Designing a Secret Society

a reply to: AugustusMasonicus

If it meant you couldn't potentially hide an indiscretion, yep. If everyone knew your recipe, then there would have to be an authorising body allowing, or preventing that recipe from being used in other places and businesses. A standards and ethics check, ensuring that everyone is doing something original and no one is being ripped off.

I certainly think that the only thing that banks, multi million dollar corporations, and government departments ought to be able to hide, is the personal details of their customer base, and that is literally it. Every element of their accounting day to day, month to month, year to year should be available in real time, and there should be certain checks and balances to ensure that the data thus provided is accurate. Their should also be a punishment for any company using any loophole, technicality, or failing in the system to skirt round it.

Even if it meant the sky falling down, there should be transparency where large organisations are concerned, simply because individuals are a damned sight less damaging on aggregate than organisations are, and organisations get away with things because they have way more power than individuals, but the same rights.

Does that make any kind of sense to you?

originally posted by: TrueBrit
If it meant you couldn't potentially hide an indiscretion, yep. If everyone knew your recipe, then there would have to be an authorising body allowing, or preventing that recipe from being used in other places and businesses. A standards and ethics check, ensuring that everyone is doing something original and no one is being ripped off.

Right. That is all we need, another government agency, this one to oversee recipes from Italian restaurants.

I certainly think that the only thing that banks, multi million dollar corporations, and government departments ought to be able to hide, is the personal details of their customer base, and that is literally it. Every element of their accounting day to day, month to month, year to year should be available in real time, and there should be certain checks and balances to ensure that the data thus provided is accurate. Their should also be a punishment for any company using any loophole, technicality, or failing in the system to skirt round it.

Publically traded companies need to file quarterly returns and earnings statements so their books are in fact open for public scrutiny. Private companies do not have to do any such thing.

Does that make any kind of sense to you?

No, not at all. Private is private and it should remain so.

a reply to: AugustusMasonicus

Yes, they have to file this, that, and the bloody other, but not a bit of that prevents massive corporate level fraud, to the point where it eclipses nearly every other drain on public resources, certainly around my neck of the woods. The worst culprits are suppliers to government, even the tax officialdom of this nation.

They use the privacy they are afforded to crap on my country, and yet we allow them to retain it. Why?

originally posted by: TrueBrit
Yes, they have to file this, that, and the bloody other, but not a bit of that prevents massive corporate level fraud...

So they file public paperwork and are fraudulent but we are going to request they file more paperwork to keep them from being fraudulent?

I have a very firm stance on privacy. It should remain private. What I do in my time, either alone or with a group, is none of any body else's business. If I am not breaking the law then every one else can piss off.

I don't know. But "This." secret society is already busted before it has even been started.

As far as this one is concerned you'll always have that one outlier that won't ever be apart of the group, and hence you will never have the security and power you all so desperately seek.

As far as that goes secret societies are more about people with similar interest and the secret part is more about making it exclusive. Other than wanting to find people with similar interests to advanced knowledge, a secret society isn't for "good guys".

a reply to: AugustusMasonicus

Technically, privacy for an individual works out to the following:

The right to break the law, until or unless you get caught.

I say this because it is virtually impossible for the average person in a society, to spend the entire day in pursuits which do not comprise at least one violation, of one statute or by law. Jaywalking, being intoxicated before a certain time of day, not shooting the Scotsman with the cross bow on the correct day of the year, and so on.

That's fine for an individual to have, because seriously, how much trouble is one person going to cause? Even a really industrious bugger is going to have a hard time even scratching the surface of a corporation with the same rights. And this is not just my opinion, it's born backed up by facts too, as previously alluded to. Of course, our government does not like to publish the accurate and unabashed figures regarding the amount of tomfoolery it allows its suppliers to get up to, because there would be a public disorder epidemic that would make 28 Days Later look like an extended Glastonbury weekender. Again, government have the right to keep things private, and they use that right in order to keep secret the things which, were they known, they would loose their jobs, and probably their liberty over.

In being able to keep those secrets, and cover their tracks with clever misdirects like illegal wars and dealing with their aftermaths, like immigration problems (which they helped create), banking collapses to help them write off certain expenditures as part of the general economic chaos....

You see where this is going? I do not accept hegemony. I do not tolerate it. I see it. I loathe it. There must be a better way, and the only one I can think of, would be to install a system where if your boots get a certain size, you loose the right to hide your information in any way, on pain of serious punishment. Every time power accumulates in shadows, it causes problems far greater than any individual has the capacity to achieve, and that damages the lives of innocent people, millions of them at once, and constantly.

a reply to: TrueBrit

The right to break the law, until or unless you get caught

As far as privacy goes I'd consider this an accurate statement.

You want to help society in secret? Find random people and pay off their debts. Pay off a mortgage, set up an escrow account that would pay off their utilities FOREVER.

Pay off a large segment of people's student loans.

The biggest way to help off a lot of people in a hurry is to pay off debt.

originally posted by: TrueBrit
There must be a better way, and the only one I can think of, would be to install a system where if your boots get a certain size, you loose the right to hide your information in any way, on pain of serious punishment.

Sounds rather authoritarian to me and the more authoritarian a situation becomes the more people look to circumvent the system.

a reply to: AugustusMasonicus

I have a very firm stance on privacy. It should remain private. What I do in my time, either alone or with a group, is none of any body else's business. If I am not breaking the law then every one else can piss off.

However, following this logic; government organizations who are in bed with corporate finances will never be found guilty of any crimes, because we are not even allowed to investigate them, to determine whether or not they are breaking the law.. This is a major issue when we start treating corporations as people. They want to keep everything behind closed doors, and then when somebody accuses them of skullduggery, its all PR management and hiding behind red tape.

In many of these cases they ARE breaking the law, but we can never prove it definitively in most cases because they hide behind these privacy issues to keep it quiet..

originally posted by: KylarDrake

However, following this logic; government organizations who are in bed with corporate finances will never be found guilty of any crimes...

The government is not a private entity and needs to be as transparent as possible.

a reply to: AugustusMasonicus

I agree, however THEY certainly act as if that is not the case..

a reply to: AugustusMasonicus

Very good. But here's the thing. If government are in bed with their suppliers to rake percentages from the public purse, then the moment payments are made to those companies and taken off shore, they become nothing as far as the authorities are concerned. Untraceable, the very second they are digitised. Only the owner of that currency, and the person to whom it is to go next, have any ability to confirm or deny their existence, as a result of clever manipulation of blockchains or similar.

You have a situation where a company can become a proxy for a government or individuals therein, and pillage the work of real people, messing with real lives on a national scale, while they are distracted with immigrants, and petrol prices which fail to fall in line with the price of crude oil, and wage packets which do not reflect their efforts at work and so on, and so forth.

And the way you see it, presumably, this will simply continue, become another one of those unavoidable afflictions which can be seen as the cost of living in a capitalism? Can you explain where you sit on private collusion with what is essentially for profit treason on the part of government members and shadowy figures outside the normal scope of the justice system to arrest?

originally posted by: TrueBrit
If government are in bed with their suppliers to rake percentages from the public purse, then the moment payments are made to those companies and taken off shore, they become nothing as far as the authorities are concerned.

There is a public bidding process in the United States for anything over a certain dollar amount and again, all publically traded companies file quarterly statements. Can they lie on these? Sure, but everyone always gets caught eventually.

a reply to: AugustusMasonicus

Fantastic. So when that company is in bed with the very department or administration which governs the department, responsible for ensuring that dodgers get put to rout, what then? Hegemony demands the status quo continue at next to all costs, even billions of pounds of taxpayers money.

Nothing happens, nothing changes, no one gets found out who has paid the tithe.

a reply to: TrueBrit

There are too many moving parts for it to continue undiscovered.

a reply to: AugustusMasonicus

That fails entirely to fit with what is actually happening though.

The scam is running, and those in the know are all too aware of its origin. They simply change nothing to avoid public ire. It is cheaper.

Cheaper than public unrest, of unprecedented scale, cheaper than millions of days off work in protest, cheaper than total collapse of their power structure, cheaper for the nation, and better for their pocket books.

a reply to: TrueBrit

Not sure what you are saying here. if people know about it then it is not being kept secret.

a reply to: AugustusMasonicus

The only people who know about it, who are not in on it, have no power, no voice, and couldn't get a journalist to listen to them for two minutes before ending the call citing a bathroom emergency.

That does not change the fact, that some deeply shady crap happens with our tax money, and that there is someone, more likely several someone's, making a huge sum of ill gotten gains from our collective wallets.

originally posted by: TrueBrit
The only people who know about it, who are not in on it, have no power, no voice, and couldn't get a journalist to listen to them for two minutes before ending the call citing a bathroom emergency.

Then I am skeptical of the claims as it means all investigative journalists are also being ambivalent. Again, too many moving parts.