> Even a well-paid expatriate moving to the United States can be caught in the conundrum of not getting a credit card for lack of credit record, and not having a credit record for lack of credit cards.
> Fintech resolves the dilemma by tapping various nonfinancial data: the type of browser and hardware used to access the internet, the history of online searches and purchases.
I enjoy the framing of this; give us the keys to the kingdom and we'll give you even more credit (to get yourself further into debt!)
Of course it won't stop there, better pay down that mortgage before you search or buy the "wrong" thing if you want to keep your house (they won't take it outright, just raise the interest rate on your loan because you now represent a higher risk based on "new information")
The fact that the IMF thinks your choice of operating system should impact your creditworthiness is something I've been warning people about for months because it shows why we need cosmopolitan software. Since it's nice to have the ability to pick up and move our apps elsewhere should we discover we're using the "wrong" one. Because political winds change, but good engineering endures. https://github.com/jart/cosmopolitan
> The fact that the IMF thinks your choice of operating system should impact your creditworthiness is something
At some point in the past or maybe in another universe, a well known accommodation booking site might or might not have been offering better rates to people using Linux than OSX. Not confirmed, obviously.
I've tested this multiple times with friends who use an IPhone, and indeed I got better rates on Android. Might do course also been other aspects involved, maybe they analysed my data realised I'm a penny pincher.
I think the thought there is just that STEM nerds tend to have stable high-paid jobs and thus good credit, and so OSes/browsers that nobody but nerds use / would tolerate using, are signals of having good credit.
Income, or even 6mo income history, doesn't predict how likely you'll be to get another job if you lose your job. What lenders really want to know is how in-demand you are in the market, and so what they should predict as the "floor" on your future income.
Add to that how likely someone with your personality-type is to just decide to take a few months/years off between jobs living off of savings, and you've got a heuristic nearly as predictive of loan-repayment as all the rest of the information lenders use today put together.
To be fair, the fixed interest rate mortgage is uniquely American, and is not seen in most other countries of the world. It's a great deal if you can get it! But obviously someone has to backstop the other end of this deal, and in the US it's basically the government.
I have a mortgage that is fixed interest and not backed by the government in anyway... So I think you might be wrong on how the risk is calculated.
I can't see how any new risk is added in a fixed rate. In fact I can't see how a non fixed rate would really be good for anybody, and would keep the risk fluctuating for all parties involved.
If you have a fixed rate mortgage, the bank bears an interest rate risk. If the interest rate goes up, the bank could be getting more money in interest, but they aren't.
If you have an adjustable-rate mortgage, you bear the interest rate risk.
No, the bank has at risk the capital loaned, which they payed out. A risk is not a "loss" in a hypothetical amount of money that maybe could be had in the future given market conditions which are not predictable.
> A risk is not a "loss" in a hypothetical amount of money that maybe could be had in the future given market conditions which are not predictable.
This is incorrect. It is very common for investors (yes, including commercial banks) to frame risk in the way I described. This link to investopedia will expound upon my admittedly short description of interest rate risk [1]. Another obvious risk in this context is prepayment risk [2]. Note that both of these risk models are not about whether or not the bank is losing the money used to pay for the home, but are about factors that could affect the return on investment. You can find even more examples of risk models exactly like this on investopedia.
Is it just me or is a prepayment risk effectively moot for large loan investment companies like banks?
After all, even though their calculations were counting on the profits of that money, having it back now means they can loan it out again, and possibly will receive a lager return if interest rates have risen.
For instance, my mortgage is at 2.49%. Right now interest rates are at 3.04%, so if I paid my mortgage off today the bank should be able to find a borrower who would pay over 20% more for the same money, right?
I get that this could go in the opposite direction, though, so I know it's not a perfect answer.
We have fixed interest rate mortgages in Canada, but the fixed rate is only valid for a specific period (typically 5 years). After this, the mortgage needs to be either renewed for another term at then-current rates, or transferred to a new lender.
Sure, fixed term for a short period is normal everywhere. But a fixed term for the entire length of the mortgage, whereby mortgage terms are commonly 30 years long, are only seen in the US and Denmark.
> But a fixed term for the entire length of the mortgage, whereby mortgage terms are commonly 30 years long, are only seen in the US and Denmark.
Strange, because I have a fixed term for the entire length of my mortgage and I'm not living in those countries. Admittedly it's for a length of time shorter than 30 years, but even at that timeframe it would be possible to get one.
There is however one additional modifier in the statement of the article: "fully prepayable", that may not exist anywhere outside of Denmark and the USA (but still, your source doesn't really explain where it got it's list of countries that have it, so I have no way to know it's correctness).
Yes, but hardly anyone uses them because fixed rate mortgages are so much better of a deal in most cases. The government owned guarantors (Fannie/Freddie mainly) are the main reason that 30 year mortgages can be offered at such low rates in the U.S.
The quote is not entirely true, you can get a letter of good credit (i.e. a reference) from your bank in your home country. it won't get you a $25K credit line, but it'll get you up and running with the basics.
The article talks about things like browser, ISP, etc and not so much browser history. Even so, this is the worst possible type of pattern matching. It’s easy for some to manipulate but really bakes in the worst bias.
People with the means can easily change their computer - You go from a budget pc running an old version of windows to a brand new Mac and your credit score goes up.
On the flip side your isp may indicate you live in a “bad neighborhood” and get penalized for it.
We have all got to hope this never gets implemented.
Well of course! The real question is: what shouldn't impact your credit score? Any information you consume could potentially impact your ability to repay a debt - if you read the wrong book, see the wrong movie, visit the wrong person, any of these events could change your mind, and make you a less reliable credit risk. Reading the wrong web resources is a natural extension.
(Because the actually crazy people have killed satire, let me be clear: this is satire.)
I ran into this myself, in my High-school Library and I'm sure may other children may have as well.
Not per se a social credit system, but, how different is it? One org/database, interpreted by people of org and then a similar enough inquisition/questioning of "why."
Very interesting, but it seems that was more about sensitive information (I'm guess stuff like technology, maps, security procedures) rather than who reads which political ideology.
A better conversation is whether IMF/credit scores deserve to exist in the first place. Didn't these geniuses JUST add field-specific search to SWIFT, so orders for "cubanos" don't get held up because of Cuba sanctions?
Maybe these clueless old men should stick to what they know - mountains of physical paperwork and pointless policies and procedures, and stay away from anything that uses electricity or internet.
Bitcon/DeFi will render them obsolete in a few years' time anyway.
>A better conversation is whether IMF/credit scores deserve to exist in the first place
>Bitcon/DeFi will render them obsolete in a few years' time anyway.
Credit scores exist because banks want to know how likely they're going to get their money back. I'm not sure how that'd be replaced with "bitcoin/difi". Most of the "loans" I see are difi are either flash loans or overcolateralized loans, which have limited application to typical consumer loans (eg. car loan or mortgage).
Can an autonomous bot on some smart contract have a credit score? Why is credit a privilege only humans can enjoy?
We should be able to spool up a persistent pseudonym that can have a credit score based solely on its selectively disclosed transaction history since inception.
If we screw up the credit score of that pseudonym, we should be able to create another and another. The market decides what score to give based whatever factor it feels relavant, which should result in abuse prevention over the long term.
>Can an autonomous bot on some smart contract have a credit score? Why is credit a privilege only humans can enjoy?
companies and even countries can have credit scores, so it's not something that "only humans can enjoy".
>We should be able to spool up a persistent pseudonym that can have a credit score based solely on its selectively disclosed transaction history since inception.
Part of what gives credit scores value is that you only have one identity, so you can't create burner accounts and default all the loans on them.
>The market decides what score to give based whatever factor it feels relavant, which should result in abuse prevention over the long term.
The market will react by treating pseudonyms the same way websites treat tor exit nodes: with extreme suspicion. Using a pseudonym with little history and/or "real" identity tied to it would essentially put you in the "default imminent" category of credit ratings.
The reason I'm keen about pseudonyms is because by detaching real-world identities from credit requirements, we can greatly improve access to finance.
If new pseudonyms are treated with extreme suspicion then so be it, but there should be a way for the pseudonym to progress from there solely through transactional behavior.
Even if the amount of credit the market becomes comfortable with through this scheme is $100, that could make a big difference in developing countries.
If someone is operating under a pseudonym and can walk away from it, you're playing an iterated prisoner's dilemma where one party knows on what turn they will defect and the other doesn't.
With real identities, the iteration only ends in the death of one party, the timing of which is seldom known to anyone (although will statistically be taken into account).
this but with real identity. it should not be that you are only who government says you are. days are past when you can move to a new place under new name and have no issue and government not know difference.
> A better conversation is whether IMF/credit scores deserve to exist in the first place.
You're right about this. People's access to necessities like housing shouldn't depend on whether they are making money for the finance industry. And developing countries' access to the resources needed to improve the quality of life of their citizens shouldn't depend on making the development process profitable to US/European institutions.
> Bitcon/DeFi will render them obsolete in a few years' time anyway.
Unlikely. Bitcoin and other proof of work systems are likely to be banned in many places because of their environmental impact. And systems that survive that are likely to be banned as vehicles for financial fraud. The future of blockchain currencies is probably in making transactions more traceable to shut down tax avoidance schemes.
> > A better conversation is whether IMF/credit scores deserve to exist in the first place.
> You're right about this. People's access to necessities like housing shouldn't depend on whether they are making money for the finance industry. And developing countries' access to the resources needed to improve the quality of life of their citizens shouldn't depend on making the development process profitable to US/European institutions.
While there's definitely issues with how credit scores are implemented, it's absolutely essential for something like them to exist. People who habitually default on their debts shouldn't be able to keep borrowing money as easily as the rest of us.
I mean, that's exactly what the opaque number is trying to do - typically you have some thresholds, below X deny the loan request, above Y approve, in the gray area review.. The number will have some complex weighting, but I'm not sure how you get away from assigning a score if you want to make an automated decision.
The IMF, at least in its current form, shouldn't exist. The only way it can work is if artificial or instigated crises are periodically created to extract wealth from (or covertly tax) the masses so it can be redistributed to nations and NGOs that may or may not be risky lendees.
Credit scores might be a good idea in some respect but it shouldn't be possible for anyone but lenders and the individuals those scores represent, and they should only ever cover whether the person or organization is a good or bad risk for loaning them money or credit. Employers and landlords should never be able to know what your credit score is. At best they should know about your employment history, but if they want your credit score then they might as well ask what shows you watch on Netflix or if you look at porn, you know, for moral reasons.
Hopefully the system will be kept in check by decentralized tech, but who knows how long it will be before social credit will bar you from using the same internet as everyone else.
The IMF and the World Bank serve an important purpose. They provide a great standard of living to otherwise unemployable economists and policy analysts.
Therefore, regardless of how many people they kill, and, yes, they have killed people due to statistics and economics illiteracy combined with blind career ambition, they will continue to be around for a long time.
> Bitcon/DeFi will render them obsolete in a few years' time anyway.
(I am assuming "Bitcon" is a typo for "Bitcoin" rather than some new cryptocurrency or blockchain thing I have not heard of).
This reminds me of a question someone once asked Miss Manners:
> Dear Miss Manners:
> Don't you think that nowadays, in modern life, the old-fashioned custom of the condolence call is out of date?
> Gentle Reader:
> Why it that? Is it because people don't die anymore, or is it because the bereaved no longer need the comfort of their friends? Miss Manners is always interested in hearing about how life has been improved by modern thinking or technology.
People lending money via Bitcoin/DeFi or any other mechanism now or in the future are still going to want a way to estimate the risks that the borrower will be able to pay back the loan on schedule.
Living in country where we don't have credit score it always seemed massive black box with very strange incentives... Here the loaning is based on income, other loans and possibly registry of past failed payments.
I'm not really sure if more than last one is needed, maybe some overall registry of how much money single person has lend and what part is unguaranteed of it...
Credit score to my understanding is some magic number that can be effect by things like someone querying it... Which seems quite weird and opaque... But in sense component of negative credit score is a thing. And I don't think it should go any further...
In financial analysis of a company, the number one item you tend to look at is "free cash flow" - the "cash available for the company to repay creditors or pay dividends and interest to investors." [1]
Why then do we not take income into account in credit worthiness? Why do I not periodically upload my W2 or tax return to the credit bureaus in order to show that yes, I'm credit-worthy because my income makes it possible to service my debt?
The entire idea of a credit score based on having had credit and paying past loans off is asinine. To start throwing nonsensical parameters like browsing history into the equation is second derivative asinine.
> Why then do we not take income into account in credit worthiness?
We...do. Any significant credit application will look at your employment history, income, and credit score, not just the latter.
> Why do I not periodically upload my W2 or tax return to the credit bureaus in order to show that yes, I'm credit-worthy because my income makes it possible to service my debt?
Credit reporting companies do gather and provide pay data. As fir other data, they don't gather it directly from the people about whom they keep files.
> The entire idea of a credit score based on having had credit and paying past loans off is asinine
No, its not. While past performance isn't a guarantee of future results, it is useful as a guide. And it isn't the only factor considered in most loans.
In reply to your first point, the original article discusses credit score, which does not use income in any way. You're talking about applying for loans, which use a credit score and other factors to determine credit worthiness. My points are relevant to the credit score only.
Consider the fact that conflating credit score to credit worthiness (respectfully, as your reply does) as the biggest indicator of the brokenness.
> Consider the fact that conflating credit score to credit worthiness (respectfully, as your reply does)
No, it doesn't. My reply was to a question that did that, and explicitly corrected it, identifying other factors considered in creditworthiness besides credit score.
Again, my original comment is merely a criticism of credit score and not the entire consumer lending infrastructure. Three credit bureaus purport to have a comprehensive opinion of someone's credit worthiness without considering their income and that's broken, full-stop.
> Again, my original comment is merely a criticism of credit score and not the entire consumer lending infrastructure
Then why did it explicitly say that income was not considered in creditworthiness? The conflation of that with credit score was from this line in your comment: “Why then do we not take income into account in credit worthiness?” My response was directed at the error in the explicit premise of this question.
> Three credit bureaus purport to have a comprehensive opinion of someone's credit worthiness
No, they don't, which is why they also gather and provide, as separate products, payroll data and other data, and even credit decision platforms that incorporate income and other data. Credit score is a single product with a more limited function (both as advertised and as used by customers) than you are representing.
Exactly, a credit score is supposed to correlate with someone’s willingness to repay debts. Income is used to determine someone’s ability to repay. Almost all lending decisions evaluate both.
> Why then do we not take income into account in credit worthiness?
Income is definitely considered in large loans. You’re not going to get a mortgage or a car loan on your credit score alone.
Credit firms also collect a lot of payroll data, but it’s kept separate from what you know as your credit score because they inherently can’t have payroll data for everyone that also has credit history data. The scores must be kept separate as a result.
>Why then do we not take income into account in credit worthiness? Why do I not periodically upload my W2 or tax return to the credit bureaus in order to show that yes, I'm credit-worthy because my income makes it possible to service my debt?
Is this supposed to be better? Right now I can apply and get credit cards without mailing my paystub. That actually seems better than companies having regular updates of my income, which they can use for evil marketing purposes.
This is definitely true although 99% of the time they rely on self reported income. American Express is one exception that is known to occasionally “Financial Review” big spenders, asking the borrower to authorize release of their prior IRS tax transcripts.
Organizations are allowed to be incompetent. The real problem is they have buy in from other industries with major decision making abilities and the government has provided us no protections from them.
If Equifax went out of business today, you'd have 5 new equally shitty credit companies trying to get their market share.
Only up to a point, though. Restaurants can be shut down when they have too many health violations. Private medical practices can be sued into the ground. There are lots of types of incompetence in finance that can get you shut down / sued out of existence.
> The real problem is they have buy in from other industries with major decision making abilities and the government has provided us no protections from them.
Which is why I'm being vocal, where possible, about how incompetent these organizations have become.
I’m not using an EBITDA/MV equation on my personal valuation, nor am I using FCF for any credit calculation.
Credit calculations are based on the most reliable data points that correlate with outcomes I care about.
Frankly, new tech is helping credit calculations - people are using phone call data to find what correlates with credit worthiness. I believe this is already in production around the world.
Whether the term “credit scores” is used or not, there will always be some mechanistic way to value risk. It will also use whatever data we have lying around to do so.
If we have no data, then it goes back to the good old days of the boys club, which is even more restricting Thant today.
I didn't bring EBITDA into the conversation; free cash flow is a useful metric for both personal finance and corporate finance and isn't comparable. EBITDA is too adjusted to be useful for personal financials.
A person may open a credit card at 18 and be given a limit of $2,000. That card may still be open 10 years later, when the issuing bank raises the limit to $20,000. Many banks do not even require attestation of income to raise limits like this. This is what I mean by no meaningful income verification.
Income verification is what happens when you buy a mortgage. It has nothing in common with the credit card process.
> If you lie, you may be committing credit card fraud.
It seems like we're heading for a society lying and fraud are engaged in and almost tolerated a lot more, and certainly where resources for enforcement are stripped.
It's a high trust process in a high trust society. Assuming that most people are honest, it works out well. Verification bogs down the process and may discourage people from applying. Clever fraudsters can probably pass that anyway.
Even though the article is old, I saw my last few years' pay history in the links provided there.
Opting out feels like a devil's bargain: credit will presumably cost you more or be harder to get as a result. But there's no fine-grained way to choose who gets the info.
Self-employed for many years. Anecdote, but I can tell you that my access to consumer credit has not been impacted in any way by my compensation not appearing in those databases.
On larger loans, sure. But the credit score metric that is the first indicator does not inherently use income. You self report with no verification whatsoever.
Every landlord I’ve had (except for a sketchy cash-only guy) has verified my income. They also verified for my first car loan (I guess due to lack of any existing loans.)
Income is required for any loan ranging from a personal loan, to a car note to a mortgage. Even renting an apartment requires proof of income! The only loan that doesn’t require proof are student loans, and those are essentially impossible to default on.
Just to be clear, my criticism is of the credit score metric, which I feel is disproportionately depended upon for credit worthiness. A credit score does not take into account income.
Credit cards make money on the transaction side, so they don't need you to pay interest to make money. Simply borrowing against your credit card (i.e. performing transactions) is sufficient to keep them happy, and they 'reward' you with a higher score as a result.
At the end of the day, a credit score indicates how profitable you will be as a customer for a lender. Showing profitability for a lender in a past indicates that you will likely be profitable in the future as well. Thus, in effect, you do have to buy your score, although the method of purchase may not always be straightforward.
I understand how credit cards work. I also get a lot more out of that transaction fee than just a credit score, so I am OK with it. But my point was just that you don't have to pay interest, it wasn't really about any of that.
I hate to keep this thread going, but they are more interest on cash payments than anything (due to increased prices) but with the card I get most of that money back in rewards and security (can have transactions disputed on demand and have them instantly removed).
That was a fun tangent, for sure, but it remains that you are indeed paying interest, if not directly, in a roundabout way. Credit card companies would not provide you with those benefits if you did not provide them with revenue to justify the cost of the benefits plus some margin of profitability. Nothing in the world is free. At the end of the day, your credit score is bought, as the original topic of this thread asserted.
It's like we need eternal vigilence against people like this or something. There is always someone who thinks they have a technocratic solution that optimizes for their own interests and then litigates for it and encircles us while insisting it is in ours. Nobody subject to this proposed measure desires it.
Why on earth does the IMF, an organization staffed almost exclusively by academic economists and political appointees, think they have any expertise whatsoever in consumer credit decisions? These are people whose understanding of business stops at "getting funding," from presumed and paternalistic granting agencies. The entire premise of their organization was to use lending as a globalized policy leverage tool, to issue bad loans to weak governments for political reasons, and then demand policy concessions in exchange for renegotiation terms. These have always been really bad people.
It does suggest we need better p2p lending instruments, and really, anything that these organizations think they can do, we should probably be developing alternatives that limit their influence.
Somehow I have a feeling that each passing day, things are getting tighter and tighter and private corporation and government institutions are getting more controlling and totalitarian.
That feeling like slowly being boiled into 1984.
Various parts of the U.S. are already there. You know where those are if you live in them. Ask yourself: How many times have stopped yourself from asserting 2 + 2 indeed is four[1] in conversations with colleagues, neighbors, teachers, or even family because you may lose your income or worse if you did not at least remain silent in the face of assertions to the contrary?
For those not familiar, here is the beginning of the relevant passage[1]:
> 'It is impossible to see reality except by looking through the eyes of the Party. That is the fact that you have got to relearn, Winston. It needs an act of self-destruction, an effort of the will. You must humble yourself before you can become sane.'
> He paused for a few moments, as though to allow what he had been saying to sink in.
> 'Do you remember,' he went on, 'writing in your diary, "Freedom is the freedom to say that two plus two make four"?'
> 'Yes,' said Winston.
> O'Brien held up his left hand, its back towards Winston, with the thumb hidden and the four fingers extended.
> 'How many fingers am I holding up, Winston?'
> 'Four.'
> 'And if the party says that it is not four but five—then how many?'
You're absolutely right, even though I suspect I would strongly disagree with some of the things you would assert as self-evident facts. I might feel that the current majority consensus opinion on many things is good and right, but I can still be disturbed when I see the walls closing in on people who dare to think otherwise. The Overton Window is shutting fast and we may all find our fingers crushed sooner or later.
Not nanis but i have been in places where i couldnt say my opposing as persons talked about gun control. Biggest example in past year is corona though, anybody who disagree with lockdown etc. is anti-mask trump loving redneck in some place, one of which I worked.
I am not referring to that argument. There was no "antivax conspiracy nonsense" ... Just people who can't read.
I have made no statements regarding vaccination.
However, I do consider delaying until after the approval announcement the release of the update to what is known about how many people who are fully vaccinated against Covid19 are dying from Covid19 or being hospitalized due to Covid19 to be suspicious.
That is not a conspiracy theory. It happened. Information that was due to be released on Friday was delayed and released after the FDA approval on Monday. The updated information showed that known rates of death from Covid19 among those fully vaccinated against Covid19 continued to increase.
Plus, the CDC does not put out a proper time series table[1]. Every week, they overwrite the information from the previous week so one is forced to rely on external snapshots[2] to preserve what should be public record. Plus, many states don't even release or track information about the vaccination status of people who are hospitalized or who die from Covid19. For months now, CDC have been saying:
> Ultimately, CDC will use the National Notifiable Diseases Surveillance System (NNDSS) to identify vaccine breakthrough cases.
1984 was not a novel about getting downvoted by other people because they didn’t feel your point was a particularly good or insightful contribution to a discussion board, nor is a downvote in any way equal to censorship in any meaningful sense, so it seems a bit hysterical to suggest it somehow “proves his point”.
Last year, I tried to put together some sane information about the statistics of testing[1] plus a simple app that allows you to play with the arithmetic[2].
It took very little time to put it together. Everything on it is factually accurate. However, it took me three months to get all the bans on it removed by which point I had given up on the notion of providing sober commentary instead of constant breathless panic mode. At this point, I do not know if it still appears in any blacklists.
The simple fact was that with 5% of the population infected, a 2.5% false positive probability, and 10% false negative probability, fully 34.5% of all positive test results will be false. So, a lot of resources will be wasted in tracking, restraining, and constraining people who don't need to be and their absence from the labor market will have further repercussions. Sure, if 95% of the population is infected, the false positive rate will be really low, but then there is really no point to a massive testing infrastructure: Just assume everyone is infected instead of dealing with the fact that 33.9% of the negative results will be false.
Testing asymptomatic people repeatedly will likely not provide a net benefit beyond assuaging the fears of the perpetually panicked.
This is a recent example I am comfortable discussing in public.
I can't see that domain, it's blocked on our corporate network, but those seem like odd numbers to have picked. Lateral flow tests have a 0.3% false positive rate, and a 23% false negative rate. With those numbers, at a 5% infected rate, 7% of all positive test results will be false, rather than 34%.
But that ignores a major factor, which is that testing isn't uniformly distributed. It's inevitably going to be skewed towards people who are more likely to be infected. That means the true number will be less than 7%.
The danger with testing really isn't the false positive rate. It's the false negatives.
> In the lab ... which is not the same as the real world
No, I quoted the real-world value intentionally. The lab value is 0.06%. Depending on when you wrote the page it's understandable that you might not have had access to that yet, but it turns out that LFT's are really, really good at not throwing a false positive.
> Only if you assume there is no cost to false positives.
No, you don't need to assume there is no cost to false positives, only that it is less than the cost of false negatives in aggregate. And that's not hard: false negatives cause infections which compound exponentially, whereas false positives have a linear cost. That alone would make false negatives more costly, but when you account for the probability of each it's really not close.
Stuff like this[1] ought to have some impact on the "real world" results, right?
> false positives have a linear cost.
That's a strong assumption. Assuming constant testing happens in an environment of quarantining of the person who tested positive and their contacts and possibly their contacts (which is the goal of the whole trace & quarantine fever of 2020), it is hard to argue that the costs of false positives do is linear in the number of false positives. They are hard to observe and record because they are mostly in foregone productive activities and negative impacts on mental health, but that does not make them go away.
> Stuff like this[1] ought to have some impact on the "real world" results, right?
The real world results, as measured, showed a 0.3% false positive rate. If your [1] has a measurable effect, it's included in that 0.3%.
> > false positives have a linear cost.
> That's a strong assumption. Assuming constant testing happens in an environment of quarantining of the person who tested positive and their contacts and possibly their contacts (which is the goal of the whole trace & quarantine fever of 2020), it is hard to argue that the costs of false positives do is linear in the number of false positives.
It's not hard at all. It literally follows from the problem setup. If one person has 4 contacts, and each of those contacts has 4 more, and you quarantine all of them, then that's 17 people quarantined from a single positive test. That "17" is a linear constant. There's no feedback mechanism: one positive test leads to 17 quarantines only, and you're done. It's linear. It might have a higher constant factor than you personally think is justified, but that's a very different question.
> The real world results, as measured, showed a 0.3% false positive rate.
Try as I did, I can't find a source for this claim. The best I could find was[1] which seems to indicate a 1.1% false positive rate for people without symptoms (keep in mind my argument is against widespread, unconditional testing). PCR results in the real world seem to vary a lot, but a 3% false positive rate seems appropriate.
> 17 people quarantined from a single positive test. That "17" is a linear constant.
That is a faulty argument. You are assuming total costs of a trace/quarantine regime are linear in the number of people prevented from participating in society and productive activities.
The specificity of the test was recorded as 99.68% - the
overall false positive rate was 0.32%, although this was
lowered to 0.06% in a lab setting.
> PCR results in the real world seem to vary a lot, but a 3% false positive rate seems appropriate.
Not to me. Again, first page of google: https://www.ons.gov.uk/peoplepopulationandcommunity/healthan... puts an _upper_ bound on the PCR false positive rate of 0.08%, and that would require all the positives in that survey to have been false. And that's a real-world result across 208,730 samples.
But given the existence of LFTs and how cheap and immediate they are, I don't think anyone's talking about population-wide PCR testing anyway.
> You are assuming total costs of a trace/quarantine regime are linear in the number of people prevented from participating in society and productive activities.
For the proportion of the population removed at any given time? As close to linear as makes no difference, yes. Is your argument that there's a quadratic factor in network effects? You haven't explained what your cost model actually is. For your argument to work you need those costs to follow an exponential curve, and there's just no mechanism for that to happen.
I think some folks still need to understand that contrarianism is not a substitute for a personality or a careful thought process. People disagreeing with you is not a good metric for being right, or special, or oppressed.
If anything, all the conspiracy nonsense being stoked from shadowy organizations can be seen as serving the same purpose as an agent provocateur. "Look, these people will obviously believe anything, no matter how ridiculous or unsupported by empirical data. We'd better constrain all information for their own good." Just like a provocateur breaking windows at a protest is used as an excuse to arrest everyone.
You don't indicate a political slant, but this is an alt-right take on American politics if I've ever seen one. I would counter with:
For a couple hundred years, Americans insisted 2+2=5. It was even enshrined in law for the first hundred or so years. We eventually agreed on a compromise, 2+2=4.5, but some of our lives depend on the answer to this math problem, so we're not going to stop fighting for 2+2=4. Sure enough, if you work as an engineer, you're going to be fired if your answer isn't within tolerance.
Basic human nature, push it as far as the other side will take it. If the other side is significantly weaker they'll compromise a lot before they snap and push back, or try to.
I believe the low quality low hanging fruits of my life are being slowly squeezed out by stupid corporate and government policies.
But it’s a glass half full for those aware and able to see it for what it is.
The end game is me sitting under a tree somewhere with a picnic in the middle of nowhere with someone I have a genuine connection with and no technology at hand.
How do people not realize this, even when it's been made so painfully obvious with their photo scanning debacle? There is *zero* privacy on closed source, proprietary, for-profit, shareholder-owned platforms. Zero, zip, zilch, nada. They own the platform and they own your behavior when you use their products.
How long before your creditworthiness determines your eligibility to vote? Don't laugh, or Texas will find a way to use it! (as a Texan ashamed of current moves against voting)
Maybe instead of taking even more of our personal data, they should worry about fixing the algorithm they run on the data they already have. For example, paying off an auto loan shouldn't make your credit score drop 60 points.
Why shouldn't it? The credit score is a tool to provide a measure of how profitable you can be to lenders. If you're paying off loans, you are a less desirable customer than those who carry loans. The lower score reflects that.
This is the same system used for Internet contracts, buying work tools, renting apartments and buying houses.
If you can afford those things more safely, you should be considered less desirable? Instead, it's the people who are likely to be in debt until death that are better?
But I guess, yeah, fuck society, get rich while you can.
FICO credit scores aren't intended for tenant assessment - it's just a lazy option some landlords do. The credit companies have dedicated products for such a use case (https://www.mysmartmove.com/).
Realistically, paying off a loan rarely hurts credit scores. And realistically, someone with years of paying off credit cards on time is going to have a high credit score (at least high enough for things you describe), outstanding debts or not.
> If you can afford those things more safely, you should be considered less desirable?
If you can afford to leave, then yes, you are less desirable than someone who needs to stick around. These services are priced based on the assumption of long-term engagement. If you cut that assumption short, the expected revenue is also cut short.
Finding new customers is expensive. When you leave, the provider needs to find a new customer to replace you. They are much better off keeping existing customers. The credit score gives an indication of how likely one is to remain a customer. Those who are most likely to stick around are the best kind of customer.
When you paid off your loan, you also stopped paying the associated interest. In other words, you retracted your patronage and stopped being a customer. This is not desirable for a business. The credit score was reduced to reflect that. 60 points is very little movement. It is not like they're writing you off as a compete undesirable with that, just statistically slightly less desirable than someone who continued to borrow.
Remember who pays for credit score information: Lenders, not you. They are the customer. It is there to benefit them, not you.
The system before credit scores was even worse. Human bankers used subjective judgement subject to individual biases. That system was unfair, inaccurate and difficult to scale. How would you replace or improve credit scores?
Personally, I'd like to have much more control over who can view my credit data and for what purposes.
This is part of a larger trend of non-state actors with a huge variety of sometimes very pro-social missions (IMF, anti-child exploitation non-profits) advancing their respective missions through leveraging or targeting other non-state actors' platform control (tech companies, adtech infra) of platforms we totally rely on for day-to-day life (browsers, smart phones, OSs).
The connective tissue is the selective analysis, or less generously: magical thinking, of tech's beneficial features for a specific mission while ignoring (or not understanding) what their views for tech-use cause in aggregate.
The only counteraction that seems capable of effective reaction to this trend is forcing that "aggregate view." Developers on GitHub re: showing hash collisions for Apple's CSAM tech have recently lead the way in this space. Tools which passively search the web to generate browser histories which have beneficial credit score impact are another option.
It's time to return to the mindset cypherpunks created, but expand it from their hyper-focus on privacy: write and socialize tools which politely but directly force tech-lite researchers and non-state actors with powerful missions and influence to acknowledge their blindspots (hopefully), or screw up their products (more likely).
This is bizarre. I don't live in the US and have questions.
a) how do they acquire users' web history? Do they purchase it from ISP?
b) how do they know what ISP to ask?
c) how does the ISP know my web history? Last time I checked, almost all websites I visit use https, so the only thing they can see is domain, not /pathname/
d) how does it feel to poke your nose where it doesn't belong?
a) Yes. Amongst others, many ISPs sell data. I picked comcast as a random example, here in Germany ISPs do that too:
"We may also share personal information that does not identify you with third parties for their own marketing and advertising purposes, which you can opt out of. This mainly occurs when you interact with our websites and mobile applications that contain third-party cookies or other advertising trackers. To learn more about this, please read our Cookies Notice."
b) Afaik there's data brokers that know this and collect data from many different kinds of sources (isps being only one of them) those then sell to people like private investigators and private intelligence companies. Sadly I don't have a source ready, I learned this on a podcast and completely forgot which one. But the vice article above goes into that direction too.
c) That's correct, but that's also already valuable on it's own. I assume the /pathnames/ can come from third party tracking / ad companies, but dns data alone is also valuable. It's all in the patters of the (meta)data
d) Very likely exciting to many. Voyeurism and the "forbidden apple" aren't exactly new concepts
Lol this kind of shit is ripe for abuse. Not even sure if it would be unethical to find a flaw in the pattern matching just to enhance your credit score.
Ultimately, human desire to control and measure other humans is not limited to totalitarian regimes. On the contrary, totalitarian regimes grow out of this naturally occurring phenomenon.
We should be a bit vigilant about such concepts creeping into freer societies. They will usually do so either under guise of combating crime, or increasing efficiency. But there is no freedom without some slack.
And you can lose your job for posting a controversial opinion in the US, completely privatized.
It's a way more stable system. Allow a very narrow band of opinions in practice while claiming that everyone's free to think whatever they want in theory.
Look at the news the last two weeks, blanket condemnation of the Afghanistan withdrawal despite 70÷ approval for it and the fact that all of these educated news people have been around watching for the last 20 years.
Yet we can't get a microphone, airtime or column inches for anyone in favor of the withdrawal.
And businesses has the right to deny employment or fire you without reason. So, who knows if they paid their friend(s) over at Twitter or wherever to tell them what you're posting on your alts. It is a system ripe for corruption and that is all that matters.
it is not removing all option, self-employing can be and also retirees are not subject to any such restrainting. i am in agreement that it is not perfect see no simple solution
Are you familiar with cancel culture? Free speech does not apply in private companies. Post something stupid on the inter webs, and you will lose your job and have no recourse.
It's not just that they target jobs but they also try to keep people from getting new ones after being fired. Ironic that these same people are often the ones saying that housing and food are human rights then they effectively try to take them from people for disagreeing.
What is sad is I think as generations go by people will be more willing to accept it. All we need is crisis after crisis to get people to trade freedom for safety bit by bit. Create a crisis where billions are stolen because "the system is broken", offer up social credit and a new monetary system as a solution, have the AP and Reuters send the same propaganda copy to all the news institutions for them to recite in unison with a new repeated phrase like "mutuality" followed by "this is the new normal", call the minority of dissidents "reactionaries" or "right wing", and your new mechanism of authoritarian control can be installed (literally) without any meaningful fight.
It is hard to say whether the problem is going to get better or worse. Many people live in an already precarious position, and this would only make matters worse. Both the left and the right already see the system as broken, even if they don't agree upon how it is broken or how to fix it. I would suggest that most of those people see themselves as moderates or at least representing the majority (whether or not they are is another question). Eventually things are going to boil over. We can only hope that it does so in a peaceful way.
The problem is that we're trying to achieve a goal which is not possible with the tools at hand. There is no way to satisfy the right of all people to self-govern in a nation where half of the population wants a secular society with a European-style welfare system, and the other half wants a laissez-faire system that imposes Christian social mores. The goals of the left and right are not reconcilable.
The underlying issue here is that democracy is not enough. To state it differently, democracy is a means to an end, with the 'end' being self-representation. Democracy is necessary to achieve self-representation, but it's not sufficient.
An example: remember when The Don wanted to buy Greenland? Well, let's say the US bought Greenland. Their people, then, would be granted US Citizenship, including the right to vote. Throughout the transition, they would reside in democracies. One day they would stop voting in Danish elections and would instead vote in US elections. They would always be able to participate in the democratic process. They would also be extremely pissed off. Why, though? They had their say, didn't they? They voted in the elections, didn't they? But even though the process was democratic, the right of the people of Greenland to self-govern was not observed. They had democracy, but not self-representation.
Folks in the US feel the same way. In the Pacific Northwest, there is a broad consensus that the state should run healthcare, and yet they don't have state-run healthcare. Why? Because they need the consent of folks who live thousands of miles away in Oklahoma, Texas, and Florida! They have democracy, but they don't have self-representation.
When the tide turns and there is majority support, on the national level, for state-run healthcare, what happens in Oklahoma? We're going to force a national healthcare system on them when the vast majority of the citizenry abhor the idea of state healthcare. And why? Because, thousands of miles away in California, Oregon, and Washington, folks support the idea. That's democracy, sure, but it's not self-representation.
The rash of democracies that have taken hold in the world over the last few centuries has been wonderful, but we'd be foolish to assume that we've perfected human governance. There are better, more representative forms of government out there that we need to seek out and implement.
To make the next great leap in human governance, we need to acknowledge the limits of the systems that we currently have. We need to admit that over-large democracies are not conducive to actual self-representation. And we need to exorcise the ghosts of our monarchical forebears. Our governments don't own us, do they? Then why do we allow them to stifle and suppress democratic secession movements, like the recent one in Catalonia?
To ensure that we are truly able to self-govern, we need to pick our governments, not just our representatives.
When you think about the power structure of our governments, power flows top-down; from National -> State -> Local government, which makes sense. But when deciding which local governments participate in which State governments, and which states participate in which national government (if any), these decisions should be managed bottom-up instead of top-down.
Consider the situation in Oregon, where five rural counties have voted to leave the state of Oregon and to join the state of Idaho.[0] According to WaPo:
> "Lawmakers in Oregon and Idaho would have to enact bills to redefine the states’ boundaries and redistrict their legislatures. They’d also have to muster the votes to override a potential veto from their respective governors. And then Congress would have to sign off on the move."
In other words, these counties can only change states if they're able to get 320 million people to sign off on the change. That's crazy.
Now, how to achieve this in practice? Ideally we would revert to the original Federal system (with a small, weak federal government and strong state governments) and allow for counties to move between states, but that seems unlikely.
Alternatively, we could allow for counties to move between states, and allow States to self-organize into new federal/confederal nations, or to move between nations via some established process (i.e. referenda). These nations should coordinate at a supra-national level (like the EU) to facilitate commerce and free movement, and to allow for the settlement if nation-level disputes.
> In other words, these counties can only change states if they're able to get 320 million people to sign off on the change.
Huh? They need:
(1) a simple majority of each legislative house in Idaho, which is 18+36=54 people
(2) a simple majority of each legislative house in Colorado, which is 18+33=51 people, and
(3) a simple majority of each House of Congress, which is 51+218=269 people
for a total of 269+54+51=374 people. Your 320 million estimate is off by about 6 orders of magnitude.
(Even if you make the rather unrrasonable assumption that they need to convince enough unique voters to guarantee the election of a sufficient majority in each involved legislature—i.e., you assume that every eligible voter treats every Idaho, Colorado, and federal legislative election as a single issue referendum on the issue—you’ll find that the number is a very small fraction of the ~240 million eligible voters in the US.)
thats really interesting, and makes sense to me, but i wonder about how feasible a weak central govt would work in such a globalized capitalism that we have today...
wouldn't such flexibility/decentralization hurt national competitiveness vis-a-vis say, u.s vs china, or russia etc?
It seems like it would definitely hurt economic competitiveness relative to our economic rivals who have top-down control (to whatever degree that confers an advantage). But it would also allow us to avoid some disadvantages of top-down governance. In the current federal system, it isn’t difficult to imagine the implantation of something like a national rent control bill (which, though productive fodder for populist politicians, would cause a rash of predictable economic problems), whereas it would be impossible to imagine the same change (and the related problems) occurring nationwide if said policy had to be adopted at the state level.
It would also allow the states to serve their original role as “the marketplace of ideas”. One could imagine Oregon implementing state-run healthcare or a UBI, or Kansas implementing the “Fair Tax”, whereas now the states look to the federal government to implement these sorts of large policy changes.
Chris Hedges calls it a "coup d'etat in slow motion". The elites have realized time is on their side and they can implement their agendas on their own schedule, covertly.
How is it disinformation? Is it because it's not currently being used for evil purposes that we can't say it will theoretically be used for evil purposes in the future? Should we label all the anti-apple CSAM blog posts as "disinformation" because apple says it will only be used for CSAM and definitely wouldn't use it for political purposes?
“The so-called pandemic may end someday”
What is “so-called” in a pandemic responsible for the deaths of millions (tens of millions most likely) people in the world?
I would agree, covid fits the medical definition of pandemic. Saying it is a "so called" pandemic is not accurate.
But are you any better than the person you called out with your projection that covid will cause "tens of millions most likely" people to die? I know of no real evidence to support that statement, based on what is known of coronaviruses specifically. There's many who would consider your statement to be misinformation, also. And fear-mongering.
The infection rate is highly arguable, because it relies on extrapolations of PCR test results, which are unreliable for detecting number of infected. PCR detects remains of the virus, not active infections.
Stop calling opinions and projection of a possible future 'disinformation and conspiracy theories'. That you disagree with something does not make it disinformation. Nor a conspiracy theory.
From your link: "By 2020,[needs update] it was intended to standardize the assessment of citizens' and businesses' economic and social reputation, or 'Social Credit'."
It's 2021 now and the "Social" part of "Social Credit" is still science-fiction, let alone somebody's web history affecting their ability to obtain credit.
The part that is in place already and works somewhat is a national registry of unpaid debts, so you can find out e.g. that the state-owned investment fund you're dealing with owned a large stake of a mining company that went bankrupt while owing a large sum of money to a state-owned bank, leading to a court case in which the fund was ordered to service part of the debt. Stuff like that.
> Xu was sued in 2019 for calling tai chi "grandmaster" Chen Xiaowang a fraud, and the Chinese court ordered him to pay Chen approximately US$60,000 in damages and to apologize for seven consecutive days on social media. Additionally, his social credit rating was lowered to the point where he could not rent, own property, stay in certain hotels, travel on high speed rail or buy plane tickets.[16][17] The restrictions were lifted after he paid US$40,000 in both legal fees and the cost of placing the apology.[18]
So it's a system that's created by the government to make people aware of unpaid debts, but it's the same government that decides to impose debt on said people whenever it wants.
Okay, I agree that if you lose in court and get ordered to pay a fine, and you refuse to pay that fine and get a bad credit report as a result, you would indirectly be punished in your ability to obtain credit. But the problematic link in the causal chain is what you have to pay the fine for, isn't it? Treating an unpaid fine the same way as any other outstanding debt seems pretty reasonable to me.
Also, I'm under the impression that people imagine something more direct when they talk about web history affecting credit scores, like visiting a site automatically deducting points from a score, or something.
If you get caught smoking on a train, they can put you on a list of people banned from buying tickets. Very simple; no credit scoring required.
Presumably being on such a blacklist will actually influence individual credit scores once they get rolled out nationwide, but unless I somehow missed the announcement, that hasn't happened yet.
People are very cynical about this but I honestly don't think there's in principle anything wrong with using such data to establish credit-worthiness, because as the article points out many people do not have a stable financial history and this creates a negative cycle.
Fact of the matter is if people want access to credit the creditor has a legitimate interest in making an informed decision about whether the individual is reliable to set a correct rate. There is no way around this.
The two other alternatives are, we don't give someone access to credit, or we hand out credit without any sort of metrics. The first one doesn't help anyone, the second one doesn't make any financial sense.
Consumer data (the article also mentions online shopping history, which makes more sense than 'browser history'), in contrast to institutional banking data is ubiquitous even in poor countries because people now have wide access to phones and services. It would enable a lot of people to get access to credit.
This is daft, but not (just) because of the Orwellian aspect. The problem is that if it was widely implemented, it would immediately stop working.
Pretty much everyone here is familiar with Goodhart's Law; I'm surprised the IMF isn't. Use browsing history for credit scores, watch for the immediate proliferation of apps that generate/clean your browser history.
Privacy is already for “nerds” only. Coincidentally, I brought up Ublock Origin last night at a gathering, and multiple people claimed they had never heard of a browser extension.
That's nice, but have you ever heard someone refer to IE as "just the normal internet"?
Anyways, Whatever the law says, us nerds should be in charge anyway, right?! Or at least we should have some inherent privilege. These guys at the IMF have great ideas.
It was only within the past few decades that being a nerd stopped having social stigma and we became elevated to the social status of normal people. But we don't have any real power since lawyers still have a monopoly on that. They fill all the seats in congress, even though they're .5% of the population. They have the power to read our emails. But if you think about it, legal code is really just a primitive form of code that lacks the precision modern programming languages can provide. Modern code has so much more benefit to offer the public, like things happening in microseconds whereas previously you'd have to wait weeks and pay thousands of dollars in fees. So the transition to the newer better technology where legal code is executable and written by nerds is inevitable, but people with power are afraid of losing their power, so it'll take time for society to evolve. Each time the lawyer ruling class does something bad, like build a website that doesn't work, they'll need to give us a little more power in order to save them. Then eventually, we'll win.
The article is about a post on the IMF's blog by Arnoud Boot, Peter Hoffmann, Luc Laeven, Lev Ratnovski [1], which itself is basically just summarizing a more detailed working paper by the same authors [2].
The working paper doesn't really contain any original research (at least on this topic); they cite a single paper by Tobias Berg, Valentin Burg, Ana Gombović, Manju Puri [3]. The IMF working paper/blog post concludes, on the basis of this paper, that a system "powered by artificial intelligence and machine learning" (ugh) can improve credit assessments using features such as "the type of browser and hardware used to access the internet".
I feel kind of depressed that this needs to be said, but...
1. There is no causal link between user-agent and loan repayment.
2. Attaching high-value signals such as credit scores to such easily spoofed data as user-agent and browsing history has some amazingly obvious problems that are never mentioned.
The level of technological and statistical incompetence on display here is rather astounding, and it's difficult for me to take any of this seriously even before the ethical questions begin.
This is part of an ongoing trend I've noticed: the quality of human capital in financial services seems to be in rapid decline. The cream of the crop was scraped off by huge tech companies on the industry side. On the academic side, all the top students are choosing CS PhD programs instead of econ/finance and top-tier faculty are leaving core econ/business/finance/etc. departments for specialized institutes/departments. And even within finance, already degraded, the under-60 talent that does remain isn't doing stuff like loan origination or credit risk assessment for obvious reasons.
I think it's time to start strictly regulating things like credit scores. If not for reasons of privacy/equality, at least merely because the entire industry seems to be incompetent and getting worse.
I know "assume incompetence before evil intent" but all of this is so conveniently set up to be an instrument for oppressing and shutting down dissent.
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>isps giving out "correlation attacks as a service" to "i swear i'm a good actor" companies
>IMF recommends using ISP/OS/browsing history metadata for credit reports
>salary data is being sent to credit companies
I wish i could just only pick ISPs and jobs and houses and lenders and such which don't send information to tracking companies.
Sadly working for someone who pays you is illegal unless you report legal names, tax forms, and such to the government... and even making an online purchase without revealing your identity is difficult and questionably legal.
How viable it is to rent an apartment or buy a house, without letting others vacuum your personal information?
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The recent Chinese crackdown on tech entities and their use of data hints that the shape of the digital financial landscape depends sensitively on what is deemed acceptable (read: legal) information flow in any jurisdiction.
In this sense digital finance will be created by decree rather than as the unavoidable culmimation of some particular "tech innovation".
Underneath the huge risks there is always the potential that easier collection and dissemination of information will support a "better" financial system, somehow combining the best rather than the worst of "fin" and "tech".
Is it just me or is this article entirely unreadable due to the in-page scrollable HP ads in the background? The page breaks aren’t calculated correctly so I can’t see half the text. Sigh.
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Haven't they just been talking about changing how credit scores are made and take it out of the hands of private parties and let the government handle it?
Can anyone explain to me what credit score is and what it's used for? Does it have to have something to do with credit cards, taking loans or mortgages?
(I'm from Europe and I've never borrowed money. I even only use a prepaid credit card, always wondered what benefits a real credit card would even bring.)
I’d have thought browser history would be a very poor second to the “hard” metrics. If the credit companies were lacking data then they could probably do worse than look at your family history as far as credit goes.
Perhaps the long-term expectation is that people will be disappeared or dis-employed for their browsing history. If so, then your browsing history will be a predictor of your ability to repay a loan. A curiously valid predictor.
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Of course the IMF has it's own goals which are fairly easy to guess. It's no surprise that a 'credit score' is more a way to separate friends from enemies rather than a measure of creditworthiness.
It's interesting to think of machine learning let loose on the problem of a persons likelihood to pay back their bills. The uproar about the 'unfairness' of the decisions would be tremendous. No doubt that's already been done to a large extent, but the politics of the era won't allow it so there's bound to be a bit of tension in the system.
This is just yet another push by financial companies to impose on your freedom of speech. Why on earth do people keep pushing for private companies to become political activists?
They have already come for individual bank accounts, in the UK for example an activist named 'Tommy Robinson' [1] is not allowed to open a bank account due to his politics [*].
"What business of mine is it
So long they don’t take the yam
From my savouring mouth?"
Then they came for Trump, the former president of the United States [3]. Irrespective of your politics, do you believe that he should not be allowed to have money or do business?
"What business of mine is it
So long they don’t take the yam
From my savouring mouth?"
Now they come after sex workers on websites like OnlyFans [4], threatening the livelihoods of people doing perfectly legal business. Sure, OnlyFans did need to clean up their act - but we're talking here about the fringe, not the majority. I really also suspect PornHub were also targetted by payment processors not so long ago, but they kept more quiet about it.
"What business of mine is it
So long they don’t take the yam
From my savouring mouth?"
"And then one evening
As I sat down to eat my yam
A knock on the door froze my hungry hand.
The jeep was waiting on my bewildered lawn
Waiting, waiting in its usual silence."
- (Interlaced poem by Niyi Osundare [5])
[*] I would suggest to hear his speech at the Oxford Union address [2], rather than a heavily biased Wikipedia entry. The first two references in the Wikipedia article are simply links to news articles calling him far-right - not evidence in the slightest of him having far-right opinions. If you even have the slightest doubt in the news media, please watch the video before casting judgement.
"Tommy Robinson is not allowed to open a bank account"? What? After multiple frauds and also declaring himself bankrupt he might have difficulty finding a bank willing to take him as a customer but I'm unaware of anyway of anyone banning him from opening one.
It's worth considering whether the 'far-right', which probably just means stuff-that-everyone-thought-20-years-ago, would go the same route if they had the upper hand in the West currently.
Maybe it's all more just a matter of opportunity than it is belief system.
And someday they probably will have that chance. Each time one ideological group gains an edge in power, for some dumb reason they become convinced that they'll hold that edge forever. You can see this constantly here on HN with people gleefully celebrating the smiting of their ideological opponents by private corporations and their government string pullers. Each time I mention that this could be turned around on them someday, they always claim it's different this time because "we're on the right side of history" which of course is what every ideologue believes.
What should scare them, and everyone else, is the distinct possibility that things won't simply swing back into a previous state but rather some new state will arise and use this power against everyone else. When the woke crowd loses power, and they will, it might not be "the alt-right" that gets power but something along a completely different axis that no one is even imagining today. And they'll have all of these tools of control and oppression ready made for their abuse.
I consider such articles to be "test balloons" for ideas. If they encounter too much resistance, there is plausible deniability. If no, the idea creeps forward to a more formal setting.
I for one am thankful they're putting these pieces out. What they're describing is a straightforward result as the traditional surveillance industry (eg Equifax) merges with the nouveau surveillance industry (eg Google). We've had two decades of people ceding their computing autonomy to centralizing webapps, with critiques being dismissed as conspiratorial thinking. Despite growing up on scifi, most people in the tech industry seemingly need things to be written down to make the conclusion inescapable - this is always how "Web 2.0" was going to end up.
This is the standard misattribution that comes up all the time in bad faith, especially online. "[Organization] published X, therefore that's what they believe."
No, the IMF/NYT/News channel (or whoever) publishes opinion pieces all the time without agreeing with them.
You seem unaware that there are many opinion or whatever sections within organizations that are designed to publish things they consider provocative and of sufficient quality (and possibly by people in sufficient power to make their opinions into fact). And excellent example is the NYT regularly publishes opinion pieces from politicians all around the political spectrum. In other cases (CNN's Crossfire was a very bad example of this idea) the same organization tries to publish both Y and !Y often side by side to present a fuller view.
I disagree. I would welcome you to search for any number of truly provocative topics and you will see a chasm bordering. It is rarely a question of 'sufficient quality' as such is in the eye of the beholder. The issue is that of whether it can garner maximum amount of eyes with a minimum amount of real scrutiny.
What you might think is provocative, I see simply as topics that are designed to induce 'engagement'. While the two overlap, those are not the same thing.
In the end, editors have to decide whether it goes in. There needs to be a sufficient 'will' to make it happen. My point stands. There needs to be an internal support for any opinion pieces ( since that is the counter example you went with ).
Those over at https://patriots.win have been claiming this has been the plan for years. A slow move to a CCP style credit system and world government, led by the IMF (control through finances) and WHO (health experts managing governance)
Even the vice chair of Berkshire Hathaway has said he wanted a Chinese style system (among many others):
It’s been real interesting to watch the conspiracy theories blend and become reality in some cases.
Personally, I think it’s more of a lose collection of similar minded people leading to certain conclusions and/or outcomes. But it does feel like an economic victory in civilization ...
In any case, the easiest response is to remove yourself from the system as best as possible. Slowly getting grey'ed out by participating with the hivemind is no way to live.
> Even a well-paid expatriate moving to the United States can be caught in the conundrum of not getting a credit card for lack of credit record, and not having a credit record for lack of credit cards.
> Fintech resolves the dilemma by tapping various nonfinancial data: the type of browser and hardware used to access the internet, the history of online searches and purchases.
I enjoy the framing of this; give us the keys to the kingdom and we'll give you even more credit (to get yourself further into debt!)
Of course it won't stop there, better pay down that mortgage before you search or buy the "wrong" thing if you want to keep your house (they won't take it outright, just raise the interest rate on your loan because you now represent a higher risk based on "new information")
[1] https://blogs.imf.org/2020/12/17/what-is-really-new-in-finte...