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Don’t Go Digital!
I’m kind of a computer guy since my entry into the role of systems analyst/programer in 1964 more or less launched my working career, which I consider to have been moderately successful. Computer technology has been an obvious boon to our modern society as an aid to meet the massively increasing work volumes involving information processing. Here, I will suggest that certain ongoing trends being promoted by government and affiliated organizations to replace completely traditional methods of information processing and record-keeping with wholly digital approaches approved and/or controlled by government are surefire paths leading to the destruction of our representative republican form of government of, by, and for the people.
I started working in commercial bank operations in 1959. Mainframe computers were just being introduced since the industry was overwhelmed with paper generated by demand deposit (checking) accounts. In a four-year period, I got the benefit of working in and managing units involving teller operations, and proof and bookkeeping operations where the checks and deposit paper were sorted and distributed and ultimately posted to individual accounts. These were machine-based and manually operated but required huge numbers of people to operate.
I became an analyst/programmer at the bank to convert these functions to the computer and later I went to the U.S. Treasury Department to lead a project to convert Social Security Checks issued monthly to Direct Deposit. We implemented this capability nationwide in the late 1970s in a joint effort with the Federal Reserve Bank operations to distribute federal payments to all types of financial institutions using electronic funds transfer (EFT). Direct deposit capability then became available to Treasury and across a broad spectrum of commercial entities for payroll direct deposit and other payment applications.
I personally benefitted in 1983 by being selected to be the Treasury Chief Disbursing Officer responsible for all federal payments with eight field offices and over a thousand employees. After the full implementation of direct deposit, this office (I was long gone) had a single location with fewer than 150 employees. I won’t venture a guess on the ultimate benefit for banks, businesses, and individuals.
Now, back to the premise of this post. The first types of information we should make certain do not go totally digital are financial (banking), elections, guns, and health. I’m sure there are others but these are vitally important to maintain our rights as individual Americans.
The Biden administration already went through a failed nomination of a candidate for Comptroller of the Currency, regulator of national banks, who proposed totally digital checking accounts for all to be administered through the Federal Reserve Banks. The very first entity with total access and control of all this information is then the federal government (all of it).
Recent elections, efforts to change election laws, especially in Washington, and Dinesh D’Souza speak for this category.
Plenty of news and Ricochet discussions are available on Second Amendment issues.
Our last two years of experience with the federal and state governments dictating health issues during the pandemic should be enough to discourage us from allowing total authority there for our health information.
Published in General
I am also in IT and agree with much of what you say. The additional alarming trend is the Cloud tech. There is a tendency for business to take all their data centers and data into the cloud. Microsoft, Amazon, Google mainly with Apple in the mix. Eventually these three service companies will have control of most data to be mined or exploited or protected or turn off as they please. They will be able to dictate business practices based on their internal politics. We have already saw how Parlor was wiped from the playing board by these guys. I understand that Russia companies were taken down by Microsoft of the Ukraine adventure. (still trying to get good details on this). As we electronic we lose control and give it to others to keep, change or delete as they please.
I was paged on a Saturday night that the maternity ward had lost wireless connectivity. I went in and helped fix the issue, but I noticed that there were no mothers or babies present. They had all been transferred to another hospital.
You can’t have a baby without a computer.
Amazing. We have some how gotten to be a culture that has to be connected to data at all times for all things.
I work for a property damage insurance company. After a disaster one of our main initiatives is getting communication and computers up.
I fired Intuit Payroll for my business because they were pushing all of my accounting to the cloud. With a subscription-based license for Quickbooks.
The copy of Quickbooks I use has a perpetual license. It is the last copy I will buy.
(I selected Gusto for my payroll, fwiw. I’ve been pushed kicking and screaming into direct deposit for my own paycheck.)
Wow! Is this a small hospital? I can’t imagine this happening where I worked. Granted, it would mean the L&D nurses would have to stay in the room with the patient instead of monitoring things at the desk, but I can’t see them transferring patients. Granted, if the computers went down, we would delay scheduled OR cases. With all the charting and billing tied to the system, it was easier to delay things for an hour or so. But emergent cases went no matter what. I’d put having a baby in that category.
Not in IT. In investigations, obviously. What I can learn about you without your knowledge would scare you. Granted, the professional databases I have access to are better than what Joe Schmuck can get over the internet – but not enough.
Medically, I’m covered – or so I thought – by TriCare. Turns out that when I became eligible for Medicare, TriCare became secondary. And guess who directs my treatment, what drugs, procedures I can get? Yep, Medicare. I’m not even going to bring up HIPAA.
My library is . . . extensive. More than once some young whippersnapper has looked at the shelves, and declared, “you know, you can put every one of these books on your cell phone.” I doubt that they ever actually saw all the bookcases, but still. Try looking up “fascism” online. The real, economic definition has been moved down a notch or two on many of the most popular online “dictionaries,” in the last couple years. Now the first definition features all the bad, tyrannical elements that are necessary elements of fascism, but can more easily be leveled at a person or party that is anything but fascist. All it takes to change that online or electronic library is an update, a small, invisible worm, etc. and, just like Winston Smith at his desk, with a shredder, “history” morphs to fit the current fad.
I have a huge, Webster’s Unabridged Dictionary, that my mother got with S&H Green Stamps when I was young. I think I’ll be keeping it. Funny, it doesn’t change.
Books would have been my likely next entry, more because of what the private sector is doing than the government. I think we should strive to keep hard copies available not because it is all I read. I’m not ready to establish my most pleasurable pastime as a computer application.
We should also remember that there’s no such thing as “the cloud.” It’s just someone else’s computer, under THEIR control not yours.
10-12 maternity beds…
Quickbooks? Yuck!
@philturmel
Despite several later editions of my preferred billing/timekeeping program for my law practice I had favored 1994, when I went to upgrade, the latest upgrade I could accept was the 2012 version, because it was the last version for which I could buy a perpetual license and I could maintain my own database on my own computer. I did not want an annual subscription, and by no means would I ever post my clients’ financial transactions, the invoices for which are full of confidential information related to my services, into the “cloud.” No way of knowing in what crap nation with lousy privacy laws or where the servers actually were, and having to rely on unseen gnomes to preserve the confidentialty of the data? Nope. Not for me.
All our utility companies are urging us to start online payments. Nope, all hard copy bills and check payments. My two biggest credit cards have also been nagging me to go “paperless”. Nope. I get hard-copy bills each month, and pay by check. We have two accounts (personal and household) and sometimes I pay with a check from each account if the expenditures warrant it. I am not interested in helping them decrease their own costs, since those savings never reduce my own costs. And I buy a new CD of TurboTax each year to do my taxes, instead of doing it all online. I do have to say that our taxes are complicated, but TT makes it easy, and I can get them done now in about two hours.
The company I am working at now uses “Paylocity” for their payroll, and they are always complaining of errors (not my issue, because my employer is a staffing company). At my old company, ADP did their payroll, with no errors or problems in the 12 years I worked there. The company where I work now also uses Microsoft Dynamics cloud-based software for their ERP system. It was very easy for me to learn when I started, and normally works fine for us. Unfortunately, Microsoft’s core competence is not ERP, and it can be cumbersome.
See, under the approach implemented when we made Direct Deposit available for recipients participation was voluntary and still is as far as I know, although marketing techniques are designed promote participation. The hard copy options should all remain available to the customer/user.
Yes, I’ve got (as I always mention) a 1973 OED. It is not only exhaustive, with word derivations and historical usages, but the definitions don’t change to fit the current media whim or propaganda purpose. Best ten pound of paper I ever bought.
Not only can no man buy or sell, save he that he have the mark, or the name of the beast, or the number of his name, but when the beast crashes no one can get anything done at all.
I work at one of the major banks. My area builds out data marts for our various analytics people throughout the company. There’s a push to move the data marts and the “data lake” to the cloud. None of the operational areas yet, but I can sense that’s coming. I think it’s a terrible idea, but I’m not high-level enough that anyone would listen to me.
I appreciate Kindle “books,” but only because my inflammatory arthritis makes it hard to hold a book for an extended period. I still buy hard copies of all the books I read that seem worthwhile.
Also since these are private companies who are operating The Cloud, even whatever decisions their owners and chief executives see as simple “improvements” can cause a great deal of loss.
Some years ago I joined youtube. One feature was you could create a playlist of the vids you needed the most or liked the most.
Eventually I had 110 favorited items, in a file I accessed using my user name and a password.
But my userid contained a space or a hyphen. (I forget which it was.)
Youtube was bought out by Google. Then Google decided that either no spaces, or no hyphens, should be allowed in anyone’s userid.
I was no longer allowed to access those 110 items, for several months. Then I remembered a friend of a friend worked at corporate headquarters in Silicon Valley. That guy helped me out.
So once again I had access to all my old faves. (Mostly rock music videos.)
No real serious harm done. But what if that had been my business reports, my inventory, and important lists of business contacts stored on The Cloud? Any business dealt such a blow for a few months would be in big trouble. (Personally I would have all those backed up, but I wonder how many people are always on top of that type of task?)
The beauty of computerization of everything in as great a detail as possible is that it leads to centralization. Unfortunately it also must lead to disyfunction and collapse. The most complex economy and society in history which is also the richest and most diverse got that way by being the first thoroughly ground up economy in history. All others became narrowly centrally controlled rather quickly and stagnated for most people as the elite took everything they could and eventually rotted. The same will happen to us but our elite believe that this new computerized power will allow them to manage everything better than leaving it in the hands of all of us ordinary folks who just know our own interests. And they’re right in general, we just know our own interests, but they only know their own interests as well but will control everything which they’ll have to simplify to the point where it will eventually work only for them until, like every other top down system in history, it rots and collapses. I’ve not a clue how to manage digital reality for a modern economy but it could be that the fix is basic. Decentralize political power, schools, police, governance but lesson all governance because it’s mostly expense and adds little positive. We need national defense and border control at the federal level. Folks will have to sort everything else out for a modern economy. The only thing we can know for sure is that centralization of everything will destroy first freedom, then prosperity. It’s pretty basic. So far in history there are no exceptions. Do we think that the folks who run these digital companies who are more narrow and less educated and influenced heavily by our principal enemy, China will figure it out? Utter nonsense.
Bob and all – I think this ship has sailed – prepare accordingly……..
Maybe for a lot of people, who don’t care enough to do otherwise. But those of us who care, can still keep our information ourselves, if we want to.
It really seems to be a big cycle – my first programming class (in the 60’s ) was at the University of North Carolina using an IBM 360 which was shared with Duke and NC State. My first job used terminals tied to a time share system. Finally, we worked up to a main-frame (raised floor, the whole bit) that you had complete control over. Eventually, the mini-computers came along.
Through all of that, the work and data I produced could be kept on removable media (from paper tape through punched cards to 9 track tapes) under my control.
Then PCs came along and the amount of data produced escalated dramatically. Even then, we had local backups. Since I retired, the ‘Cloud’ is trying to take over more and more of my life. For me, the issue is both the control of what I ‘own’ and the bandwidth used to get it back.
I have used a note taking application (EverNote) for years and it is moving from using the cloud to synchronize between different devices to being totally cloud based. One of my main goals this year is to get away from that and regain control of my data.
The most obvious reason to worry about the cloud is the single point of failure (read control) that has been faced by various Conservative startups. I totally agree with @kedavis (#9)
If the primary database is controlled by government authority, such as proposed by Biden’s Comptroller of the Currency nominee for digital currency, the threat becomes a loss of individual liberty and is more serious than a loss of data. This is what happened to the Canadian truckers with the dictatorial Trudeau.
One day last week, my bank left about a dozen messages on my phone. They had noticed that my debit card had been uploaded to a digital wallet (Google pay) and they weren’t sure if it was my wallet. I contacted them to discuss the matter and humbly pointed out that I hardly knew what a digital wallet was.
Why is it that my debit card isn’t digital enough? I understand the need for innovations such as direct deposit, and the plastic card in my leather wallet got a huge thumbs up from me back in the day when I discovered how beautiful it was to pay for gas at the pump on a frigid day. I really don’t mind using the drive through/walk up ATM machines to deposit money or take out cash and if I am putting my life at risk by doing so, so be it. A thief should have to go through me to get my money rather than have an easy time of it using his/her smart phone.
And what bothers me the most is that the banks are accomplices in the matter.
Don’t leave us hanging! What did the bank do about it??
My guess is that it wasn’t really improper or whatever but Fritz just didn’t realize how it happened or why.
They deactivated my card and a new one is on its way. I didn’t ask too many questions, but I did suggest judging how long I was in the cue, that my circumstances were not unique. I also said that sending me a new card wont prevent the recurrence of the problem.
Wouldn’t it be nice though if the cell phone of the dude or chick that uploaded my card to their wallet suddenly went dead?
Okay, so it wasn’t innocent. But I wouldn’t have been surprised if Fritz like bought something through Google Shopping or something, which resulted in his payment card being automatically added to his “wallet” and he just didn’t understand what that meant.