well after those 2 times i've never even thought about any dealing with any non-profit, etc. and the stories in the news like when a famous radio talk show host would fund raise huge money to be later paid from his non-profit to his vacation ranch business, all in the open daylight, don't surprise me at all or all those stories of Trump's charities.

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