The people who live here, who've been here the whole time, and they can't in practical terms leave, are those who endure.
I'm not a local, and I was lucky in life and work in a profession which pays well enough, so I could go if I wished, and I've only been back here now for about a month.
Your words are right and proper for the locals; let us think of it to them.
Back in early 2022, a little after the war started, TransferWise blocked transfer (i.e. donation) to the account run by the National Bank of Ukraine for support of the Ukrainian military.
Looks like it is probably against their acceptable use policy:
1.2.3 Other restricted activities
c. Weaponry, military and semi-military goods and services.
Weapons (including weapons of historic significance), military software, or any other goods or services intended for military use.
Ukraine is well known money laundering machine. Before the conflict started it was a well known fact and many banks didn't want to work with transfers to Ukraine. I am sure TransferWise shared similar risk model.
Ukraine had very strict banking rules for at least a decade. It had much more sense to launder through Cyprus for example or other EU countries like Latvia (when it was still possible) or Hungary if you’re politically connected.
Thats common knowledge for everyone even tangentially related to finance industry and likely for anyone who ever did international business with cross border payments . Not sure what kind of "sources" you expect to see here.
> Ukraine had very strict banking rules for at least a decade
Perhaps for it's own populace, but not for it's rulers and those who they work with.
Okay, so basically you’ve read some “anonymous sources” and decided they are true.
Because for me, as a person who did international business from Ukraine it makes absolutely zero sense to launder through Ukraine as it is:
1) no part of any union, so you will be unable to spend or move money outside.
2) it has extreme bank regulation, and you cannot just send money outside without cause. Receiving and sending money for fake “services” will not work (compared to a lot of other places I know)
3) it has a lot of independent anti-corruption institutions. You can be sure that any government official fears the consequences of doing something illegal.
4) it is in a state of war and any suspicious money operation will trigger investigation from SBU as well, since Russia tries to pay for its agents.
If there is corruption and money laundering happening, it is well outside of any path available for regular people.
It’s advisable not to judge within your limited worldview. Not everyone “reads” mainstream media, some people have real world experience.
Your arguments regarding why Ukraine can’t be used for money laundering are laughable and just show you are now aware how certain things in financial world work. That’s totally fine - but it gets distorted when some extended judgements are made based on very limited worldview.
So enrich my and other peoples world view - this is what this forum is about. Instead of saying "I'll leave it to your imagination", please provide any substance of your claims - anything we can talk about.
Since you didn't I have to guess, what you are talking about.
Do you mean some Russians used Ukraine as a money laundering middleman, specifically through corruption of politicians and elites in the system there? Because it sounds like it. Before the "conflict" (invasion) happened.
I'll leave your imagination to judge who used ukraine as money laundering machine. To have some supplementary data for that, we can look where the money entering ukraine come from for say last 5 years. You can easily find how much was coming from russia and compare it with flow from say EU. You should be capable of drawing your own conclusions after.
But if you look at the bigger picture, Ukraine has been invaded and occupied by a bigger countries which buys western banks to do it's money laundering through. Now is not the time to be discipling.
Yes, but that's a matter to be settled in a court. Banks and other financial institutions have no business deciding what's just; they just follow the regulations given to them by governments and the courts.
Russia invaded Ukraine, inflicting untold horror, and Russia is a threat to Europe.
In the circumstances of early 2022, I would have expected a way to be found, in the knowledge that such an action - telescope held to blind eye - would be condoned.
> Russia invaded Ukraine, inflicting untold horror, and Russia is a threat to Europe.
Realistically it is way more nuanced than that. Its a juvenile worldview to think in black and white.
Not willing to start any discussion on the matter, but you may want to know about massacres ukraine did in it's eastern side. After all, the russian invasion wasnt that unprovoked at all (albeit as any force causing many to suffer, it's hard to justify it).
The bottomline is - reality is way more nuanced than just black and white.
> Not willing to start any discussion on the matter, but you may want to know about massacres ukraine did in it's eastern side.
This is a Russian narrative.
> After all, the russian invasion wasnt that unprovoked at all
This also is a Russian narrative.
It seems to me you have been from some source been absorbing Russian material.
Putin is a dictator. A few years after he came to power in 2000, Russia was once again living in fear; you did not speak out. If you did, fines, prison, penal colonies with death and violence, or now and then being thrown out of windows.
It looks from material being produced by Putin, the State and the military Russia by about 2010 was looking to take Ukraine.
Putin had his man running Ukraine - into corruption and thuggery - until Euromaiden. He fled to Russia. Literally immediately after that, plan B - the small war began. Finally, 2022, the big war.
There is nothing here where we go "it was not that unprovoked".
Ukraine wanted, and wanted, freedom. To be itself, and not to live in a hell-hole dictatorship. Putin wants to possess Ukraine, because that's how he and it seems a good part of Russian State culture sees the world; in terms of power, conquest and territory.
What is the "russian narrative"? Whats is this made up definition?
> Putin is a dictator.
Based on what?
> Russia was once again living in fear; you did not speak out
I don't think Russia is living in fear, neither I should be speaking out as I am not in any way related to it.
> It looks from material being produced by Putin, the State and the military Russia by about 2010 was looking to take Ukraine
Doubt this is true.
> Putin had his man running Ukraine - into corruption and thuggery
Yea, all presidents/PMs were "his men". If this is not propaganda what you are desperately trying to do (and you do it quite poorly I must admit), then I don't know what propaganda is.
> Ukraine wanted, and wanted, freedom
Thats why ukraine sold everything it had, including it's rare minerals for years to west :) We certainly have different definitions of freedom.
Amount of theft from “military” accounts in Ukraine is staggering, if anyone would ever be interested to figure out. Everyone know that except people blindfolded by the world “military” and deluded to think money there would be used on anything else but beneficiaries whims.
Supporting evidence, please. So far you've made claims only - "everyone knows".
Kyiv Independent, who are pretty good at this and are on the spot, do not report large scale or significant military corruption. They have found and report on pretty corruption (individuals selling personal weapons). I note EU and US are very interested in keeping track of where the money is going.
You know, there was a time I’d have agreed with this, but yesterday at nearly 51 I walked up the emergency stairs of the UK’s 2nd tallest building 5 times, passing people well under half my age each time… never could have done that when I was physically young.
If you don’t completely destroy the joints, heart, kidney, liver, and lungs when your mind is young and stupid the much wiser and (hopefully) smarter mind you’ll earn can push the slightly more knackered bits further and faster then you’d earlier have thought you could go.
I feel this so much. I want to pack everything possible in my 20s because I know there are certain things that I just would not be able to do later on.
The instant I dropped this on HN, gptbot was scanning the site.
(Updated robots.txt, this site https://robotstxt.com/ai to the rescue. I had to update robots.txt on the Amazon Redshift site fairly recently - I had gone from something like 10mb of log file per day to something like 50mb of log file per day, from LLM crawlers.)
It's a tricky one; one wants to trust the media because they should have integrity and checks and balances and the like - which you don't know if unafilliated independent bloggers have.
But the bloggers are also great, but you need to do some more homework to decide if they are trustworthy - no editorial team, no journalistic ethical codes (if those actually exist), etc.
The other factor is that a lot of the conspiracy thinkers based their beliefs on blogs or the equivalent thereof (FB posts, youtube videos, etc), stuff you wouldn't see in the mainstream media - because it's nonsense, but the fact the mainstream media doesn't cover it actually draws the attention to the conspiracy bloggers.
My account on Reddit, and so as I was the founder also the sub r/AmazonRedshift, was in Sep 2023 banned by an automated system.
The sub was working normally, I posted about the Amazon Redshift Serverless PDF, and then Reddit began behaving oddly.
After some investigation, and some guesswork, I concluded my account had been silently shadow-banned, and the sub banned (and then shortly after, deleted).
Two years of posts and the sub disappeared, instantly, abruptly, without warning, reason, appeal process or notification, and Reddit was trying by shadowbanning to lead me into thinking my account was still active.
I used a utility to scramble (you can't delete) all the posts I'd ever made to Reddit, and closed my account.
(There's a bit of a happy ending - about a year later someone who was doing work with Reddit and had an archive of all my poss sent them to me, as a thank you. I processed the JSON and put them up on my Redshift site.)
Contract is one month of monthly savings made in AWS bill.
They have not paid, and in fact terminated the contract early to avoid payment - "the savings do not occur until AWS reservations end, contract has been ended now, so savings have not occurred". The savings are going to occur, and then the client will keep those savings.
Turns out the contract also contains what looks like a poison pill, to prevent the counter-party (me) having recourse to court at all, no matter what the client does.
Also the entire contract is confidential, so I in theory can't say a word about any of it.
Maybe you already considered this, but contracts are full of unenforceable and illegal clauses. At the end of the day you did work for them that they agreed to and then they stiffed you on it in a very visible way. Generally, if the work is already done, they are liable for the entire amount.
I would be talking to a lawyer. You might even consider it part of your job to have a working relationship with a lawyer.
I've not watched the video, but going on the title, I have to say, I have my Framework, and I absolutely love it to bits.
It was relatively expensive, but in absolute terms the difference is minor; and now I have something where I don't have to worry about Samsung/Sony/ASUS/etc accidentally or even deliberately installing a back door, which I can repair at will (and I have - a key failed and I changed keyboard), which I can upgrade over time, where the keyboard is heaven to type on, where I can easily fit and change memory, disk and the battery, the hot-swappable external post interfaces are particularly noteworthy in their usefulness, I have full support for Linux from the get-go, and where I have actual real Support on the odd occasion I've needed it (and boy, have I not had that from Sony and Samsung in the past, when I've owned their products - in fact, I had one of the worse customer support experiences, beyond imagination, with Sony and their Vaio, back in the day).
It puts me in mind of a recent experience with our ISP. We had a five day outage. No notification that it had occurred, no notification when it ended, no explanation, no ETA, nothing. Radio silence. Also the customer support phone number wasn't working, as we discovered.
That's the Big Company experience.
If we had a local ISP we could use, you wouldn't even see me move.
With Framework, I have that, but for my laptop. It's been a God-send.
I watched the video. It's hot garbage; Source: my family has two Framework laptops (gen 11), I've been in charge of repairing / upgrading them over the last two years. Our primary issue is Intel+Microsoft breaking the S3 deep sleep, not any of the Framework decisions.
If you're on the market for a laptop and the budget is not an issue, I recommend going with Macbooks, just for the battery performance. For a Linux laptop, Framework is the best we've got.
I'm not a local, and I was lucky in life and work in a profession which pays well enough, so I could go if I wished, and I've only been back here now for about a month.
Your words are right and proper for the locals; let us think of it to them.