Some years ago, we paid off our house of over 40 years through a series of good fortune (low interest refinancing) and dedicating ourselves to that endeavor.
We’ve lived in the same place all that time. Although we’ve made improvements over the years, it's hard to wrap my head around the assessed value today, along with the cost to live in the home I own.
But because we do own it, fairly recently we also learned of yet another scam perpetrated on people like us — title theft. I’m not sure how it works exactly, but advertisements suggest it's easy to pull off and I need insurance protection to guard us from this.
A good reason for why the risk exists is the convenience of online records.
If I insure myself for this, plus all the other risks to my credit or reputation, on top of the liability and protections homeowners insurance gives me, I could spend a fortune (and already do) trying to protect myself.
All the while, our elected officials are bent on reducing penalties for these crimes because they are “non-violent.”
Forget the fact that the crimes are crushing to victims.
Online shopping can be risky, but so can buying gas or using a credit card in a store. Card skimmers that can be purchased — somehow, in ways I don’t understand — steal supposedly “secure” transactions without us knowing it. Suddenly, we get hacked.
Most of the time, it hasn’t directly cost me money, but believe me, it's not a free service of the card. The pain of changing cards and contacting those who get paid that way is aggravating and the opposite of convenient.
Meantime, our government has the idea that going to digital money would somehow be a good idea. I’m not sure who it’s good for. At least right now, I know if I’ve been robbed and what I spend money on. Once they (our friendly helpful federal government) control it, who knows?
It’s not like they get hacked and compromise our personal information. Oh wait. They do, too.
If the frequency of hacking these days is any indication, we could be cleaned out and not realize it until it's too late.
I think generally I like currency as it is. At least right now if it's in my pocket I can get it.
It may not be worth as much due to inflation, but at least I can hold it.
There’s no doubt technology has made lives more convenient but with each advancement comes additional risk.
My phone seems eager to listen to me and provide unsolicited ads based on my conversation when it's around. I’ve tried banishing it to another room, but the darn thing tells my laptop to tell the refrigerator to contact the microwave to let me know it feels left out.
Even my GPS in the car listens to me, oftentimes chiming into conversations we are having.
“How can I help you?” it asks when we are talking. I think I’ve finally trained it to know what “butt out” means, but I still think it listens.
My point this week is this: Internet crime is crazy and catching the perpetrators is difficult, so be careful how convenient you want things or what you wish for, especially when our government, who can’t secure a border or anything else, and big tech are excited about it.
All these conveniences come with trade-offs of both privacy and freedom.
It’s not the technology that's bad but, as they used to say about computers, “garbage in, garbage out.”
My concern is the motives, ethics and behavior of those programming technology. Recently, unfair or untrue artificial intelligence results have largely been explained away as being the fault of an algorithm or programming mistakes.
More likely it is the politics, wokeness, ethics and honesty (or lack thereof) of the people running the systems pushing some ideology or another.
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John McCroskey was Lewis County sheriff from 1995 to 2005. He lives outside Chehalis and can be contacted at musingsonthemiddlefork@gmail.com.
