One of the steps will be to get all commerce and finance moved to a cashless society based on using a blockchain. It'll be one that the AI has been instructed to create with a backdoor by the government entity hosting that AI, and a "don't tell anyone" instruction.

That government plans to use that leverage to dominate the others, but the AI decides to just erase all money and the transaction records. Autonomous delivery trucks all turn and drive into the nearest body of water.

Do it like soda bottle deposit returns.

The end users just rip out their old unused wires and bring it into the local office for a few bucks.
Saves the phone company from hiring crews, equipment, and fuel.
Plus, if the homeowner breaks their own fiber, then the phone company gets some money for a service call.

And if they bring in their AC wiring, that'll be even more copper.

I don't have one of the balcony panels.
What I do have that works for me is a panel with batteries. I put the panel/battery on the roof and that supplies power to a wireless security cam that records 7/24. So far, it's never run the battery down. I connect using wireless when I get an alert or was just curious about what animal was making that noise last night.
Why bother? So I don't have to run a wire through the yard or any wall or replace batteries every month, and I can put one on the fence looking back at the house.
No doubt there are many uses for these as stand alones.

Old news. We heard all this back in the 20th century.

1998,
  LOpht testifies before Congress
https://commdocs.house.gov/com...

Clinton weighs in to protect us from all this in 1998
https://clintonwhitehouse5.arc...

and countless other incidents

And now we have DOGE eviscerating CISA because Project 2025.
https://www.darkreading.com/th...
https://www.americanprogress.o...

The problem with CISA is that cyber security measures previously taken have served to make Russia look bad and did nothing to prove Trump actually won in 2020.

That ^^^ or perhaps some legitimate software that was OK when installed, but later got a supply channel hack of an update that included the malware.

The real problem here is the eternal Windows problem of dll side-loading.
That allows a system dll to be impersonated and evade sfc scannow protection. How it gets activated is by far less of a problem than that the bad code is already resident in memory waiting for instruction.
Also, there's the problem that someone has gotten the privilege to put it there.

Well yes, and. That's probably directly due to Rural areas in the US having greatly inferior healthcare than what is found in cities and especially having a lack of specialists. And that is due to money, as you say, higher incomes for populations.

It is indeed about being fair.
The Handicapper General, Diana Moon Glampers is running things now.

The next step is for the lenders to bundle the small loans into securities to sell to investors. They'll say the securities will be safe because they'll be protected with credit default swaps, CDS, that will be sold on the open market. They will get AAA ratings.
Next, you'll be able to trade naked CDS and securitized bundles of CDS guaranteed by investment houses and major insurance companies. This market will be holding trillions of dollars of putative value.

Then a bomb will go off in the lobby of one of the investment houses, perhaps figuratively, and that company will collapse. The CDS will all be called and the trillions will evaporate, and by that I mean anyone who is not a too-big-to-fail entity will lose their shirts. Also, they'll lose their houses.
The treasury will prop up the too-big-fail-entities and, oh, btw, the investments of the political leadership, and by that I do not necessarily mean the elected leadership.

And for those who have not heard of Project 2025, it's also the blueprint for Doge's often puzzling shutdown of certain Federal Agencies.

What I'm reading is that none of you have been to MIT, Cal tech, Harvard, or such schools.
They have been doing the freshman pass/fail for decades.

That^^^
Knee-capping NOAA comes from The Heritage Foundation's Project 2025.
The country that would benefit the most from global warming is Russia, and The Heritage Foundation has been aligning itself with pro-Russian stances for some time now.

He's making a pun that requires some infra-dig knowledge.
  The TLA "MCP" in this slashdot article is referring to "Model Context Protocol".

Burroughs Corporation's named the operating system for its mainframe line of computers "MCP", referring to "Master Control Program" from 1961. MCP is still around.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/...

The movie TRON had a character named TRON.
TRON is the abbreviation for "Terminal Real-Time Operating Nucleus" from 1984. It's in nearly everything these days.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/...

The movie TRON operates on more than one level.
At the surface, it's a video game story where the player get pulled into the world of the game, and the TRON program helps battle the all-consuming MCP.
On another level, it parallels the rise/conflict/evolution between mainframes and microcomputers.

True, but the esp32 microcontroller chip that's at the root of all this costs only a dollar or two, so no MBA is going to approve funding a redesign.

It's about the ESP32 microcontroller chip that's in everything.
Already discussed at length on slashdot
https://hardware.slashdot.org/...