I think there are qualitative differences that arise from incremental, quantitative changes in privacy.
Sure, in the 1970s the cops could follow you around any time you were out in public. But they needed 6+ cops to provide round-the-clock surveillance, with an annual cost in the high six figures.
So the average citizen's privacy was protected not by law or high-minded ideals about privacy, but by simple numbers. There weren't enough cops to follow even 0.1% of the population.
But in the modern age of smartphones and license plate recognition and credit reference agencies? I think there's a strong argument to be made that we need new laws and new rights to reflect the new reality, where tracking people around the clock is several orders of magnitude cheaper.
I also think the laws need to change with changing technology.
Take something like speeding. We have speed limits and fines set based on the idea that cops won't catch most speeders and that cops can give leeway based on the situation (driving 10 mph over the speed limit on an empty straight highway is different than driving 10 mph over the speed limit weaving in heavy traffic).
We set a relatively low max speed and a high penalty, because you are only going to be pulled over a fraction of the time.
Then we roll out speed cameras which can catch people EVERY time they speed. It doesn't make sense to have the limits as low and the fines as high when every single person that goes over the limit can be fined. We have to tune the laws for perfect enforcement.
This is true for a lot of laws... most are designed based on the enforcement capabilities of the time. We need to adjust for technology.
> Then we roll out speed cameras which can catch people EVERY time they speed.
Hikvision, in China, has a comprehensive system for this.[1]
Hikvision has other monitoring tools. Here's their Behavior Analysis Server data sheet. It's a 1U server for monitoring people.[2]
Hikvision Behavior Analysis Server
Based on the latest intelligent algorithm of deep learning, Behavior Analysis Server with a high-density GPU architecture supports the detection of behavior events in the perimeter, street, densely populated areas, indoor and other places, and triggers alarms in a timely manner, which can effectively improve the security of various places.
Behavior Analysis Server can detect the specific behaviors of individuals and groups in the perimeter, street, densely
populated areas, indoor and other places, and provide professional video intelligent analysis applications:
* Perimeter Protection -- Real-time detection and alarming of events such as line crossing, area intrusion, region entrance/exiting, loitering, parking,
unattended baggage or object removal.
* Trend Analysis -- Real-time detection and alarming of people density, real-time people counting statistics and people counting statistics.
* Street Behavior Detection -- Real-time detection and alarming of events such as fast moving, physical conflict, people gathering or falling down.
* Indoor Behavior Detection -- Real-time detection and alarming of events such as getting up, key person getting up, climbing, absence or sleep on duty,
abnormal number of people, overstaying, sudden change of sound intensity, regional overstaying, physical conflict,
standing up, sitting, or people counting.
Lol, I think they should be low and stay low and there should be more enforcement
For me, I live in a quiet neighborhood. The residential street outside my apartment has speed limit signs of 20mph. People are trying to walk their dogs and kids. 9 out of 10 cars go 40-50mph. Part of that is road design. The road is new, straight, barrier and speed bump free. Worse, if you try to obey the law and go 20 the person behind you will get road rage and then illegally pass on the left (going into the opposite lane) or pass on the right and swerve around to get to the left turn lane.
That said, a street a block over is 25mph with speed bump and at least 1 of 3 cars races to each bump. And 1 of 20 just flies over the bumps.
This is a street with apartments and condos one one side and a park and elementary school on the other.
There might be some roads that don't need enforcement (somewhere in Nevada) but even in outside of the city, say LA to Vegas or SF to LA there's enough traffic that speeders cause accidents.
There's also a great video I stumbled across yesterday
So if have a car going 70mph and they slam on their breaks to avoid an accident. When they stop they'll have expended 4900 units of kinetic energy. Another car, same weight, going 100mph slams on the breaks. When their car has expended 4900 units of kinetic energy they still have another 5100 units to get rid before their car will stop because 70^2 = 4900, and 100^2 = 10000. In other words, after they've applied as much stopping force as the 70mph car required to come to stop they're still going over 70mph
The point being, speeding issues scale exponentially, not linearly.
American drivers are extremely poor by international standards though - perhaps because of the relative ease of getting a licence, perhaps because of poor enforcement of road traffic laws.
Look at the level of road fatalities [1] in the US - comparable with developing world countries. I vividly remember travelling on the interstate in the US in the 2000s, and seeing a couple of burnt out recent wrecks (most likely fatal) by the highway side every hour or so. That's incredibly shocking to someone from the EU. For contrast, I've driven by the site of a serious accident perhaps twice in my life here in Ireland - which has a road fatality rate 1/4 that of the US.
I think this has more to do with the prevalance of driving among the population. At least compared with India I remember looking into this, and it did.
Being a driver or passenger on a roadway in India is much more risky, but people in India are far less likely to die in this scenario because they spend so much less time in those situations than Americans.
So you're saying that in your neck of the woods 60+% of drivers aren't texting, the average following distance is >0.5 seconds (ideally always, but at a bare minimum when it's icy out), the average speed through a stop sign is under 20mph, people choose to stop when the sun is blinding them instead of hoping for the best, ...?
Suppose drivers are perfect though. Things happen. You can't account for every kid, dog, ... running out in front of you. You don't know when there will be gravel on the road greatly increasing your braking distance. Top speeds of 15-25 are reasonable in a residential area in the sense that anything more greatly increases the chance and severity of pedestrian injury.
> have speed limits and fines set based on the idea that cops won't catch most speeders
I don't think there is any truth to this at all.
> We set a relatively low max speed
We made the mistake of mixing vehicle and pedestrian infrastructure. Our speed choices have way more to do with this than with imagined enforcement outcomes.
> because you are only going to be pulled over a fraction of the time.
Many cites engage in "zero tolerance traffic enforcement" programs. This is where they patrol a single stretch of road and stop every single person who is even 1mph above the limit.
> most are designed based on the enforcement capabilities of the time.
Most are "designed" (a.k.a rapidly created and pushed into existence) in reaction to disasters that occurred and people broadly feel could have been prevented if there was a law curtailing the behavior that led up to the accident.
We didn't make speeding laws based upon "enforcement capabilities" we made them in response to "wasteful deaths."
A lot of your post wreaks of 'citation needed' but I'll choose this one.
>Many cites engage in "zero tolerance traffic enforcement" programs. This is where they patrol a single stretch of road and stop every single person who is even 1mph above the limit.
Searching this all I find is Virginia where over 80 is an automatic reckless driving, but the highest speed limit in the state is actually 70. I've never heard of anyone being pulled over for 1mph over the limit.
"Reeks" (stinks) not "wreaks" (inflicts). And for any linguistic archaeologists of the future, yes, this is evidence that those two words are audibly indistinguishable in American English in this time period.
Yeah, they'll do it. You'll typically see a pair of cops with a speed gun. Then as you pass a curve, bridge, or other obstruction there will be six or more squad cars lined up. Speeders are picked up by radioing ahead. I've seen it in Illinois.
It's called "STEP." The NHTSA encourages states to do it. Several California cities engage in it once a month. Search a little harder before you victoriously declare "citation needed!"
Not sure if speeding is the leading cause of death or just gets the blame. The standard of driving in the US is abysmal and getting worse. US rates of accidents and deaths are much much higher than anywhere in Europe.
In my state, everyone speeds 10-15mph above the posted limits on highways. But the people that cause everyone around them to maneuver aren't the speeders, it is the people driving the posted limits and creating a bottleneck on the highway. And the number of rear end collisions caused by distracted drivers looking at screens instead of paying attention to their driving is the type of driving incident I see most often.
You don't crash into a stationary post or a pedestrian on highways.
If you crash into a stationary post, you were texting. If you crash into a pedestrian, WTF was the pedestrian doing there.
> And the number of rear end collisions caused by distracted drivers looking at screens instead of paying attention to their driving is the type of driving incident I see most often.
Talk to anyone on a motorcycle, especially in states where they're allowed to lane split. Almost everyone is on their phones. Almost all the time.
I personally think if you are at fault because you were on your phone, you should lose your license and the device for a period of time. After that timeout period, you then have to pay for a device to be installed in your car that forces you to place your device in it that prevents it from being used as anything similar to a breathalyzer ignition lockout.
People will not put down their devices with the current no consequence state we find ourselves now.
> The standard of driving in the US is abysmal and getting worse. US rates of accidents and deaths are much much higher than anywhere in Europe.
Rates per capita are much higher in the US, but the average American drives more than the average European so even if American drivers and European drives were equally good drivers we'd expect a higher death rate per capita in the US.
It is generally more useful to look at rates per vehicle per kilometer. By that the US is still higher than most of Europe, but not all. The Czech Republic at 9.8 is higher than the US at 8.3. Second in Europe is Belgium which is about 13% less than the US, followed by Slovenia at 16% less than the US. The rest of Europe ranges from about 30% below US to 64% below US.
> The standard of driving in the US is abysmal and getting worse.
This is honestly the biggest issue. So, so, so many drivers are so utterly shit at driving, and because our infrastructure is completely 100% car-centered, they HAVE to be permitted to drive unless their infractions add up to a degree where it becomes untenable to let them continue. And even then, due to the same pressures, they will probably still be driving because in many places in the States, there is simply no public transit whatsoever. They'll just then be driving without a license, and be subject to an extra fine on top of the fortune they already owe.
I work remotely but make a drive down to my employer for various reasons very regularly, usually once a month or so, and it takes me about three hours, and never, ever am I able to make that trip without seeing dozens and dozens of boneheaded, brain-dead maneuvers out of people. Traffic weaving, left-lane camping, people merging onto highways doing 40 mph, people who don't understand roundabouts, people making illegal U turns, crossing several lanes so as to not miss an exit. The state of driving in the US is an utter disgrace. So many drivers have absolutely no business behind the wheel ever again.
IIUc in a lot of cases, they can now know speeding was a factor because (ironically given this post's topic) the black boxes in the vehicles involved plus nearby surveillance tools the vehicles passed or had an accident in view of give hard evidence someone was speeding.
i.e. "We used to believe lies about how people drive, but thanks to the presence of more concrete evidence we are disproving those false assumptions."
One of the things Alphabet discovered early on in the Waymo experiment that was an eye-opener to the whole industry is that auto accidents were probably underestimate by a factor of three. When they started rolling out vehicles on the road, the best numbers available for accidents-per-mile were insurance reports and NHTSA incident records. Having vehicles with cameras on the road continuously revealed that there were 300% more accidents than those numbers suggested because humans are bumping into each other due to mis-estimates at stoplights all the time, but nobody wants their insurance rates to go up so they just don't report those incidents.
What if ubiquitous mass surveillance is good actually because it forces us to come to grips with realities we'd rather pretend are otherwise?
> IIUc in a lot of cases, they can now know speeding was a factor because (ironically given this post's topic) the black boxes in the vehicles involved plus nearby surveillance tools the vehicles passed or had an accident in view of give hard evidence someone was speeding.
Base rate matters though; for example if literally everyone is speeding because speed limits are too low then every accident will involve someone speeding.
> for example if literally everyone is speeding because speed limits are too low
is that really the case though, or is it people are so self involved that they feel they are too important to have to move that slowly? Just because everyone else is speeding does not automatically mean that faster speed is safe. It could also just be that people are assholes and they do what they want.
IIUC it's mostly that speed limits are set a little conservative relative to average road conditions.
The tongue-in-cheek way it was explained to me once was "the highway isn't 70 because you need that. It's 70 because the trucker driving sleep-deprived in a light rain who doesn't know his left tire is about to blow needs that."
We have always had technology to detect this, it is just a matter if it was on.
A few decades ago the NYS Thruway caused a bit of political controversy because they started issuing speeding tickets if you traveled between two tollbooths faster than would be possible going the speed limit.
> US rates of accidents and deaths are much much higher than anywhere in Europe.
That's actually only true per population. If you measure per miles driven the US does better then Europe (although Europe is large, and numbers vary in different countries).
The US is 7.3 if you use the same dataset as France. The wiki puts in 8.3 because they have updated data for the US, but not for France.
There are also some differences in data methodology US vs European countries, and when checked the rates from a different source (it was a while ago, I'll have to try to dig it up) the US came out better by comparison.
I think the difference had to do with what counted as a KM traveled.
Traffic accidents and deaths are rising because of phones. I think we actually "won" the war on drunk driving, only to have a new more vicious war set upon us.
Collision energy and thus damage increases with the square of speed (or ~speed^4 for head-on) so there is still an interest in controlling speed.
Most drivers (especially those over 35yo) will auto-regulate their speed to the optimal (safety vs throughput) for the road design. The problem is the ones who don't. Speed limits are set lower than this optimal speed, partly to make it easier to stop and charge drivers that can't auto-regulate well. Most of the time you will be ignored for going 5-10mph over. If you are over that, it is seen as deliberate defiance and "you are asking to be pulled over".
Automatic enforcement turns this de facto road law on it's head however.
During the 1970's oil crisis, highway speeds were capped at 55 mph nationwide. It took several decades for this to reverse and only after safety studies showed that differential speeds (those obeying and those going the optimal natural speed for the road) is a significant contributing factor in crashes. Unfortunately, speeds limits are still often below optimal because of an assumption that every driver will always go at least 5mph over the limit (which is incorrect).
On 70 mph interstates away from urban/commuter traffic (where time pressures often affect driving), It's not unusual to see some cars going 5mph below the limit. That is a sign that these Interstate segments have the optimal natural speed.
Every other nation has cell phones so I fail to see how the cell phone argument holds water.
Also the safety of speed for a given environment should include pedestrians. Many advocates for urban areas rightfully push for 25 mph limits for exactly that reason. If you want to successfully convert in town urban roads that are wide and have high speeds to 25mph there are two good options: speed calming measures or speed cameras.
I live in NZ and they introduced laws here where you can be fined and potentially lose your license for using your phone while driving citing it as being dangerous.
It most certainly is not. Plus, I'd imagine this is more for accidents "in town" rather than on straight interstate highways where these cameras are normally set up. Take out alcohol and poor conditions and it's basically a non-issue.
Speeding is dangerous, but almost all traffic engineers say that speed limits don't always match what the safe driving speed is.
I think you are already doing subconciously what i am talking about; you are thinking of speeding, but I doubt you are thinking of someone driving 50 mph in a 45mph zone. That is not the type of speeding that kills, but would be the type that could be caught with perfect enforcement.
> but I doubt you are thinking of someone driving 50 mph in a 45mph zone. That is not the type of speeding that kills
I know you're pulling this up as an example of a small infringement, but there are studies that quantify the fatality rate as a function of velocity. The numbers you picked are right in the steepest part of the increase. Using equation 2.3 from [0] (with conversions from mph to kph), there's a 64% chance of fatality at 45mph, but a 83% chance of fatality at 50mph.
US traffic engineers can't be trusted on anything about safety. If they designed roads to make speeding as easy as possible and to kill as many pedestrians as possible, it would look no different from what they do today.
Speeding/speeds would be reduced if they simply designed roads to be harder to drive above the speed limit on, like being narrower and less straight. They don't do this.
The population is also increasing. If you're not using deaths per mile driven, and instead just the raw absolute number of deaths, your viewpoint is meaningless and just adding FUD into something that should be an extremely easily data-driven topic.
I am not making a blanket statement that all speed limits are too low, just that they are set based on the implicit assumption that enforcement rates are going to be low and that police are going to be using their judgement to determine if someone is driving at an unsafe speed.
They have speed cameras all over Europe too, but the speed limit is often 130 km/h (about 80 mph). Most of the population of the US lives in states where the speed limit is 70 mph or lower.
Obviously this is an oversimplification, Switzerland and Spain are 120 km/h (75 mph), Germany often has no upper limit, a few places are 140 or higher. But in general it seems like most of Europe sets the limit at the speed Americans actually drive.
And int he uk the highest speed limit is 70, and in busy areas it’s usually 60 or 50 on highways from average speed camera enforcement of variable speed limits.
In towns it’s 30 and there’s plenty of cameras, for speed, red lights, bus lanes etc.
I know from experience that raising the speed will immediately raise the speed speedsters are willing to go. When the highway in my country went from 100 to 130km/h, people who drove 120 then started to drive 150.
The UK has the best system for speeding prevention I've seen.
The cameras are established to clock you at position X1 at time Y1. Then the next cameras a handful or more miles down the road clock you at position X2 at time Y2. You get a ticket if (X2 - X1) / (Y2 - Y1) > Limit + e.
You can speed all you'd like between those cameras, but unless you're exiting before the next set, you'll have to pull over and wait the amount of time necessary to bring you back to the speed limit for that area, achieving zero reduction in total trip time.
This would be an improvement for sure. The locals in my town are all familiar with the highway speed cameras now, so they just slam on their brakes before the camera and speed up again after. The is combined with the fact that they put these cameras right at a speed limit change from 65 down to 55. Driving that section of the highway is a cluster fuck.
This also doesn't really touch on the perverse incentives when implementing automated fines. Want to make a stop light intersection safer? Increase the yellow light time. It's been proven to work, over and over and over again. Sometimes we see cities shorten yellow lights, increasing accident risk in an effort to get more revenue.
We know we can better control driver speed through road design. That's been effectively demonstrated through studies. Yet our "solution" to speeding is to make the roads as straight and wide and clear as possible and then give you a fine for using them as they have clearly been designed.
I disagree strongly with your example, which also ruins your point for me. I think you should find a different example than one based in motornormativity, saying some laws are fine to break as long as it's behind a wheel.
I was not saying there is anything special about being behind the wheel that makes it ok to break a law. I used that example because it fits with the 'low enforcement rate but a high penalty to make up for the low enforcement rate' combo.
How about an example like playing poker for money with friends? Illegal in most places where gambling is illegal, but people do it all the time. The laws might make sense if we think casinos are bad for society and want to prevent them, but think occasional gambling amongst friends is fine.
The current laws don't carve out home poker games because there was never a need to; there was no way to enforce the law against small friend groups gambling. If there suddenly became a way, we would need to re-write the laws to permit home games.
Yes, I like those examples better. Speeding and the danger cars impress on society is something many of us want to be handled stricter.
One other example for me could be something like drinking alcohol in a public place. It's never enforced if people are just enjoying a beer quietly during a picnic and bother no one. However if sound equipment mounted in trees could detect the opening of a can and write a ticket, I would feel the law obviously would need to be amended.
If we start pervasive automated enforcement of speed limits everywhere, it is most likely to hit poorer Americans as a regressive tax.
We haven't redesigned our cities to be non-car centric, with good public transportation and street design that favors lower speeds. But we've got a bunch of people running around wanting to severely punish anyone breaking the speed limits (because "fuck cars" means holding individual people responsible for being born in a car-centric society). The result will be that one morning they'll wake up and have to deal with how much they've punitively hurt the working poor in this country. I guess that'll be okay though because that "in this house" rainbow flag in their window means that they care.
The poorest often don't own a car. Yet another way a car-centric society punishes them, as you often need a car to do normal functions. I don't get why car-proponents often push other groups in front of them to argue their case. Also see it all the time with parking. "You can't remove parking, think of HC parking!", "We will actually double the amount of HC parking and make the area more accessible when we remove other on-street parking", "oh".
But not breaking the law when driving is something people are in full control of themselves. I don't buy the premise that it's a regressive tax. Yes, some laws disproportionately hit certain demographics, but not speeding is not one of those.
> I guess that'll be okay though because that "in this house" rainbow flag in their window means that they care
I'm not sure what you mean by that? Are you conflating lgbt stuff into a comment about cars and technological advancements in enforcement, or am I misunderstanding what you mean?
The poorest may not, but the working poor are likely to be highly dependent on some cheap, old vehicle.
> Yes, some laws disproportionately hit certain demographics, but not speeding is not one of those.
WFH software developers are probably going to be hit a lot less than someone who needs to drive from where the cheap rents are to the job site every day.
And that was a comment on performative liberalism.
And the "if the penalty for a crime is a fine, then that law only exists for the lower class" aphorism applies.
> And the "if the penalty for a crime is a fine, then that law only exists for the lower class" aphorism applies.
This is the kind of thing that's only repeated by slumming upper-class children, the same ones who live in Brooklyn, have leftist podcasts, and think it's actively good when you see someone smoking crack on the subway because it's "cool".
Actual working class people don't like it when other working class people speed near them or commit crimes!
(It's also a very American statement, because in other countries the upper class is not the people with the most money, it's the people with the most tradition and social status. Or they own a lot of land but are cash poor.)
> Actual working class people don't like it when other working class people speed near them
Survey 100 working class Americans and ask if they think another working class American should receive a ticket for driving 65 in a 55 on an Interstate.
I’d be shocked if even 5% of them wanted that outcome.
50 in a 25? Sure. 100 in a 55? Sure. But I doubt they want perfect enforcement, which is the topic being discussed here.
I have no problem with strict enforcement of current speed limits in residential areas. But speed limits on controlled access highways in many states are set ridiculously low. When government officials try to claim that a 65mph limit on a flat, straight freeway is necessary for "safety" it's obvious that they're being disingenuous and this is just a revenue grab. It breeds contempt for the law among the driving public and is ultimately counterproductive.
The emissions and efficiency difference between 55, 60, 65, and 70mph are significant and cannot be understated. It makes such a real difference for air quality that TEXAS (the state that hates regulation and built the monstrosity called the Katy freeway) has a reduced speed limit in some metro areas for air quality reasons.
In fact, the reason most national highways have a speedlimit of 50mph, even out in the boonies in Kansas where everything is flat and straight, is because of the fuel crisis of the 70s.
When I was a child, I was curious why highways were 50mph but the interstates had a speedlimit of 65-70mph, so I went and found out instead of assuming it was a disingenous revenue grab.
Most interstates were generally built after the fuel crisis, and they modified the national speed limit in 1988, setting the speed to 65mph, again for efficiency reasons. It was repealed in 1995. Perhaps 65mph is what was considered safe for the road and vehicular technology at the time, and no one has had the political or municipal capital to do a new study ever since.
You want that speed limit changed, contact your reps, I guess.
You typically don’t want different limits for different vehicles on the same highway. Although where I live trucks have a lower limit than passenger vehicles.
A large enough change in scale manifests as a change in kind.
As a topical example, SpaceX is trying to reduce launch costs by 20x with Starship, which just had its 4th test flight this morning. Some don't see the point: there's not nearly enough demand to launch thousands of tons into orbit per year. But 20x is a lot cheaper, so they're banking on induced demand expanding the kinds of projects that send things to space.
They're also planning to go to Mars, and Starship is the smallest vehicle that could enable that on the scale desired.
It's certainly a gamble that there will be a million people willing to spend $200k to do this, which… well, I think it's not entirely impossible, as the idea was something I liked until Musk's own personality put me off the idea of being stuck on a planet with only his sycophants for company.
Which is a bit of a shame, but still, I'd give it 50-50 odds of being a product-market fit just for that.
We are so incredibly far from being able to build a sustainable colony on Mars, especially at a realistic cost, that it makes no sense as a product goal. It is a fun thought experiment and an inspiring goal for many though, which I think is the real motivation for focusing on it so much.
Elon is undoubtedly great at getting folks to commit money and talent to his companies, and talking about plausible-ish things like becoming a multiplanetary species is one way he accomplishes that.
> We are so incredibly far from being able to build a sustainable colony on Mars, especially at a realistic cost, that it makes no sense as a product goal.
"Dying on Mars, just not on impact" is Musk's final bucket list item. Almost everything else he does is to enable that vision, either directly by creating the tech, or indirectly because he knows this is expensive.
He may well fail, nobody's ever done this and we don't know how many surprises there will be.
But the ship working well enough for $200k tickets is plausible.
(The idea that banks will give people loans for that, not so much: without multi-planetary trade, nothing that happens on Mars can repay a debt on Earth, and I don't see Mars as having any special economic benefits to make such trade worthwhile).
Wikipedia splits induced demand into "latent demand" and "generated demand". I think Elon has no trouble with the idea of latent demand and that by lowering the costs of space travel more will do it. The issue is generated demand, it is a bit irrational to think that a person with no desire for space travel in the first place will say "oh look, space travel is cheap, let's make a satellite". The general story is startups find market fit or they die. You have to find the customers, it is not like you make a product and everyone changes their desires to conform.
> it is a bit irrational to think that a person with no desire for space travel in the first place will say "oh look, space travel is cheap, let's make a satellite".
They won't make a satellite but they will demand things which middlemen can solve with a satellite.
> You have to find the customers, it is not like you make a product and everyone changes their desires to conform.
Once smartphones were invented, people found within themselves the desire for a smartphone.
So-called "induced demand" is just a dumbing down of the more fundamental notion of supply and demand, for people who aren't comfortable thinking about math, calculus, dynamic equilibria, etc. If you read the wikipedia article on it, you'll see they constantly describe it in terms of supply and demand. The term was originally "defined" in 1999 in a paper that was not written by economists. It's not an economics term.
in terms of transportation planning, a better way to think about it is, "misery distributes itself throughout the system".
The Stasi in Cold War East Germany reportedly had 1 informant for every 6.5 people, or 15% of the population informing on their neighbors. That's the kind of scale that is needed for total analogue surveillance.
And then the CCP looked at what the CCCP did, thought "that's cute" and optimised it until they'd invented the social credit score. It turns out digital is the way to go for scale.
I get where you're coming from, but I think it's important to keep in mind that there is no centralized score for Chinese citizens, and that such claims are often sensationalized. [1] However, I'd agree that China is a good example of high degrees of surveillance.
If the west had a creditscore, mine would be very very low. I am banned on almost every social medium. C, FB, insta, tiktok, reddit, google and more. Its pretty tough sometimes to survive on the internet without having access to all. (Although most still have read access)
> I love how every American is so ready to jump on the China hate train for their social credit score thing when it's literally the same goddamned thing as a credit score in America, with like, some added shit about public shaming
The “added shit about public shaming” is not a trivial issue, and also Americans aren't particularly fond of actual credit scores or the broader credit reporting system they are part of, either.
Like, there is nothing hypocritical about viewing extra negatively another society that has taken a disliked element of your own and made it worse.
> The “added shit about public shaming” is not a trivial issue
I think it could be considered trivial given how much of your life can be made an utter hell by a bad credit score. Things like not being able to finance a house when you already spend more per month on rent than a mortgage, being forced into predatory financial products because you lack the ability to get regular ones, refusal for companies to hire you for work based on your credit score, your credit history just being wrong and being saddled with the task of probably hundreds of hours of work and god knows how much money to fix it because none of the providers give a shit about helping you, the risks with identity theft, on and on and on.
As someone who has had to unfuck my credit due to idiocy in financial institutions that was completely, 100% not my fault and yet fell solely on my shoulders to handle, I assure you it is a special circle of bureaucratic hell that would easily stand toe-to-toe with the worst any governments have to offer.
Is it GOOD that it has mechanisms for that? No. But again, I emphasize: we add that ourselves to it all the same. And yes it's definitely worse when it's inscribed in the law's text, but I wouldn't say it's that different either.
> Like, there is nothing hypocritical about viewing extra negatively another society that has taken a disliked element of your own and made it worse.
Oh sure, 100%, but that presupposes that the commenter in question thinks credit reports are bad. And yeah, a fair number of Americans hate them, but like with a lot of things Americans hate, they'll also say shit like "well that's just how it is." But apparently such status-quo allyship doesn't cross into China.
The landlord wants to be paid every month. A credit score's entire reason for existence is to attempt to quantify that. It would be strange if a landlord didn't look at that.
My understanding of the Chinese credit score system is that, unlike the US credit model, it includes your personal social media posts.
Thus the negative press in the US was specifically about that, with fear that if you ever, say, criticize the wrong person or expressed an unpopular opinion you'd end up paying a premium on your loan or even be unable to get a mortgage.
Since there's a fairly high opacity to the US credit scores I wouldn't be surprised to find these things added to the US credit score too as an opt-in mechanism to save money similar to how we can now choose to get a key fob to prove to our insurance companies that we drive within the speed limit.
If being anti-government in the US was something you could get arrested for and therefore stop paying your debts because of, I think it'd get added to credit scores pretty quickly.
> So why does almost every US landlord use credit scores to screen renters?
Landlords are part of one of the bourgeois (petit ot haut) classes, elite minorities. Their interests are not those of the median American, and are in many ways opposed to them.
Hardly. It's more that in a large business, you know that a percentage of people will trash the apartment, requiring expensive repairs, so as a company you reduce risk.
And as a small landlord, renting a second house, hoping to pay for your retirement in old age, or maybe a good school for your kids, you're even more cautious.
The alternative is a year's rent in deposit, because first and last barely covers a damaged carpet, let alone a trashed place.
And that's just the damage side of things.
One of the landlords I spoke to, said that while he understood why renter protections had become so strong, it took forever to kick out a tenant not paying rent. So naturally, he was scared of renting to anyone with money troubles before.
You may disagree with these reasons, but people aren't reducing the market they can rent to for no reason.
Times were easier when most people lived in smaller towns. You knew who you rented to, and didn't need a credit bureau to vouch.
Every time this subject comes up all we hear about is how risky it is for the landlord. Like... no shit? It's an investment. Risk is part of investments. Sometimes investments don't pay out, and sometimes you lose money.
If you want to make money in a risk-averse manner, might I suggest a job instead of an investment property? You know, like the people who's money you want to take are required to prove to you they have, so you can take a nice chunk of it so they can not freeze to death? One of those. They're all over the place, according to the landlords.
> One of the landlords I spoke to, said that while he understood why renter protections had become so strong, it took forever to kick out a tenant not paying rent.
Did he happen to mention why the tenant stopped paying? Because that's probably pretty relevant to why renter protections were stopping him from throwing him out onto the street. Like, I'm sorry it's bit of a bureaucratic fuckabout to KICK SOMEONE OUT OF THEIR HOME but you know, the landlord in this scenario has the economic backing to, in some way, own an extra residence that they don't need, and the tenant they're trying to evict (probably) doesn't. So on the whole I'm okay with renter protections making that hard. One of these people is acutely more vulnerable to houselessness, and it isn't the dude with 2+ houses.
Again, if this is a problem, maybe said landlord should get a job.
Your entire argument is basically "how dare someone have something I don't" and "people shouldn't seek to mitigate risk".
This won't get far with me, and seems to me to be a pointless response.
Are you seriously of the thought that owning more than one home is wrong? And renting it to someone that cannot afford to buy a home is wrong? If so, why?
Do you get mad if that person just leaves the money in the bank, and the second home isn't built?
Are you mad people may make more than you? Do you believe everyone should just be given all the same stuff?
You're quite abusive, but beyond that, you're not really responding in kind.
The post you originally responded to, simply explained the risks involved in renting, and why a credit check is often used to reduce that risk.
As a response you went on a rant about, essentially, "screw landlords" inline with "because they have what I don't". This is effectively what you said, and you've doubled down here.
No matter what, you're blaming the wrong people. If you have an issue with how certain aspects of our free economy works, I'll listen. But blaming landlords is akin to blaming car dealerships because a car is expensive. It's finger pointing without cause.
A person with no credit or a low credit score is still allowed to buy train tickets and leave their hometown. A person with high credit score is not punished in any way for interacting with a person with a low credit score. Credit scores in the United States do not incentivize families cutting off contact with members who do not support the ruling party. To say that "they are essentially the same" is to run cover for the most objectionable parts because you are mad that creditors want a way to determine if someone is going to cut and run with their money.
The government is allowed to 'unbank' you, or to at least push banks to 'voluntarily' 'unbank' you. Having your bank accounts closed and credit cards all canceled summarily is going to hurt your credit score, which in turn is going to make renting a place to live very difficult.
Could you provide an example of the government pushing for someone to be unbanked? Preferably someone not guilty of some kind of finance crime (or accused and on the run).
i started struggling with this years ago with the scale up of face recognition software.
nobody thought there was a problem when you stuck up a wanted posted and asked a community 'do you know who this is'? but if you stick that poster into a computer and ask, all of a sudden people complain that it's a privacy issue.
i really struggle to see how they're different and the only thing i've been able to some up with is that people feel the only counterweight to abuses and biases of policing is to build in random inefficiencies
A wanted poster might have some people watching faces more closely, but they aren't compiling a history of every face they saw and when and where they saw it, and sending that in to law enforcement where it can be combined with other histories and used to generate suspect lists based on coincidences.
Right, that's just saying "we prefer built-in random inefficiencies" with extra steps. The heart of investigation is pulling coincidences into an actionable pattern (which is different from trial and conviction, which relies on far more than coincidences).
Given how much crime currently goes uninvestigated because the backlog is so high, is automating some of the coincidence-sniffing a bad thing?
See my other comment in this thread, but I’d venture to say yes. Changing the efficiency of enforcement naturally will throw something else in the economy out of balance, particularly if the money spent to increase confidence-sniffing is not being well dispersed into the local economy.
If in the past you’d have to hire more local policemen, they’d need more police vans made, they’d need more uniforms made, more wear on police vans means more work for the mechanics, etc etc etc, now you just pay Protector Co. once for your new surveillance software. Now you haven’t dissuaded people from crime with good plentiful local jobs (as a gross oversimplification, but hopefully you can see this would still apply to a more realistically complex economy)
I think it really depends on the reason why you were going around putting up wanted posters and asking people if they’d seen somebody. If it was a dangerous criminal, sure. An ex? Creepy. In general, I’d have some probing questions before being forthcoming, I like to think. Picture of my friend? Sure Mr. Private investigator, tell me what you want and give me your number, and I’ll let him know somebody wants to talk to him…
If there was, like, a club devoted to organizing the sort of informal observations of who was where and trying to track everybody the old fashioned way, I’d think everyone involved was a real creep there, too. Although, of course, this would be a bit impractical.
And the paparazzi weren’t some beloved people, and they mostly targeted public figures!
There’s something to be said for the inefficiency I guess. But, I think it is also to a large extent a proxy for the idea that normal people only went on the hunt for somebody for a good reason.
1. Wanted posters were only hung up based on human witness reports and for a very limited number of suspects. With face recognition, you can hunt automatically for hundreds who happened to be around a specific place at the wrong time.
2. Reach, and therefore likelihood of false-positive face matches.
3. Investigators wouldn’t blindly believe a random community member reporting a match, they would check if the reported suspect really matches the description and the circumstances. With face recognition and AI, people tend to just assume that the computer is correct.
I think you’re absolutely correct, inefficiency is a strong counterweight, and it’s one that’s (consciously or subconsciously) built into the laws and punishments.
When you look at a punishment which is set up as a “deterrent” or you hear about someone “throwing the book at you” it’s because of all the perceived inefficiency. They caught “you” this time, and they’re accounting for all the times “you got away with it” (statistically).
If you go from 10% efficiency to 100% efficiency without changing the punishment, observant people will, I believe correctly, take issue with the fact the punishment has now become “10x more drastic” when taken as a whole society.
There is also something about this inefficiency that makes us more free. Everyone bends the rules to some extent in an area they feel is worth the risk. Maybe you changed an outlet without consulting a licensed electrician / inspector.
To that end, the inefficiencies are built into our economies. Would people be safer with every electrical change being measured? Surely. Could the economy support every electrical change being measured? As in, can the average American even afford to pay an electrician every time they want to change a fixture? I think the answer is realistically no. If everyone has enough free cash they don’t mind spending it on an electrician, 100% efficiency and compliance might be reasonable and good.
You’ll see this phenomenon while traveling, there are things like traffic violations, sketchy wiring, eyesores, etc that you’d say “that would never fly in $HOME_COUNTRY” and it’s commonplace there. They may even still be illegal there. But the standards of enforcement change to meet what are in principle the ideals of the people, but in practice what’s possible for the economies to support. You might go back in 10 years and find their economy is stronger, the enforcement has increased, but people are not unhappy with the change and life goes on. The people who did the sketchy wiring have probably had time and an influx of cash from the stronger economy to pursue better training, and are now the ones doing good to-code work.
The way technology throws this out of balance is to give enforcement the ability to expand without incurring the traditional economic penalties for doing so. Those economic penalties would’ve grown the economy in other areas. If you follow the line of thinking, it leads to a significant increase in the wealth gap. Of course, there’s enough evidence to support that this is exactly what’s been unfolding. My thought is, if this natural economic balancer is reduced, we should seek to add another.
I call this phenomenon One Fed Per Child. Now we can have a synthetic government agent monitor every man, woman and child on the planet. If we don't have that already, we soon will...
as usual, a small group of effective people with strong leadership have already acted on this -- in the opposite direction you are suggesting.. Palantir and others have built, monetized and promoted exactly the opposite, and thousands of schlubs in the ad business went along with it.. the USA has changed
Looking past the cost, it also used to be a huge hassle. If I wanted to know what you were doing, I'd have to hire 6 guys sure, but I'd also need to manage them. Plan out their shifts, handle payroll, and their internal disputes. The practical reality of surveillance meant it HAD to be a conspiracy. The risk of someone talking was huge.
Now it's easily hidden. Somebody can monitor you just by accessing information systems without the people collecting the data even knowing. You can now do the surveillance alone, no pesky accomplices needed.
A partner showed me their CRM tool, it had an AI component that created a profile of each of their contacts. It was pretty complete and clearly had info from LinkedIn and other sources.
The personality summary was concerning as it was both deeply accurate in some respects and deeply inaccurate in others. Most concerning, it said I was "risk adverse" and "struggles to make decisions with incomplete data".
With 35 years at startups and independent contracting, risk tolerance and ability to make decisions with incomplete data are kind of in my wheelhouse.
Worse, if this profile was being shown to potential employers, it could (would?) be a deal breaker. It's kind of like being judged by your MBTI results.
Similar with social media advertising profiles. I've seen what FB and Twitter thought of me, and it included interests in various spectator sports, which were wrong both as a general statement about my personality, and specifically those sports don't even have any societal significance outside the USA.
Also several languages that I don't speak.
And they showed me ads for both dick pills and breast surgery; and others for a lawyer who specialised in renouncing a citizenship I've never had (for tax purposes) when moving to a country that I left; and also an announcement by the government of a country I don't live in about a ban to a specific breed of dog I've never heard of, when I don't own any dog anyway and never have.
And people complain about LLMs making things up :P
I’m no expert in tort law but that really sounds like it could be libel. Afaik proving reckless disregard for the truth is one of the ways you can build a case.
In a decision making process, if many parties are involved, it is in interest of all parties to not turn on each other in case of wrong decisions. Just let it slide.
It's impossible to detect whether some statement in isolation is a hallucination or not, with LLMs.
It's better for it to aggregate the information and then provide the resources to be able to verify whether any deduction is well supported or not.
I guess with a few more iterations you could have another agent verify whether a deduction is well justified, but that will also have some significant percentage of errors too.
IANAL, but I would think that would open up the software maker and users of it potentially to libel lawsuits by unscientifically speculating about a person's qualities with little or no proof and no ability to prove their claims.
What we need is (a) AI literacy (education), and (b) Ai-generated content being marked as such. Then no one would take such a personality summary at face value.
IMHO an opt-out system is never going to work for this.
Story time: while I still worked at Facebook, there was a company wide project for data attribution to comply with opting out of personalization (I believe to comply with an EU directive but don't quote me on that). The idea was to identify the source of any data by esentially tagging it on a granular level. This affected all the offline data procesing and ML processes but also code (online and offline) where various tools and systems were being built to analyze sites of data usage to detect use of personalized data and respect opt outs where applicable.
I made two predictions at the early stages of this:
1. The tools and systems would tell us "all data is used for everything" and
2. Creating new non-personalized data pipelines and add things to them would be far easier and faster than trying to remove personalzied data from existing pieplines. Then, things like ad performance become an optimizatino problem with a clear benchmark (eg new unpersonalized ad serving pipeline vs the old personalized pipeline).
A lot of work did, I believe, basically confirm (1). Untangling that seems, at least to me, to be a Sisyphean task. I don't know where this project ended up since I left while it's ongoing but I stand by (2).
My point is that (IMHO) opt-out just doesn't work for this kind of thing. If we really care about data privacy and authorized use of data at some point we will need to take the oposite approach and enumerate what data we're allowed to use.
When I'm met with the response/resistance of "if you care so much then just OPT-OUT!" my usual retort is: "if it weren't just about money, it'd be OPT-IN."
> The tools and systems would tell us "all data is used for everything"
Reminds me of the tendency in program analysis to just spit out top (e.g. all possible values) because the state space overwhelms automated reasoning, and the only way back is annotating/rewriting code to help the analyzer forward.
But, as someone who doesn't think/deal with data much, this is a surprise to me. It makes sense though. Does this mean our data is forever tainted, as were?
Since you've been proximate to this work: do you think there's any hope in flipping the script such that possessing/processing this data is a liability rather than an asset? That's one of the few ways I can see to align incentives between highly monied-interests and the targets of data collection. (I'm doubt this will happen in the US in my lifetime, barring a major, 9/11-level event where abuse of this data is directly tied to the catastrophe.)
Processing data is already a liability. The compute power isn't free. The storage isn't free. The engineering time isn't free. It's just that it produces more value than what it costs or people wouldn't do it.
I believe this project was in response to the EU's Digital Services Act ("DSA"). Now IANAL but it always struck me as ambiguous as to what constitutes "personalization". Like, can your data be used to train an ML system? What if identity is scrubbed from that data? What if it's aggregated in some way so there's no individual user activity at all?
It also raises questions about every aspect of product behavior. Let's say you see a video post on your news feed. You get shown a snippet of the comments. Usually this is from friends but maybe it's just a comment that we thought might interest you. Is that personalization? What about a shared link where a snippet is shown from the article?
Also, the DSA seems to apply to on-site contextual personalization. What about off-site? Is that covered? Is there a separate law for that? Can I use derived demographics from a display ad pixel but not what pages you've liked and what groups you participate in on site?
Can I use your friends' activity to customize your experience?
The list goes on.
I'm a fan of clear legislation. If the goal is, for example, to allow opt out of personalized ads based on contextual on-site behaviour, we should enumerate what applications (eg feed ads) are covered and what information you're allowed to use if someone opts out.
I don't love this. Informed consent is a lie and a loophole you can drive a container ship through. Anything less than right to refuse where services aren't allowed to deny you service until you accept is worthless. Also AI isn't special, I don't want to be profiled by humans or non-AI based systems based on my public data either. And for that matter public data isn't special either -- I don't want to be profiled via my private data sold though backroom deals between companies more than I care about my public data. At least I can can curate the latter.
The problem is that if you don't narrowly target AI you bump into "well this is what adtech does" and getting legislation that hurts the profits of one of the US's golden calfs is a nonstarter.
I wish there were a way to verify, when I encounter a camera that is pointed at a public place, that it's not feeding into some kind if nation wide person tracking system maintained by whatever security company, but is instead going to local storage with a retention period of < 1wk.
I have a camera that can see the street which meets these requirements, and would definitely go through extra steps to inform passers-by that I've taken steps to keep data about them out of the cloud. I just don't know what those steps ought to be.
I think you’re missing the point, the issue is important because they have no reason to act against themselves, but a healthy system would have someone opposing them, and that’s not happening at the moment.
I don’t think anyone’s disagreeing with that. My interpretation of your initial comment was that you were saying it’s not an important issue because it can’t be effectively policed. I don’t think that’s what you meant, but that’s what I got out of your saying no in response to the assertion that it’s important.
>> The people who nominally you want to be enforcing this "right" are also some of the people who most want to AI profile you.
If your goal is specifically to have someone enforce a rule against themselves, that's not an important issue, because it won't work.
If you change the statement of your goal so that you're not requiring the enforcement power to be vested in the target of the rule, then the issue might become more important.
This is focusing on the wrong side. Better than the right, which is pretty unenforceable at individual scale, why not focus on prohibiting companies/institutions/goverment from AI profiling?
The problem is that we(as humans) label the output of these algorithms to give them meaning.
For example if you build a resume grading AI based off historic data(as some companies have done) it's quickly realized that what's being outputted by the algorithm is typically not the same as what people label it. In this case the output is "how likely would this candidate been to have been hired using previous methods", but it's being used to try and answer "how good of a candidate is this".
IMO it's these discrepancies between what these algorithms are doing(which in more complex cases we can't know) and what we label the output that causes these issues. If we acknowledge that historic data can't be used to accurately predict future outcomes(especially a subset of historic data), we wouldn't even try to do things like profile candidates.
Self-response: the article does consider this (section 6), argues that the exceptions to restrictions on the use of publicly available data in GDPR are exactly in places where it makes sense to prevent AI usage, and further argues it makes sense to consider AI profiling a more severe breach because of the higher potential for harm.
I hope this right gets applied to credit scoring agencies as well, which don't publish the methodology in the calculation of credit scores. God knows what the exact mechanics of these calculations are (beyond the well-known but very hand-wavy broad strokes), and they impact people in serious ways.
While I agree with you that living within your means is best, it definitely won’t help build your credit score. From my experience, if you don’t use a credit card, you won’t have a good score. If you use it and pay it off quickly, you’ll see barely any positive score gains. Then, I used a service to build my score, and it worked, but slowly over the months. However, what really increased my score substantially was actually being in debt. So, I kept the debt and paid the monthly amount on it. Surprisingly, even missing a payment still increased my score. The conclusion: they want you to be in perpetual debt aka debt slave to have good boy points.
> The conclusion: they want you to be in perpetual debt aka debt slave to have good boy points.
More data is needed before thinking you can determine the formula.
More importantly, it is trivial to understand the reasoning behind assuming a higher probability of someone repaying debt if they have a history of successfully repaying debts.
As long as you pay it off close to the due-date, your report will show up as having a non-zero daily balance. I have never paid a credit card in any way other than "in full" and "before the due date" and have a score of around 800.
> I have never paid a credit card in any way other than "in full" and "before the due date" and have a score of around 800.
There are a lot of very specific assumptions in there about the mechanism.
How do you know which dates' balances are relevant to the calculation? If your credit score is 800, then you probably don't have a "credit utilization" of zero, as it's widely believed that the optimal % is more than zero (not "too low" but also not "too high", whatever that means).
Basically the concept is that if you're already borrowing as much money as people are willing to lend you, those people probably have a good reason to not want to lend you more.
Also, as a bonus, the utilization component doesn't have history. If you're about to take out a loan, you can just borrow/pay back as much debt as you want the previous month for an ideal utilization.
Good resource, here's a bit about how you are likely to have a non-zero utilization even if paying your card off in full each month (linked from that article):
> Now things get a little trickier. Paying your balances in full each month isn't the same as maintaining 0% utilization. Here's why.
> Credit scoring systems calculate utilization using balance information that card issuers report monthly to the national credit bureaus (Experian, TransUnion and Equifax). Each issuer reports balance information on its own schedule, and many report to different bureaus on different days of the month. Each credit bureau also has its own timetable for revising your credit report once it has received a card issuer's update.
> For these reasons, if you use your credit cards at all, your utilization can vary from day to day at any one credit bureau—and it will differ from one credit bureau to another, even though all of their records are accurate.
> Here's a simple example:
> Let's say you use a credit card with a $5,000 credit limit and zero balance to make a $500 purchase on the 10th of the month. You then pay that balance in full on the 20th, before the charge even appears on your statement. If the card issuer reports your balance information to Experian on the 15th, then credit scores based on Experian data will reflect 10% utilization for that card on that month. Meanwhile, another credit bureau that gets updated on, say, the 25th will reflect 0% utilization for that card.
> Factor in multiple cards and balances, and you can see that your utilization on any given day is something of a moving target, and so are credit scores based on it. (The normal differences between credit scores based on data at different credit bureaus is one reason many lenders use more than one credit score when processing loan or credit applications.)
> Put another way, the only way to be sure you have 0% utilization all the time is to refrain from using your credit cards at all...
I have over an 800 score and never paid before the due date. They tell you the balance due ("Last statement Balance") and the date it is due on. Every card will let you schedule the payment for the due date.
They also won't knock you if you are a few days late. I have been late a handful of times before and never took a hit. They will also reimburse the late fee if you call, but obviously they won't do this often.
The idea that an irresponsible third party who has no obligation to deal with you can control so much of your life is dystopian. The fact that you've been very lucky and have never met or even read about someone who wasn't lucky is awesome for you, but it clearly doesn't erase the complications with the systems we currently have.
Yes, but living within your means does absolutely nothing to shed light on the black box that is credit scoring. It's an irrelevant comment.
If you're trying to say that you should avoid credit altogether, that's a terrible idea... Unless you plan on not getting a mortgage and paying for your home in cash. In which case your personal financial situation might not be representative of the average / median Joe.
If you build a robust budget and spend within that, you will have an 800 score. Do that. Do it intentionally.
Credit agencies evaluate risk, so even if you can stomach that $1200/mo car payment on your $50k/yr job. You are gonna take a hit for making a stupid financial decision, because even if you make those payments, you are almost certainly teetering on the edge to do it. (never mind that your score was probably already bad given the thought process to take on that loan).
Banks don't want to loan to people who are lucky and always somehow pull it out. They want to loan to people who are smart and reliable. Credit agencies try to filter for that.
Credit scores aren't a black box. The components are in the credit report and are pretty straightforward.
Also, it's not actually true that everyone uses credit scores. More recently companies use custom risk models because they see this as a competitive advantage. (Especially the afterpay companies like Klarna don't use them.)
I have found that living within my means resulted in no credit score at all, which was treated as the worst possible credit score, when I finally started to investigate the possibility of buying a house. 45 years old at the time, $120k income, same job since '99, no debt at all, cars all paid cash etc, Didn't owe anyone a dollar, not late on any bills for decades, solid predictable longstanding income, only about 100k in the bank though not counting the 401k, ... no credit. Because I never even got a credit card let alone used one. All cash/debit whole life.
So, F this line. It's only true if it also includes "...and intentionally aquire and actually use a couple of credit cards that you don't want and don't need, for no other reason than to go through the motions." And even then it still doesn't result in an exactly great credit score if you always pay in full and never carry a balance. Even after years. 10 so far for me since the above. It's ok, but not great.
Unfortunately, it's dumb to not use a credit card nowadays. Every business marks up the cost of goods to cover CC fees, so you are just paying extra every time you pay cash (unless they offer a discount, some do).
On the other side, you get benefits and money back for using your credit card. So people are in a situation where they really should use a card for everything. It also makes it easier to get good credit as long as your treat it like cash.
Well, making minimum payments has a negative impact because then you're carrying a debt which eats into your debt vs ability to borrow ratio which does have a big impact.
Paying off cards in full each month is the absolute best thing to do for your credit score (and saving money by not paying interest).
> making minimum payments has a negative impact because then you're carrying a debt
I think it would depend on your credit utilization %. If your credit utilization is too low, it may hurt your score. Of course if your credit utilization % is too high then it's an (even worse) issue. But who really knows? It's not like we have the formula.
Paying in full does not adversely impact your credit score, but it is generally believed that not utilizing your available credit at all can adversely impact your score.
Of course, who really knows? And the fact that we can't really know is the real problem IMO.
I'm saying that credit scores being a black box is inherently not a good idea. There can never be any accountability, because there is no visibility. In general, it's impossible to verify the correctness of a credit score. It's also impossible to discuss the fairness of the scoring methodology, because all we can do is speculate and guess.
For something so impactful to an individual, you'd think there would be more government oversight / regulation... And more transparency.
"And hope that no third party ever misreports anything to your profile."
If you've never been a victim to this then you don't understand how pernicious this system is. Once one creditor does this, then all the other creditors automatically operate on that information. They don't double check, they don't notice the strangeness of the report, they don't care. Your credit changed, so your limits changed, so they want their money back NOW.
Ubiquitous surveillance is becoming cheap and easy.
We can pass all the laws we want trying to put this genie back in the bottle. It may work, some, it might keep the law-abiding government agencies at bay (are there any)?
But anybody wanting to make a buck off of us, they won't hesitate to use it. There's money in it. You refuse to do it, well, you lose in the marketplace. Social Darwinism. Or, economic.
We have to come up with some social rules to control how we feel about it, how we are subjected to it. That could help. Like, you don't mention what you saw on a streaming microcam that drifted through your neighbor's bedroom window, because that is gauche. Some fiction of privacy. Like not mentioning what you hear through a bathroom door. It's just not polite.
That's the best scenario we can hope for, I imagine.
I agree that this sucks, but it's going to happen no matter whether we call it a right or not. We need to quickly accept that we've made a world where you can't stop anyone from using AI for things you don't like, and that there are infinite incentives for them to do it, and start focusing on ways to mitigate the risk. My position is that calling it a right—even enshrining that recognition into international law—will not, by itself, do anything. It's step 0, we need to be on like step 12, pronto.
Rich people erecting barricades against the poor. The intelligence services, malign actors, and anyone who's already gotten in (aka, large tech companies) will ignore this to the maximum extent possible. Other rich people (aka, large companies that don't depend on this stuff, like railroads, construction, etc) will also ignore this to the maximum extent possible in order to avoid awkward moments at dinner parties with their rich tech friends.
Just an aside, I've always been impressed by how much non-verbal human attitude/expression Randall Munroe is able to capture in faceless stick figures. Or maybe it's just me reading that into his drawings?
The only "rights" anyone has anymore are the right to be used, abused, and eventually killed by the tiny percentage of humanity that own all the money, weapons, and resources. If you think you have "rights", you're living in a fantasy world.
This is an absolutely stupid notion IMHO because if somebody has the data there’s NOTHING you can do to stop profiling. The right to the deletion and security of your own personal data is what needs to be protected. This sort of right is closing the barn door after the horse leaves.
But securing your personal data sounds a lot like a stone trying to gather up all the waves it makes when it drops in a pond.
Where do we draw the lines? Do we all end up walking around cloaks and masks in public and if you suss out who the faceless individual is next to you in the crowd it's your fault you figured it out?
This sort of right is closing the barn door after the horse leaves.
In fairness, so is the right to deletion.
Once your data is in some of these systems, it's sold on to other systems immediately. (Most of the "sell side" market is set up on the basis of subscriptions). So, for instance, your data gets written to some merchant system or whatever, and it's slurped out in the pull that happens 15 minutes later by data subscriber 531962. Unless you get your request to delete your data to the merchant customer support within that 15 minute time period, your data has already been pumped out into the ether.
Make it so you have to give affirmative consent to opt out of right to deletion? Great idea!
Of course, most of these companies slip the opt out language into the Terms of Service and Privacy Statement.
You, uh, you did read them before you clicked 'OK', right?
(BTW, you likely suspect that it doesn't take 15 minutes for these automated processes to slurp up new data. And, yeah, your suspicion is correct, on most of these systems, it takes far less than 15 minutes before one of their subscribers pulls new data. So. Yeah. Fun Times!)
Creating words is linguisto-washing that no one agreed to, yet somehow i was able to understand your sentence. In both cases, the washing is a step to achieving intended outcomes.
Varying degrees of individual crony capitalism and authoritarian countries like Russia, China, and the US will refuse to grant their citizens ownership of their data, will find new ways to surveil and charge people with crimes, and permit companies to create stealth credit and behavioral tracking companies to discriminate against people in new and subtle ways.
> But when they were on the open road, they spewed lethal quantities of toxic gas, killing people by the thousands.
I point this out because I was liking the argument until this point: He's off by a couple orders of magnitude, according to Wikipedia. Not enough for me to read it as absurd hyperbole, like calling Adam Smith a communist, but enough for me to stop reading the essay, look up his claim, and then feel like he's either misinformed or lying.
Sure, in the 1970s the cops could follow you around any time you were out in public. But they needed 6+ cops to provide round-the-clock surveillance, with an annual cost in the high six figures.
So the average citizen's privacy was protected not by law or high-minded ideals about privacy, but by simple numbers. There weren't enough cops to follow even 0.1% of the population.
But in the modern age of smartphones and license plate recognition and credit reference agencies? I think there's a strong argument to be made that we need new laws and new rights to reflect the new reality, where tracking people around the clock is several orders of magnitude cheaper.