261–270 of 491 posts
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By "legally gained cash" I mean that taxes have already been paid for it.
Also, governments are finding new and creative ways to put new taxes on already legal money. So yeah, privacy matters.
It's about building a society that can be based on assumption of honesty and trust rather than surveillance and authoritarianism. At present, our electronic monetary system has morohed into something that resembles George Orwell's 1984.
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Those are legitimate observations, but so is CamperBob's. I have first hand experience of how bad the carceral system can be, but the fact of that awfulness doesn't mitigate the oddness of a very high profile prisoner just falling through the cracks. The whole thesis here is that what happened to Epstein could happen to anyone, but that's not true. Most people are not billionaires with 24-7 access to the best lawyers…
Epstein had a lot of advantages, but they weren't enough to buy him a luxurious prison experience. He paid off other prisoners and exploited loopholes, but was still in a spartan cell. The luxurious pay-for-play prisons in the news occasionally are generally municipal prisons; Eppstein was in federal pretrial detention which is much harder to game. When he died Epstein was in a cell in the Special Housing Unit for un…
Like his 2008 prison sentence right?
From what I read the hack was not sophisticated at all. If they had decent endpoint protection this would not have happened. Maybe they disabled defender after the initial access and privesc because defender blocks Get-Keystrokes and other things in empire,even with significant modification. Anyway, I don't care about the hacktivism and propaganda (don't really get it -- tbh,rich people bad/corrupt?) But would very m…
I have learned this the hard way, having started up an MSP at one point and done a lot of contracting to help orgs unfuck their infra, I have seen it all first hand, from 5-30 person lawfirms to fortune 500 oil companies to unicorn startups. I have been the senior sysadmin who failed to convey things in a way the got through C-level thick skulls, and most of my career trajectory has been angled towards keeping up with the sysadmin transition to devops while learning how to fill that gap so I don't repeat those mistakes. I've failed multiple times, but each one is a lesson I learn from and try to apply to the next place, and sometimes C-levels literally just don't care and can't be reached, and nothing happens till a major breach or lawsuit costs lots of money.
To me, this is the importance of the CTO/CIO roles. The problem is, again, the vast majority of America isn't SV. I would say ~%80 of companies I saw didn't even have those roles, and if they had someone in that role but without the title (like IT director), they often didn't have a seat on the board or any real influence with the C's. I have also seen those roles taken by people who should be in other positions but enjoy the "C" title too much, to the detriment of the org.
Sorry, this got kind of ranty, but it's an issue I obsess over in trying to find better solutions for. Basically I'm learning how to hack management instead of computers these days.
After watching The laundromat, I think it's big news. Although I will always be curious why countries are letting those small, insignificant islands and countries manage all this wealth, and why they're trusted to do it. This can't be secure or safe. I'm curious about the diplomacy and the political implications of this. What if their office get robbed? What if the island gets attacked? What if one of those shady ban…
Their status as being "held" outside the US is mostly a fiction existing on paper which allows for privacy and tax avoidance.
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Epstein had a lot of advantages, but they weren't enough to buy him a luxurious prison experience. He paid off other prisoners and exploited loopholes, but was still in a spartan cell. The luxurious pay-for-play prisons in the news occasionally are generally municipal prisons; Eppstein was in federal pretrial detention which is much harder to game. When he died Epstein was in a cell in the Special Housing Unit for un…
> Epstein had a lot of advantages, but they weren't enough to buy him a luxurious prison experience. Like his 2008 prison sentence right?
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> forcing foreign financial institutions to tell the US government about any American-owned assets on their books This is another interesting part. How can the US "force" a sophisticated wealthy sovereign nation that culturally and morally values banking privacy (not only for the profits), like Switzerland? It cannot be understated how much power, control and ownership the US has of the world financial system. If Swi…
As a Swiss, in a way it was sobering to see one of our dominant industries brought to heel so quickly. On the other hand, it was very satisfying to see those banks, who for decades had hid behind their hand tailored secrecy laws to do business with Nazis, dictators, and drug dealers, and were domestically untouchable, finally clean up their acts. As for "culturally and morally values privacy", I would find that a lot…
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Texas receives more federal dollars than it contributes. The real tax dodge is perpetrated by state governments that manipulate the federal budget to their benefit.
That's a lie. Texas pays more in federal taxes than it receives.
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If you read the article South Dakota is a great choice. It's a fantastic read on the history of how these states to harbor cash came to be. This part of the article sums it up in a very compelling manner: "Here is an example from one academic paper on South Dakotan trusts: after 200 years, $1m placed in trust and growing tax-free at an annual rate of 6% will have become $136bn. After 300 years, it will have grown to…
That example is a bit ridiculous. Yes, compounding is powerful. But there’s also inflation, and a single passively invested $1mm is never going to own the entire economy (if nothing else, returns would be distorted by scale). That said ... this is the premise of some entertaining science fiction.
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Exactly this - one wonders why anyone would rationally become a journalist. The pay is crap, the verbal attacks are constant ("fake news", etc), the competition is immense (publish NOW because it's already on Twitter, yet it needs to be 100% factually accurate, so don't forget to triple-check your sources), and oh by the way, if you report on anything of societal value (rooting out corruption, printing stories about…
> and oh by the way, if you report on anything of societal value (rooting out corruption, printing stories about drug cartels), you may get yourself killed. Don't forget sued, which prevents many independent journalists from being as aggressive as they should be with the plutocratic class and large corporations in countries where murdering journalists is still verboten. If you don't have the legal resources (and insu…
https://www.propublica.org/article/terror-in-little-saigon-v...
If you confront the powerful, it often ends up being too little, too late, in terms of government protections.