Fuck this video. Repeat; FUCK THIS VIDEO.

This country needs less ignorance, not more. It pisses me off to no end, that a sizable chunk of this country somehow thinks that not raising the debt limit is a viable thing to do. This video does nothing but play into that.

All raising the "debt limit" does is allow the treasury to cover the money that congress has ALREADY spent.

An accurate allegory would be to compare the "debt limit" to paying your credit card bill at the end of the month, because, bitch, you already spent that money.
Not paying your credit card bill isn't going to help your finances, it IS going to ruin your credit.

You want lower debt, fine. Raise taxes or don't spend so much in spending authorizations. But not paying the debts you already agreed to? Fucking stupid.

he's talked about in the past that they wanted to do an episode on if the RFIDs in credit cards were secure. They were quickly shutdown by the credit card companies and kept from doing this.

"Rich Man's World (1%)"

[Arthur Jensen:]
"You get up and howl about america and democracy.
There is no america there is no democracy,
We no longer live in a world of nations and ideologies.
The world is a college of corporations... inexorably
Determined by the... immutable bylaws of business.
The world is a business.
And I have chosen you to preach this evangel"

[Immortal Technqiue:]
For all my free market, healthcare robbing, stock stealing, retirement fund
Fucking with niggas. Fuck your little credit card scammin, jewlery stealing,
Crack selling, liquor store robbing mother fuckers (Its a rich mans world)
Hahahaha. Shout to the homies, Carnegie, OG, Willie Randolf Hearst,
Rockefeller, the real Rockefeller, my main bitch Leona, pour out a little Louie the
Thirteenth, Jack Abramoff, hold ya head, my Rothschild niggas, LET'S
GET THIS MONEY

[Verse 1: Immortal Technique]
I spend my day repping america overseas
Pensions for the workers? nigga please
Embezzlement etiquette private settlement
I'm better with confederate rhetoric from my mansion in connecticut
Foreclose and evict homes at the tenement
I twist words like a speech inpedIment
I hope you got good credit bitch
If not better get a new job with benefits
When I play golf with niggasii get cheddar with
New money buys brand new karats
My old money bought your great grand parents
You got grills in ya mouth I ain't mad at ya
I own every gold mine in South Africa
Thanks baby you made me a billion
Plus I own a building for each one of my children's children
That's the shit, snort coke in the whip miss USA sucking my dick
Yea what fuck the law 'cus real jail is for suckas
I go to country club prison you dumb mother fuckers
(I am the 1% fucking bitch)

[Hook]
You know my CEO corporate steeez please
Overthrow governments overseas in a breeze
Politicians in my pocket for a few hundred Gs
So if I'm never in court my assets a never freeze

[Verse 2: Immortal Technique]
I got a job and house and a bank account
When I'm out I doubt that's something you could say
And if not then I fake death like Kenneth Lay
Make money every day the world burns
Wanna tax us while y'all struggle to pay taxes
I'm getting my money the fastest
Memos and faxes shredded up documents
Slush funds through the corrupt continents
But they don't want me indicted
'Cause they don't want my dirty laundry aired when I fight it
Don't get my lawyers excited
'Cause what good is a law if you can't rewrite it
I got CIA traders, dictators so fuck y'all whistleblowers and haters
(Its a rich mans world) Shiiieeeaaat
I'll invest money from Al Qaeda
In the bank 911 widows go to later
Capitalism so I pray to fuck the state of the world
Money talks so what the fuck I need to say to ya girl
(I don't pay em to fuck, I pay em to leave)

[Hook]
You know my CEO corporate steeez greed
I'll treat countries like the IMF down on your knees
Real gangsters run the world fuck what you believe
I'll cut down the forest while y'all niggas burning some trees
I'll get your family murdered for a couple of Gs
'Cause your working class money ain't fucking with me
You think rappers are rich 'cause of songs you heard?
My labels make the money and haven't rapped a fucking word

[Verse 3: Immortal Technique]
Y'all in the ocean coastin' with the sails out
Hey America thanks for the bailouts
I made off at the banco ambrosiano
Got away scott free like el Vaticano
Acitvists activist get mad at me
'Cause I'm a tax free charity
80% to the staff and company
And 20% to the homeless and hungry
The country gotta pay the fed reserve
Kick back to the banksters haven't you learned
You protest cops or patrols on the street
But I bought city hall so I own the police
Email facebook and the shit you tweet
On the phone companies so I heard you speaking
My suggestion is no correction no elections, sex with no affection
No invention would benefit the world of man
Will exist till I got the money in my hand
World bank, interest rate damn rape on the spot
But I'm a gangster you gon' take my money like it or not, nigga
(I got your country in my pocket, motherfucker!)

[Hook]
You know my CEO masonic steeez cheese
Only little people pay all these taxes and fees
Since you were born we controlled what you watch and you read
And pretty soon were gonna own the fucking air that you breathe
I take what I want fucker I don't have to say please
I'll convince you that it's good for you, take it and leave
You think presidents are the face of a nation
I put em all where they are, end of the conversation

Hahaha

Spiegel now reports of an NSA branch called "Follow The Money".

Guess what they do...

Yap, they collect information about international money flows and feed them into their aptly named database "TracFin". 84% is said to be credit card related data, though VISA again claims to know fuck all about it.

TracFin also includes everything they extract from SWIFT, which was something we predicted during our protests against the program in 2009. They publicly shamed our movement as being driving by paranoia, yet here we are. Again. Strictly enforced data privacy... my ass.

@blankfist

i would be totally on board with a massive re-structuring of the corporate charter.

might i suggest we return the clause "for the good of the people"?
and force responsibility financial and otherwise when a corporation causes damage to either the enviroment or society at large.

adam smith said"only with absolute liberty can a free market truly exist".
we do not have absolute liberty nor a free market.
we have a protectionist government which serves the needs of the corporate elite.
and those needs simply translate to :less competition...for them.

which is the point i think you were trying to make and on that note i agree.
but i think the leviathan is a far larger beast and will not be dismissed so easily.

power begets power and seeks only to retain its power.

we have to get money out of politics.
money should never equal free speech,yet sadly that is where we find ourselves to day.

corporations spend billions towards influencing legislation favorable to their bottom line.i read somewhere that for every dollar spent they receive 22,000 from the beneficial legislation.

so not only is out government bought and paid for...they are more trashy than the 10 dollar crack whore.

the only thing that has ever worked to change things...ever.
is the people.
social movements.
we need to starve the beast.

in my opinion the very first step to even BEGIN to make that move forward is we need to fix our fourth estate,or at the very least ridicule and dismiss the fucking circus that we know as corporate media news.
its not news.
its propaganda.

i really think that most people would agree to an extent on what your saying blankie but the reality does not reflect the dream and may be why some people dismiss the notion as silly.

@JiggaJonson brought up a good point and is actually a great way to start to starve the beast.
civil disobedience in the form of refusal to participate in the system.
dont file your taxes.
dont buy car insurance or register your vehicle.
cut up your credit cards and dont pay them.
buy local,from family owned establishments (so your money stays local).

but in my experience most americans do not like being uncomfortable nor afraid and doing these things will bring both to your doorstep.

i always said the american revolution will commence the moment they take away their cable tv.

They'll also lock you out of access to every single game in your library if there's a billing issue with just one of your games. Rather than lock just the disputed game, they take your entire library hostage. My brother had it happen to him and he couldn't play any of his games for something like 6 weeks. Steam's side of the story was that my brother's credit card disputed a charge, but when he contacted his CC company they said they did no such thing, which is true, because he owned and had played the game for 3 weeks prior to the account lock, so the charge went through fine at time of purchase, obviously. In the end it was a fuck-up by Steam, and they never offered so much as a "oops, sorry."

Is that credit card AND popsicle?

I'll just briefly touch on what I've already talked about in the other thread. Basically....

1. They have the data, but where's the evidence that they're doing harm with that data. Those are two separate questions. I think this is consistent with my views on the 4th AND 2nd amendment. 1. It's one thing to have a gun/the data,and 2, its another to use it wisely and there should be safeguards in place to incentivize safe and constructive use.

2. Privacy is overrated. At the very least as technology gets more and more sophisticated. we're going to have to re-evaluate what is and isn't privacy. I think privacy boils down to two things. Things we are doing that are illegal or unethical that we want to hide, in such a case, tough shit. And then there are the things we are simply embarrassed about that we want to hide. In such case, that falls into the realm of "humans being human" and we ultimately shouldn't be embarrassed about it. Think about all the things people during revolutionary times thought were private, but we consider silly to withold now. Now extend that thought another couple hundred years into the future.

3. Our outrage over privacy is hypocritical when we consider credit cards, internet, gps tracking and all other forms of technology that already are tracking our movements. It's ok that corporations have this info? but as soon as the gov't does it? It's bad? I can vote out a president, I can't vote out a CEO. One group is trying to get me to buy shit I don't need, the other group is using it as part of defense. I'll take the latter thanks. If you're going to have this mock outrage over privacy, at least be consistent about it.

If you don't like it, demand better of your politicians. They do this shit because even now, with it being in the limelight, there is simply not any real outrage over this. Quite frankly, there is probably good reason Most likely because they know it isn't that big of a deal and it's what the data is being used for is the larger issue. I'm tired of this hyperbole. People calling oppression and they can't name one thing they could do pre-Bush/Obama that they can't do now.

well first off, I think to answer your first point. As with most things, there's a grain of truth to most scandals, but it's distorted, exaggerated and sensationalized.

But here's the thing, I freely acknowledge that I make no claim to understanding the whole topic and I call BS on most people who do. Because of the sorry state of our 4th estate. I assume there is some bias one way or the other in just about everything they report, especially when it's political. You don't trust gov't? I don't trust media. With gov't even people who are just ultimately seeking power, they're typically seeking power because they think they can wield it for good. even if they ultimately do bad things with it. No one wakes up and says "you know what? I'm going to totally use my power to fuck over some people, woo hoo!" Even the most crazed elected official deep down thinks they're trying to help out. or they honestly believe their ideas will ultimately benefit everyone.

meanwhile, with the media, it's just pure profit motive there. give me ratings, give me money.

as for your remaining arguments. I think the whole privacy issue is a bit hypocritical. Whenever you buy something with a credit card, that's a fingerprint that gets left behind that can track you. Whenever you use your smartphone GPS, that's something that can track you. Whenever you use the internet, there are a myriad of technologies all designed around tracking you. all for the sake of selling you something, to extract more money out of you.

..and we accept that, hell we demand it.

But when gov't does it, suddenly it's bad. But they're supposedly using that tracking to catch terrorists. So let's see, catching people who mean to do us harm, or ads and methods to extract money from you. I know which one I'd rather have. Sure, both types of surveillance could be abused, but one we tolerate, the other is not. I think that's rather hypocritical. either it's all bad, or it's not.

I also just tend to think our sense of privacy is exaggerated. (and no I felt this way even when Bush was in power). While I don't agree with the Patriot Act, I do think our fears of surveillance and are outdated and as I explained above, hypocritical. Just like virtually every tool, there are good positive uses for surveillance data, and the tool can be abused as well. That doesn't stop us from using it, we just try to put safeguards in place to try and reduce the incentive to use it for harm.

I think our sense of privacy comes from two things. Either we're doing something we shouldn't be doing..ie illegal or unethical, in that case tough shit. Or we're doing something that we consider embarrassing. In that case you're just being human and really shouldn't be embarrassed about it at all.

lets take two cases. First one: homosexuality. Lets say it was the 80s when most people were still quite firmly in the closet. and bam. because of no more privacy, everyone was instantly outed. no more hiding. Everyone knows. People would be forced to accept it. Even though they would be in the minority, there would be just too many people out to dismiss it anymore. You couldn't lock them up or ostracize them without committing holocaust-level atrocities.

Same thing with my 2nd case, marijuana. If it were suddenly possible to know each and every person who ever smoked. It would force the issue out in the open. You couldn't lock them all up as there would be too many. Even if you could, it would be a huge hit to our workforce and our families. We'd be forced to re-evaluate it and legalize it.

it would be impossible to commit physical abuse if there was no privacy.

In many ways, our views on sexuality and privacy are SO puritanical. In the long run things would be so better if we could just get it out there in the open and thus solve problems and help.

I get what you're saying about corruption and power. but historically speaking, ANY time there has been widespread corruption and abuse of power, it's always been stamped out in some way. It has to be. corruption and abuse of power are ultimately unsustainable and it eventually falls apart and gives way to something better that is sustainable. otherwise we wouldn't have survived this long.

If enough people are wronged, they WILL do something about it. If things were REALLY that bad here in America. There wouldn't be pundits talking about revolution and tyranny. There WOULD be revolution and tyranny.

Talk. is. cheap.

"Transcript

This is a rush transcript. Copy may not be in its final form.

AMY GOODMAN: We begin with news that the National Security Agency has obtained access to the central servers of nine major Internet companies, including Google, Microsoft, Apple, Yahoo! and Facebook. The Guardian and The Washington Post revealed the top secret program on Thursday, codenamed PRISM, after they obtained several slides from a 41-page training presentation for senior intelligence analysts. It explains how PRISM allows them to access emails, documents, audio and video chats, photographs, documents and connection logs that allow them to track a person or trace their connections to others. One slide lists the companies by name and the date when each provider began participating over the past six years. But an Apple spokesperson said it had "never heard" of PRISM and added, quote, "We do not provide any government agency with direct access to our servers and any agency requesting customer data must get a court order," they said. Other companies had similar responses.

Well, for more, we’re joined by Glenn Greenwald, columnist, attorney, and blogger for The Guardian, where he broke his story in—that was headlined "NSA Taps in to Internet Giants’ Systems to Mine User Data, Secret Files Reveal." This comes after he revealed Wednesday in another exclusive story that the "NSA has been collecting the phone records of millions of Verizon customers." According to a new report in The Wall Street Journal, the scope of the NSA phone monitoring includes customers of all three major phone networks—Verizon, AT&T and Sprint—as well as records from Internet service providers and purchase information from credit card providers. Glenn Greenwald is also author of With Liberty and Justice for Some: How the Law Is Used to Destroy Equality and Protect the Powerful. He’s joining us now via Democracy—video stream.

Glenn, welcome back to Democracy Now! Lay out this latest exclusive that you have just reported in The Guardian.

GLENN GREENWALD: There are top-secret NSA documents that very excitingly describe—excitedly describe, boast about even, how they have created this new program called the PRISM program that actually has been in existence since 2007, that enables them direct access into the servers of all of the major Internet companies which people around the world, hundreds of millions, use to communicate with one another. You mentioned all of those—all those names. And what makes it so extraordinary is that in 2008 the Congress enacted a new law that essentially said that except for conversations involving American citizens talking to one another on U.S. soil, the NSA no longer needs a warrant to grab, eavesdrop on, intercept whatever communications they want. And at the time, when those of us who said that the NSA would be able to obtain whatever they want and abuse that power, the argument was made, "Oh, no, don’t worry. There’s a great check on this. They have to go to the phone companies and go to the Internet companies and ask for whatever it is they want. And that will be a check." And what this program allows is for them, either because the companies have given over access to their servers, as the NSA claims, or apparently the NSA has simply seized it, as the companies now claim—the NSA is able to go in—anyone at a monitor in an NSA facility can go in at any time and either read messages that are stored in Facebook or in real time surveil conversations and chats that take place on Skype and Gmail and all other forms of communication. It’s an incredibly invasive system of surveillance worldwide that has zero checks of any kind.

AMY GOODMAN: Glenn Greenwald, there is a chart prepared by the NSA in the top-secret document you obtained that shows the breadth of the data it’s able to obtain—email, video and voice chat, videos, photos, Skype chats, file transfers, social networking details. Talk about what this chart reveals.

GLENN GREENWALD: I think the crucial thing to realize is that hundreds of millions of Americans and hundreds of millions—in fact, billions of people around the world essentially rely on the Internet exclusively to communicate with one another. Very few people use landline phones for much of anything. So when you talk about things like online chats and social media messages and emails, what you’re really talking about is the full extent of human communication. And what the objective of the National Security Agency is, as the stories that we’ve revealed thus far demonstrate and as the stories we’re about to reveal into the future will continue to demonstrate—the objective of the NSA and the U.S. government is nothing less than destroying all remnants of privacy. They want to make sure that every single time human beings interact with one another, things that we say to one another, things we do with one another, places we go, the behavior in which we engage, that they know about it, that they can watch it, and they can store it, and they can access it at any time. And that’s what this program is about. And they’re very explicit about the fact that since most communications are now coming through these Internet companies, it is vital, in their eyes, for them to have full and unfettered access to it. And they do.

AMY GOODMAN: Glenn Greenwald, as you reported, the PRISM program—not to be confused with prison, the PRISM program—is run with the assistance of the companies that participate, including Facebook and Apple, but all of those who responded to a Guardian request for comment denied knowledge of any of the program. This is what Google said, quote: "We disclose user data to government in accordance with the law, and we review all such requests carefully. From time to time, people allege [that] we have created a government 'back door' into our systems, but Google does not have a back door for the government to access private user data."

GLENN GREENWALD: Right. Well, first of all, after our story was published, and The Washington Post published more or less simultaneously a similar story, several news outlets, including NBC News, confirmed with government officials that they in fact have exactly the access to the data that we describe. The director of national intelligence confirmed to The New York Times, by name, that the program we identify and the capabilities that we described actually exist. So, you have a situation where somebody seems to be lying. The NSA claims that these companies voluntarily allow them the access; the companies say that they never did.

This is exactly the kind of debate that we ought to have out in the open. What exactly is the government doing in how it spies on us and how it reads our emails and how it intercepts our chats? Let’s have that discussion out in the open. To the extent that these companies and the NSA have a conflict and can’t get their story straight, let them have that conflict resolved in front of us. And then we, as citizens, instead of having this massive surveillance apparatus built completely secretly and in the dark without us knowing anything that’s going on, we can then be informed about what kinds of surveillance the government is engaged in and have a reasoned debate about whether that’s the kind of world in which we want to live.

AMY GOODMAN: Glenn Greenwald, on Thursday, Senate Intelligence Committee Chair Dianne Feinstein told reporters in the Senate gallery that the government’s top-secret court order to obtain phone records on millions of Americans is, quote, "lawful."

SEN. DIANNE FEINSTEIN: As far as I know, this is the exact three-month renewal of what has been the case for the past seven years. This renewal is carried out by the FISA court under the business record section of the PATRIOT Act, therefore it is lawful.

AMY GOODMAN: That was Senator Dianne Feinstein. Glenn Greenwald?

GLENN GREENWALD: Well, first of all, the fact that something is lawful doesn’t mean that it isn’t dangerous or tyrannical or wrong. You can enact laws that endorse tyrannical behavior. And there’s no question, if you look at what the government has done, from the PATRIOT Act, the Protect America Act, the Military Commissions Act and the FISA Amendments Act, that’s exactly what the war on terror has been about.

But I would just defer to two senators who are her colleagues, who are named Ron Wyden and Mark Udall. They have—are good Democrats. They have spent two years now running around trying to get people to listen to them as they’ve been saying, "Look, what the Obama administration is doing in interpreting the PATRIOT Act is so radical and so distorted and warped that Americans will be stunned to learn" — that’s their words — "what is being done in the name of these legal theories, these secret legal theories, in terms of the powers the Obama administration has claimed for itself in how it can spy on Americans."

When the PATRIOT Act was enacted—and you can go back and look at the debates, as I’ve done this week—nobody thought, even opponents of the PATRIOT Act, that it would ever be used to enable the government to gather up everybody’s telephone records and communication records without regard to whether they’ve done anything wrong. The idea of the PATRIOT Act was that when the government suspects somebody of being involved in terrorism or serious crimes, the standard of proof is lowered for them to be able to get these documents. But the idea that the PATRIOT Act enables bulk collection, mass collection of the records of hundreds of millions of Americans, so that the government can store that and know what it is that we’re doing at all times, even when there’s no reason to believe that we’ve done anything wrong, that is ludicrous, and Democratic senators are the ones saying that it has nothing to do with that law.

AMY GOODMAN: On Thursday, Glenn, Director of National Intelligence James Clapper said he stood by what he told Democratic Senator Ron Wyden of Oregon in March, when he said that the National Security Agency does "not wittingly" collect data on millions of Americans. Let’s go to that exchange.

SEN. RON WYDEN: Does the NSA collect any type of data at all on millions or hundreds of millions of Americans?

JAMES CLAPPER: No, sir.

SEN. RON WYDEN: It does not?

JAMES CLAPPER: Not wittingly. There are cases where they could inadvertently, perhaps, collect, but not wittingly.

AMY GOODMAN: That’s the questioning of the head of the national intelligence, James Clapper, by Democratic Senator Ron Wyden. Glenn Greenwald?

GLENN GREENWALD: OK. So, we know that to be a lie, not a misleading statement, not something that was sort of parsed in a way that really was a little bit deceitful, but an outright lie. They collect—they collect data and records about the communications activities and other behavioral activities of millions of Americans all the time. That’s what that program is that we exposed on Wednesday. They go to the FISA court every three months, and they get an order compelling telephone companies to turn over the records, that he just denied they collect, with regard to the conversations of every single American who uses these companies to communicate with one another. The same is true for what they’re doing on the Internet with the PRISM program. The same is true for what the NSA does in all sorts of ways.

We are going to do a story, coming up very shortly, about the scope of the NSA’s spying activities domestically, and I think it’s going to shock a lot of people, because the NSA likes to portray itself as interested only in foreign intelligence gathering and only in targeting people who they believe are guilty of terrorism, and yet the opposite is true. It is a massive surveillance state of exactly the kind that the Church Committee warned was being constructed 35 years ago. And we intend to make all those facts available so people can see just how vast it is and how false those kind of statements are.

AMY GOODMAN: Let’s go back to Senate Intelligence Committee Chair Dianne Feinstein. Speaking on MSNBC, she said the leak should be investigated and that the U.S. has a, quote, "culture of leaks."

SEN. DIANNE FEINSTEIN: There is nothing new in this program. The fact of the matter is that this was a routine three-month approval, under seal, that was leaked.

ANDREA MITCHELL: Should it be—should the leak be investigated?

SEN. DIANNE FEINSTEIN: I think so. I mean, I think we have become a culture of leaks now.

AMY GOODMAN: That was the Senate Intelligence Committee chair, Dianne Feinstein, being questioned by MSNBC’s Andrea Mitchell. Glenn Greenwald, your final response to this? And sum up your findings. They’re talking about you, Glenn.

GLENN GREENWALD: I think Dianne Feinstein may be the most Orwellian political official in Washington. It is hard to imagine having a government more secretive than the United States. Virtually everything that government does, of any significance, is conducted behind an extreme wall of secrecy. The very few leaks that we’ve had over the last decade are basically the only ways that we’ve had to learn what our government is doing.

But look, what she’s doing is simply channeling the way that Washington likes to threaten the people over whom they exercise power, which is, if you expose what it is that we’re doing, if you inform your fellow citizens about all the things that we’re doing in the dark, we will destroy you. This is what their spate of prosecutions of whistleblowers have been about. It’s what trying to threaten journalists, to criminalize what they do, is about. It’s to create a climate of fear so that nobody will bring accountability to them.

It’s not going to work. I think it’s starting to backfire, because it shows their true character and exactly why they can’t be trusted to operate with power in secret. And we’re certainly not going to be deterred by it in any way. The people who are going to be investigated are not the people reporting on this, but are people like Dianne Feinstein and her friends in the National Security Agency, who need investigation and transparency for all the things that they’ve been doing.

AMY GOODMAN: Glenn Greenwald, we want to thank you for being with us. Is this threat of you being investigated going to deter you in any way, as you continue to do these exclusives, these exposés?

GLENN GREENWALD: No, it’s actually going to embolden me to pursue these stories even more aggressively.

AMY GOODMAN: Glenn Greenwald, I want to thank you for being with us, columnist and blogger for The Guardian newspaper. We’ll link to your exposés on our website, "NSA Taps in to Internet Giants’ Systems to Mine User Data, Secret Files Reveal", as well as "NSA Collecting Phone Records of Millions of Verizon Customers Daily"." - Democracy Now!

Why not just use credit cards and have the tracking of whose using, then cross check it with medical records, and if they haven't been diagnosed with the proper medical condition, send the cops to go and make a bust?

Oh because that would be how it should be handled, and we wouldn't want to do that.

Wat? You know they are just giving their phone number rite not like, credit card details, their address etc.

The Justin Bieber one was definitely true, he stole credit card for penis enlargments


lulz

Good post.

There are always so many things could have an influence. A simplistic explanation is always going to be self serving and misleading.

Example: I bet just the move to credit cards (cash-less society) has lowered violent crime (muggings) by at least a small amount.

As a Criminal Justice student we reviewed studies on the effects of gun control (ineffective in the U.S.), death penalty (ineffective as deterrence), etc.

A very large influence to the crime rate was inequality and the number of people who feel disenfranchised from the mainstream.

The availability of social programs and safety nets (or lack of) also had a great effect.

That was years ago and the analysis has been out there for a very long time - but never used in any meaningful way.

Getting even part time minimum wage work can take months, at least where I live. When McDonalds had a hiring day for all their locations in the area, there were huge lines of people hoping to get a job there. I counted close to twenty at the one I was at (which was a fairly small McDonalds compared to the rest in the area), most of them twenty to forty something aged people. Every time I checked on my status, up to a month later, they were still evaluating people from that day. I would guess the weed part was a joke, but even then I wouldn't judge the guy, some people waste their money on alcohol (far worse for the person and society), others waste their money on tobacco (he does, and again far worse for the person and society), some waste their money on the lottery, gambling, clothes, movies, games, cable... who cares what they spend money on. Everyone spends money, if they got it, to help hide the misery of their life or improve their life. So long as they aren't spending it on actively hurting others (hiring hitmen, dog fights, etc.) who cares what the money is being spent on? I can think of billions of things better to spend money on than drugs (I personally don't get the point of drugs unless it is for medical reasons, but I don't get alcohol or legal depression drugs and the like either), but I'm not going to fault the guy for doing them.

Anyhow, I have a part time (barely more than minimum wage) job, and still can't pay any creditors (largely just a student loan and some old utility bills and one credit card that is all of a thousand or less that keeps trying to garnish but child support is in the way, you would think they would give up)... hell, my kids will have a very disappointing Christmas this year... I have to borrow money some weeks just to get gas to get to work (very poor gas mileage and work is 20 or so miles each way) so getting a part time job likely won't help pay the debts at all. Even a full time minimum wage job doesn't make enough to pay for basic living expenses like rent, food and essential utilities (that is no cable) let alone cover any debts created while better employed. Who knows how many applications/resumes he'll send out that day, its only 11 am (although the place looks excessively dark for daytime), so he could be heading out later. I don't expect an unemployed person to spend 8 hours a day 40 hours a week driving all over town, especially since a great many jobs only take applications/resumes online these days (especially the part time minimum wage ones).

That all said, I agree any company scared of being recorded is sketchy... how do they know you are actually recording for one, and then who cares second unless you are breaking or at the very least bending the law?