Echoes of Earth by Sean Williams and Shane Dix (first book of the Orphans Trilogy) explains a similar scenario to the Bobiverse books, but it is darker and perhaps a little more cynical on the hard scifi parts.

Anyone that is willing to show up and be paid less than what they produce is a gold mine. Party of the grift requires businesses to treat everyone like shit, make everyone feel that their work is meaningless, that they are easily replaced, and that they won't survive without a job. HR departments have grown to fill that need of corporate propaganda and overall management of the greatest grift in history.

If they cared about fraud we'd have chips & pin everywhere. They only care about the fraud that they can't easily shift onto merchants and consumers.

They will have to accept lower revenue when I don't show up to buy anything.

Between Visa Inc and Mastercard Inc, there isn't much competition for payment processing regardless of who holds the debt. It's no coincidence that these companies have faced numerous antitrust lawsuits over the years (won some, lost some, settled many)

So at least someone enjoyed it

Generally its not too hard to hijack old hardware and add your own op-amps and whatever to the existing bias and drove circuits. Once you can get some signal in, even if you're just using your digital storage scope and some decently set up triggers you can crank though just about any old data set. Phase encoded, MFM, etc are all pretty easy to decode in software with a sufficiently fast microcontroller.

I used to get the two coupled like that until very recently. C didn't show up until around 1972. (UNIX was created in 1969). That factoid ended up being a minor plot point in a Chinese drama my wife is watching and I got it wrong, much to my embarrassment.

Training AI right now to make fake versions of old UNIX.

We need to encourage them to move to a Martian colony or Venusian balloon city. There's not room on this Earth for the mega wealthy and the rest of humanity.

Talk about fighting fire with gasoline

We're going out with a bang, not a whimper.

Ending DEI in federal agencies without a substitute policy is a violation of rulings related to the Civil Rights Act of 1964.

Preventing private businesses, universities, and individuals from applying DEI-like policies in their own hiring practices is a violation of the First Amendment.

Not that anyone is going to stand up to a court dead set on creating the first Unitarian Executive in US history.

America voted the way they did because they wanted the government ran like a business with a CEO holding absolute authority. GOP and MAGA won. They got their dream they've wished for since the Reagan era.

Slavery or feudalism is often their end goal. Everything and everyone is property when money is the primary metric in your society (if it can even be called a society at that point)

A few generations of purges for the bourgeoisie should work to apply useful selection pressure.