Myanmar's Cyberslaves

Perhaps an explanation for the Craigslist scammers.

When you reach the end of an article here you will find a sample of other posts being offered. I was surprised to see the East Bay Craigslist Scammer had risen to the top among all the things I’ve written. That one has 172 views while the next, Spilled Milk, is an older post with just 101 views. I think that the offerings are maybe the top per month or per category, because Spilled Milk is not the only post into the triple digits.

San Francisco Studio Simulacra was another fraud related post but it’s not received nearly as much attention. SIM Swap $17,300 Loss is another fraud oriented article and it’s only got about sixty views. So there’s something specific about the East Bay article and I worry that it might have to do with an operation like this.

This is the sort of solution I’d like to see applied to the people running these operations.

The Big Picture:

The conclusion I came to after digging into food and water security a decade ago was grim: there are too many of us on this little rock. What I missed at the time, that to which Peter Zeihan has opened my eyes, are the paths forward from this place.

2022 is the year that climate change arrived in an undeniable fashion. We baked, we burned, we drowned, we froze, and at the fringes of the global populace, it became more likely that we were going hungry.

China’s economy is utterly dependent on the global world order where the United States pummels anyone who interferes with freedom of the seas. If they touch Taiwan, the world reacts. China imports 80% of their agriculture inputs. Depending on when this starts they have some number of months, but not a year, until something an order of magnitude worse than The Great Leap Forward famine stalks the land.

Sound far fetched? Chinese companies are raising militias and this is NOT due to imminent action against Taiwan.

Conclusion:

The 20th century is already being being seen as the golden age of our species. We had enough to eat, we mostly held disease at arm’s length, our families shrank and our lifespans expanded. The early 21st century was the peak of the notion of the value of human life. More and more we’re going to come to see each other as liabilities.

I am in no way an end of days nutter, or a Qanon millenarian, or a Vernor Vinge technological singularity proponent. The world didn’t end in 1998 (666 x 3!), nor did it end in 2000, nor December 21st of 2012. We are going to have to put up with Christian Nationalists arguing that periods of trouble are “the tribulations”, and there will be a cottage industry in moving the goalposts for this purported seven year period before The End.

As Mother Nature continues to express her displeasure and life takes its normal course with old white people this millennium notion will get increasingly preposterous. Somewhere between 2030 and 2040 it’ll be relegated to a punch line as the twin grind of climate change and receding globalization just keep coming.

Being forced to migrate due to such troubles is already a thing and this is going to accelerate. There are going to be more places where the rule of law slides to the point that human trafficking expands from just the sex trade to other sorts of labor like this.

This is the third of fourth time since 2007 where I’ve encountered something like this, a set of simple facts that add up to dystopia being one of the better possible outcomes. Project it all forward a bit and even if you rule out nuclear weapons there are a variety of possible extinction level events for our species. This … weighs on me … despite having some practice in seeing and accepting things as they are.

I don’t want to see anyone get scammed … nor beaten for failing to scam someone … so maybe I should unplug for a while.