algos / AI has already been used to justify racial discrimination in some counties who use predictive policing software to adjust the sentences of convicts (the software takes in a range of facts about the suspect and the incident and compares it to how prior incidents and suspects were similar features were adjudicated) and wouldn't you know it, it simply highlighted and exaggerated the prejudices of police and the courts to absurdity, giving whites absurdly lighter sentences than nonwhites, for example. This is essentially mind control or coercion technology based on the KGB technology of компромат (Kompromat, or compromising information, or as CIA calls it biographical leverage, ) essentially, information about a person that can be used either to jeopardize their life, blackmail material or means to lure and bribe them. Take this from tradecraft and apply it to marketing or civil control, and you get things like the Social Credit System in China to keep people from misbehaving, engaging in discontent and coming out of the closet (LGBTQ+ but there are plenty of other applicable closets). From a futurist perspective, we homo-sapiens appear just incapable of noping out of a technology or process, no matter how morally black or heinous that technology is, we'll use it, especially those with wealth and power to evade legal prosecution (or civil persecution). It breaks down into three categories: Technologies we use anyway, and suffer, e.g. usury, bonded servitude, mass-media propaganda distribution Technologies we collectively decide are just not worth the consequences, e.g. the hydrogen bomb, biochemical warfare Technologies for which we create countermeasures, usually turning into a tech race between states or between the public and the state, e.g. secure communication, secure data encryption, forbidden data distribution / censorship We're clearly on the cusp of mind control and weaponizing data harvesting into a coercion mechanism. Currently we're already seeing it used to establish and defend specific power structures that are antithetical to the public good. It's currently in the first category, and hopefully it'll fall into the third, because we have to make a mess (e.g. Castle Bravo / Bikini Atol) and clean it up before deciding not to do that again. Also, with the rise of the internet, we've run out of myths that justify capitalism, which is bonded servitude with extra steps. So we may soon (within centuries) see that go into one of the latter two categories, since the US is currently experiencing the endgame consequences of forcing labor, and the rest of the industrialized world is having to bulwark from the blast.

Yup, my grass does best under my trampoline.

Huh, looks like my days of having absolutely zero interest in going to Dubai are coming to a middle

It really depends on the company. Some look for any way to squeeze you. Others are pretty decent and probably more efficient as they dont waste as many working hours on bullshit claims and claim resolution. Also if i rent a car i want things to go smoothly. I got places to be. You make my life easy, ill happily pay again and do my best to make yours easy too.

After some further reading it seems obvious that the two incidents are entirely unrelated, but it was a fun rabbit hole for a sec!

Indeed I did not, we’re at a stalemate because you and I do not believe what the other is saying! So we can’t move anywhere since it’s two walls. Buuuut Tim Apple got my back for once, just saw this now!: https://lemmy.blahaj.zone/post/27197259 I’ll leave it at that, as thanks to that white paper I win! Yay internet points!

Divide and conquer. Non state-actors and special interest have a far easier time attacking a hundred small entities than one big one. Because people have much less bandwidth to track all this shit than it is to spread it around. See ALEC and the strategy behind state rights. In the end this is about economic power. The only way to curb it is through a democratic government. Lemmy servers too can be bought and sold and the communities captured that grew on them.