You Should Know

I'm completely anti-crypto but that's not the topic.

This is a warning about an angle of attack against people. I'm not advocating a product. My suggestions are to make sure you have trustworthy, legal access to multiple addresses should your housing become unstable, and to have diversified access to real banking services through both traditional banks and credit unions.

Why are you carrying water for fascists?

Propaganda efforts large than we can imagine operating for decades. How has the rural poor identity morphed from union men and worker solidarity to backing military and police? It got too dangerous and they stomped it out with myths of foreign adversaries. I’m of the mind that we need to reach across political lines to overcome this, we can’t allow them to split the country evenly in half or we’ll be in a deadlock forever that just lets them do what they want. It can seem herculean but there are shades of it when a CEO is killed on the streets or a bunch of politicians work together to protect pedophiles; political identity fades and it becomes more obvious that it’s us against them

Also a lot of the most disenfranchised are kept from voting at all. Either they have to work, polling place is too far away and they don’t have a car, polling place getting changed, don’t have a permanent address

it is pretty wild dude but I think some of the people resorting to sane washing are burned out by all the cable news / huff post / raw story kayfabe

they see somebody pointing at a threat and instead of add that to their mental load, they'd rather shuffle it aside as panic bait or whatever

i kinda get it

my hope is that if their banks actually threaten them with this they remember "oh yeah, i've heard of this, it has something to do with my address getting challenged" and then maybe they can figure it out in time? then they don't have to deal with getting labelled like this and losing services.

Hahaha right? They sold the lie so well. But it's so easy to do when you control the majority of the world's media, whether it's news, radio, television, cinema, or online streaming.

To be honest, this shift in our politics has been brutally quick and more federally far reaching than anything that happened while I was growing up. People used to be able to just exist. Camp in parks, sleep on benches, etc. This authoritarianism is... Somewhat new.

I've long held the belief that the US postal service should also provide basic banking services too in the US, that way no one can be denied a bank account.

Unfortunately there are systems that will reject PO boxes - credit applications, mortgage and loan applications. It's increasing and I think they're catching wind that nomads do it, so they challenge for a "physical address" which of course must match your credit file. This is a nice way to shit on people who are trying to get out of transitional housing too, since they can easily spot group homes and halfway houses.

I was eager to find some opensource service tô get rid of the dependency of banks all together.

Credit unions

You being lucky doesn't necessarily imply that other people will be equally lucky, though.

Plus, what we may not have thought about is that the triggers for a financial institution to review your account will happen due to a change in circumstance. Address move, insurance change, employment change.

Since you left 25 years ago, there have presumably been essentially zero changes to your personal status as far as the bank is concerned. They aren't hearing about it because you don't live or work in the country anymore.

So your account is just sitting there, quietly unnoticed and unbothered.

To make them want to close it, something would need to happen to make them review it in the first place.

This is what privilege looks like

Currently shit scared as a gay guy with autism. I studied this, on my own, out of curiosity -- how a relatively modern society can commit atrocities upon its own citizens that it deems "lesser".

In high school, where we had entire chapters of our history books that we focused on for weeks dedicated to things like the civil war and the war of 1812, WWI and WWII were (in my recollection) split between a single chapter titled "The World Wars" or something like that, and anything later was usually glossed over in even briefer fashion (Korea, Vietnam, and the Cold War all shared a single chapter. I'm not even sure the Cuban Missile Crisis was given a sentence. But holy fuck did they want you to recount in great detail all the facts and figures of the revolutionary war and civil war, down to excruciatingly painful detail. -- I digress, it just irked me then and it still does now).

My point is, nobody chased me down and beat me over the head with a textbook to research the Holocaust and how it happened, nobody made me learn the finer points of going from an economic crisis to an angry little egomaniac getting elected to gas chambers and piles of bodies. We were taught what happened, in the driest fashion, but they never taught us how it happened. For me, nobody had to. I wanted to learn, so that I'd hopefully recognize the signs if they ever happened again. And now I can't afford to leave on my own, while watching them slowly follow the exact same playbook in almost the exact same way. You start with the most vulnerable people and expand that over time to "everyone you don't like", and I have no illusions about being a friend to republicans.

Also, hey, sidebar: anyone else finding the combination of "gutting NOAA funding", "open air cages", and "located in Florida, where devastating hurricanes regularly sweep through", to be something Eichmann would've called genius? "Oops, we didn't have any warning! Awww, shucks, shame about all those un-people we wanted to be rid of!" And the gators take care of the bodies. It's brilliant, in a way.

my last hope is Canada opens their borders to unskilled/disabled refugees, but I don't hold out a lot of hope.