Yeah. It's not imaginary or hypothetical. It's already happening. Millions of people in the US alone have had their information compromised, and once it's out, it's out.
And yet the craziest thing is, here in slashdot, here where people are supposed to be paying attention, where teh bad guys are starting to flex their muscles and file fraudulent returns, because they now have so much datat they can impersonote real people, sinec I don't blame it on teh IRS, I'm called a troll.
The IRS wasn't hacked that we know about, it's a whole lot of other places, and they have our Social security, our credit card numbers, our drivers license numbers, our employee records, and all that makes an digital doppleganger of us. And those chickens are coming home to roost.
It's just such a pity no one saw this coming. Who knew? Yeah - that's sarcasm.
It's laughable that they criticize Apple for not building in backdoors, when they are so obviously incapable of keeping any info from those backdoors a secret. China is outclassing them in every way and it's time we get a President like Trump who's at least capable of knowing there's a problem, unlike the "mainstream" crooks and liars.
So you're against people criticizing Apple for not building backdoors into their software but then you claim we need Trump as the president who has said he's going to force Apple to build in backdoors? Excellent troll is excellent!
If I might, Irascable Bill Maher has some insight to the issue -Lies are the new truth.
That Internet of Things phoning home is some sort of secret, you've been living under a rock the last few years. Phoning home is what they are designed to do. It's the core principle of the IoT.
What Disney did is specifically against the intent AND letter of how the H1B program was written.
Exactly, they circumvented a law that was standing in the way of the free market. Creating a freer market than was legal, resulting in an American competing against all of India. And in all of India there or course existed more talented people who wanted the job more than the American.
You've made it the whole way to internet troll. You mad bro?
That is happening, it is just happening for Asians. The free market is providing jobs and training to the most needy. Indians need these jobs more so the free market is giving them to them. What you are looking for is some form of communism designed to protect a privileged class that gives jobs and resources not to the needy or skilled but to the upper classes.
How odd your posts are. The idea of hiring citizens of another country to replace citizens of your own country is inherently short sighted and counterproductive, but to brand what would have ot be an extermely mild version of nationalism as communism by people who think that there is an economic basis for hiring citizens of one's own country just takes it to a new extreme.
I mean your concept of hiring the most needy foreign citizens to replace the "upper classes", makes me suspect you sing The internationale every night before you go to bed.
I never said that anything good would follow from the free market. In a free market, given cheap transport, every single person in America would be out of a job.
The economy would eventually settle down with Americans settling for far less then they have been accustomed, but the starving Africans and Indians would be doing far better than they are now. Probably save millions a year from starvation and create a classless utopia; But those are things Liberals want, not me.
Holy smokey spoons! Liberals wanting a free market? Wat's dis world a-commin to?
This is what your Free Market paradise would be like.
Is your ideology so important to you that that's how you would like to live?
The answer, for true capitalsts is - As long as I got mine, this gives me a woody!
The problem of course, is that modern day American Corporatism is pathologically short sighted. The three month cycle rules.
So for some weird reason, they have lost sight of the concept that you need people to buy stuff in order to make money. This is probably an extension of the concept of the employee as enemy number one, someone to be rid of if at all possible, that corporatists have been chanting for a long time.
But just between us chachalacas, it might seem that the best way for people to spend money is for them to have money to spend in the first place. In the end, it makes more sense to have as many people making and spending money as possible.
But individual prosperity which was once thought of as a good thing to the point of being a given, has now become crazy talk.
Meanwhile once decently paid workers in IT, now unemployed, or maybe working at the drive through at McDonalds, and getting food stamps and Government assistance, possibly moving into section 8 housing because they don't have an employable skill set any more, are a drain on the country, and being replaced by someone who isn't making anywhere as much, and is probably sending a good chunk of that change back to to India - well, I doubt either group will be affording to go to DisneyWorld. It's a triple hit. All money being drained from teh economy.
And at some point, the "make everyone as poor as possible" will end up being a detriment to companies like Disneyworld, who let's face it, are completely built on people having money to spend on things that if they disappeared, whouldn't make a bit of difference in the world.
I have this weird dream, that if people have money to spend, they will spend it, and bring wealth to others, who will make and do more things, which will be sold to people who have money to spend.......
Somehow that has been turned upside down. Somehow, some way, lowering the average wage is the path to wealth.
Then don't call it free market. Call it regulated market and be done with it.
Who cares? No such thing nor will ther ever be - a free market.
The free market is mere mental masturbation, where people are somehow greedy, but will never ever do anything that jeopardizes the free market. When in fact, as soon as any greed based system has a major player, the first thing they do is work the system so they have a permanent advantage.
So by that logic, all things motorised should use the Chrysler Viper 8.4 liter V10 640 horsepower engine, one of the most powerful combustion engine ever to be put in a car.
It's the free market at work. If these jobs keep paying better and better, more and more people will get the training to go into the field and balance it out. But that's not happening because...
I teach computer information science at a college. We have a hard time recruiting students into the program because they pretty much all say they don't want to spend years learning how to be a programmer when all of the jobs are being replaced by foreigners or outsourced overseas.
My son was going to go into CS some years ago, I talked him out of it when the first wave of outsourcing hit, seeing the writing on the wall.
I always wondered, since American workers are considered so overpaid, wouldn't it make sense for the corporations to fire all of us, find the area of the world where people are paid the least, and hire them at just a few pennies above what they are making there.
Then all of the unemployed Americans will buy all that stuff they do now, and corporate profits will be wonderful. Sounds like the perfect solution! A new golden age of Capitalist nirvana...
You are not describing "capitalism" or "capitalist". Good grief go read the fucking books! The reason Capitalism works is because it's balanced on all ends.
Definition 123,555,876,095 of how capitalism is. A couple days ago it was maximum profits for minimum costs. Before that, it was total efficiency. None of those definitions are balanced in any way.
And, hey, these were from people who define themselves as Capitalists. So We may be onto a "No True Capitalist" argument.
Being a programmer is the most lucrative job for a kid out of school. Where else would they go? A shift leader at a local Pier One? Believe it or not they hire business majors at malls. Talk about a slap in the face after $40,000 worth of education.
Your kids can go to where the jobs are at too fresh out of school
We are seeing the ending scenario of a many decades long project in education. The "If you do not have a degree, you are a failure as a human being" model.
It has been hammered into our heads - I know at leaast since I was in high school, where I got a personal visit from teh Principle of my school after choosing a dual high school major of academic and technical school. To sum up, even though I had elected to do something difficult, He told me I'd be thought of as stupid for having anything to do with the technical classes and should just stick to academics.
So I'm certain that this Tekkers iz teh dumazzes, was played out most everywhere, and as my generation grew up and had children, the mantra became "A college degree at any cost!
Which Universities were happy to provide. Along with the shift from Corporate based research, the Universities were expanding, and with that expansion came lots and lots and lots of administrators and accountants.
But as time went on, the increased costs were starting to make the system a little creaky. But student loans to the rescue! So now the brakes were off, this train is bound for glory!
And we have professional beggars working at highly paid positions in Universities, who's job it is to shake down graduates for more money. One woman who worked with me was continually being called by the professional beggars.
Except that now, unless you are in a very few majors, you are going to graduate with a starter home worth of debt, and the prospects of getting a job that will allow you to pay it down in a reasonable time are pretty slim.
And how is corporate college America going to continue their growth? There are very few low paid people to terminate. Next cuts will be in administrators, and that's a mortal sin.
The system has failed. And it's going to be a helluva trick to fix it.
And you seem to have missed I have no money at this point. Bringing up a 'vacation' now is so funny... I haven't had money for one of those in over six years. Actually more than that as I had a fiance nearly six years ago and giving in to her random whims took any money I had for vacations..
While I feel badly for you, the answer is in that part of the sentence I quoted. Money management.
I remember back in 1979, when I was a lowly technician, listening to a couple engineers who were making over 100K at the time with the same lament as you have. These couple guys were living paycheck to paycheck, both single, and 100K in 1979 was nothing to sneeze at. But yeah, they couldn't afford to go on vacation, while I was making a heck of a lot less than they were, and was taking vacations, as well as putting money in the bank.
So now you gotta figure out how to live within your means. Don't get pissed, this isn't calling you stupid or anything, you just need to pick up a helpful skill.
One side pushes for education? All I see is bullshit unions sacrificing children to make sure they get their mordida. In general, these unions support race-baiting politicians because they think it's easier to blame peoples' skin color for a problem instead of their socio-economic class. Why is anyone voting for any congress member that supports these H1B-type programs? I haven't a clue.
You forgot to add Social Justice Warriers, pension funds, All Deomcrats and welfare queens and anchor babies, and most of all BENGHAZI! In short, Libtards, eh?
In teh case of a company like WalMart to "suggest" that it's employees vote a certain way, it becomes a WalMart issue, as well as a political one. There are those among us, inclusing myself, who have an issue with WalMart demanding my Tax dollars to subsidize their loww low prices every day.
So I think you can take away from the "suggestions" on how you should vote, is that they won't benefit you.
There has sometimes been some pressure to remove tax exempt status from churches when their preachers tell them that they have to vote a certain way to be in compliance with God's will.
But if your company wants you to vote a certain way, they can "suggest" it, and in at will https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/... they can fire you for not voting they way they "suggest"
100% preventable,, mostly kids, our spiritual & physical allies all over the wwworld... calling it/us society must be another madison ave, tackdick? like cold or civil war? all part of our wmd on credit greed fear ego based never ending holycost.. talk about a fairytail... truth+mercy=justice !in the moms we trust!.
Holy crap, see what happens when you hid a stoner's Fritos?
"While it is so popular to blame the government, And no doubt many will, there is a basis for this, and it isn't the government, it is us."
That's stupid enough. The IRS is one of the most important data holders about everyone, and they should be required to protect the data they handle, and they should be punishable with the highest possible penalties, since they should be held by higher standards than everyone else, including companies.
Very nice screed and all, but you could line up every IRS employee, push them off a cliff, and it wouldn't cure a thing. You do understand how this fraud is happening don't you?
People who have personal information on the internet, and that is most of us, have had that information stolen. Social security, credit information, payroll information. The bad guys involved have made up artificial people who are indistinguishable from the real people without some fairly deep scrutiny.
When the bad guy knows your name, social security, driver's license, credit card numbers, home address, place of work, medical records, and credit history, they can make up a pretty convincing you.
Think Target, think Home Depot, then know that they are the tip of the iceberg.
Given that the personal info is out there, and wasn't compromised by the IRS, but used by the perps to make up an artificial you, how would you suggest that the IRS handle this? DNA tests for everyone?
And there is, I suspect, the bigger problem. I have a pretty good suspicion that for political reasons, you have a deep and abiding hatred of the IRS. So there probably isn't any scenario under which you wouldn't blame them.
But know that pre-determination of the guilty party seldom results in fixing the problem. You want to be pissed at the IRS and guvmint, by all means have at it. But that isn't where the perps are getting their data to make up their artificial people.
It's not an/imaginary crisis/, it's a/hypothetical crisis/.
A hypothetical is something that *could* happen but under certain circumstances.
Imaginary is simply 'not real' -- existing only in your imagination.
The latter is/technically/ correct, but not really correct, and changes the meaning.
It's effectively the difference between "Oh this can't happen" and "This could really happen".
All very nice, but you missed the part about it going on as we speak. for all the stories that we do hear, like Hollywood Hospital's paying ransom to hackers, Target and Home Depot's data being hacked, and now some of those compromised Social security and other stolen data being used to file fraudulent tax returns - there are the daily data thefts we don't hear about. There is nothing hypothetical about it. The only thing that didn't sound like "didn't this already happen?" from TFA was the business of a girl being killed because her health records were altered.
The only thing protecting us is that at the present moment, the bad guys have a vested interest in keeping their fraud at a level that does not topple the institutions they are parasitizing.
Actually, GP just made a point, which you ignored and decided instead to be insulting. Presumably because you don't have a reasonable counterpoint. So... you're kinda the one that doesn't look very smart.
The problem is, that the invisible hand of th free market will not do one goddamned thing. Not one little bitty thing about a free market company losing the data. Your data is lost, not doing any more business with them won't make one little bit of difference. It's got, the bad guys have it, now they use it.
And since these data breaches were not committed by the government, it's doubly stupid to blame the government.
Insulting? I have no patience for willful stupidity, for those who trot out stock bugaboos for every single problem, then strut about like little cock-a-whoops, basking in the glow of the bernevolent smiles and stupid grins of those who actually are impressed by having one answer for every problem. so you're damned right I wanted to be insulting.
Private company loses your data, you stop doing business with them. IRS loses your data, fuck you.
Private company negligent with your data, private company gets sued and maybe criminally charged. IRS negligent with your data, fuck you. IRS workers keep their jobs, no one faces any consequences. Except you. Because fuck you.
Don't be a stupid anarchist. Once your data is stolen, it is out there forever. You figure the bad guys are going to say "Oh that company we stole data from went out of business bdecause of the invisible had of the free market, so we'll have to steal it all over again?"
No, once they steal your SS number, and I know of a lot of non-governmental breaches - they have the keys to the Kingdom. provided by the lax network security, that most Private industry networks incorporate.
Don't be so anti-government that you make all of your ilk look like they have IQ's of 10. Because you are sounding so incredibly stupid now, you make the government you hate so much look like a great alternative to anything you could come up with.
Slashdot Mirror
Yeah. It's not imaginary or hypothetical. It's already happening. Millions of people in the US alone have had their information compromised, and once it's out, it's out.
And yet the craziest thing is, here in slashdot, here where people are supposed to be paying attention, where teh bad guys are starting to flex their muscles and file fraudulent returns, because they now have so much datat they can impersonote real people, sinec I don't blame it on teh IRS, I'm called a troll.
The IRS wasn't hacked that we know about, it's a whole lot of other places, and they have our Social security, our credit card numbers, our drivers license numbers, our employee records, and all that makes an digital doppleganger of us. And those chickens are coming home to roost.
It's just such a pity no one saw this coming. Who knew? Yeah - that's sarcasm.
It's laughable that they criticize Apple for not building in backdoors, when they are so obviously incapable of keeping any info from those backdoors a secret. China is outclassing them in every way and it's time we get a President like Trump who's at least capable of knowing there's a problem, unlike the "mainstream" crooks and liars.
So you're against people criticizing Apple for not building backdoors into their software but then you claim we need Trump as the president who has said he's going to force Apple to build in backdoors? Excellent troll is excellent!
If I might, Irascable Bill Maher has some insight to the issue -Lies are the new truth.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?...
The person who you are replying to has no problem with holding contradictory thoughts.
That Internet of Things phoning home is some sort of secret, you've been living under a rock the last few years. Phoning home is what they are designed to do. It's the core principle of the IoT.
What Disney did is specifically against the intent AND letter of how the H1B program was written.
Exactly, they circumvented a law that was standing in the way of the free market. Creating a freer market than was legal, resulting in an American competing against all of India. And in all of India there or course existed more talented people who wanted the job more than the American.
You've made it the whole way to internet troll. You mad bro?
That is happening, it is just happening for Asians. The free market is providing jobs and training to the most needy. Indians need these jobs more so the free market is giving them to them. What you are looking for is some form of communism designed to protect a privileged class that gives jobs and resources not to the needy or skilled but to the upper classes.
How odd your posts are. The idea of hiring citizens of another country to replace citizens of your own country is inherently short sighted and counterproductive, but to brand what would have ot be an extermely mild version of nationalism as communism by people who think that there is an economic basis for hiring citizens of one's own country just takes it to a new extreme.
I mean your concept of hiring the most needy foreign citizens to replace the "upper classes", makes me suspect you sing The internationale every night before you go to bed.
Despite Disney's actions, the future looks really bright for tech workers.
Just not American ones.
I never said that anything good would follow from the free market. In a free market, given cheap transport, every single person in America would be out of a job. The economy would eventually settle down with Americans settling for far less then they have been accustomed, but the starving Africans and Indians would be doing far better than they are now. Probably save millions a year from starvation and create a classless utopia; But those are things Liberals want, not me.
Holy smokey spoons! Liberals wanting a free market? Wat's dis world a-commin to?
This is what your Free Market paradise would be like.
Is your ideology so important to you that that's how you would like to live?
The answer, for true capitalsts is - As long as I got mine, this gives me a woody!
The problem of course, is that modern day American Corporatism is pathologically short sighted. The three month cycle rules.
So for some weird reason, they have lost sight of the concept that you need people to buy stuff in order to make money. This is probably an extension of the concept of the employee as enemy number one, someone to be rid of if at all possible, that corporatists have been chanting for a long time.
But just between us chachalacas, it might seem that the best way for people to spend money is for them to have money to spend in the first place. In the end, it makes more sense to have as many people making and spending money as possible.
But individual prosperity which was once thought of as a good thing to the point of being a given, has now become crazy talk.
Meanwhile once decently paid workers in IT, now unemployed, or maybe working at the drive through at McDonalds, and getting food stamps and Government assistance, possibly moving into section 8 housing because they don't have an employable skill set any more, are a drain on the country, and being replaced by someone who isn't making anywhere as much, and is probably sending a good chunk of that change back to to India - well, I doubt either group will be affording to go to DisneyWorld. It's a triple hit. All money being drained from teh economy.
And at some point, the "make everyone as poor as possible" will end up being a detriment to companies like Disneyworld, who let's face it, are completely built on people having money to spend on things that if they disappeared, whouldn't make a bit of difference in the world.
I have this weird dream, that if people have money to spend, they will spend it, and bring wealth to others, who will make and do more things, which will be sold to people who have money to spend.......
Somehow that has been turned upside down. Somehow, some way, lowering the average wage is the path to wealth.
Then don't call it free market. Call it regulated market and be done with it.
Who cares? No such thing nor will ther ever be - a free market.
The free market is mere mental masturbation, where people are somehow greedy, but will never ever do anything that jeopardizes the free market. When in fact, as soon as any greed based system has a major player, the first thing they do is work the system so they have a permanent advantage.
So by that logic, all things motorised should use the Chrysler Viper 8.4 liter V10 640 horsepower engine, one of the most powerful combustion engine ever to be put in a car.
Worst
"By that logic"
Argument
Ever!!
So your definition of a free market is a market where a company is restricted from hireling the best person for the job?
S your definition of the best person for the job is only the cheapest person for the job?
Your job won't exist in 10 years because of Google. You best be looking for your next gig. (Busking?)
Could be no one's job will.
It's the free market at work. If these jobs keep paying better and better, more and more people will get the training to go into the field and balance it out. But that's not happening because...
I teach computer information science at a college. We have a hard time recruiting students into the program because they pretty much all say they don't want to spend years learning how to be a programmer when all of the jobs are being replaced by foreigners or outsourced overseas.
My son was going to go into CS some years ago, I talked him out of it when the first wave of outsourcing hit, seeing the writing on the wall.
I always wondered, since American workers are considered so overpaid, wouldn't it make sense for the corporations to fire all of us, find the area of the world where people are paid the least, and hire them at just a few pennies above what they are making there.
Then all of the unemployed Americans will buy all that stuff they do now, and corporate profits will be wonderful. Sounds like the perfect solution! A new golden age of Capitalist nirvana...
Oh.......wait.......
You are not describing "capitalism" or "capitalist". Good grief go read the fucking books! The reason Capitalism works is because it's balanced on all ends.
Definition 123,555,876,095 of how capitalism is. A couple days ago it was maximum profits for minimum costs. Before that, it was total efficiency. None of those definitions are balanced in any way.
And, hey, these were from people who define themselves as Capitalists. So We may be onto a "No True Capitalist" argument.
Being a programmer is the most lucrative job for a kid out of school. Where else would they go? A shift leader at a local Pier One? Believe it or not they hire business majors at malls. Talk about a slap in the face after $40,000 worth of education.
Your kids can go to where the jobs are at too fresh out of school
We are seeing the ending scenario of a many decades long project in education. The "If you do not have a degree, you are a failure as a human being" model. It has been hammered into our heads - I know at leaast since I was in high school, where I got a personal visit from teh Principle of my school after choosing a dual high school major of academic and technical school. To sum up, even though I had elected to do something difficult, He told me I'd be thought of as stupid for having anything to do with the technical classes and should just stick to academics.
So I'm certain that this Tekkers iz teh dumazzes, was played out most everywhere, and as my generation grew up and had children, the mantra became "A college degree at any cost!
Which Universities were happy to provide. Along with the shift from Corporate based research, the Universities were expanding, and with that expansion came lots and lots and lots of administrators and accountants.
But as time went on, the increased costs were starting to make the system a little creaky. But student loans to the rescue! So now the brakes were off, this train is bound for glory!
And we have professional beggars working at highly paid positions in Universities, who's job it is to shake down graduates for more money. One woman who worked with me was continually being called by the professional beggars. Except that now, unless you are in a very few majors, you are going to graduate with a starter home worth of debt, and the prospects of getting a job that will allow you to pay it down in a reasonable time are pretty slim.
And how is corporate college America going to continue their growth? There are very few low paid people to terminate. Next cuts will be in administrators, and that's a mortal sin.
The system has failed. And it's going to be a helluva trick to fix it.
And you seem to have missed I have no money at this point. Bringing up a 'vacation' now is so funny... I haven't had money for one of those in over six years. Actually more than that as I had a fiance nearly six years ago and giving in to her random whims took any money I had for vacations..
While I feel badly for you, the answer is in that part of the sentence I quoted. Money management.
I remember back in 1979, when I was a lowly technician, listening to a couple engineers who were making over 100K at the time with the same lament as you have. These couple guys were living paycheck to paycheck, both single, and 100K in 1979 was nothing to sneeze at. But yeah, they couldn't afford to go on vacation, while I was making a heck of a lot less than they were, and was taking vacations, as well as putting money in the bank.
So now you gotta figure out how to live within your means. Don't get pissed, this isn't calling you stupid or anything, you just need to pick up a helpful skill.
One side pushes for education? All I see is bullshit unions sacrificing children to make sure they get their mordida. In general, these unions support race-baiting politicians because they think it's easier to blame peoples' skin color for a problem instead of their socio-economic class. Why is anyone voting for any congress member that supports these H1B-type programs? I haven't a clue.
You forgot to add Social Justice Warriers, pension funds, All Deomcrats and welfare queens and anchor babies, and most of all BENGHAZI! In short, Libtards, eh?
For an employer to tell their employees to do or take a political stance?
Not really, especially now that Corporations are people and have all the rights and less responsibility than flesh and blood people.
Its a two edged sword though http://www.hrcapitalist.com/20...
In teh case of a company like WalMart to "suggest" that it's employees vote a certain way, it becomes a WalMart issue, as well as a political one. There are those among us, inclusing myself, who have an issue with WalMart demanding my Tax dollars to subsidize their loww low prices every day.
http://money.cnn.com/2004/05/2...
http://www.americansfortaxfair...
So I think you can take away from the "suggestions" on how you should vote, is that they won't benefit you. There has sometimes been some pressure to remove tax exempt status from churches when their preachers tell them that they have to vote a certain way to be in compliance with God's will.
But if your company wants you to vote a certain way, they can "suggest" it, and in at will https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/... they can fire you for not voting they way they "suggest"
100% preventable,, mostly kids, our spiritual & physical allies all over the wwworld... calling it/us society must be another madison ave, tackdick? like cold or civil war? all part of our wmd on credit greed fear ego based never ending holycost.. talk about a fairytail... truth+mercy=justice !in the moms we trust!.
Holy crap, see what happens when you hid a stoner's Fritos?
But can we stop trotting out Orwell as our anti-gov't poster boy please? The man was a socialist for Pete's sake...
Any full blown 'ist is indistinguisable from another.
"While it is so popular to blame the government, And no doubt many will, there is a basis for this, and it isn't the government, it is us." That's stupid enough. The IRS is one of the most important data holders about everyone, and they should be required to protect the data they handle, and they should be punishable with the highest possible penalties, since they should be held by higher standards than everyone else, including companies.
Very nice screed and all, but you could line up every IRS employee, push them off a cliff, and it wouldn't cure a thing. You do understand how this fraud is happening don't you?
People who have personal information on the internet, and that is most of us, have had that information stolen. Social security, credit information, payroll information. The bad guys involved have made up artificial people who are indistinguishable from the real people without some fairly deep scrutiny.
When the bad guy knows your name, social security, driver's license, credit card numbers, home address, place of work, medical records, and credit history, they can make up a pretty convincing you.
Think Target, think Home Depot, then know that they are the tip of the iceberg.
Given that the personal info is out there, and wasn't compromised by the IRS, but used by the perps to make up an artificial you, how would you suggest that the IRS handle this? DNA tests for everyone?
And there is, I suspect, the bigger problem. I have a pretty good suspicion that for political reasons, you have a deep and abiding hatred of the IRS. So there probably isn't any scenario under which you wouldn't blame them.
But know that pre-determination of the guilty party seldom results in fixing the problem. You want to be pissed at the IRS and guvmint, by all means have at it. But that isn't where the perps are getting their data to make up their artificial people.
It's not an /imaginary crisis/, it's a /hypothetical crisis/.
A hypothetical is something that *could* happen but under certain circumstances. Imaginary is simply 'not real' -- existing only in your imagination.
The latter is /technically/ correct, but not really correct, and changes the meaning.
It's effectively the difference between "Oh this can't happen" and "This could really happen".
All very nice, but you missed the part about it going on as we speak. for all the stories that we do hear, like Hollywood Hospital's paying ransom to hackers, Target and Home Depot's data being hacked, and now some of those compromised Social security and other stolen data being used to file fraudulent tax returns - there are the daily data thefts we don't hear about. There is nothing hypothetical about it. The only thing that didn't sound like "didn't this already happen?" from TFA was the business of a girl being killed because her health records were altered.
The only thing protecting us is that at the present moment, the bad guys have a vested interest in keeping their fraud at a level that does not topple the institutions they are parasitizing.
Actually, GP just made a point, which you ignored and decided instead to be insulting. Presumably because you don't have a reasonable counterpoint. So... you're kinda the one that doesn't look very smart.
The problem is, that the invisible hand of th free market will not do one goddamned thing. Not one little bitty thing about a free market company losing the data. Your data is lost, not doing any more business with them won't make one little bit of difference. It's got, the bad guys have it, now they use it.
And since these data breaches were not committed by the government, it's doubly stupid to blame the government.
Insulting? I have no patience for willful stupidity, for those who trot out stock bugaboos for every single problem, then strut about like little cock-a-whoops, basking in the glow of the bernevolent smiles and stupid grins of those who actually are impressed by having one answer for every problem. so you're damned right I wanted to be insulting.
Criminals can't steal what the IRS doesn't have.
You don't know how the fraud works, do you?
Private company loses your data, you stop doing business with them. IRS loses your data, fuck you.
Private company negligent with your data, private company gets sued and maybe criminally charged. IRS negligent with your data, fuck you. IRS workers keep their jobs, no one faces any consequences. Except you. Because fuck you.
Don't be a stupid anarchist. Once your data is stolen, it is out there forever. You figure the bad guys are going to say "Oh that company we stole data from went out of business bdecause of the invisible had of the free market, so we'll have to steal it all over again?" No, once they steal your SS number, and I know of a lot of non-governmental breaches - they have the keys to the Kingdom. provided by the lax network security, that most Private industry networks incorporate. Don't be so anti-government that you make all of your ilk look like they have IQ's of 10. Because you are sounding so incredibly stupid now, you make the government you hate so much look like a great alternative to anything you could come up with.