The right solution here is to take the telecom tax invoice, edit it in a PDF editor to say Telecom bill, and send it back.
The process is stupid enough that this will work 95% of the time. Is it fraud? No, not really, I'd argue. You're just conforming the document to an arbitrary standard, but all the relevant details are factual, not fraudulent.
I can confirm that this is the exact method recommended in forums where people and businesses that meet adversity from banks on a daily basis (most of the time for completely legitimate businesses, sometimes not) congregate to share advice.
The point is to feed the compliance critters exactly what they want so they can tick their boxes without sticking their necks out.
That was my first thought as I was reading. Of course, I imagine almost every serious business would be extremely uncomfortable doing something like that. On the other hand, if the alternative is getting your account closed anyway, there's not much to lose.
In my country, there is no single document that shows my name and address that is acceptable as a document for address verification in many western fintech applications.
If you're renting, bills will arrive in the name of the owner, even though I personally pay them each month.
We don't really do lease agreements either, except for very rare circumstances.
If you own a property, you could go to the public registry, then translate that, notarize and _maybe_ it will work. But I don't own any property.
We don't even get a PDF for the bills, it's just a HTML table with a few lines of CSS.
So I simply change the owner's name to mine in that table, save as PDF and send that. Never failed.
And at that point, why even have this process at all?
The way you describe the transition events elides the incredible instability that people living through them experienced (wars, revolutions, famines, etc.), which I think is what Stross is getting at here, and ultimately is probably right about.
Will things end up better? Maybe, and based on history you could even make a case for "probably", but will it be better for _us_, the ones alive _right now_? Again, based on history, almost certainly not.
I think what you are saying is that it would be great to live after the French revolution happened and settled, good enough to live before the revolution happens; and the worst is during the revolution?
> Will things end up better? Maybe, and based on history you could even make a case for "probably", but will it be better for _us_, the ones alive _right now_? Again, based on history, almost certainly not.
I find myself in this odd internal conflict. I genuinely care about the planet, but I'm approaching 60 and childfree, and have definite misanthropic tendencies. While there's big part of me that's a tree-hugging greenie and who wants to attend every protest about human rights abuses and war, here's always a loud voice in my head telling me "it only all needs to last another couple of decade without completely collapsing".
all of those things were also very common outside of energy transitions until about the last century.
for all of its faults, one thing the globalized system has allowed is that it makes relieving famine possible by shipping food from other parts of the globe.
Is there any more information about the Eureka educational project? I think it's probably the wrong endpoint to target teaching about AI first (too complex, too many pre-reqs), really these tools should work from the base of the educational pyramid and move up from there.
There is a lot of success already in adaptive learning in elementary school for instance, my kids are blasting through math on Prodigy and it seems like Synthesis may be a great tool as well, and I believe we're just at the beginning of this wave. For that level of learning I don't think we need incredibly more capability, just better application.
It's at the end of the interview. He wants to build Starfleet Academy for technical fields. Physical with a digital equivalent. Thinks education will become like a gym (self-educate to look sexy) by the time AGI gets here.
It kind of already exists as youtube. Star fleet academy wasn’t really for training the best of the best. The best usually don’t have time to waste on all students… they usually take apprentices. The best of the best students don’t waste time in an academy.
I was nodding along until the bashing of neoliberalism, which I believe to be unfounded left-woo essentially.
If we were to apply neoliberalism a bit more in the present moment, we may be much better off, but that's not what the current trend is anyway. We're currently experimenting with some unholy mix of populism and authoritarianism which has basically no predictable endpoint, because it's just based on the whims of one man (in each respective country doing this at the moment).
Also the view of climate change as primarily being about photosynthesis is laughably myopic... he does acknowledge weather instability as being an issue as well, but it's that and sea level rise which really seems to be poised to disrupt the current iteration of civilization.
Currently to me it seems that neoliberalism is exactly the mechanic that enables that populism and authoritarianism - is this the connection you see as unfounded? (I am genuinely asking, to understand your point of view)
The subsidies for green energy in the Inflation Reduction Act targeted a lot of red/purple states. So you get a burgeoning battery industry going in Georgia, solar and wind in Arizona and Texas, and so forth.
A Harris presidency would have beefed up those programs for another 4 years. So if you got a Trumpism in 2028, that green energy sector of the economy would have an 8-year head start. Republicans would either have to battle a much more powerful green energy lobby or figure out how to do green Trumpism. Either would be a substantial hurdle. So if you're not in favor of having a random number generator in charge at the White House, you'd probably agree we'd be better off with the neoliberalism.
As to "much better off," I'm going to need to hear more substance from OP to believe that. Harris didn't have an anti-monopolist stance, and I see no reason to think that state/corporate surveillance-tech and cryptobros bullshit would have been curtailed in any meaningful sense. And someone who is currently relying on Klarna to pay for groceries now would not exactly be thriving at the end of a first Harris term.
It's funny considering what people are telling me about the rampant cheating in that game. May settle out eventually but these anti cheat systems seem to not do much.
Not if the windows are both from the same program. Then it's a different keybind, CMD-~ which doesn't have the same priority order style as CMD-Tab. I get caught up on this constantly, to the point where I decided to stop using one Chrome window under my work profile, and one under my personal profile, just so I can have my personal browser under a different program so CMD-Tab works better.
I used Teams just before Covid (last job I had used it). For one messages didn't arrive in the same order for everyone, so chat histories often didn't make sense, with replies appearing above the messages they were replying to. The other thing I recall was slow loading time. Slack is _snappy_, moving from channel to channel is very fast, as if nothing ever needs to load (it does, it just cleverly preloads everything except images it seems like). The interface was just far less intuitive as well.
At the end of the day, just about every team that I worked with had a WhatsApp group that they actually used to chat in. Having a bad product as your internal chat is how you get shadow IT like WhatsApp where people are discussing your proprietary information on a third party service.
I got tired of paying the Logitech premium for the MX Ergo after I broke my second one (both out of warranty, both had the main button switch fail). Ended up with a copycat that works just as well and is 1/3rd the price.
amen to that! I started using a Logitech MX Vertical mouse a few years back to deal with wrist pain. It helped with the pain immensely, but the switches in the mouse failed after ~6 months of use.
I replaced the Logitech mouse with an inexpensive vertical mouse from ProtoArc and haven't looked back.
The process is stupid enough that this will work 95% of the time. Is it fraud? No, not really, I'd argue. You're just conforming the document to an arbitrary standard, but all the relevant details are factual, not fraudulent.