Yep, the FBI is unlikely to nail you to the wall for doing something inadvertantly (unless it was really really bad).
A friend of mine is a field agent who spent years prosecuting financial crimes, and a lot of her time was spent knocking on doors and telling people to stop doing stupid stuff. Like one lady in particular was elderly and kept getting taken advantage of by money launderers (people putting cash in her account and telling her to deposit it somewhere else). My friend had to visit her on multiple occasions to explain that she needed to stop doing that.
"This is really blatant money laundering? How are you planning on beating the FBI?"
"Seriously? Oh, I'm old and confused and this nice young gentlemen on the telephone called me and said he accidentally put a bunch of money into my account that was supposed to go to his mother. Such a nice boy. Just keep up your side of the deal. If my cut isn't in the Cayman account within the week, then I can guarantee that you won't be worrying about the FBI."
EDIT: Just to be clear. I'm hoping that we don't unknowingly live in a universe where all elderly people are secret underworld mob bosses. However, I'm honestly not sure how you would tell the difference between a sufficiently proficient elderly mob boss and someone who's just old and hasn't kept up with changing trends.
haha, that scenario definitely crossed my mind when I heard about it, but she's not an idiot (my friend) - I assume they had other reasons to think the lady wasn't all there, but I didn't ask.
Prior to working in financial crimes she spent a lot of time dealing with catching drug dealers/smugglers/cartels, which I think is where most agents go to cut their teeth, so she's heard pretty much every ridiculous excuse/justification you can imagine.
Read the article. This is a global thing, not US-specific.
Los Angeles is planning to put a vacant homes tax on the ballot for 2022, in the face of a mounting homelessness crisis. Hong Kong officials are considering taxing condo developers to deter them from hoarding new units. Ireland is exploring its options. Barcelona has gone as far as threatening to seize landlords’ empty apartments — paying half of market value — and convert the units into affordable rentals. Paris tripled its tax on second homes in 2017.
The author doesn't spell it out but he mentions that the idiot story about Hunter Biden's laptop was totally real and not Russia using Giuliani like a stooge and he implies that if you don't think covid was leaked from a lab you're an idiot.
So yea, I don't doubt that this guy thinks facebook is being mean by not letting him spread conspiracy bullshit on their platform.
> Immerse yourself in news of Russian plots to counterfeit presidential children’s laptops, viruses spawned in Wuhan market stalls, vast secret legions of domestic terrorists flashing one another the OK sign in shadowy parking lots behind Bass Pro Shops experiencing “temporary” inflation, and patriotic tech conglomerates purging the commons of untruths.
Pretty standard alt-right nutjob. Substack is swarming with them.
That people so often stretch the truth in these matters (while complaining about people who are clearly writing provocatively, and thus have no shortage of genuine weak points) is interesting.
> Go read more bullshit. Immerse yourself in news of Russian plots [...]
Seems pretty clear-cut to me. The original comment did muddy the waters a bit by taking the inverse of that statement, but the author isn't being ambiguous on their beliefs in that regard.
> One option, more popular each day, is to retreat to the anti-bullshit universe of alternative media sources. These are the podcasts, videos, Twitter threads, newsletters, and Facebook pages that regularly vanish from circulation for violating “community standards” and other ineffable codes of conduct, oft-times after failing “fact-checks” by the friendly people at Good Thoughtkeeping. Some of these rebel outfits are engrossing, some dull and churchy, many quite bizarre, and some, despite small staffs and tiny budgets, remarkably good and getting better. Some are Substack pages owned by writers who severed ties with established publications, drawing charges of being Russian agents, crypto-anarchists, or free-speech “absolutists.” I won’t bother to give a list. Readers who hunt and choose among such sources have their own lists, which they fiercely curate, loudly pushing their favorites on the world while accusing those they disagree with of being “controlled opposition” and running cons. It resembles the old punk-rock scene, but after it was discovered, not early on. Some of the upstart outlets earn serious money, garnering higher ratings and more page-views than the regime-approved brands Apple features on the News screen of my iPhone. (A screen I’ve disabled and don’t miss.) This wilderness of “contrarianism” – a designation easily earned these days; you merely have to mention Orwell or reside in Florida -- requires a measure of vigilance and effort from those who seek the truth there. As opposed to those who go there to relax, because they prefer alt-bullshit to mainstream bullshit. They can just kick their shoes off and wade in.
Does your mind detect any ~disrespect for alt-bullshit in here? For example, what meaning do you think is intended by "They can just kick their shoes off and wade in"?
> Seems pretty clear-cut to me.
That's the thing though: things are not always as they seem (I assume you've seen magic shows & optical illusions, or read to some degree on neuroscience, the numerous forms of psychological bias, etc)?
> The original comment did muddy the waters a bit by taking the inverse of that statement, but the author isn't being ambiguous on their beliefs in that regard.
Here are you referring to shared reality, or your/the author's/my individual highly customized model of reality? It's an important distinction, but one that is rarely made.
You think there are "vast secret legions of domestic terrorists flashing one another the OK sign in shadowy parking lots behind Bass Pro Shops experiencing “temporary” inflation"?
> alt-right
Yeah. I think the woke are done. No one actually likes or agrees with them, it's all just preference falsification.
I don't think anyone is under the delusion that domestic terrorists in the US are being secretive any more. That ship somewhat sails after an attempted insurrection.
let's not move the goalposts, we aren't arguing whether this was a "peaceful protest", we are arguing whether it was an insurrection aka a violent attempted takeover. If all it takes to overthrow the capital is the same level of violence as a civil riot, I'd say there's something wrong.
> One of the cops died of injuries sustained on site
> On April 19, 2021, the office of the chief medical examiner of the District of Columbia, Francisco J. Diaz, reported that the manner of death was natural and the cause of death was "acute brainstem and cerebellar infarcts due to acute basilar artery thrombosis" (two strokes at the base of the brain stem caused by an artery clot).
> If all it takes to overthrow the capital is the same level of violence as a civil riot, I'd say there's something wrong.
You are trying to use body count to measure the seriousness of an attempt to take over the government? It’s starting to look like the Taliban took over Kabul with less violence than what happened in the US Capitol.
I disagree. Do you identify any mis-information article? Otherwise I don't share your distain.
EDIT: this is an ad-hom. Please respond to the point - I also linked to WP as evidence that your claim is shaky. Refusing to do so because I linked to a journalist you dislike is pure tribalism.
I'm not going to read anything written by Greenwald, he's completely gone off the deep end. He quit his job at the intercept because they wouldn't let him publish conspiracy garbage about the Biden rape accusation unless he could provide some sort of proof - he concluded that being asked to show proof of what he was accusing someone of counted as "being censored".
Anyway, I'll say that just because the guy died of a stroke afterward doesn't mean it wasn't caused indirectly by being blasted in the face by bear mace. Even if his death was completely unrelated, it doesn't make Jan 6 any less of an insurrection.
Again, this is an ad-hom. I didn't claim something was true because Greenwald believes it - I linked to an article addressing the topic, so you can address the content of that article, rather than its author.
> He quit his job at the intercept because they wouldn't let him publish conspiracy garbage ... unless he could provide some sort of proof
doesn't seem to match up with
> just because the guy died of a stroke afterward doesn't mean it wasn't caused indirectly by being blasted in the face by bear mace
where's the proof? various outlets already back-peddled on the claim he was hit in the head with a fire extinguisher, they have yet to prove anything with regards to bear mace (other than two men carried it).
More abstractly, most everyone bends over backwards to promote their subconsciously estimated personal ~~illusion~~ model of reality as being representative of shared reality.
The US intelligence agencies don't themselves have a clean record: COINTELPRO, PRISM, CIA spying on the Senate intelligence committee (then lying about it).
Each of those counts as a conspiracy, and it's of note that people like Edward Snowden have been hunted and chased out of the country (and people like Julian Assange similarly persecuted).
It's not going away any time soon, the app is still available for MacOS and the browser extensions work just fine. Eventually they will stop supporting them but that'll just mean at some point in the future a MacOS/firefox/chrome update will break the existing app and they won't fix it. That might be 2 months from now or it might be 2+ years.
Sure, if you longer have a way to use an older version of MacOS. Not a good idea to leave your sole copy on a machine you don't have full control over.
The issue is not the size of the stdlib but rather the process for how things get in there. IMHO Python's stdlib has a number of modules of sub-standard quality and design. It would be good to have a gradual process for inclusion in the stdlib, so that different 3rd party libraries could be vetted by the community before we bake one into the language.
Absolutely - standardisation is the path to ubiquity. From the screw thread to the accidental standard (ISA) of the IBM PC.
It removes many of the barriers to competition and reduces the risk of large players creating monopolies.
I think it’s fair to say that much of what we see in tech is deliberately engineered to avoid standardisation in order to protect competitive advantage.
Wired did an interesting article on standardisation years ago.
Think about railroads and even early highways. It’s hard to standardize before you have a problem.
Containers have big downsides too... but technology allowed costs to be vaporized with containers.
The other big thing is that containers appeared in the US as the railroads entered their death spirals. You can build a dock anywhere and have trucks show up from 100 companies quickly compared to the negotiation required to live railroads. Think about how quickly the NYC maritime business died and moved to New Jersey... that’s a market that represented ~10-15% of the US population at that time.
A friend of mine is a field agent who spent years prosecuting financial crimes, and a lot of her time was spent knocking on doors and telling people to stop doing stupid stuff. Like one lady in particular was elderly and kept getting taken advantage of by money launderers (people putting cash in her account and telling her to deposit it somewhere else). My friend had to visit her on multiple occasions to explain that she needed to stop doing that.