• cattown 3 hours ago

    Use cash. Get cash out at the ATM, keep it in your wallet. Spend it at local businesses. Even if you can’t do it all the time do it as much as you can. Start today and stick with it.

    Otherwise this is what we’ll be stuck with everywhere all the time. There won’t be a choice anymore if you don’t exercise that right. We’re already far down this slippery slope.

    • idle_zealot 2 hours ago

      And advocating for mass individual consistent behavioral change is less than useless. If you want change you need political organization. The sum of public opinion is more influenceable than the sum of everyone's actions. Unfortunately, in the US it's not so simple as "vote for the party that's against this" as we only have two and neither are. Which means if you want to be effective you should throw your lot in with an advocacy group. In this case probably the EFF, maybe the ACLU?

      • sequin 2 hours ago

        Many people (not the EFF or ACLU, lol) saw it coming years ago and put in a monumental effort to try to turn to tide, only to be relentlessly repressed and dehumanized by bolsheviks and idiots.

        • leptons 32 minutes ago

          >we only have two and neither are.

          Both sides are not the same. One side wants to criminalize protests, the other side actually respond to protests. So vote for the side that will listen to protests.

        • mrdarkies 3 hours ago

          cameras + machine learning trackable serialized bills

          • Almondsetat 3 hours ago

            Yeah, people forget bills have a serial code, and if shops were required by law to validate them you could still mostly track all the money

            • calciphus 2 hours ago

              Or if it was just valuable tracking data for them to have.

              You don't need a law where there's profit incentives. Rewards programs track plenty.

        • socketcluster 29 minutes ago

          I co-founded a holiday real estate-backed crypto project in 2019. We only raised $50k though. Just enough to buy 1 unit in South Africa. We started using profits to do on-chain token buybacks with proof of burn. We proved the concept but scale was too small with just one apartment. It was a really cool concept though. Too bad the powers-that-be didn't select us.

          The main problem with blockchain projects is that they're not decentralized in the way that counts. You still have to be chosen by the powers-that-be. There's still only one path to success; just like the rest of the tech sector.

          • narrator 37 minutes ago

            Thanks to Blackrock owning voting shares on behalf of 401k holders that control most publicly traded companies, the World Economic Forum's ESG score functions as a defacto means of centrally planning the world's economy. This is why the left loves corporations now.

            • jongjong 23 minutes ago

              Yes it's some weird faux-communism with all of the problems of communism and none of its benefits.

              At least communism must pretend to serve the common man.

              There's a point where I'd rather live in a system which at least pretends to serve people... Then at least we'd get some half-assed semblance of fairness and the discrepancies would be a subject of conversation...

              When you live in a system and adhere to its rules, it's nice to be getting something of approximately equal value in return.

            • tcdent an hour ago

              All you need to read is the manipulative marketing buzzword jargon littered throughout articles like this to realize they do not have your best interests in mind.

              • nakamoto_damacy 12 minutes ago

                Zionization

                • storus 2 hours ago

                  Dude who became powerful by the simplest business model in existence (buying S&P winners with other people's money, selling losers), suddenly gets to set the policy for the rest of the world. Index funds should never be allowed to vote in corporations they own as their business model is just a simple rental of success.

                  • gruez 44 minutes ago

                    You're barking up the wrong tree with this because index funds typically vote according to whatever the proxy advisory firm's recommendations are.

                    https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Proxy_firm

                  • AlexandrB 3 hours ago

                    What I find funny about this is that cryptocurrency - a supposed way to create a currency independent of bank or government control - laid the foundation for this. Look at all the terminology Larry Fink is throwing around here: tokens, ledger, fractional ownership.

                    Good stuff, thanks guys!

                    • IncreasePosts 2 hours ago

                      Cryptocurrency did not lay the foundation for a ledger. That's been around for over 500 years. And fractional ownership was well understood before computers, but viewed as not worth the effort.

                      • gessha 2 hours ago

                        In popularized the terms because cryptobros made it their life mission to advocate for it. The sermons had to explain all the terminology GP mentioned.

                      • kogasa240p 2 hours ago

                        Read the Great Taking book, it's a bit kooky in some places but a good read nonetheless.

                      • viccis 3 hours ago

                        You first, Larry. Any functional social credit would have him at "untouchable" levels.

                        • slowhadoken 2 hours ago

                          Like forcing ESG wasn’t creepy enough. Social media is already too much herd mentality.

                          • zigzagger11 an hour ago

                            Um. This is a disturbing article but the source is a Christian website monitoring for the Apocalypse.

                            • sbuttgereit an hour ago

                              It's a fair point. I actually posted the article mostly to get discussion... and before I realized exactly what the rest of the website was about. So I would urge taking things in that spirit, including feeling free to call out that the assertions in the article are wrong in fact or interpretation.

                              I do think it raises some fair questions about the drive to certain forms of digital commerce and identification. Perhaps, just because you're paranoid doesn't mean they aren't out to get you.... at least sometimes...

                              For the record, I've seen no convincing evidence for the existence of a divine presence of any sort and don't support most of the site's messaging. Sure, we could be on the edge of real apocalypse, but am very doubtful that, should that day come, it will be the Christian Apocalypse or the same prophesied from any other faith for that matter.

                              • zigzagger11 an hour ago

                                For one, the WEF is not actually aiming for people to "own nothing and be happy," as the author states.

                                • Lammy 33 minutes ago
                                  • narrator 34 minutes ago

                                    The WEF did publish an article that said that. They may have deleted it by now because of all the bad press it generated.

                                    • shwaj 29 minutes ago

                                      Maybe Klaus shouldn’t have said it then.

                                  • EvanAnderson 31 minutes ago

                                    I remember the local evangelical TV station running "documentaries" about the "mark of the beast" and "cashless societies" when I was a kid in the early 90s. I assume this is more of that.

                                    • leptons 23 minutes ago

                                      Way back in the 90's I used to date a pretty crazy Christian girl who saw my tech prowess as useful for fighting "the mark of the beast" which she thought was some kind of future government electronic ID. While she was kind of nuts about Christian conspiracies, I actually kind of agreed about where we were headed with electronic surveillance - even back in the 90's we kind of saw this coming.

                                    • varispeed an hour ago

                                      That's how democracy was bypassed. Whoever you vote for, they'll do what Fink says, not what voters choose.

                                      In the UK, it's the duty of MI5 to ensure such corruption of state doesn't happen. See how well they protect British public:

                                      https://www.reddit.com/r/LabourUK/comments/1gx4qoa/keir_star...

                                      https://www.gov.uk/government/news/new-digital-id-scheme-to-...

                                      Security services should start doing their job and restore our democracies.

                                      • pharos92 2 hours ago

                                        Hate is a powerful word. But I really hate this people. If you work on these projects, shame on you.