Heck, they might even have been consenting adults!

We can debate exactly where to draw the line, for sure. And, honestly, it should be calculated as a multiple of minimum wage or ‘poverty level’ or something, to avoid the number becoming obsolete due to inflation.*

But, really, anything between $10M and $200M would be a fairly reasonable place to draw the line. The important part is to tackle the ultra-rich, the ones for whom even hundreds of millions is chump change. (Personally, I’m letting it edge up a little higher to account for small(ish) business owners and people/farmers who might own a particularly valuable plot or two of land.)

*Edit: $50M is ~6,896,551x the federal minimum wage of $7.25. For simplicity’s sake, let’s round the limit up to 7,000,000x. Which would make the limit $50.75M in total assets. If the rich fuckers want to be able to own more than that, they’ll need to raise the minimum wage, which would then raise the limit accordingly. Raising the minimum wage to $10/hr would increase their limit to $70M, for example.

Check out the related images!

There won’t be anything stopping people from unplugging their tech and just walking away from it.

Facial recognition cameras in stores and public buildings, on poles next to roads and bike paths, and in every modern car you pass near will still be recording and reporting your location.

Go back to writing checks and paying cash.

Checks are just as traceable as credit/debit card transactions. (Perhaps even slightly moreso, since they all come as a package deal with a nice handwriting sample and a memo line saying what the check is for, in your own words?)

Cash is going to be (mostly) traceable soon, too, as more and more places ‘voluntarily’ sign up for programs where they scan and record the serial number of every bill that passes through, in or out. Cash will only be untraceable if you’re very careful about where you get it and where you spend it. And even then, unless the people you get it from and give it to are also just as careful, it will still be fairly easy to reconstruct a picture of where the money went. If $300 is withdrawn from your account, and then later a drug dealer deposits the same $300 in their account, the surveillance state won’t 100% for sure know what happened there, but they’ll have a pretty clear idea.

Buy an old school flip phone in case you need to call somebody.

Can still be used to trace your location anytime you have it powered on. And old school phones are even easier to remotely eavesdrop on, with no option of using encrypted messaging apps instead. The phones (and other devices) of everyone else around you are still listening in on everything you say.

Unless you can ensure that everyone around you gives up all technology just like you do, you’re still subject to mass surveillance.

So … anybody want to go form a tech-backward hippie commune with me, way out in the middle of nowhere?

Hell, even milk will usually last more than one day.

About as NSFW as airliners can possibly get. I have no regrets.

But they’re working on it. That’s the real reason for all that massive datacenter buildout. It will finally be possible to monitor everything everyone says and does.

All individual wealth over $50M should be taxed at 100%.

If you can’t live very comfortably on $50M, you need budgeting advice, not more money.

And that’s just the mandated monitoring – it doesn’t include the monitoring that businesses and banks are doing for free, on their own.

I hear rumors that many places are rolling out systems to record and track the serial number of every bill of cash that goes in or out, because they can sell that information to big data collectors who can use it to piece together a picture of where cash flows – previously the only flow of money they couldn’t completely monitor. And, of course, that big data is available to the government at any time, either by buying it or by getting a friendly judge to sign off on sweeping warrants.

But why post the article at all if it’s clickbait?

Why you post clickbait?

with the huge numbers of teeny tiny patents nowadays, where most of them should never have been granted at all.

What, are you telling me that rounded corners shouldn’t have been patentable?

Ah, okay then. Might be worth a try.

Hmm…

Could Democrats learn this power?

No global hotkeys is a dealbreaker for me, though.

Once you get used to using custom global hotkeys as part of your workflow, you can never go back.

They make regular glasses for that.

“And we promise we’re not lying about the privacy issues this time.”

If you’re going to make laws about this, you should get one step ahead and make those laws apply to all concealed recording devices.

Not very ‘lightweight’ if all you need it to do is read PDFs.