This stuff terrifies me. I'm de-googling as fast as I can and reviewing all my local backups plus add encryption to what stays in the cloud.
Does quicken still sync well with most American banks, investment accounts, and credit card companies?
I used to be a power user as well but then moved overseas where is syncs with nothing.
Now I use gnucash with a ton of custom python scraping and importing scripts. It isn't perfect but as close as I have been able to find.
I was traveling internationally recently and returning to the USA I didn't even need my passport to clear through immigration. They had a camera which recognized me and gave me the green light to pass as I approached.
The agent had a few questions and I was on my way.
It was convenient as hell, but the fact that their system can link me to whatever data is stored with my passport records based on a second or two of recognition out of all the faces that must be in there...
actually kinda blows.
It means they can definitely put a street camera system in place and see oh, there's /u/nucleative. Wonder why he's at the protest, bank, with that person, driving that car, near a crime scene, or anything else.
Somehow we have zero privacy yet the enforcement hides behind numbers and masks.
I expect that this will just continue to go further and further.
Kids, this is why we needed to push back hard on privacy, random cameras, and facial recognition 20 years ago.
The metaphorical horse is already out of the barn and removing or disabling these systems will probably never happen now.
Are there any resources that compile a good counter-argument to this?
💪 2 years here we go
Congrats!
On the one hand we seem to currently have some of the cheapest air tickets the world has ever seen. If you're willing to travel like cattle.
On the other hand it feels like air travel is now like getting on the city bus and there's some guy vomiting in front of you and a screaming kid pissing on the seat behind you, all the while you're getting herded around like a cow, your stuff is at high risk of getting stolen with no recourse, and the airline is playing mind games about the best time to buy a ticket after sneaking in a bunch of clauses designed to get you to pay more later.
Interesting, we call these things ladybugs in the US. I haven't seen one in a long time but I know they are good news for Rose gardens.
Drone wars: begun they have
Impressively, one can get the other
This is intuitive and you can see it everywhere. Rules and laws only have power when they are actively enforced. If there's nobody there to stop a bad actor, eventually they will figure it out and abuse the flaw.
Getting people to drive at (or close to) the speed limit only takes seeing a couple of cops a day and perhaps having received a ticket or two.
Preventing tax cheats just requires enough enforcement so that you know of a guy who knows a guy who was turned inside out by an audit.
Keeping corruption in government low just requires a few public cases of the right people getting thrown in jail never to come back again. Sadly this is one that's eroded significantly in recent memory and too many rotten actors are publicly getting away with shady business.