cik2e

> Atleast SBF took the extra step of first funneling money to Alameda and then directing Alameda to send it back to him and then send it to his dad as a tax free gift.

I am pretty sure it's the source of the money that matters more (legal vs. illegal) than whether the accounting tricks are legally sound.

What you're saying sounds like "at least he wasn't a complete numb-nuts", but that's not much of an "at least" in this scenario.

I am pretty sure the courts will be looking for an "at least he wasn't stealing from his customers".

At least, that's the sane hope.

Not sure what you're getting at but 400 mph is 0.178816 km/s. Off by two orders of magnitude from 11 km/s.

I am sure everyone has seen a shooting star. Planes don't move like shooting starts or whatever is in this vide.

I think it's safe to conclude that this is not a plane nor a meteor.

So this can't be a meteor then. That's not 11 km/s unless the video has been drastically slowed down.

> So instead of allowing the disappointing truth to come out, the Bank of England secretly funneled money to hide the gap.

I believe that's what was meant by "fake". In other words, inauthentic.

As far as the transformation from "private institution" to central bank, are you suggesting that this was a form of Open Market Operations?

I'm only suggesting that the official story doesn't stand up to any sort of critical analysis. Yes there were many witnesses. I don't know what all of the witness accounts were and how those filtered down into the official story.

What I'm suggesting is that the official account makes no sense. Mary Lincoln Todd waits for Booth to do all of his theatrics, instead of immediately screaming "EVERYONE WITH A GUN SHOOT THAT MAN".

I am not suggesting it anything beyond that. But I am not terminally naïve.

I challenge you to look for good historical analysis of the situation. There isn't that much.

But the story is that he WAS injured. So fine, let's say it's minor and he's jacked up on adrenaline and doesn't notice.

And as Booth is being a Marvel action hero (a man in his 40s), everyone is standing around twiddling their thumbs? Including the military detachment outside. The story is not realistic on any level.

So he was given more time to limp around and retrieve the knife while not being apprehended or shot at?

You are kidding right? Of course Lincoln had bodyguard. Maybe they weren't called the Secret Service but he had bodyguards. This was a time of war and the president is going about unprotected? Guarding your most important politician is not a modern invention.

I am not a lawyer either, but we can deduce logically that Walmart's lawyers approved it, so it's cool.

If companies are "allowed" to lay people off, then why not this? I'm pretty sure this is within the boundaries of "at will employment". You'd have to show some kind of civil rights violation.

Companies don't have to show cause to fire anyone. That's a cover your ass situation. This ass-covering makes sense with more than half of the US population now falling into some kind of protected class.

Ironically, here in the United States, they have everyone distracted with race wars and gender ID while workers' rights are still nonexistent.

That's why corporations love Corporate Black History Month and Corporate LGBTQ Month so much. They get to virtue signal that they don't discriminate while continuing to rob everyone blind.

> Restaurants can be forced to limit portion sizes (which might also have side effects to improve public health, aka obesity epidemic).

Pricing out poor fat people from restaurants will not solve the obesity epidemic. It will drive them to Doritos.

> wasted because restaurants prefer to deliver too large portions because they are afraid of bad Google/Yelp/... reviews...

Not everybody eats restaurant food for entertainment. Sometimes you can't cook and a larger portion means leftovers and usually more calories per dollar.

There's nothing wrong with large portions. If you didn't want that much food, go to a different restaurant, or a buffet where you can select exactly how much food you want.

And what large portions are we talking about anyway? That peaked in the 90s just like your bug splattered windshields.

That sounds like some good practical advice, but also slightly vomit inducing.

> Economists such as Lord Adair Turner, the former chair of the British Financial Services Authority, have argued that innovation in the financial industry is often a form of rent-seeking.[24][25]

source: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Rent-seeking

Do they not teach this stuff in an undergraduate business classes any more? "Float" was BIZ101 and in BIZ102 you learn how to read financial statements...

The "genius restaurateur" in the article rediscovered the art of not paying your bills with a credit card, i.e., the "debt trap".

Great read. The real problem with "the skin in the game argument" is that it's a matter of opinion, but one opinion is more likely to be right.

> Raising capital to do a startup reduces skin in the game (you’re spending other people’s money, after all).

The more likely correct take is as follows. Note that I am changing just one word.

The right version:

> Raising capital to do a startup INCREASES skin in the game (you’re spending other people’s money, after all).

The naïve take seems to place no value on reputation (ability to get more financing in the future).

Probably, UBI is the best first solution. In the sense that it acts as a collective bargaining system for all citizens who are forced to trade their time for income.

What exactly are you even saying? What is "rubbish" and what do you mean by "certain sounds"?

People have been paying for live performances of music, i.e., "certain sounds", throughout all of recorded history. So it's the opposite of an aberration. "Paying to hear certain sounds" is a time-honored human tradition. If we broaden our definition of "paying" to include barter, I would guess it goes back to the invention of musical instruments.

> Because the creator of crypto concept never understood why there are centralized institutions in the first place.

You are totally missing the point. Having to rely upon central banks was the fundamental problem being solved.

The root problem with conventional currency is all the trust that's required to make it work. The central bank must be trusted not to debase the currency, but the history of fiat currencies is full of breaches of that trust. Banks must be trusted to hold our money and transfer it electronically, but they lend it out in waves of credit bubbles with barely a fraction in reserve. We have to trust them with our privacy, trust them not to let identity thieves drain our accounts.

-Satoshi Nakamoto [0]

Getting central banks out of the picture is original philosophical motivation for developing a digital currency. All of the "cashless society" convenience aspects are secondary features. Everything that follows, regarding ledgers/records/blockchain/double-spending/trust-less is what's needed to make a digital currency work without a centralized authorities that mint money and validate transactions.

A lot of people automatically dismiss e-currency as a lost cause because of all the companies that failed since the 1990's. I hope it's obvious it was only the centrally controlled nature of those systems that doomed them. I think this is the first time we're trying a decentralized, non-trust-based system.

-Satoshi Nakamoto [1]

Next up, the irreversibility of transactions is a feature, not a bug.

For many purposes, reversal and arbitration is highly desirable, but there is no way anyone can compete with the arbitration provided by Visa and Mastercard, for they have network effects on their side, and they do a really good job of arbitration, at which they have vast experience, accumulated skills, wisdom, and good repute. So any new networked transaction system has to target the demand for final and irreversible transactions. [2]

[0] http://p2pfoundation.ning.com/forum/topics/bitcoin-open-sour...

[1] http://p2pfoundation.ning.com/forum/topics/bitcoin-open-sour...

[2] https://satoshi.nakamotoinstitute.org/emails/cryptography/th...

I don't think "expected" is the right word when a) it's the only option and b) women suffer most of the consequences of unwanted pregnancies.

I guess there are child support for males wrt to (b), which could very well incentivize the use of a male pill.

Western Europe, the US and China are already below replacement. If you have bought into this line of thinking then you should be saying:

> Right now the absolute worst thing you can do for the environment is to have a child as an African. [0]

Because today's African babies are tomorrow's European migrants, who will bolster the ranks of the polluting global elite.

But we don't want to go here do we?

[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_sovereign_states_and_d...

I pictured a whole live cow covered in breadcrumbs instead of fur when I read that. The southern US would be a huge importer.

Too many people have let their vision become consumed by the fact that Trump was an insufferable asshole. A nuanced discussion can be had about his time in office and his actual actions, without giving undue weight to the shit that comes out of the man's mouth. Just as an example of something most democrats would applaud, he signed an executive order to keep federal unemployment assistance flowing, while congress was happy to keep bickering and holding millions of Americans hostage. I'm not trying to break down the man's presidency here, but I would say that this provided more good to the average American, in a time of great need, than anything any recent president had done.

I do feel compelled to mention the following in regard to the comparison with Bush. The man, Cheney's puppet as he was, started an illegal war that killed a few hundred thousand people. Using the intelligence apparatus to manipulate Congress and the American people, in my view, is much worse than anything Trump had done. Same with enabling the domestic spying apparatus with the Patriot Act. If that's not undermining our institutions, I don't know what is.

I guess I should preempt the obvious counter argument about Trump's allegation that the election was stolen. The Democrats did the same exact thing with Russiagate. Both in terms of the accusation and pursuing it through legal channels, all based on fictional evidence to boot.

We should not allow us to miss the bigger picture while falling for the manufacrured distraction of "my party vs their party." But rather look to understand the special interests that are amplifying our division, and benefitting from it.

Chrome loves to eat huge chunks of available CPU on my MacBook while watching YouTube videos. I use ublock origin so my fans are basically never running otherwise, even on other streaming platforms. Netflix does tend to run the fans continuously, but at a very quiet, low rate.

This machine is ooold so having the fans run at max always makes me nervous. This never happens in firefox. I've talked to friends on relatively new MacBooks and they all run into the same issue with Chrome + YouTube.

Anyone know what the he'll Chrome is up to with this?

I have been in this situation myself, but my former boss has a conscience, as it turned out. My wife and I were on a vacation that was timed to celebrate an important birthday. I had spend days during the preceeding week training up two people on my team, and maybe one or two others, on various processes and contingencies. Yet still, when push came to shove, I was asked to get online to put out a fire. Luckily it only took an hour or two. A few days later I was surprised to find $1000 bucks deposited into my account from my boss as a thank you.

This system that I had hacked together, built out and maintained, kept on growing in size, complexity, attributable revenue and potential compliance liabilities. Within the year, I had to call the execs into a meeting to drive home the point that this wasn't a tenable way for us to operate. Everyone had known as much but it was still a tough pill to swallow. I let them get too spoiled at a huge cost to my own mental health.

I had to paint a dire picture to make my case that the system had to be rebuilt from scratch in order to be integrated into the main infrastructure. I ended up leaving a few months later as the rebuild was nearing completion. A couple of months down the road I was surprised to learn that they were still using a part of my system alongside the rebuild. Apparently their architecture couldn't support an algorithm that this component had relied on.

What a mess!

Just a wild guess, but it may have something to do with the federal government having the sole power to regulate interstate commerce. Which makes me wonder if weed sold in a state has to be grown in that state.

Which leads to deforestation, the depletion of ground water supplies and still produces CO2 on both then front end and back end. Renewables aren't interesting just because they are renewable. We're not going to run out of fossils today so burning something else instead makes no sense. Especially when it becomes a form of geewnwashing to cover for a lack of progress in wind and solar.

The car beeps and by the time the driver returns to earth and figures out what the fuck is going on, it will almost certainly be too late.

What you're really asking for is a car that predicts when it needs to beep. I'd imagine that in most of the serious situations, the maximum warning time will be shorter than the minimum spaced-out driver reorientation time. In fact, no meaningful scenario comes to mind where the car would want help but with a handful of seconds to spare.

I think Cold War 2 has already begun. I just don't see how the pre-invasion state of affairs could be restored in any realistic scenario. To hit the undo button Putin would have to stop the invasion, profusely apologize, pay reparations and make other concessions like returning Crimea. And of course he will do nothing of the sort. There's no scenario that I see under which which Putin is still running Russia and it stops being an international pariah.

Brain-computer link bypasses the gorilla arm problem entirely.

Kids like princes and princesses, I would guess. It's a theme that goes way back in children's literature.

I've noticed this to be especially annoying with recordings that artificially inflate the bass. Yay for earbuds but it's a real pain in the ass when my car speakers rattle until I have to turn the sound down so low that road noise becomes an issue.

I like to listen to playlists on shuffle and the inconsistency between different albums has me fiddling with the bass on a song to song basis. Luckily my car has steering wheel controls for this. But most modern vehicles would have you fucking with a touch screen which is a non-starter while driving.

It's not clear to me whether Russian-issued cards will still work within Russia.

VISA: > Once complete, all transactions initiated with Visa cards issued in Russia will no longer work outside the country and any Visa cards issued by financial institutions outside of Russia will no longer work within the Russian Federation.

They very specifically state that Russian cards won't work outside the country and foreign cards won't work within Russia. But there's no mention of local cards and local transactions. I assume this means that Visa will continue to operate within the Russian silo.

MC: > With this action, cards issued by Russian banks will no longer be supported by the Mastercard network. And, any Mastercard issued outside of the country will not work at Russian merchants or ATMs.

Mastercard, on the other hand, says that any Russian-issued card will no longer be supported by the "Mastercard network". This sounds like they are disabling all Russian Mastercards, period.

The distinction is very important. Siloing Russian cards to work only within Russia would surely be annoying but not catastrophic. Completely cutting off access, on the other hand, is a huge fucking deal.

After I typed that I went looking for Visa vs. Mastercard market share numbers to get an idea of what impact there would be from just one of these shutting down.

Looks like Russian banks have already been working to get ahead of this by partnering with China's UnionPay, which I hadn't even heard of.

https://www.russia-briefing.com/news/russia-s-sovcombank-par...