Bots use sites like this to validate lists of stolen cards with low dollar donations to validate the cards before using them on the target site. Without some one of protection sites like these are quickly flooded with fraudulent transactions and then fined and shut down by Visa and Mastercard.
This sounds like a problem where cryptocurrency could actually be the solution. Next time I want to make a charitable donation I will ask for an XMR address to preserve my privacy and work around commercial payment processor issues.
I agree, and I am still pointing to the collapse of society, not civilization. My infrastructure is local. If local society collapses, what reason do people have to maintain transmission and distribution lines and electrical substations, to work at power plants, to maintain fiber optic or copper lines for internet connectivity?
Even if "the internet" as a whole is still around, the inability for someone to connect to and to use it means cryptocurrency is similarly useless.
Maybe if moral virtues can be purchased they were never moral virtues to begin with?
Many moral vices naturally decline with age as physical senses and hormones dull and life loses novelty. It may be a comforting fantasy that we can somehow link our inevitable physical decline to a story of moral progress and assume that our accumulated wisdom would protect us from the folly of youth if we were somehow thrust again into our younger bodies.
But what if instead moral progress is about finding the right way of living? About spending more time with your kid than with a screen.
Maybe the virtue wasn’t in getting over the wall but finding yourself on the other side and choosing it because it is better? Society puts up walls all the time to prevent people from finding themselves on the wrong side of the wall. Nobody ever talks about the “grit” of the addict persistently dodging law enforcement to score their next fix.
Maybe the problem is society putting walls in the wrong place. If that’s true, does it really matter how you get over the wall?
People have different preferences, some people are going to be more productive at home and some less. Some people simply can’t work from home.
I think the challenge is that leadership isn’t coherent when it comes to RTO:
1. Leadership has largely abandoned the notion of geography when hiring or building teams. Building geographic centers of excellence where all team members with the same function working closely together used to be a thing. Leadership wants the flexibility to pick the best talent, at the best prices, on short notice but also wants ad-hoc collaboration. Workers are rightly confused when every meeting they have in an office is on Zoom.
2. Leadership has largely abandoned the notion of timezone alignment and structured working days. Leadership wants to hire talent across the globe which requires more cross-timezone collaboration and non-standard-work hour meetings. That wasn’t possible when at 5PM to 7PM everyone was commuting. It also isn’t reasonable to expect people to hold a rigid 8AM to 5PM in-office schedule and then take 2 hours of meetings from 6PM to 8PM.
3. Leadership is complains that office space is both essential to productivity AND too expensive to spend money on. Employees home setups in terms of working space, noise isolation, connectivity and configuration are now more productive than what is offered in-office. When leadership took people from dedicated offices, to cubicles, to open seating and then to “hot desking” it was justified that commercial real estate was scarce, expensive and required the sacrifice of productivity to manage costs. Now that it is plentiful and cheap? Leadership is saying that RTO is needed for productivity AND that they will continue to reduce spending on office space per employee.
The only way to mentally reconcile that is to either assume that leadership is incompetent or that they want to return to 18th century sweat shops and envy China’s 9x9x6 culture. I can see why mid-level management is struggling getting compliance which is why they are relying on badge swipes.
Money is a call option on the labor of its citizens. When money accumulates to people who operate against the best interests of its citizens more and more of a countries labor and future is traded for less societal value. There exists some tipping point where no societal value is created and money exists just to drain the vitality of its citizens. In other words, no matter how hard you work things only get worse.
This doesn't really have anything to do with "money laundering". For example, you get the same set of problems if the money is accumulating to monopolies or industries with artificial scarcity as a result of regulatory capture even though the law doesn't require them to "launder" the money they're accumulating.
Meanwhile in the case of classical criminal enterprises, the laws against money laundering don't actually work because in practice there are ten thousand ways to exchange value other than with official currency. And then the systems to prevent "money laundering" cause more problems for honest people who get trapped up in them out of ignorance, or become victims of corrupt government officials who use financial surveillance systems for oppression, whereas professional criminal organizations just restructure their activities to bypass the rules.
All of the other items you mentioned are things that society attempts to regulate against as well. And while there are an infinite number of ways to exchange value it stays between those involved. If the drug dealer is happy to trade heroin for house painting the damage is self limiting.
Once it’s converted to money it’s everyone’s problem. I can’t avoid my mortgage interest helping supporting the dealer who is supplying the addicts who are stealing my stuff. The harder I work, the worse it gets.
The controls may not be effective but I think they are necessary. I wouldn’t want to live in most countries where money laundering dominates financial activity.
> All of the other items you mentioned are things that society attempts to regulate against as well.
Which is exactly the point. The proceeds from both market monopolization and contract killings are the proceeds of a crime, but the proper way to address this is to impose penalties for the antitrust violation or murder rather than tracking the finances of millions of innocent people only to fail to prevent the criminals from successfully laundering the money of the un-prosecuted original crime regardless.
If you're prosecuting the original crime, you don't need laws against money laundering. If you're not prosecuting the original crime you're already screwed and need to fix that.
> If the drug dealer is happy to trade heroin for house painting the damage is self limiting.
It's quite the opposite. The drug dealer doesn't want their house painted by a heroin addict, they want money. But by definition money is fungible. Anybody can buy or sell whatever.
Now let's suppose the heroin addict has a choice between taking a job to buy heroin and stealing the copper pipes out of your house to buy heroin, and these things are equally annoying. It's hard to hold a job as an addict but it's also hard to steal things because it's dangerous and illegal, so to begin with it's six of one, half a dozen of the other. But the drug dealer wants money, not copper pipes, so the first one has an edge.
Then you pass a law against money laundering. Well, now the drug dealer wants copper pipes, or wire, or anything else that can be pawned, because he can take them to the scrap yard or pawn shop himself, claim he found them in an old shed or had them left over after a renovation etc., or even set up a fake construction company in order to do that at scale, and then get a receipt from the scrap yard legitimizing the cash he gets from selling your pipes that the addict stole to get drugs. Is this new arrangement helping you or hurting you?
If all the drug cartels in the world were limited to pawning copper scrap it would make me very happy indeed. I am also sure that it would benefit a large number of people who live in countries where cartel money dominates the economy.
> If all the drug cartels in the world were limited to pawning copper scrap it would make me very happy indeed.
That isn't one of the alternatives. Notice that the laws against "money laundering" are the status quo and the cartels continue to get enough money to buy entire countries.
> I am also sure that it would benefit a large number of people who live in countries where cartel money dominates the economy.
I feel like I must not be explaining this well enough.
The cartels are going to end up with money, not assorted junk. When they launder money through a car wash, they're not doing it because they want to have their cars washed. They're doing it so they can claim their drug profits are car wash profits and then deposit them into a bank.
The problem with trying to prohibit "money laundering" is that nobody except for the criminals knows that it's happening. If you deposit money into a bank, the bank has no way to know what you were actually paid for, they only know what you tell them, and then criminals just lie to them.
Anyone can convert an arbitrarily large amount of money to stuff and then back to money again. You simply buy something fungible and then sell it again. That prevents anyone observing financial transactions from tracing the money because they have no way to know that the stuff Alice bought and the stuff Bob sold was the same stuff. The cartels know this which is why the laws against money laundering are completely ineffective.
And when you have a law that causes a ton of collateral damage to innocent people while being highly ineffective at producing value to the public, you should get rid of it.
Cite on “ton of collateral damage”? That’s the disputed point in my mind. I just see obstacles that are like speed bumps in parking lots. I don’t find speed bumps do a ton of collateral damage. They also don’t really “work.” But they are needed, and better to keep in place at this point, maybe they could be made slightly less common at the margins. Why not treat AML regulations similarly?
> I just see obstacles that are like speed bumps in parking lots.
If you multiply a small inconvenience by the entire general population, you are causing a lot of damage.
And the damage to specific people or industries is significantly worse. There are legitimate things people may need to buy that would be dangerous to have associated with their identity, e.g. because it reveals something about their religion or health or sexual preferences. If you want to anonymously pay for any of those things to be sent to you in an unlabeled box at a numbered mailbox so that you don't have to risk someone seeing you buying it in person with cash, you should be able to do that. If some schmucks you've never even met have added some erroneous data to a database or you share the same name with someone rowdy, you shouldn't be endlessly aggrieved like an outlaw by financial institutions that aren't even allowed to tell you why.
> They also don’t really “work.” But they are needed
Speed bumps are built on public roads, which are shared property.
A private transaction is incomparable to that. The government imposing itself on every private economic interaction, by making itself a gatekeeper from whom you need permission, is incredibly invasive and dangerous. The threat vector here is the government, or the people in it, harming the general populace through malice, and more commonly, incompetence in how they wield these powers of warrantless surveillance and financial exclusion.
Banks unilaterally closing people's accounts, or refusing to open an account for them, because those people fall into high-risk categories, is now very common.
On the bank side alone, the costs of this system are estimated at hundreds of billions of dollars a year. All those costs are ultimately passed down to the consumers in a way of higher banking fees. On the consumer side, not knowing if you can move your money or access it is a significant source of anxiety that also makes it harder to plan one's life.
There are definitely legal ways too that screws you over in this financial world.
You say that you wouldn't want to live in a world where money laundering dominates financial activity?
Well how about a world where cryptocoins/multi level marketing/ai stickers/private equity parasites/land owners (almost parasites?) /billionaires dominates the financial activity??
I guess you or many others live in such a system. I am not even talking about United states, I feel like to a lot of countries, the same thing is true.
I wouldn’t want to live in a world where the equivalent of the life’s work of its average citizen are traded causally like chips on a poker table and the only option to opt-out is to barter or starve. It would be hard to see the difference between that and feudalism.
There have been proposals to inject sulfur into airline engines at high altitudes so this approach has been well studied. The first challenge is that even if it addresses the problem of global temperatures rising it does nothing to address other issues such as ocean acidification. At some point C02 levels become physiologically relevant to humans and it feels like living in a stuffy room all the time. The second problem is that it has to be maintained forever. Any technological glitch and the planet goes into run-away heating. Basically we’d be making a decision for humans 100 to 1000 years in the future to maintain a specific lifestyle.
It would be the equivalent of people in the 1970s deciding to not move away from ozone-layer destroying CFCs and deciding to fit all humans and animals with permanent sunglasses to prevent cataracts instead.
> There have been proposals to inject sulfur into airline engines at high altitudes so this approach has been well studied. The first challenge is that even if it addresses the problem of global temperatures rising it does nothing to address other issues such as ocean acidification. At some point C02 levels become physiologically relevant to humans and it feels like living in a stuffy room all the time.
What about wars and cancer?
> The second problem is that it has to be maintained forever.
Any solution should be "maintained forever", at least until we have the ability to undo it, so basically everything while there are humans on the planet.
You are missing the point or being purposefully dense. Many of the solutions to climate change are self sustaining . Like the biosphere itself regulating the climate. Your dumb statement about "maintaining forever" highlights the type of engineer brain /economics PhD arrogance that got us into this mess in the first place. While disregarding basic science and common sense.
Other than a brief thaw in relations in 2015 there is nothing that would suggest that Iran’s anti-US rhetoric is for domestic consumption and for show.
You mean troops from occupying forces that engaged in an illegal war to overthrow the government, based on lies about WMDs, who killed over 120,000 civilians?
As far as I'm aware, you don't get to project military force 8000 miles away and then complain about killed soldiers. Which has been the US' favourite past time since the 60s.
So, should we have invaded in 2003? Why were the people now calling to just kill the entire country not talking about this just two weeks ago, let alone years or decades ago?
I’m not arguing for or against the merits of the recent strikes. I am disputing the notion that Iran’s anti-US stance is purely rhetoric for domestic consumption.
One of the arguments against limited strikes against the Iranians was that it would be simply stirring up the hornets nest and things spiraling out of control.
I agree. I was pointing out that these anti-US-troop actions by Iran were related to prior conflicts / actions by the US. There was unlikely any consideration to downstream reactions which will endanger our troops. Completely short-sighted warmongering.
North Korea had enough conventional artillery to level Seoul with an estimated 1M casualties. That was why Clinton decided against attacking North Korea as they moved towards building the bomb:
Iran’s deterrent was/is through its proxies (Hamas, Hezbollah, Houthis) along with its sizable missile inventory, anti-air capabilities and strategic threats to oil and gas exports.
Israel’s investment in missile defense and the outcome of the Oct 7th attacks severely weakened Iran’s deterrence to a conventional attack.
I think the lesson should be that any nation that has enough conventional leverage to deter an attack could choose to build nuclear weapons. Nuclear weapons may complement, but can’t displace other capabilities.
The US has nuclear weapons but that didn’t deter Iran from launching direct attacks on US troops in the Middle East or sponsoring insurgents in Iraq.
Nuclear weapons are also essential worthless against non nation-state actors such as Al-Qaeda.
I have become much more skeptical about DNK’s artillery after seeing the results of a frontline air-superiority stalemate in Ukraine and the Israeli campaign against Iran.
If South Korea’s coalition could establish air superiority over the DMZ and artillery range in the first moves, I think it takes you from “Seoul destroyed” to a “pretty average modern conflict.”
In many of the areas I am talking about teachers, lawyers, doctors, pharmacists, policemen, other government workers, etc can affordably buy a house in those areas.
Much of the US housing stock includes homes built before 1990 (30 years ago). If most of the median home price increase was due to build quality there would be a bimodal distribution of housing appreciation with newer homes having appreciated more than older homes.
Most of the appreciation in housing is due to higher household incomes due to two income households.
I would change your last sentence to: is due to higher household incomes due to two income households without a similar increase in the supply of housing near where jobs are.
Why bimodal? Houses are being built every year. So maybe houses built in 2023 have appreciated 1% more than in 2022, and those have appreciated 1% more than 2021, and so on, leading to a smooth distribution.
