SIM card registration

My wife bought 2 sim cards yesterday, no questions asked.

 

I'd imagine the requirement will be aupon registration or a request from the provider at some later point.

Those governments that can get their "citizens" to comply with this will no doubt enforce it softly or otherwise one way or another in the name of protecting "your own goodself "

Upset those powers to be and you will be switched off, now I suggest barcoding everyone at birth, IMO that's the next step in this slippery slope to an Ai dominated world

 

The law on SCR is not actually in force yet. Many government bodies here don't know the rules they apply - with different offices having different interpretations or simply not knowing a new national law. So we are now dealing with stores and their staff (possibly even less knowledgeable than government staff??) who may have heard about the new law and rush to implement it without a clue when it becomes enforceable. Thus some report here being asked for ID and some for none - any store can justify asking for ID as they have no compulsion to sell (they offer a product under their terms and we accept if we agree and hand over the cash).

Eventually everyone who buys a sim card will have to provide ID and those with existing cards will have 6 months from the enactment of the new law to register them (which will mostly be online).

But I have read of text blasting via the internet - sending masses of texts without needing a sim card at all - and so I wonder if the new law will prevent much of what it is supposed to. I suspect the criminals are the ones will be least affected (as in gun law in the UK where I paid a lot of cash to have my 4-cartridge shotgun reduced to 3! The criminals opted out!).

@Garcia mentions barcoding at birth and he might not be far off - implanting a chip is not impossible to imagine, after all, as he says, it's all for our benefit! As will be the transition from cash to a (mostly) cashless society - where they will have records of everyone's transaction (where and what).

 

These mass Data collects are not to catch or stop any Bad blokes, that's bollocks, as they will always find a way round things as that's how their minds work. And so would yours if needs must.

As for the coming cashless society, pretty obvious where that's leading to. Obey or your money plug will be switched off.

The worst people are those that say and quote...
"If you're not doing anything wrong then you got nothing to worry about" naive at best being polite.

Explaining what one's Carbon Footprint to some over here is neigh on impossible and with the event of DIMDUM TikTok what chance has any awareness or intelligence really got? Owned of course by the Chinese! Makes you think what a smart piece of propaganda it is. They even don't want their own race to be aware of anything. Much better than films, just saying....

Once Ai makes it's own first decision we are history especially as they'll terminate all the barcoded ASAP.

Nothing in this post provides any financial advice about the future just so we all clear.... (-:

I'd add we're f*cked but not today....

 

Just be nice and hope for tomorrow!

 

Said in jest so added...

 

Obviously the idea that this law requiring sim-card registration "is needed to combat evil elements sending mass sms messages to non suspecting users with the aim to commit fraud" is the product of wishful thinking (but was very much the core argument in debates in the senate).

However, the stubborn defense/promotion of unregulated everything by libertarians and their sympathizers on the one hand and believers in multiple conspiracy theories on the other is also not the answer.
I just need to point to the abject failure of crypto currencies in giving the general public confidence that this is the "money of the future" to illustrate that unregulated money can not succeed. And especially in the case of crypto, regulation was inevitable from the start, unless you're willing to accept as "business as usual" ongoing abuse by criminals and a continuing stream of institutional failures (from the early demise of the Mt.Gox exchange all the way to the recent FTX collapse) leading to massive financial losses for the public.

Money is just one example of things that can't and shouldn't be unregulated, and unless you'd want humanity to return to the days of barter trade, that regulation is unavoidable.
The other aspect of regulation is a little more philosophical, and has to do with taxes. If you believe like me that governments being able to collect taxes is vital to its ability to provide necessary public services that individuals could not efficiently organize (police, fire brigade, just to name a few) and to support those that can not look after themselves (social benefits), then unregulated money is a surefire recipe for governments to collapse everywhere.

 

That's a bit offtopic but anyway:

Failure of specific actors (due to personal greed or technical failure or whatever else) doesn't necessarily mean that the general idea of introducing a means of online value exchange between individuals that cannot be tracked or interfered with by third parties is a bad thing or can't work.

Unfortunately the huge amount of money poured into "crypto" by clueless investors looking for the next big thing led to an influx of fraudsters that invented bullshit nobody needs (NFTs anybody?) just to give them something to throw money at. Gives the whole thing a bad image, but that doesn't mean that the original idea of providing cash-like transactions online is bad.

I don't think BTC etc in their current form are really the solution to the payments problem - it isn't really comparable to cash in terms of privacy (the blockchain is a gigantic public ledger, so all transactions are visible for everybody and staying anonymous is hard in practice), and it costs the equivalent of a small countries' energy consumption to run these networks.

For all the same reasons that anonymous / private communication is a good thing, anonymous / private payments are a good thing. Offline you take that for granted (or would you invite some govt official to listen in on every conversation you have or record any cash payment you make?), and in a world where many things move "online", these basic rights have to be taken care of in that space, too. That's why having a cash equivalent in the online world would be a good thing.

Of course all freedoms come with side effects / can be abused by bad actors, like idiots abusing (perceived) anonymity online, money laundering etc, but that's always the case and whatever you do, a reasonably motivated criminal will always find a way. A wiser man once said "once you take away all freedoms in the name of fighting crime, what's left to fight for actually?"

As for the taxes and oh so poor goverments: It's a fact that goverments have always been able to collect taxes, even before the invention of the internet, even when people where still exchanging gold coins.

Making tax collection _easier_ for the state is not citizen's duty, and it's certainly not a valid reason to give them (or anybody else) access to absolutely all financial transactions. Same with the SIM registration (which is law for years in Germany as well, btw) and other surveillance mechanisms - just because it may make it easier in certain cases to catch a criminal, doesn't mean it's a good thing.

 

I read that this is the domain of Gen X - that makes me worried about my future!

It seems the US government already records every phone conversation and text message. Whatsapp - that great bastion of privacy - admitted they employ (or employed?) 1000 contractors to read so-called private messages (the 'contractor' status means they can deny THEIR employees are reading messages).

Brilliant! But that is what is happening and the future the next generations face (IF we get there).

I agree wholeheartedly that I want a means of transferring MY money from one place to another without being interrogated for an hour as to WHAT I will be spending it on. Once they have established it is MY money and have received my disclaimer that they cannot be sued if I am being scammed, then what I do with it becomes solely my choice. Whichever method I use to move money, I come up against the UK banking system and their over-the-top control. Do they really think that terrorists are going to say they are moving money to buy weapons???

 

A number of very valid true points, regards - It seems the US government already records every phone conversation and text message. Absolutely true, touch of a button and your whole life will appear for scrutiny, this is the world we now live in. No turning back that clock, I'd rather be aware of this than as ignorant as a prole which most of the world’s population are.

Wikileaks has shown what certain governments get up to in secret in the name of our freedoms and democracy and to what ends that government will go to silence not just Assange but the press in general. To quote: "Those who would give up essential Liberty, to purchase a little temporary Safety, deserve neither Liberty nor Safety." This often comes up in the context of new technology and concerns about government surveillance. Unfortunately they governments all do it, China being a main culprit.