221–230 of 261 posts
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The cancellation had no effect on the ability of Venezuela or Russia to permit him to travel.
Sentence four. Let me spell it out for you: Venezuela and Russia would happily have allowed Snowden to fly, but the US was ready and willing to force down and search any plane that was even suspected of carrying Snowden.
How could you possibly believe you would get away with something like this.
Especially with a frankly embarrassingly poor attempt to place distance between himself and the payouts. He picked his own brother and a close family friend? Might as well have walked up to his boss every other week with a spot of feigned surprise and a new jackpot winning ticket to cash out, figuring they could direct deposit it along with his paycheck. Really makes you wonder how many moderately intelligent people…
Now this is a prestige TV series I would watch.
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As a thought exercise, what do you think the minimum distance between the cheater and the payout would need to be in order to avoid detection?
I don't know if distance matters. Let's say he found the perfect stranger who agrees to this. I think the bigger problem would be how do they exchange $7,000,000 in a way that nobody will notice?
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> Good luck. It's pretty difficult with the various capital controls in place to get lots of money out of the US without attracting attention. No it isn't, buy Bitcoin, store coin in brain wallet, walk across any border.
Sure, but then you've changed the game into finding a way to purchase that much Bitcoin and also find a way to liquidate that much Bitcoin once you realize that few merchants accept it.
So, have they not watched Die Hard ? The point made in that movie is that when you steal this many millions, they will find you -- unless they think you are already dead (thus, the plot to blow the building and look like they all died in the process). What were these fools thinking?
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> Ehh. A $1/week expense which buys you hope and dreams for a week isn't that bad in the grand scheme of things There's a demographic of lottery players that really only are spending $1 a week (or even $1 every few months or whatever), but there is also a large demographic that is regularly buying multiple $20 scratch tickets on a regular basis, which tends to be more of what people are thinking of when they evoke th…
The actual solution for the population which spends significant money on scratch cards, of course, is to invest in social care and support for people who are obviously very vulnerable. They'd be vulnerable whether the scratch cards existed or not.
I'm not for humanity dedicating more resource to social service. But we have to get socially vigilant and strict. Otherwise more people will be susceptible to this vulnerability. Part of that vigilance means shaming people for drugs, gambling, & alcohol, etc.
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> If they put it into savings, their mental health would generally go down the drain, Does this not come back to education, though? Putting money away in savings, hopefully to secure a more stable future, should bring some measure of confidence/happiness. This sort of basic financial sense does not require an expensive education. At least I don't think it does, maybe I am being naive. I do take your last point. I thi…
> Putting money away in savings, hopefully to secure a more stable future, should bring some measure of confidence/happiness. Only if you actually believe that saving money secures a more stable future. In practice, it really doesn't - you're still working at the same shitty job with no prospects, just with nothing to distract you from the reality of what that means, and maybe if you manage to save enough over half a…
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The actual solution for the population which spends significant money on scratch cards, of course, is to invest in social care and support for people who are obviously very vulnerable. They'd be vulnerable whether the scratch cards existed or not.
Invest? This is a pitfall that all people are vulnerable to, including the ones who invest. I'm not for humanity dedicating more resource to social service. But we have to get socially vigilant and strict. Otherwise more people will be susceptible to this vulnerability. Part of that vigilance means shaming people for drugs, gambling, & alcohol, etc.
The issue is that there is fuck-all support for people to overcome their faults - we've become a society in which if you can't get out of your situation on your own, you also can't get help getting out of your situation - because we don't believe that anybody can possibly be in that position. Individualism at its worst. The faults are usually a result of the shitty environment you're in, of course - nobody becomes an alcoholic because they're happy with how their life is going or feel they can do much to change it.
I don't think you understood my post. I mean we, as a society, need to help vulnerable people in our society - we need to invest resources into helping them. We can do that ourselves, we can do that through charity, we can do that through mutual aid, and we can do that through Government policy and services. Broadly speaking, as a society, we choose not to.
Ok. Do these guys that commit white collar crime not know how a passport works? If you have millions of dollars stashed in bank accounts WHY are you in the US? Why are you buying estates and testing out a new bmwI8 and spilling champagne all over? Why not get on a plane go to Morocco (a country with an extremely complex extradition process)? wtf. Even the guy running silk road was hanging out in SF now lives in a 4x6…
I've also always wondered this. But people seldom run. I think Snowden had seen enough of the sausage being made to realize that hiding in the USA was impossible, given the security apparatus' capabilities.