which

The "return to player" numbers for lottery tickets are on the order of 60% https://wizardofodds.com/are-lottery-players-smart/. Many states have online lottery apps, they do TV and radio ads, etc. Why should that be allowed? Of course some of the only forms of gambling where skill actually matters (poker and sports) come under constant attack...

If you bet randomly on the winner of NFL games on DraftKings you'd expect to lose 4-5% of your money per bet over time. I'm not sure the people here with a cultivated disinterest in professional sports know this but it is much more entertaining to watch a game when you have money on the line. We know that all but 1-2 percent of people are able to control themselves and not become problem gamblers. The UK fines casinos for not doing enough to stop problem gambling, the US can do the same. You can do income checks, have a national self exclusion system, and ban advertising.

Lastly, prediction markets are the only way for Americans to bet on sports and not be banned for winning too much (short of using sketchy agents for Betfair and Asian books that can randomly steal all your money)

If you read the settlements that come out of these lawsuits, you will pretty much always find an 8 to low 9 figure settlement (that the lawyers get a third of), maybe some superficial policy changes, and $12 checks to the supposed victims who only became victims when they randomly got an email telling them they should join the lawsuit. The only people who benefit are the lawyers.

Is there a widely used phrase which represents the 95-97% range? One did not come to my head.

Yes, I think you can make an argument that the jury verdict was in line with the law... if that's the case then I think the law here is ridiculous. I can read what the law is, we're having a discussion. If the story of the woman who was burned by McDonald's coffee was posted here you would have people arguing for and against whether people should be able to seek recourse in courts for harms of that nature.

The argument that research was suppressed and this is somehow damning is absurd on its face. The most obvious reason being that they obviously didn't do a very good job of suppressing it given that we hear this claim every day. The second being that they could have just not done this research at all and then there would have been nothing to "suppress" (this terminology is also very odd... if 3M analyzes different sticky notes and concludes that their competitors sticky notes are better than theirs but does not release the results, is that suppression?). The third is that studies with the same results have come out probably every year since 2010 and have been routinely cited in the mainstream press. Lastly, it ignores that many platforms have actually responded to research about potential harms of social media by implementing safeguards on teen accounts.

Look at the plaintiff in this case: it's a mentally unstable person who blames her life problems on social media. Never mind the fact that she had been diagnosed with mental illnesses as an early teen, or that an overwhelming majority of people who use social media don't develop eating disorders or other mental illnesses as a result of it (and in fact the incidence of say bulimia peaked 30 years ago in spite of almost universal social media adoption among young people). This is not at all like smoking where 15% of smokers will get lung cancer.

And due to some absurd legal reasoning the plaintiff was allowed to pseudonymously extort $3 million out of tech companies. Worst of all I see people on a technology forum applauding this out of some sort of resentment towards large companies!

The average park in America is only like 5-10 acres. And of that only certain areas may have playstructures / basketball courts / benches / other things that people can actually use. So sufficiently loud audio can ruin people's experience. It's obvious to anyone who's been outside in the past 10 years that "live and let live" doesn't work... if they were using heroin and nodding out would that just be another form of recreation?

Yes, and the crime spike of the 1960s started with boomers reaching 15-20. You can follow that to cookie monster pajamas in Walmart.

That same line of reasoning could apply to music on planes. No one really needs to use a particular airline at a particular time or use a public park at any given time. It ceases to be a public place if a small group of people can de facto monopolize it by making it unpleasant for most other people to be there.

James Q. Wilson talked about this problem a long time ago... and why standard neighborhood shaming cannot really police it. Maybe there is an increasingly different set of norms among different generations which is why you have a breakdown in manners and even high school kids from affluent areas hitting "devious licks."

    Because the sanctions employed are subtle, informal, and delicate, not everyone is equally vulnerable to everyone else’s discipline. Furthermore, if there is not a generally shared agreement as to appropriate standards of conduct, these sanctions will be inadequate to correct such deviations as occur. A slight departure from a norm is set right by a casual remark; a commitment to a different norm is very hard to alter, unless, of course, the deviant party is “eager to fit in,” in which case he is not committed to the different norm at all but simply looking for signs as to what the preferred norms may be.

The tax avoidance schemes used by most major US companies are to avoid US taxes on foreign income. Most developed countries have territorial tax systems so their companies do not even need to use these fancy legal maneuvers because the income is largely exempt anyways.

In any given year corporate income tax is like 6-10% of federal receipts so even if that was doubled there would not be a huge decline in income taxes needed. The way the US does corporate tax is really also not that great from an economic perspective because it is a form of double taxation. The Estonian model of only taxing distributions incentivizes investment and avoids many debates over depreciation etc.

Does Leslie Groves deserve (some) credit for the Manhattan Project? Obviously there were people under him doing the actual day to day physics and chemistry work, but if a less effective person was in charge, the whole thing could have failed.

How much worse could you get from a society where 80% of people are living in extreme poverty and where in a good year inflation is 250%? Maduro was not some great guarantor of stability who kept a divided society together. For instance about half the prisons are run under the so called pranato system which means they are literally run by the inmates. I think it's reasonable to say that almost anyone would be better than him.

Pretty much everyone who wasn't in on the CADIVI scam or the subsidized gasoline racket or selling $0.05 screws to PDVSA for $75 stands to benefit from a new government. Many corrupt dictators understand that stealing a small percentage of a bigger pie is a more stable arrangement that can ultimately be more profitable in the long run but the clan that ran Venezuela was so greedy they wanted to take everything as fast as possible.

Venezuela was not a society held together by a strongman unlike Iraq/Libya/Syria. It also does not have the religious or tribal divides those places did. The country was already on the brink of collapse from a combination of sanctions and truly astronomical levels of corruption. There has been a roughly 70% economic decline over the past decade and while there is no longer hyperinflation, inflation in 2025 was at least 200%. Panama would be a more appropriate reference point.

Sadly I am not in a position to hire anyone but just a heads up that if I click your resume link I get a Microsoft login page

Relatedly about another member of the same group:

Penchukov’s political connections helped him evade prosecution by Ukrainian cybercrime investigators for many years. The late son of former Ukrainian President Victor Yanukovych (Victor Yanukovych Jr.) would serve as godfather to Tank’s daughter Miloslava... Sources briefed on the investigation into Penchukov said that in 2010 — at a time when the Security Service of Ukraine (SBU) was preparing to serve search warrants on Tank and his crew — Tank received a tip that the SBU was coming to raid his home.

https://krebsonsecurity.com/2022/11/top-zeus-botnet-suspect-...

It took 10 years for Madoff victims to get most of their money back and he was literally just depositing the money into his checking account. He also almost certainly had much fewer victims than this guy did. Based on the complaint I think there may be a large number of international victims as well. This case will really test whatever claims process the DOJ has but hopefully some measure of compensation can be reached quickly. I suspect there are tens of thousands of scam domains and different addresses used so even identifying who to notify will probably be extremely difficult.

Citizenship by investment revenue was 20% of St Kitts’ GDP in 2023. Look at the Henley & Partners website - pretty much every developed country (much of EU, Singapore, Switzerland, many Asian countries) offer at least offer residency by investment. And they still offer it despite pressure from the EU to shut these programs down, so there must be some benefit to it.

You can buy Austrian citizenship for ~5M EUR. Cyprus and Malta offered similar schemes at much lower prices until recently. Italy incentivizes people to move their tax residence there by letting them pay a 200k EUR lump sum tax annually instead of the standard progressive rate. I don't really see why we shouldn't have programs like this if there is vetting, but I'm also curious under which US laws this can be justified. Who would have standing to contest this even if it wasn't legal?

PS:

Under 50 USC §3508, the CIA director or the Attorney General can bring in up to 100 aliens and their family per year for permanent residence without regard to any admissibility requirements. Perhaps to maximize revenue these spots can be auctioned off at a premium.

It would seem that accumulating stuff is a waste of time at a point much lower than one billion. On the other hand, giving every Debian maintainer $500 a month is ~$5M a year. Add in Gentoo, Alpine, and other things I like and you're looking at probably double that total. Ivy admission for kids is a few million a year for 5-10 years... Retaking Artsakh would be north of $3 billion

I see what you mean. I feel like it's a collective action problem. If Myanmar had its security situation together, the incentive to meddle would be much lower. No one funds rebel groups just for the sake of it, except maybe Gaddafi. But there are way too many parties to way too many tables, so chaos just continues because reaching a deal never seems possible.

I read a book about Dostum and I vaguely remember they actually had multiple candidates in mind originally. There was Rabbani, Dostum and I think some others, but they chose Dostum cause he had the least baggage and ties to Iran. Problem is in Myanmar might not be anyone with real power who is even defensible. You don't hear too many bad things about say the TNLA, but that might just be a function of them not being important enough to make headlines in English news. I get the impression the KNLA is the most legitimate EAO in the eyes of Western governments yet their leaders are on tape negotiating heroin deals and brokering uranium [1], so maybe my hope for a unifier to come out of these armed groups is a bit unrealistic.

[1] https://storage.courtlistener.com/recap/gov.uscourts.nysd.57...

Do policy people see any light at the end of the tunnel for Myanmar? I feel like we just need to give intelligence + a couple billion in weapons to a Burmese version of Dostum. Make it a condition of receiving aid that scammers are ruthlessly cracked down on/sent back to China. Form a coalition with other EAOs that matter, sort of like the Northern Alliance, and take over Tatmadaw controlled cities one by one. Then get some highly decentralized federalism in place (draw the rest of the owl).

Well in all fairness to China/India, they might prefer to work with a legitimate government, but the legitimate government of Myanmar (when it existed) has always been completely dysfunctional. It also has never really exercised any control of the borderlands, which are where rebel groups like those in Manipur often congregate. Even prior to the development of the scam industry, out of work Chinese in provinces like Yunnan would often seek opportunity in the more well run EAO quasi-states. There are well-maintained paved roads in Pangkham, which can't be said for much of the country.

They backed a group of militias to invade areas where this was happening [0]. They also pressured family members of tens of thousands Chinese in northern Myanmar to return [1]. China literally waltzed into Kokang and put the top scam leaders on a plane.

The real question is why there hasn't been any remotely comparable response from the US. Every EAO that matters is aligned with China and thus doesn't care when Americans are scammed. The US should make them care.

[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Operation_1027

[1] https://www.scmp.com/week-asia/politics/article/3141474/beij...

When a decently sized percentage of it goes to "independent monitors" almost entirely run by ex-DOJ revolving door types, yeah. See https://www.forbes.com/global/2010/0607/companies-payoffs-wa...

And some think that FCPA enforcement and huge fines targeted at European companies like BNP Paribas motivated the creation of the EU tech extortion apparatus.

I still don't understand the Polymarket business model. Why take the legal risk of $3 billion in volume as an unlicensed commodities exchange if you're not even going to get paid for it? 1% would be $30,000,000!

This! And where do people think open source funding, hackathons, bug bounties for software that's not even theirs, oss-fuzz, really incredible but not necessarily profitable research like Project Zero comes from? AdWords largesse.

This interpretation is at odds with what happens in Rotterdam aka cocaine ground zero (or is it Antwerp now?). It's the most automated port in the world. They still routinely bust port insiders who help crooks there.

https://www.bbc.com/news/stories-59379474

https://www.vice.com/en/article/belgium-netherlands-cocaine-...

https://www.occrp.org/en/project/narcofiles-the-new-criminal...

Because the Tor project is the only anonymity network with enough cover traffic and nodes to actually provide a reasonable amount of privacy to users. Yes, there are attacks that are possible but they are typically costly (at least ones that aren't targeted at hidden services) and are mitigated using recent inventions like Vanguards.

Yeah but they might just be eating higher fraud losses. It used to be pretty much instant unlocking until they asked for a waiver to make it 60 days in 2019 (which was granted by the FCC with not much pushback). So clearly some delay is important. Given their previous agreement they might not have felt they could ask for a longer wait.

The FCC is proposing unlocks for phones that are not completely paid for yet. No one is against unlocking paid for phones. The lock is basically the only recourse the carrier has for nonpayment because blacklisting the IMEI doesn't matter if the phone goes to another country. I don't think you can relock a phone once it's unlocked, and the crooks typically make 1 or 2 payments which would cover the 60 days so by the time the carrier realizes the plan is in default they're not getting their money back.

The GSMA has a blacklist system. Participating carriers can blacklist a stolen / fraud / nonpayment phone IMEI and all the other blacklist members will agree to also ban that phone from their network. The problem is that people won't make payments, sell the phone for cash, and eventually the phone ends up in places (China, UAE, Nigeria, Russia, ...) that don't participate in the blacklist.

This might be well intentioned but it's a bad idea. See https://www.justice.gov/usao-edtx/pr/101-indicted-transnatio... for why but the gist of it is that people use fake IDs to impersonate someone, get phones on credit, and make only the first payment. Then they sell it to a wholesaler who uses a sketchy connection to get the phone unlocked, Fedexes the phone to Hong Kong, and never pays again. Having to bribe rogue carrier employees for unlocks is a big cost center for these thugs.

By automatically unlocking by default you're doing their job for them and making this crime more profitable. And the victims in many cases don't spot the fraud until months later because not everyone is constantly checking their credit report. And it's not some isolated thing either. Literally ONE phone store / wholesaler in Texas bought and exported 100 million dollars worth of stolen phones in a couple of years.

The locking is also part of why new iPhones are even affordable to middle class people in the first place.