It all used to be very easy in Australia, you bought the phone at a supermarket and gave bogus info when registering the SIM. Then the “War on Terror™” began and the government started taking things a bit more seriously started mandating the paper registration forms needed to be completed or the retailers could get in trouble. But your average supermarket worker wasn’t going to take the time to do that and it was way too widespread for the government to actually crack down on it.

Took a few years but the Telcos started actually paying attention to the fact that the majority of prepaid phones weren’t getting completed paperwork at point of sale so they just moved to make all sim card activations require online or over the phone ID checks.

Every bit of training I ever did made it clear it was all about catching terrorists, drug dealers and paedophiles, which of course means “We want all that juicy data without citizens asking any annoying questions.”

My fault, I missed the “Stop AI” at the end.

He is right, accelerating climate change, wealth disparity and economic collapse is likely going to unite a lot of us, probably not the way he suspects though.

Guessing that would be They Live. Haven’t actually watched it myself but cultural osmosis being what it is… Anyway here is some more info https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/They_Live

Well how many people on Death Row are handing out juicy consultant work when he gets sick of being in local politics (or gets kicked out)?