Without further comment

[unixronin]

"When a place gets crowded enough to require IDs, social collapse is not far away.  It is time to go elsewhere.  The best thing about space travel is that it made it possible to go elsewhere."

— Robert Anson Heinlein  (July 7, 1907 – May 8, 1988)

Comments

[rbos.livejournal.com]

"But all he did was spread the room
Of our enacting out the doom
Of being in each other's way,
And so put off the weary day
When we would have to put our mind
On how to crowd but still be kind."

(Frost)

[luke-jaywalker.livejournal.com]

I don't think IDs are a problem - it seems to me that due to that brain-dictated social limit of not being able to know more than about 150 people, even allowing for a certain amount of "I know him, he knows you, he can vouch to me that you're good", a society without some form of ID for loans and so forth is limited to towns of a couple of thousand people.

On the other hand, Manhattan alone had about three million people in the late 19th century, and they did just fine without IDs. Certainly "require" IDs, as opposed to "find IDs to be convenient time-savers for doing stuff that a lot of people don't do anyway", like maybe renting a car.

That said, I agree. In the last couple of days I've had an increasingly hard time avoiding the conclusion that we're screwed.

[unixronin.livejournal.com]

That said, I agree. In the last couple of days I've had an increasingly hard time avoiding the conclusion that we're screwed.

Unfortunately, that's my conclusion too. It's not a 100% certain thing yet, but the odds point that way.

[metahacker.livejournal.com]

This is how I feel about offices. Places that require badges bother me. (Because clearly it's so hard to fake them, too.)

However, having just interviewed at a 2000+ person company that does NOT require face badges to be worn externally, I was reminded that this is not just a function of size or crowding, but largely of culture and attitude. (Contrariwise, my previous, 50-person office moved to 'face badge must be visible at all times'. Yah. Like we don't all know each other.)

[yndy.livejournal.com]

RAH predicted many things that never came to pass - but sadly, I'm afraid that he was right when he said that if we didn't get off this planet, we were doomed.

[unixronin.livejournal.com]

Unfortunately, I don't see us managing to get any of our eggs out of the basket before we manage to tear the bottom out, unless we both get really serious about cleaning things up really soon and get rid of the oligarchs to whom maximizing short-term profit trumps everything else.