Trading privacy for survival is another tax on the poor

Re:Trading privacy for survival is another tax on the poor by bluGill on Monday March 18, 2019 @02:41PM (#19423836)

Poor people are at risk. Even though they are poor, they collectively have more money than the rich have collectively. Target a rich person for a million, or a million poor people for a dollar, either way you have the same amount in the end. There are different ways you target each, but there are plenty of scheme to choose from on both ends. (or even in the middle)

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Re:Trading privacy for survival is another tax on the poor by JohnFen on Monday March 18, 2019 @03:52PM (#19424525)

> Even though they are poor, they collectively have more money than the rich have collectively.

That entirely depends on how you define "rich" and "poor", which is a nontrivial thing to decide. In 2019 in the US, the top 10% wealthiest households collectively have more than twice as much money as the bottom 90% collectively. But lots of people in the top 10% don't consider themselves "rich".

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Re:Trading privacy for survival is another tax on the poor by bluGill on Monday March 18, 2019 @04:56PM (#19425195)

Of course. If you want to play games with numbers you can make them say anything you want. To reach the top 10% you need just over $100,000 in income. That isn't rich in most people's book, though it is upper middle class.

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Re:Trading privacy for survival is another tax on the poor by JohnFen on Monday March 18, 2019 @07:29PM (#19426412)

> That isn't rich in most people's book

Depending on the part of the nation you're talking about. In much of the nation, exceeding 100k makes you unambiguously wealthy. In other areas, you'd have a hard time living anything more than a squarely middle class lifestyle on that.

It's not about "playing games", it's that economic conditions vary so wildly across the nation that you can't accurately characterize what's "rich" and "poor" using the same scale everywhere.

That's why I say that determining "rich" and "poor" is a difficult thing to do.

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