I believe liberewolf does hide your machine id

yup, both Chrome and Firefox expose your machine-id by default

It does actually matter. While the US isn’t going to go bankrupt as a result of printing money, there is a real consequence within the framework of the way the system actually works. They can issue infinite currency, but the two problems they have are inflation and debt payments. Inflation devalues the currency, while higher debt payments mean that there’s less operational budget available. So, end result ends up being less money available for productive purposes as more and more of the budget ends up being allocated towards interest.

The government doesn’t just print cash and hand it out either. What actually happens is that they issue Treasury bonds instead with the understanding that private interests buy them and the government will pay back later with interest. These bonds are then bought up by pension funds, foreign governments, big financial institutions, etc.

When the government prints too much money or issues too many bonds, the bond holders start getting awful nervous about their investment because they wonder if the dollars they get back in ten years will be worth the paper they’re printed on. So they demand a higher yield to cover the risk. It’s not unlike a credit card company jacking up your rate when you miss a payment.

Rising bond yields, in turn, make the government’s interest payments go up. Bigger and bigger checks need to be paid to the people who lent the money, which further reduces the operational budget. Today, that sum is already sitting at over a trillion dollars a year. It’s money that’s just flowing out of the treasury and straight into the accounts of bondholders.

And of course, as you note, the other problem will be that the rest of the world will start dumping dollar because holding US bonds will mean losing money as the dollar continues to depreciate in value.

what a weird coincidence https://www.pravda.com.ua/eng/news/2026/07/11/8043595/

Sure, there will be an effect on many countries, but it’s also just going to mean that global economy reorients around trade outside the west. China, in particular, has been actively pursuing a strategy of dual circulation ensuring their domestic economy is the primary driver rather than trade. I imagine once there is a financial crisis in the west, countries in BRICS and ASEAN will increasingly focus their trade on China.

thanks that’s a good talk

basically

It probably does, but I suspect they just didn’t consider the problem in the first place rather than the issue being that not having a persistent id is somehow extraordinarily difficult.

yeah probably, and you can tweak any distro to rotate it too, just most people don’t realize it’s a thing in the first place

oh you can do that with linux, even with systemd, just takes a bit of tinkering

tracking is a core function of pretty much all commercial software at this point

not necessarily, but it’s definitely easier to avoid having machine id without it

also to login with edge on top of that

unfortunately https://lemmy.ml/post/49710604

Imagine your computer has a secret ID number that Microsoft gives it when you sign in with your Microsoft account. This number is like a permanent nametag that your computer wears. Even if you use a VPN to hide your location, that nametag stays the same.

A hacker used a VPN to hide while breaking into a jewelry store’s computer system. But Microsoft helped the FBI find him because his computer’s secret nametag kept showing up everywhere he went online. They matched that nametag to his social media accounts and other stuff he did, and that’s how they caught him. Most people didn’t even know this secret nametag existed, and you can’t turn it off without breaking your computer.

Neither is it my first language, what’s your point?

at least you’re self aware

It appears that you are in need of help with reading comprehension here because I was not talking about any particular government.

I do admire their unwavering dedication to the clown act though.

Which doesn’t change the point which is that your own government has far more agency over you than a foreign one.