A big biometric security company in the UK, Facewatch, is in hot water after their facial recognition system caused a major snafu - the system wrongly identified a 19-year-old girl as a shoplifter.
A big biometric security company in the UK, Facewatch, is in hot water after their facial recognition system caused a major snafu - the system wrongly identified a 19-year-old girl as a shoplifter.
Even if someone did steal a mars-bar… Banning them from all food-selling establishments seems… Disproportional.
Like if you steal out of necessity, and get caught once, you then just starve?
Obviously not all grocers/chains/restaurants are that networked yet, but are we gonna get to a point where hungry people are turned away at every business that provides food, once they are on “the list”?
No no, that would be absurd. You’ll also be turned away if you are not on the list if you’re unlucky.
Maybe they send you to Australia again?
The world hasn’t changed has it.
Sure it has. They send you to Rwanda now
This becomes even more ridiculous if you consider that we wasted about 1.05 billion tonnes of food worldwide in 2022 alone. (UNEP Food Waste Index Report 2024 Key Messages)
But no. Supermarkets will miss out on profits if they ban people from their stores who can’t pay.
Seems illogical? Because it is.
If that case ever does exist (god forbid), I hope that there’s something like a free-entry market so they can set up their own food solutions instead of being forced to starve.
If it’s a free market, and every existing business is coordinating to refuse to sell food to this person, then there’s a profit opportunity in getting food to them. You could even charge them double for food, and make higher profits selling to the grocery-banned class, while saving their lives.
That may sound cold-hearted, but what I’m trying to point out is that in this scenario, the profit motive is pulling that food to those people who need it. It’s incentivizing people who otherwise wouldn’t care, and enabling people who do care, to feed those hungry people by channeling money toward the solution.
And that doesn’t require anything specific about food to be in the code that runs the marketplace. All you need is a policy that new entrants to the market are allowed, and without any lengthy waiting process for a permit or whatever. You need a rule that says “You can’t stop other players from coming in an competing with you”, which is the kind of rule you need to run a free market, and then the rest of the problem is solved by people’s natural inclinations.
I know I’m piggybacking here. I’m just saying that a situation in which only some finite cartel of providers gets to decide who can buy food, is an example of a massive violation of free market principals.
People think “free market” means “the market is free to do evil”. No. “Free market” just means the people inside it are free to buy and sell what they please, when they please.
Yes it means stores can ban people. But it also means other people can start stores that do serve those people. It means “I don’t have to deal with you if I don’t want to, but I also can’t control your access to other people”.
A pricing cartel or a blacklisting cartel is a form of market disease. The best prevention and cure is to ensure the market is a free one - one which new players can enter at will - which means you can’t enforce that cartel reliably since there’s always someone outside the blacklisting cartel who could benefit from defecting from the blacklist.
That is some serious “capitalism can solve anything and therefore will, if only we let it”-type brain rot.
This “solution” relies on so many assumptions that don’t even begin to hold water.
Of course any utopian framework for society could deal with every conceivable problem… But in practice they don’t, and always require intentional regulation to a greater or lesser extent in order to prevent harm, because humans are humans.
This particular potential problem is almost certainly not the kind that simply “solves itself” if you let it.
And IMO suggesting otherwise is an irresponsible perpetuation of the kind of thinking that has led human civilization to the current reality of millions starving in the next few decades, due to the predictable environmental destruction of arable land in the near future.
They’ve essentially created their own privatized law enforcement system. They aren’t allowed to enforce their rules the same way a government would be, but punishment like banning a person from give swaths of economic can still be severe. The worst part is that private legal systems almost never have any concept of rights or due process, so there is absolutely nothing stopping them from being completely arbitrary in how they apply their punishments.
I see this kind of thing as being closely aligned with right wingers’ desire to privatize everything, abolish human rights, and just generally turn the world into a dystopian hellscape for anyone who isn’t rich and well connected.
I can see this being used against ex-employees.
I mean… you could try getting on food stamps or whatever sort of government assistance is available in your country for this purpose?
In pretty much all civilized western countries, you don’t HAVE to resort to becoming a criminal simply to get enough food to survive. It’s really more of a sign of antisocial behavior, i.e. a complete rejection of the system combined with a desire to actively cause harm to it.
Or it could be a pride issue, i.e. people not wanting to admit to themselves that they are incapable of taking care of themselves on their own and having to go to a government office in order to “beg” for help (or panhandle outside the supermarket instead).