Military operations would do that as well. Ukraine is destroying Russia's oil and gas industry right now. Sanctions or not, that oil and gas is becoming unavailable. Either way, preventing innocent Ukrainians being slaughtered with your money will do harm to your economy; continuing to get cheap oil from Russia inevitably pays for evil.
Might as well do whatever is most effective, which is likely to be harsh sanctions followed by military action to fully enforce them.
Because it works with a credit card? Also unless you do what this service is doing by accumulating payments until a reasonable threshold is reached before actually charging the fees then even on Lightning will eat you alive. So if you have the system to handle billing this way you might as well use existing payment networks.
I think credit cards succeed because they give customers rewards, passing on the cost to the vendor and ultimately all other customers. Also because they were the only alternative to cash for the longest time
Don't confuse NFT gambling with Bitcoin. The former is a dying craze as the gamblers move onto something else. The latter is at all-time-highs, for the obvious reason that a digital replacement for gold is clearly useful, and Bitcoin is the obvious leader in that market category.
Indeed, for certain use-cases Bitcoin is competing with Christies too: a lot of the fine art market is actually about storing and moving value. Not about the art.
That was probably a sound legal strategy. Selling location data without consent is obviously unethical behavior that should be illegal. A jury is more likely to rule on the basis of that; with a judge maybe there's a chance that a technicality in the law leads to a ruling in their favor.
Anyway, this practice should be criminalized with companies and their employees receiving criminal penalties like jail time.
Besides, one reason why they can be coerced is because these actions aren't clearly illegal. If they are, the employee can just report what they're being asked to do to the police. Workplace safety has been dramatically improved in western countries simply by making many unsafe practices illegal and creating entities to report illegal work to. While this did require criminal charges for some managers and employees, because safety has improved so much, they're really not that common.
I remember when I had workplace safety training as a poorly paid university lab monitor. They made clear that I had potential criminal legal liability if I allowed egregiously unsafe things to happen. So they didn't.
It doesn't legitimize all police brutality, only whatever amount of it is necessary to keep your job.
And legitimising this is appropriate. The only other position -- requiring people to behave in a way that doesn't meet their basic needs for survival -- would be inappropriate. It is the responsibility of those in power to prevent society from degrading to a point where police are forced to be violent in order to keep their jobs.
No brutality is legitimate. First of all, if police get this pass, then so do the street criminals they deal with. And then you just have a never-ending conflict since both sides get moral passes to put themselves above the greater good.
If you study game theory such as the prisoner's dilemma, you'll understand that these are perverse incentives where actors are certainly "rational" given their constraints, but the overall system is harmed. In a feedback loop such as society, this can have a runaway effect until eventual societal collapse.
> legitimising this is appropriate
For who? Who decides this?
> It is the responsibility of those in power to prevent society from degrading to a point where police are forced to be violent in order to keep their jobs.
Maybe you now understand why this is circular logic. If those in power are just doing what they "have to do" in order to keep their job and survive, and civilians do what they "have to do", and police do what they "have to do", the buck gets passed to no one. Every single culpable party gets to say it's not their fault or their responsibility to introduce structural change through personal sacrifice.
If a doctor fucks up is liable for bad practice.
If an architect fucks up is liable for bad practice.
CEOs, CTOs, etc. of organizations with the budged of small countries can be stupid, unknowledgeable and reckless and there are no consequences (unless it affects shareholders money). Executives should be held legally accountable of the damage that their companies do.
Accountability is required for a civilized society. When the people with the most power do not need to follow any rule we get into anarchy and chaos. Just watch the news to see that it is already happening.
What makes this more infuriating is that they always point to their additional responsibilities, when it comes to pay/salary. Oh yes, they need to manage sooo much responsibility! But when these things happen, no one seems to be taking the responsibility. Very strange. Almost as if some people only want the upsides of "responsibility".
Ha, yes! I was actually thinking about using that exact phrasing, but then wasn't 100% sure, whether that is basically the definition of that phrase. Thanks for confirming.
There are also various ways that big companies have to influence judges or increase the odds of getting favorable ones, not even mentioning outright corruption, where quickly and randomly selected jurors are harder to touch.
> Anyway the fact is almost 4 years in Ukraine is probably dead demographically. You can't really reboot a country after having so much of its "fighting age" male population dead.
You should actually look up the facts before making assumptions. Or, for example, actually visit Ukraine. Currently conscription is between ages 25 and 55; mobilization of younger men is not done specifically to ensure the next generation is not depleted, and men of all ages are fighting. You're actually more likely to get called up if you are in your 30's and 40's than if you are younger.
There's about five million males currently in Ukraine in that age range, of which under 100,000 have been killed and under 500,000 wounded. That's just not an existential crisis at all. Germany the country survived WW2, and about half of their male population died in the war.
This matches the on-the-ground reality: I've visited plenty of Ukrainian cities during the war, and there are plenty of males of all ages. Including young males. Any crisis they face is the same birthrate crisis that all developed countries face. And hopefully, the psychology of war will help reverse that --- Israel also has a notably high birthrate.
> Especially because the one who will be left will be deranged, violent and addicted to all sort of things.
I personally know quite a few Ukrainian soldiers who have seen action. They're all well functioning people. Combat when you're on the side of good rather than evil doesn't have the psychological toil people think it does. It's not nothing. But the supermajority of people recover just fine and go on to lead productive lives.
An important part of that is recognizing that Ukraine is up against an irredeemably evil enemy. You were killing orcs, not men.
>I personally know quite a few Ukrainian soldiers who have seen action. They're all well functioning people.
What kind of "action" did they see, pushing pencils? Because all soldiers who I saw coming out from action on the front line, meaning killing and seeing your friends get killed under firearms, drones and artillery shells, all had various forms of PTSD. There's no way sane normal people don't get affected witnessing that and can just bounce back to be "well functioning people" as you claim. So maybe they lied to you about their action.
> Combat when you're on the side of good rather than evil doesn't have the psychological toil people think it does.
Then why are so many men deserting and dodging the draft to leave the country, if fighting so chill? Some often almost die trying to cross the border to my country. That pretty much tells me everything.
> What kind of "action" did they see, pushing pencils?
Frontline trench warfare, including getting wounded.
A high % of the young male population saw combat in WW2. What followed was some of the most successful economic growth and society advancement in human history, especially the US. People are more resilient than you'd think, especially when society as a whole has your back.
This isn't Vietnam or Afghanistan. The mission is crystal clear and vital. Every day at 9am all of Ukraine stops to remember the dead. I've seen this first hand. Cars stop, people get out and stand, and they honor what soldiers are doing for them. It makes a big difference.
>A high % of the young male population saw combat in WW2.
Sugarcoated way of saying "most of them died". I wonder what their opinion would be if the dead could speak.
>What followed was some of the most successful economic growth and society advancement in human history
So every 50-100 years or so, we need to kill a lot of people in a world war, so that whoever remains alive in the rubble, gets to see massive economic prosperity because of the labor shortage that follows? Basically, the same thing Mussolini and Hitler were advocating for in their speeches.
Not sure I'd sign up for that. You can keep your "economic growth", I'd rather live mediocre but not die in a war for the elites.
And how will Ukraine achieve this hypothetical growth when all of they're youths moved to Europe? Most Europeans didn't have this luxury of moving to a safe country during and after WW2 but they were forced to fight for their country and then stay and rebuild it. Most Ukrainians are not forced to stay or even if they are, they can smuggle/bribe their way out with money, skills, connection or sheer determination, and can just pack their bags and go shopping for the best country that fits their desires via the asylum system. There was no asylum system of this generosity for Europeans in WW2.
I sure hope you are right but I wouldn't trust too much the official numbers we are told. We know during a war every incentive is there too minimize the causalities of one side. The real number usually appear long after and are always much larger.
> Germany the country survived WW2, and about half of their male population died in the war.
One way to see it is Germany and Europe did not really even survived WWI. The demographic shock and the trauma then lead directly to WWII. At the end Europe has been a shadow of itself since. Most of the problems Europe have today are rippling effects of the deep traumas of the two WW.
Let's say just a third or half the men between 25 and 55 are dead/badly wounded/traumatized/addicted, it will destroy the next generation and society.
Just look on much smaller scale at what the wars in Afghanistan and Iraq did to the US in the last 20 years. Even the few professionals and volunteers who fought it abroad brought back a lot of problems still clearly visible in today american society.
This is why those type of wars need to be avoided or stopped at all cost.
>Most of the problems Europe have today are rippling effects of the deep traumas of the two WW.
Can't agree on this when I see what China managed to do starting way worse than Europe and with no marshal plan to help. You can't keep endlessly blaming the distant past. How far in the past does the blaming go?
China is even more shocking example of the consequence of the WWs (and what happened before). Just the cultural revolution was an extreme aftershock of the wars.
They did then had their "Marshal plan" with almost the entire world massively investing in their economy.
In Europe for example I vaguely heard the French government collapsed again. One of the reasons is usually that for decades they can't reform their retirement system. This retirement system was designed for the lost and greatest generations demographics after the war but totally unsustainable after that.
After 80 years of "never again" because of the WWs Europe dangerously under invested in its military capabilities, now it is panicking and the pendulum is swinging in the other direction.
Wars create demographic and societal shock waves, this is one of the reason historian focus so much on them.
> I sure hope you are right but I wouldn't trust too much the official numbers we are told.
I don't have to trust the official numbers. I've been to Ukraine both before and after the full scale invasion. Yes, there are easily visible differences (like the big increase in the number of men you see with visible war wounds). But this isn't a society in collapse. Not yet. Overall, Ukraine is winning this fight and what they're getting in return for that sacrifice is a future.
> Let's say just a third or half the men between 25 and 55 are dead/badly wounded/traumatized/addicted, it will destroy the next generation and society.
Again, we've been through this before. It simply does not destroy society.
> Just look on much smaller scale at what the wars in Afghanistan and Iraq did to the US in the last 20 years. Even the few professionals and volunteers who fought it abroad brought back a lot of problems still clearly visible in today american society.
No. America's biggest problems have nothing to do with veterans. It wasn't a veteran who killed that Ukrainian refugee...
> This is why those type of wars need to be avoided or stopped at all cost.
Do you have a better plan? Russia isn't invading Ukraine out of some religious dispute. They're just war criminals who just want to plunder and steal. Negotiations have been tried over and over before: Russia just violates every agreement ever made. The only solution is to defeat Russia. And the fastest way to do that is to crush Russia's economy... which is exactly what Ukraine is (finally!) doing with their strikes on oil and gas infrastructure.
If you want less harm to be done, help Ukraine win faster.
> If you want less harm to be done, help Ukraine win faster.
That was my point.
What I find disgusting is those type of proxy wars where one side say we fully support you but won't send any troops or really work on a diplomatic solution (see my original comment).
So the war continues for years and kill the population.
This isn't a proxy war. Russia is invading Ukraine because they want to invade. That has absolutely nothing to do with anyone else; Russia is not a proxy.
Ukraine has exactly one choice: defend themselves, or be subjugated and killed. There is no diplomatic solution. It's very helpful that Ukraine has outside help. But that doesn't make it a proxy war. Regardless of whether or not Ukraine had outside help, they'd still be fighting.
The fact is that the #1 thing Ukraine is doing right now to win is destroying Russian industry with Ukrainian made weapons. They're doing that themselves. Again, that's not a proxy.
> making it impossible to reliably delete material
That said, SSD's have improved the situation a lot with TRIM. While previously deleting a file wouldn't actually destroy any data until it was overwritten. With TRIM in most cases for files more than a few KB almost all the data will be physically destroyed soon after TRIM is called. It depends on settings. But that's commonly either immediately, or about once a day (the default on Android).
If you read the forensics literature TRIM has caused them enormous problems by radically reducing the amount of data available.
On the open internet? The drone strike in January that made headlines was not quite that simple. The drones were directed using dead reckoning. The drivers of the trucks were not informed what was happening with their cargo. Even the American government was kept in the dark.
Not at all. Ukraine had operatives inside Russia. The trucks were not driven in from outside Russia. The system was assembled inside Russia. Also, every single drone had its own pilot: https://www.bbc.com/news/articles/cq69qnvj6nlo
That's also just one of many operations inside Russia. There's lots of sabotage and assassinations that have been done.
You just can't do operations like that without secure communications.
Chat control will require client-side AI scanning of all messages, bypassing end-to-end encryption. Since the AI will be an unauditable blackbox, it will make it effectively illegal to have secure end-to-end encryption.
Installing open source software on phones is becoming more and more difficult. It used to be the case that bootloaders were generally unlocked or unlockable. That is no longer true, including on Android. Google is also planning on banning APKs from unregistered sources soon.
We need end-to-end encryption on phones to have reasonably convenient privacy. We can definitely lose that, and open source software won't help.
Worse, once phones are locked down desktops and laptops can be locked down as well.
If this becomes a widespread way to bypass this, wouldn't they just pass a law to make Linux usage illegal unless you install some module?
I mean, look at all the geniuses saying "I'll just use a VPN" in response to the latest ID for age verification. A week later, the law was amended to also involve VPNs.
How long until hardware vendors prevent you from installing a certified OS that is specifically not anything like linux? Before you call it a conspiracy, know that we are already there with our phones, which represent an overwhelming share of consumer compute use today.
> There is nothing that a Stripe controlled blockchain could offer that a database could not.
One way of thinking about a blockchain is to think of it as a shared datastructure to keep databases in sync. Any time you want to distribute your database over more than just a single central place, in a cryptographically secure way, you're probably going to re-invent a blockchain to do it.
> One way of thinking about a blockchain is to think of it as a shared datastructure to keep databases in sync. Any time you want to distribute your database over more than just a single central place, in a cryptographically secure way, you're probably going to re-invent a blockchain to do it.
Even more specifically, a blockchain is for when you want Byzantine fault tolerance, i.e. you don't trust one or more of the actors involved. This is the main distinguishing feature of blockchains IMO, the reason we have proof of work, proof of stake, etc. It's also the main thing I saw people getting wrong when using blockchains during the earlier waves of cryptocurrency fever; most proposals for blockchains did make sense as distributed public ledgers, but didn't really need the extra computational overhead because only trusted parties were adding blocks to begin with.
> Even more specifically, a blockchain is for when you want Byzantine fault tolerance, i.e. you don't trust one or more of the actors involved.
Often yes. But also blockchain's can be useful simply for backups and scaling: by cryptographically linking every bit of data together you can be confident that you actually have a complete copy without any errors.
Git is basically a blockchain for this exact reason: starting from a git commit hash, git works backwards, checking that every byte of data is what it should be. Similarly, modern filesystems like btrfs use strong (if not cryptographically strong) hashes for this same reason.
Though in a sense, you're still correct: the "actor" you aren't trusting here is your own computer hardware.
I think you're technically correct here: if you just have a bunch of Merkle trees where each one tracks the hash of the previous block, it would be accurate to refer to it as a blockchain even if you're not bothering to implement any of the distributed consensus algorithms that cryptocurrencies are actually known for. It's probably not the first thing that would come to mind, but it is a correct way to use that word.
I wouldn't really say trust is a solved problem in cross-border transfers. Why only today I've seen transactions where:
- an intermediary credited another institution only to realise later they didn't have the money, and have to beg pretty-please to return the payment over a SWIFT message (there is no guarantee here, at best there is "market practice" which is basically just manners, but for banks)
- an intermediary failing to credit the next institution because of a processing error, but when inquired from remitter claiming they had in fact credited it
Many of these cases are very expensive to resolve. Far more expensive than the value of the payments in question. And for that reason they are often left unresolved.
Now I don't know if I'm convinced on stablecoin remittance, I find many of the counter-arguments extremely compelling, but some days I sure do think gee it would be nice if everyone was transacting on a shared public ledger and I could have some certainty of the status of a transaction.
> an intermediary credited another institution only to realise later they didn't have the money, and have to beg pretty-please to return the payment over a SWIFT message (there is no guarantee here, at best there is "market practice" which is basically just manners, but for banks)
But this situation is not made any better by a blockchain - there's still no way to reverse a transaction except asking nicely and hoping the other party obliges, right?
I was only disputing parent assertion that trust is a solved problem and that banks don't "need" a solution.
I haven't the foggiest if stablecoins solve these problems any better. In theory I think all participants having visibility into the ledger would at least answer the problem of "where actually is the money", but I'm not even sure of that though because of fiat on/off ramps, custodial arrangements, roll-ups that might happen off chain, etc.
I don't know if you could use smart contracts to encode a recall/dispute resolution process into transactions but that's very hand-wavey and possibly collapses under scrutiny!
All in I've no idea if crypto helps us here but I do think we have a long way to go either way.
this is such a bizarre position, what you're describing has been not only possible but actually implemented in real-world systems for decades before even the idea of a blockchain was thought up
Ejections are pretty rough, and occasionally career or even life ending. So there would be a lot of pressure on the engineers to try to avoid it. Plus, this plane is very expensive. The cost is multiple times the average lifetime earnings of a typical person. It's not entirely wrong to say that they were attempting to save the life's work of multiple people.
Also the now-pilotless aircraft could potentally kill people on the ground when it crashes. If this had happened in a more populated area it very likely would have.
Might as well do whatever is most effective, which is likely to be harsh sanctions followed by military action to fully enforce them.