101–110 of 118 posts
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The funny thing is I was messing with you by citing the exact circumstances of the 2008 financial crisis that's still reported on periodically. I was thinking you'd catch that. Good to know that you've been seeing signs in other places, too, though. ;)
I thought it was obvious enough I didn't feel the need to repeat it given how repetitive I was with the OP. ;)
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>"He did it and nobody connected dots until piles of high risk crimes added up with benefit of easy tracing" All really good points. I found myself having to re-read the part where he was actually brought in by the authorities, thinking to myself how hard it would have to be to actually trace Le Roux the man. I wasn't fully expecting him to be captured until the next installment, actually. It just seems amazing for s…
To be fair to Le Roux, he switched to the methamphetamine/cocaine trade after his holdings in Hong Kong were seized. It's possible I misinterpreted the article, but it appeared to me that he was trying to recover his previous wealth. It seems like a psychologically normal thing for a multimillionaire who lost millions (but is still wildly wealthy) to attempt to restore that wealth.
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> ...it's the broken ones who turn to crime. If law were derived from universal morals (heh...) then that might be accurate. But due to the relatively arbitrariness of whether or not someone is a criminal, especially with respect to the great variety of countries in which virtually all of HN would be criminals for freely speaking about various topics, I think it's a bit presumption and mean to call those who "turn to…
>If law were derived from universal morals (heh...) then that might be accurate. Well, there's a pretty big difference between "I shouldn't get arrested for smoking pot" and "I shouldn't get arrested for murdering rival pot dealers." Maybe western law is mostly derived from a sensible universal moralism with certain exceptions. That doesn't mean that all criminality is rational or that the OP's opinion that most crim…
It's actually easy to show that this isn't possible, because the amount of western law is much larger than a single person could ever hold in his head. This could not be the case for "universal" moralism, which is by definition shared by everyone.
> Many studies have shown your average criminal to be a fairly messed up individual: mental illness, strong personality faults, poor reasoning skills, poor executive control, poor discipline, etc.
I suspect these are studies of caught criminals. They can't apply to uncaught criminals, and they specifically don't apply to Paul le Roux (caught or not) without adjustment for the type of crime being committed. He filled a managerial role; "most criminals" in those studies (and most criminals generally) don't.
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Why do you think world leaders before 1800 are significanly different than the ones since?
I don't, really. There isn't a sudden demarcation. It's more of a gradual shift. If you go back in time before then, you're predating the enlightenment. Democratic revolutions will be following the example of the British Colonies after that point.
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True, if anything that should be a feature of HN. To try and follow a 403 and use that instead. The only examples I can think of in which this wouldn't be desired are articles you have to login to access, but that could be a short blacklist or whitelist. Of course once we're inspecting URLs for 403s, I can see a slippery slope to indexing and comparing content of submissions...
304, not 403. And actually, only a 301 Permanent Redirect should be followed and used instead. bit.ly and URL shorteners it powers, which includes atav.st, use 301 Permanent Redirect. Fetching the headers would also be a good way to check the MIME type (for automatic warnings like [pdf] or [video]), as well as checking the title.
Another great, fun write-up by Ratliff. I'm surprised by by a number of things which I'll comment on in a disorganized way. :) One is how often Israeli commandos turn up in these organizations. In parallel, there's their well-known effectiveness plus the risk of Mossad connections that can burn you. Mexican cartels, Colombian, Paul Le Roux... they all buy them up. Cheap, too. I'd like to hear their logic on that. Tha…
I dunno. My personal opinion is that humans to some extent are innately good, and that it's the broken ones who turn to crime. Furthermore it's the EXTREMELY broken ones that become the crime lords etc. and those people often have massive flaws in their character such as the arrogance you described. Basically I don't think he could've ever accomplished what he did if he wasn't arrogant and wreckless to his core.
Not sure whether arrogance is something that helps people achieve more, or if it is a byproduct of their achievements.
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Sure, but I would imagine that in such a situation it would be quite rational to choose to coöperate.
Please explain.
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Is it really a link-shortener or just atavist providing a short perma-link? 'atav.st' == atavist.com?
it doesn't make any difference, if you think about why hacker news bans link shorteners: there should be one, and ONLY one, canonical URL for every article. if you allow two or more, then there is essentially no way to detect duplicate submissions. so i can pretty much guarantee that it is just a matter of time until atav.st is banned here.
They also have partnerships to do branded shortening. Bitly will happily generate shortened URLs for other domains, eg http://amzn.to/
As part of their content scrubbing, I suggest HN re-shortens URLs. Another +1 use case that bitly or other service could provide.
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> arguments against Book of Mormon discovery given calculations showed it was over 1,000lbs [citation needed] This document catalogs historical statements about the physical characteristics of the Book of Mormon: https://ojs.lib.byu.edu/spc/index.php/JBMRS/article/download... Summary: even if it were a solid block of pure gold, it would only weigh ~200 lbs. However, there's no strong historical evidence that it was p…
Oops, you got me: another memory failure. Thanks for the catch. Yeah, a guy with a limp outrunning or fighting attackers carrying a book that weighs 200lbs. The 60lbs part is his and apologists "alloy" BS that's rejected by the book itself in Mosiah 8:9 where it says the plates are pure gold. So, it looks like a stretch unless the book is wrong.
My goal isn't to "get you"; I just don't want incorrect information passed off as truth. You clearly think the Book of Mormon is bogus. That's fine, but please use better researched arguments against it.
Anyway, I'm going to drop this thread here, since a post about Paul Le Roux if the wrong place to have this discussion.