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.
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?
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.
> advocating for mass individual consistent behavioral change is less than useless.
Again, the trend is to sound smart by saying it's hopeless. We behave much differently than prior generations in many ways. Heck, look at the rise of neo-right wing politics, the manosphere, YOLO investing, etc. Look at smoking, recycling, etc. Look at people using social media, when cell phones weren't universal for their parents
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.
I completely agree with you, but you cannot stop this train. Cash will continue to exist only as a loophole to be exercised by rich and connected individuals. Everyone else will be robbed by police for having "suspicious amounts of cash."
Cameras and other means of tracking cannot remove me from commerce. The problem isn't just the tracking. Cash requires no oversight to transact. If I am required to use a payment network, there are many third parties who get a say in what I can do. That's the biggest issue.
On the plus side, once cash is de facto outlawed, the US Supreme Court will be forced to finally step in on the subject. The removal of cash will force banks to authorize bank cards and accounts, no matter who. A bit later after that, they will be forced to give access everyone access to payment terminals and gateways.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
the contrarian optimist case against this dystopia of CBDCs and digital identity is that institutions themselves are too corrupt to adopt them. i met some people involved in a project to turn a government budget into a ledger and the resistance was that it would remove all the discretion from the system, and even technocrats forget that the discretion is its own reward in those places.
their entire plan is predicated on there being no alternative, and these world domination plans make some noise but they do not prevail.
The tokenization being talked about is minting digital tokens in a public blockchain to represent traditional assets.
Unlike decentralized cryptocurrencies, this blockchain is not decentralized and participating requires creating a wallet and having it whitelisted by a centralized controlling entity.
Some form of identification, KYC/AML process has always been required to be an investor or non-trivial financial transactions.
The benefits of tokenization over the traditional approach are fractional ownership, faster settlements and transfers, 24/7 market, etc.
>World Economic Forum founder Klaus Schwab was effectively forced out of his own globalist
God I hate the word globalist
>The WEF, as we know, is the controversial group that tells us that we, among many other controversial things, will “own nothing and be happy” by 2030.
The WEF hosts many viewpoints and doesnt have any real power, obsessing over them is usually the province of the same people who obsess over black rock which is where I am betting this is going.
>BlackRock has massive amounts of control and leverage over thousands of companies across all sectors valued at $4.35 Trillion.
And there it is. BlackRock usually takes a very safe stake, 1-10% in a lot of companies. Their influence is usually incredibly overstated, usually by youtube grifters.
>Trump has had a good relationship with BlackRock CEO Larry Fink.
Trump likes rich people, news at 11.
>tokenization is the new monetary financial system quietly transforming the world
Holy hell. Most tokenisation projects take something thats already roughly abstracted as a token, like shares, or home ownership, and shifts it to the blockchain. "OMG MY SHARES ARE BEING TRACKED IN A LEDGER" yeah always were.
>“It will be on one general ledger. Every investor, you and I, will have our own number, our own identification."
Every polity that I can think of already has investor tracking. ASX has CHESS. Trading and reputation systems are weak to sybil.
>Clearly, tokenization and digital ID are inseparable
Trading and Identification are inseparable. Digital trading and Digital ID are obviously the same.
>Digital ID is not just an app on a smartphone; that is the bait & switch. Digital ID is really about your personal credentials (KYC - Know Your Customer) tied to your internet and financial transactions.
Theres no bait and switch this has always been the case, and the app having KYC details is so extremely obvious that this article trying to twist it into extreme language is crazy. This is really "The elites want you to think the sky is blue" sort of shit.
>In effect, digital footprints are the new credit scores.
Credit agencies have wanted this data for a very long time. There might be abuses. Those can be resolved legislatively.
>Indeed, it is an unholy alliance: President Donald Trump yoking up with big-data harvesters such as Palantir, Oracle, and other big-tech companies to steal our private data and transactions, merged together with the likes of BlackRock, globalist institutions such as the UN, IMF, WEF, and the Federal Reserve and the BIS - Trump and Fink are working in lockstep together to build a digital prison state and a tokenized panopticon to usher in their “golden age,”
Read: Hi this is my first day on planet earth. Lots of these scary names are discussing things that frighten me, because I have never read a book or purchased shares in my life. Please hug me. Its impossible to steelman this raw fearmongering.
Of course, no scary article is complete without a bible quote
>Revelation 13:16 And he causeth all, both small and great, rich and poor, free and bond, to receive a mark in their right hand, or in their foreheads: [17] And that no man might buy or sell, save he that had the mark, or the name of the beast, or the number of his name. [18] Here is wisdom. Let him that hath understanding count the number of the beast: for it is the number of a man; and his number is Six hundred threescore and six.
Sorry but first up, the people who lap this shit up are largely idiots. I blame the US education system. If you have a problem with Credit scores, go do something about it politically. If you cease being american that will probably solve 99% of this.
The institutional investors operate in lock-step, so multiply the Blackrock stake by, at minimum, 3. Then take into account the massive reputational downsides to having institutional investors "pull out" of your company. I think that would make you untouchable to most of Wall Street. Just my opinion. The potential power here is enormous. Is it being abused? That's harder to prove. But when Larry says things like "you have to force behaviors" he really makes it hard to play devil's advocate.
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.
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.
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?
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.
3 replies →
> advocating for mass individual consistent behavioral change is less than useless.
Again, the trend is to sound smart by saying it's hopeless. We behave much differently than prior generations in many ways. Heck, look at the rise of neo-right wing politics, the manosphere, YOLO investing, etc. Look at smoking, recycling, etc. Look at people using social media, when cell phones weren't universal for their parents
It doesn't require politics.
>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.
5 replies →
> Spend it at local businesses.
The ones that still take it, anyway.
I completely agree with you, but you cannot stop this train. Cash will continue to exist only as a loophole to be exercised by rich and connected individuals. Everyone else will be robbed by police for having "suspicious amounts of cash."
cameras + machine learning trackable serialized bills
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
1 reply →
Cameras and other means of tracking cannot remove me from commerce. The problem isn't just the tracking. Cash requires no oversight to transact. If I am required to use a payment network, there are many third parties who get a say in what I can do. That's the biggest issue.
On the plus side, once cash is de facto outlawed, the US Supreme Court will be forced to finally step in on the subject. The removal of cash will force banks to authorize bank cards and accounts, no matter who. A bit later after that, they will be forced to give access everyone access to payment terminals and gateways.
Some countries almost completely cashless now. No escape from big brother
A reason to use cash is that transaction fees (like CC fees), over time, tend to eat up all the original money being transacted.
On the other hand, cash is a germ superhighway.
Taking out cash from ATM has higher fees often than using the credit card to pay
1 reply →
How does clutching to colored pieces of paper solve any problem? IMO, it only reinforces the pathology which is the cause of many of our problems.
You can't be tracked.
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.
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.
Cronyism is inevitable at scale, the UK's digital ID scheme is an obvious recent example.
Is there an online presence for the project or traces ?
Which powers at be do you mean? I’m not following.
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.
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
I wonder what BLACKROCK'S Social Credit Score would be???
You first, Larry. Any functional social credit would have him at "untouchable" levels.
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!
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.
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.
Read the Great Taking book, it's a bit kooky in some places but a good read nonetheless.
Every single time, huh guys.
Based
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.
Like forcing ESG wasn’t creepy enough. Social media is already too much herd mentality.
Um. This is a disturbing article but the source is a Christian website monitoring for the Apocalypse.
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.
For one, the WEF is not actually aiming for people to "own nothing and be happy," as the author states.
17 replies →
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.
It's interesting how people often have the same fears and enemies but express and interpret them in different ways.
I'd prefer to read about techno-dystopianism from a source that isn't actively looking and praying for signs of the end of the world...
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.
Hate is a powerful word. But I really hate this people. If you work on these projects, shame on you.
the contrarian optimist case against this dystopia of CBDCs and digital identity is that institutions themselves are too corrupt to adopt them. i met some people involved in a project to turn a government budget into a ledger and the resistance was that it would remove all the discretion from the system, and even technocrats forget that the discretion is its own reward in those places.
their entire plan is predicated on there being no alternative, and these world domination plans make some noise but they do not prevail.
The tokenization being talked about is minting digital tokens in a public blockchain to represent traditional assets.
Unlike decentralized cryptocurrencies, this blockchain is not decentralized and participating requires creating a wallet and having it whitelisted by a centralized controlling entity.
Some form of identification, KYC/AML process has always been required to be an investor or non-trivial financial transactions.
The benefits of tokenization over the traditional approach are fractional ownership, faster settlements and transfers, 24/7 market, etc.
>World Economic Forum founder Klaus Schwab was effectively forced out of his own globalist
God I hate the word globalist
>The WEF, as we know, is the controversial group that tells us that we, among many other controversial things, will “own nothing and be happy” by 2030.
The WEF hosts many viewpoints and doesnt have any real power, obsessing over them is usually the province of the same people who obsess over black rock which is where I am betting this is going.
>BlackRock has massive amounts of control and leverage over thousands of companies across all sectors valued at $4.35 Trillion.
And there it is. BlackRock usually takes a very safe stake, 1-10% in a lot of companies. Their influence is usually incredibly overstated, usually by youtube grifters.
>Trump has had a good relationship with BlackRock CEO Larry Fink.
Trump likes rich people, news at 11.
>tokenization is the new monetary financial system quietly transforming the world
Holy hell. Most tokenisation projects take something thats already roughly abstracted as a token, like shares, or home ownership, and shifts it to the blockchain. "OMG MY SHARES ARE BEING TRACKED IN A LEDGER" yeah always were.
>“It will be on one general ledger. Every investor, you and I, will have our own number, our own identification."
Every polity that I can think of already has investor tracking. ASX has CHESS. Trading and reputation systems are weak to sybil.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sybil_attack
>Clearly, tokenization and digital ID are inseparable
Trading and Identification are inseparable. Digital trading and Digital ID are obviously the same.
>Digital ID is not just an app on a smartphone; that is the bait & switch. Digital ID is really about your personal credentials (KYC - Know Your Customer) tied to your internet and financial transactions.
Theres no bait and switch this has always been the case, and the app having KYC details is so extremely obvious that this article trying to twist it into extreme language is crazy. This is really "The elites want you to think the sky is blue" sort of shit.
>In effect, digital footprints are the new credit scores.
Credit agencies have wanted this data for a very long time. There might be abuses. Those can be resolved legislatively.
>Indeed, it is an unholy alliance: President Donald Trump yoking up with big-data harvesters such as Palantir, Oracle, and other big-tech companies to steal our private data and transactions, merged together with the likes of BlackRock, globalist institutions such as the UN, IMF, WEF, and the Federal Reserve and the BIS - Trump and Fink are working in lockstep together to build a digital prison state and a tokenized panopticon to usher in their “golden age,”
Read: Hi this is my first day on planet earth. Lots of these scary names are discussing things that frighten me, because I have never read a book or purchased shares in my life. Please hug me. Its impossible to steelman this raw fearmongering.
Of course, no scary article is complete without a bible quote
>Revelation 13:16 And he causeth all, both small and great, rich and poor, free and bond, to receive a mark in their right hand, or in their foreheads: [17] And that no man might buy or sell, save he that had the mark, or the name of the beast, or the number of his name. [18] Here is wisdom. Let him that hath understanding count the number of the beast: for it is the number of a man; and his number is Six hundred threescore and six.
Sorry but first up, the people who lap this shit up are largely idiots. I blame the US education system. If you have a problem with Credit scores, go do something about it politically. If you cease being american that will probably solve 99% of this.
The institutional investors operate in lock-step, so multiply the Blackrock stake by, at minimum, 3. Then take into account the massive reputational downsides to having institutional investors "pull out" of your company. I think that would make you untouchable to most of Wall Street. Just my opinion. The potential power here is enormous. Is it being abused? That's harder to prove. But when Larry says things like "you have to force behaviors" he really makes it hard to play devil's advocate.
^^^^
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[flagged]
"The left" loves corporations? What corporations would those be? All leftists I know despise corporations.
"the left". It is a disservice to call that "the left", since it has nothing to do with left-wing policy.
But please explain to a noob like me how exactly those 401ks are enabling that, and what ESG have anything to do with mass surveillance?
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.
Old Soviet joke: government pretends to pay us, we pretend to work.
Zionization