FBI is hiding details about a raid on Americans’ safe deposit boxes
reason.com
reason.com
Where are people supposed to store physical copies of backups and yubikeys outside of the house safely?
Fundamental is that your data should be encrypted and duplicated before you give it to your host so if someone tries to read your data, they just get random numbers, and if someone breaks your devices, you give them a bad rating and move on to the other nodes in your BnB RAID.
[1] https://www.forbes.com/sites/worldeconomicforum/2016/11/10/s...
"You Will Eat The Bugs" - https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=8_8LTUmHWP0
edit: I should add that the video above is a joke, but what scares me is the fact that the technology to make this reality already exists, and is a large political crisis away from being imposed.
Meat is a part of the carbon cycle. The carbon in plants is largely atmospheric. The plants eat the carbon, the animals eat the plants, the animals belch CO2 and methane, and that methane becomes CO2 again after ~12 years. The kind of carbon rising in the atmosphere isn't even that of animals (by stable isotope testing).
Guess what, those who believe that bugs are the answer. Bugs eat plants. Bugs don't burp, but to grow insects at scale, the plants need to be processed and brought to them. Guess what that means? Burning fossil fuels in transportation.
Cows, on the other hand, can feed on grassland.
As someone who is has eaten plenty of bugs, I sincerely hope that the globalists try something other than bugs. The "science" behind it is extremely flimsy. You can't just take livestock out of the carbon cycle and think that's going to do anything for climate change.
>Cows, on the other hand, can feed on grassland.
That's a feature, not a bug (hah) for them.
As you point out, bug farming requires a large number of inputs and a complicated process. This makes it highly amenable to centralisation & control.
Whilst modern livestock farming is similar in complexity, in theory, it can go back to having more decentralised inputs, with a drawback of lower yield.
Accounting for CO2 intensity is all squishy-squashy. But if we tax the actual emissions then the true energy impact will be reflected in prices and the market will adapt to whatever actually really is optimum--whatever lends the most utils of resource use.
That kind of exercise is far more likely to get kinetic than defining "truth" (or whatever) because it is more directly linked to peoples livelihoods and standards of living.
We could just start with the easiest case, which is a product/process that inherently releases pollutants (anything that releases gases) that may have some negative effects on others or the environment (the threshold should be low), then determine the market rate for capturing that pollution back from the environment and tax accordingly. This would also apply to medicines and lotions that don't get metabolized by the users and are inherently are going to end up in the ocean.
It gets trickier when we consider things that directly harm some people nearby, like smoking, and at a certain level of harm, these things should just be banned outright (i.e. you can't really undo lung cancer or mercury poisoning). Or things that aren't inherently pollutants (plastic containers), but in practice end up causing a lot of pollution.
Our government is too incompetent to approach the problem in a first-principles based way like this, but that doesn't mean we shouldn't try. Banning individual things after they get out of control and doing complex mental gymnastics like cap and trade are much worse solutions.
Under this tax regime as long as the homeless person makes sure to promptly file the appropriate forms each year they should not be at risk of jail time.
( Being the internet, this is all a joke )
Are you familiar with the recent developments in regenerative agriculture including livestock integration?
https://montanafreepress.org/2021/07/06/regenerative-agricul...
Sustainable livestock sounds great. But it won't scale far enough to meet even the current US demand, at least not if grown domestically. So maybe just subjugate a bunch of other countries, and ensure they do it sustainably! Can't be clear cutting rainforests we might need to breath or anything.
As we search out the threshold of unsustainable living maybe we could tap the breaks a bit first? Earth is a nearly closed system we must all share, and cows are a terribly inefficient way to produce protein and calories.
avg american men eats more than 100gm protein perday, CDC recommends 46-56. As you asked, now are you going to follow that? https://www.bluezones.com/2020/07/blue-zones-diet-food-secre...
https://peterattiamd.com/category/nutritional-biochemistry/p...
From what I could find sarcopenia's exact causes aren't fully understood yet.
Regardless of the correct quantities protein does not need to come from animal sources. And if we want to live with less suffering and environmental destruction we'll need to reduce reliance on animal protein.
Putting aside the ridiculousness of the Big Agra's bedroom activity with the Government, what's your point? Corn is a type of grass after all. The same rules apply. If there's a problem with how corn in particular is raised and transported for cattle feed, that's really not central to whether raising cattle is bad for the climate in and of itself. Cattle can and are fed on grass all the time, even in cases when the cattle is grain-fed in the months before they are slaughtered.
> It's a fact that Americans eat more meat than they should
According to whom?
How is this ridiculousness? The government heavily subsidizes corn, which makes it cheap to use to fatten up cows. If corn wasn't cheaply produced, it would be used less in beef production.
Government subsidies are why corn is in most products, and why it's being used for a percentage of fuel. The corn being produced is low in nutrients and high in sugar. The subsidies are not a positive thing for the economy or for our health.
CDC, avg american men eats more than 100gm protein perday, CDC recommends 56.
Then read about blue region people who eats much less meat, in most Blue Zones diets people eat small amounts of pork, chicken, or lamb. https://extension.psu.edu/longevity-tips-from-the-blue-zones
I think the issue is that we’re artificially increasing feed crop yields with massive use of synthetic fertilizer. And beef is a very inefficient use of those resources.
I don’t know if bugs is the solution, but when our answer to everything is “more gas!” I’m willing to entertain and try alternatives.
Plants are largely composed of cellulose, which is not digestible by humans. Just because we pass it through and just because a study found trace amounts of cellulose-consuming bacteria in our gut doesn't mean we are well developed to handle cellulose. Those are "calories" we are pooping out.
If you were to just look at the carbohydrate content of plants, well, if we reductively look at the energy density of macronutrients, sorry, carbs of any kind are not as energy dense as the fats from meat.
As an aside, this is one chief reason why calories, which are a measure of heat, are a poor metric for nutrition.
> Pastures and farmland are not effective carbon sinks.
Neither is any kind of farmland, whether it's cows that are being raised or tomatoes.
Carbon sinks only mean something in the case of fossil carbon being introduced to the atmospheric carbon cycle, but that doesn't matter anyway because no amount of trees added to the earth are going to offset anthroprogenic climate change in any appreciable way.
> Most land used by cattle was earlier forestland or other land that served as a carbon sink.
Not all forest land is a carbon sink, and not all forest land is woodland.
Also, I would really appreciate some evidence for this.
> For example, one of the major causes of rainforest destruction in Brazil is cattle ranching.
As if demolishing the Amazon is a prerequisite to cattle ranching, as opposed to something people do because the economic incentives are there, which has nothing to do with whether raising cattle in and of itself is harmful to the climate. Tons of beef are is raised on the Great Plains and has been for over a century, and the Great Plains is nothing close to the kind of carbon sink you're thinking of.
Trying to tackle sources one by one is going to be a mess and give us a crap solution full of holes, and tons of argument and inaction as people fight for their preferred solutions.
Tax the carbon entering the carbon cycle and let the costs of that flow through all the supply chains, soften the blow for people via rebates and by ramping the amount up over time to a well-telegraphed future target, and things will adjust. The poor will generally come out ahead after the rebate, since they tend to generate a lot less carbon, the rich will pay much more. Things like flying will probably triple in price, or more, if we set it at the price for durable sequestration, and so people will fly much less for recreation. And maybe we'll survive as a species to see another couple generations.
I wasn't proposing any specific solution, just stating that eating animals does in fact contribute more CO2 than eating plants. And I have no problem with carbon taxes, in fact I'm in favor. A carbon tax could certainly cover this case if it taxes the CO2 that animals emit.
But... It does. 220lbs of methane per cow on average. Annually.
> Guess what, those who believe that bugs are the answer. Bugs eat plants. Bugs don't burp, but to grow insects at scale, the plants need to be processed and brought to them. Guess what that means? Burning fossil fuels in transportation.
This is a bit absurd. Now I'm not saying I'm not in said "bug camp" - but you're arguing that transport of plants, using fossil fuels, even remotely touches the amount of fossil fuels, not to mention water, that is required for transport of livestock / processed meat?
> Cows, on the other hand, can feed on grassland.
True. Cows feed on grassland that could be significantly more productive acre for acre. Not only the space they need to live but the space required to grow the feed corn, the water that is consumed and the fossil fuels that get burned. The argument is fantasy at best.
The final thing being - cows don't exist without humans in their current capacity. Insects, on the other hand do. We don't need meat. We have access to plenty of what we need to thrive via plants without bugs. It's unfortunate that meat is looked at as a staple with overconsumption of specific meats even being touted as healthy (e.g. chicken).
Has there ever been research done on this? Historically humans depended on animal protein for essential amino acids. It seems far-fetched to suggest we could scale up quinoa to 7+ billion humans given current global realities.
Humans naturally consume animal protein out of biological necessity. This has only changed for people who have the necessary resources to follow incredibly regimented and expensive vegan diets.
And how much phytate does hemp seed contain? 4g/100g. Good luck with mineral absorption.
Proportion of amino acids isn't the only important metric.
There are tens of millions of healthy vegans. Not everyone can be healthy on a pure vegan or even vegetarian diet, but very nearly everyone can do just fine on a couple of meals a month that involve cows, chicken/duck once a week, and an egg every day or two.
If you need large amounts of non bean/grain/hemp protein for some reason then chicken is still vastly better than beef, and insects are totally an option.
If you are going to make a claim about the overwhelming majority of anything it should come with a source.
Please provide evidence that less than half of caloric intake for hunter gatherers came from meat instead of making additional claims without reference.
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_countries_by_meat_co...
A world where "we have plenty for what we need with just plants" may be a possible world, but it's not the one we live in now. It seems like it would require immense effort to get there.
What I'm saying is you don't need to eat it 2-3 times per day. I don't eat meat by choice.
> Historically humans depended on animal protein for essential amino acids. It seems far-fetched to suggest we could scale up quinoa to 7+ billion humans given current global realities.
I'm curious how you think we're feeding those 7+ billion today? If you're saying that animal production globally is efficient with respect to natural resources and waste, well that's even crazier than growing plants via alternative farming methods.
> Humans naturally consume animal protein out of biological necessity.
This is where the argument is lost on me. I'm not sure what point is being made here but it reads as if you're saying prehistoric humans got their protein through animals and animals only. This just isn't true and some research has stated only 40-50% of protein was acquired via animals. But the real problem here is that sales and marketing has led us to believe that we need more protein. Way more than we actually need. So much so that we're polluting via urine because of overconsumption of protein [0].
[0] https://www.scientificamerican.com/article/eating-too-much-p...
I eat meat only a few days a week, and typically only for dinner. So we are in agreement there.
I don't even have the same concerns about a vegetarian diet. Dairy and eggs have everything you need and in large quantities.
Veganism is a luxury lifestyle in 2022. If you aren't meticulous about your shopping, cooking, and consumption, it will make you profoundly ill given enough time.
Agreed. I haven't eaten red or white meat for over 5 years now. I'm not strict about animal oils / fats tainting my food intake. I also still consume eggs/dairy/fish. The difference being I consume very little of those things. I may eat fish 2 times per week at the most. I eat maybe 2-4 eggs per week (both cooked and used as an ingredient). Dairy I don't consume other than as an ingredient or the very occasional dessert (ice cream).
I've only improved my health during that time. And as you get older it's interesting to see peers continue to overconsume and pay the price accordingly.
We don't need to be vegans to make a significant improvement on our planet. But what's considered "normal" from a dietary standpoint today is nowhere near a truly healthful diet nor is it treading lightly on our ecosystem.
https://tools.myfooddata.com/protein-calculator/174914-17429...
There is quite a happy medium out there between veganism and a Jordan Peterson-style carnivore diet.
Do you actually believe that humans can function optimally on only rice, beans, and peanut butter?
Really, look into who proposes a carbon tax. It isn't scientists
It’s proposed by a huge assortment of economists, including a lot of heavyweights: https://clcouncil.org/economists-statement/
Economists!? Honestly not the group I would defer to at this particular moment in time. We are on the precipice of a possible global finance collapse thanks to their pseudoscience
Make sense? Obviously a ridiculously tall order politically, maybe impossible, the rich would take the brunt, but it’ll also be harder for the middle/upper middle class to jet across the country.
I’m also pessimistic about MMT and it’s effects, but I’d view that as more of a political necessity to keep the music going for debtor nations than something most economists thought was actually ideal. No one has the stomach for austerity, and it frankly would probably be catastrophic anyway, we just have to try to inflate our debt away without hitting hyperinflation.
Maybe..?
We have to transition away from growth economy and inflation, neither is sustainable. We're hitting the end of the line in under 100 years.
If debt is fake and we're just using time to diminish it, then let's just do that and stop robbing people of their wealth. Likely impossible for politicians and economists to allow this either
Half of china;s pollution comes from producing shit that we consume. We outsourced out pollution, and then have the gull to complain about it.
You know where 99% of all electric busses are? In China. You know which country has more electrified rail than the rest of the world combined? China. You know which country has the highest percentage of it's population take high sspeed train isntead of flying? China.
China has deplorable pollution, this is a fact. Busses and rail aside.
The first world pays them to make cheap goods without regulation so that we can wash our hands and keep clean.
Changes nothing about carbon tax
China pollutes 3x less per person than US does, even taking into account the fact that they prodice our good. Their government actually takes climate change seriously and they invest more in clean technologies than we do.
Other have commented that you are wrong about how carbon tax works as well
This 'china the boogieman' and 'we will keep polluting untill china closes the last coal power plant' is the political fongerpointing of the lowerst sort.
Well, the US doesn't have 900 million peasants to dilute our numbers. Moreover, at 3:1, China is still a greater gross polluter, if you take the reporting from China at face value. From other data collected in China where there is 1. Profit 2. Political repercussion - the outputs always seem to match up with the government prescribed allowable limits....
Those arguments are assuming the carbon tax will work as it is on paper. I am assured by ever other treaty that China and other 3rd world countries will be granted exemption.
China is not even the point. It's the whole "Third World" status protectionism racket.
The entire program will not work unless the entire world plays by the same rules and adheres to the same standards. This will not happen
Get your head out of your rear, and stop complaining about farmers in 3rd world countries who 'will be granted exemption' so they can go from having 1 farting cow to 2 farting cows and actually afford a meal every day - they still produce less pollution in their lifetime than you do in a year.
I am sorry for being rude, but you are a total hypocrite, and untill you sort out your shit, no other country is interested in what you have to say.
I'm not complaining about farmers. You have based your entire position on assumptions that not everyone in the world agrees with.
Had you thought about that? Have you thought that there are significant reasons why some countries would gladly accept 'climate change'??
Your premise is that everyone is going to do this reduction in output and gladly yoke themselves with an individual accounting for their global expenditure. How utterly foolish.
The climate accords you so poignantly mentioned are attended by private jet riding elites that have NO intention of reducing their quality of life.
When you choose to step into the light of reality, I'll gladly meet you
The methane a cow farts is not ex novo, but was part (albeit transformed) of the ecosystem already. It's like complaining about cows wasting water. And if we were not eating meat, these cows would still eat grass and fart methane.
Methane is bad when it's added to the natural ecosystem, like extracting petroleum from a hole underground and burning it.
Already being captured for energy. VC funds are all over this
> I'm not saying I'm not in said "bug camp"
So you are saying you are in the bug camp, got it.
>but you're arguing that transport of plants, using fossil fuels, even remotely touches the amount of fossil fuels...[meat]
Hyperbole and no accounting. You have no idea. Scale production and see what happens. Have you any data to validate your assessment?
> grassland that could be significantly more productive
How so? Do you believe all grassland on earth should be appropriated for "best use" to increase productivity? Why would you believe that? Are you aware that allowing cattle to forage in forests helps prevent wildfires and enriches the soil increasing undergrowth and biodiversity. The practice is largely banned in state and national parks thanks to zealots of ecowarriors and bug campers.
>We don't need meat
What we need is trivial. We don't need cars or shoes or knowledge.
Meat can be considered a byproduct of an immensely useful material that lasts indefinitely, has been harnessed by possibly every culture to exist and has uses that every person requires.
Leather.
You need to read Oryx and Crake before you destroy the world.
Many people are eager to make their opinions the de facto law of the land. In reality they have rarely done any searching outside of their emotions.
They same people then cling to statutory protection when their ignorance is displayed
> Already being captured for energy. VC funds are all over this
There are roughly a billion cows on the planet. I live in the midwest. If VC funds (not sure what this means exactly) are all over this - then why have I not seen thousands of cows wearing ridiculous contraptions to sequester said methane? Show me the data.
> So you are saying you are in the bug camp, got it.
This is ignorance at it's finest - I'm not promoting bugs as food, nor am I discouraging it. Your comment is ignorant and assumptive at best and provides no value to your response other than to show little thought around the topic.
> Hyperbole and no accounting. You have no idea. Scale production and see what happens. Have you any data to validate your assessment?
https://livestockdata.org/data-object/livestock-and-greenhou... https://grain.org/article/entries/5976-emissions-impossible-... https://www.weforum.org/agenda/2021/09/animal-based-food-vs-... https://www.ecowatch.com/which-is-worse-for-the-planet-beef-...
Again, your arguments have no context and no basis. This information is widely available and is suppressed by dairy and meat industries - no different than tobacco or big oil has done.
> How so? Do you believe all grassland on earth should be appropriated for "best use" to increase productivity? Why would you believe that? Are you aware that allowing cattle to forage in forests helps prevent wildfires and enriches the soil increasing undergrowth and biodiversity. The practice is largely banned in state and national parks thanks to zealots of ecowarriors and bug campers.
It seems you haven't looked at the environmental impact that is caused by the supporting agriculture, which is required, to support livestock at our current consumption levels.
There's over 90 million of acres per year plated for "feed" corn. 90 million acres that are used for singular feed crops. 90 million acres that have fertilizer and pest control applications annually to keep the machine in motion. And you're proposing just letting the cows "forage in forests". Laughable at best, considering there are over 94 million cows in the US alone. Your idea is probably banned because cows are also, not natural wildlife in state and natural parks. There's something called the food chain and cows would be prime, and easy, targets for many predators. So your idea would disrupt the food chain and provide, basically, no value. And yet you claim that "it's because these practices are banned". Again, a biased and unfounded point of view that you've provided zero data to support.
https://petkeen.com/how-many-cows-in-us/
> What we need is trivial. We don't need cars or shoes or knowledge. > Meat can be considered a byproduct of an immensely useful material that lasts indefinitely, has been harnessed by possibly every culture to exist and has uses that every person requires. > Leather.
I don't know where to start with this because you're all over the place. First you start with a strawman that, seemingly, implies you live a minimal lifestyle of which you don't have a car, shoe, or cognizance? The idea that we don't need "knowledge" basically proves the point: your commentary is drivel.
> You need to read Oryx and Crake before you destroy the world.
Please provide sources.
Meat is the flesh of sentient living beings with feelings and their own rich internal lives. Their bodies do not belong to us to strip for parts as we see fit. Though people throughout history have often eaten meat, there have also been many cultures that do not (about half of India is vegetarian for example). In the developed world, our factory farms have become brutal inhumane places of horrors with no connection to the indigenous uses of animals you reference.
> has uses that every person requires.
In the developed world it is false to say that every person requires animal products, as we surely don't. Most people can thrive on a plant based diet, no need to destroy the lives of thinking beings for their meals or shoes.
We are not ruminants. We don't have multiple stomachs.
Your emotions are the deciding factor in your position. I implore you to look at the animal kingdom with honesty and not a disney-washed, Blue Planet version for children.
Nature is harsh and awful. Animals often die by incredibly vicious means from predators. Gored and crushed in their jaws.
We are humane to a fault. Now people are so disconnected from the reality of nature, they expect to impose restrictions based on their emotions. I find this argumemt to be lacking substance.
The developed world you highlight is dependent on petrochemicals. Everything you have and use. Leather is one of the very few durable goods that is not.
Sure, you can say compassion is an emotion. But can you really even be a part of society without compassion? To say we should be willing to enslave and kill animals because we should set our compassion aside... why? Why do you argue for a world without compassion? Yes nature is brutal. And yet we have child seats for cars because we don't expect to expose our children to random brutality. What about a pig or a cow makes you feel it deserves brutality when we will work so hard to shield one another from the same?
We don't live in the jungle. That is not the point of society. We do care for one another, and compassion drives many aspects of our society. I see no reason it should not play in to what we eat.
> We are not ruminants. We don't have multiple stomachs.
This doesn't have anything to do with veganism. Vegans don't eat grass from the ground. We don't need multiple stomachs. This is a straw man.
Well, as far as I've looked into it, the production of meat is significantly more water and energy (carbon) intensive than if we were to consume plants directly. And there's also the carbon output via methane. The meat production is completely unnecessary and it's not an efficient conversion.
> The fact that eating insects is being suggested as an alternative makes it even worse.
I don't know why someone would suggest eating insects at all. We don't need either of those things. Just eat the plants directly. There's no need for an inefficient conversion mechanism from plants to something else.
> As someone who is has eaten plenty of bugs
Interesting. Why did you do that?
Plant diets are lacking, we are not herbivores
No, they are not lacking. Have you tried a plant based / meat-free diet and found this to be the case?
"Studies at Harvard University as well as other studies conducted in the United States, United Kingdom, Canada, Australia, New Zealand, and various European countries, confirmed vegetarian diets provide sufficient protein intake as long as a variety of plant sources are available and consumed"
You are making assumptions and otherwise fail to realize that a lifetime diet has more impact than can be understood with a contrived, likely biased, study designed to find the answer sought.
Inuits lived primarily on whale blubber. It's entirely possibly to live on a diet nearly devoid of nutrition. No I won't provide you with a study. It is evident from the modern western diet of processed foods
They feed on soy and corn that was grown using twice its mass in fossil fuels and transported further than it would be to the insects. They the multiply its ghg severity by turning a bunch of it into methane. The carbon mass of cattle comes from the gas wells, (including fugitive methane which dwarfs the burps).
They don't live on grassland either. They live on freshly burnt down old growth rainforest.
We can, however, cut the number of cows down to just the ones that can graze, and eat vegetarian for the other 9/10 days. This frees up 70% of the corn and soy land too. If you really need extra high quality protein then insects are an option, and can eat some of the crop byproducts we cannot.
It's not the referent when someone says "beef has high emissions"
If everyone eats cows that are pastured, you will have 1 small burger a month. Because that's how much beef pastures can support divided by the number of people that want it. The rest if bred on soy and stuff
Why does it mean that? Alternative methods of operating would be either electric vehicles, or farming the bugs in the same place as growing bug food.
What pisses me off is people complaining about my local, free-range meat consumption while chomping on fruit and grain grown in more temperate countries and flown here.
EDIT: But I have to admit, as a meat eater, I support the research into bugs for food. Because animal protein is unrivalled compared to vegetable protein. Although squeamish, I'd rather eat cricket flour than trying to make a vegan diet work.
Not sure if you're being serious here, but the _extreme_ vast majority of food is shipped, not flown. It's something like 0.16% [1], and I'll bet that's low-volume, high-worth food. And your local meat _probably_ has a higher carbon footprint than meat imported from a better climate; lamb from New Zealand, plus shipping to the UK, has a lower carbon footprint than lamb from the UK eaten in the UK [2], because the New Zealand climate is better.
[1] https://ourworldindata.org/food-transport-by-mode
[2] https://www.ecoandbeyond.co/articles/british-new-zealand-lam...
People really underestimate how efficient shipping has gotten over the last 50 years or so.
The idea that importing lamb from NZ is better than locally grown is absolutely ridiculous I wouldn't even know where to start.
No, that carbon is also human generated. All these cows are created only for human use. They are not here by natural process.
As a kid, I was super grossed out when I watched it.
Now, I'm not so sure.
I eat a ton of crawfish, and love them. Pretending that they aren't bugs is just marketing.
Are there other bugs I'd like with the appropriate amount of Zatarain's?
Probably.
You might find this useful:
Blackrock, Zillo, etc. cornering residential housing market. Sorrelle nails it: https://youtu.be/pwmEJWKCLF8
What I find so interesting is that the super rich don’t even seem to be trying to hide this mischief.
the problem is, that revolution is just two missed meals away, and with people living on the edge (due to huge costs of living), just a tiny unforseen "thing" happening, can cause those two missed meals, and angry hordes of people lynching the politicians.
They don't need to. Talk to normies, they love their pods, Doritos, Xtreme Mountain Dew, sportsball, porn, celebrity drama, and Instagram.
The product that elites provide to normies is far, far, superior to bread and circuses by every single hedonistic metric you can think of. They love it.
Still, its surprising to see comments like this on HN - stuff like that is usually flagged and downvoted.
Which is a problem if you want to get real information and there really is a conspiracy. And this is a possibility. Mainstream sources are plainly politicised and owned by a very small, 'elite' section of society - they will not say what needs to be said - their paychecks, training and editors prevent this. So...
The conspiracy world seems far closer to the truth nowadays, with a deeper, more meaningful take on reality that attempts to explain what is going on, than anything you can find on a TV or mainstream source.
Lol maybe several years back.
The conspiracy world wraps the world in a compelling narrative that is more coherent than actual reality relying on surface level understanding of numerous topics and trivial fabrications. If you dig into it then you soon find out that its a tremendous pile of bullshit amenable only to people who are willing to spend hours scouring niche sites for entertaining nonsense but unable or unwilling to pick out the trivial flaws in the reasoning of the narratives they push.
This statement
> The conspiracy world seems far closer to the truth
is tremendously suspect. I suggest you examine your beliefs more carefully.
This guy was predicting where things were going based on the principles of capitalism; it's more profitable to charge people in perpetuity than to charge them only once. It is not a conspiracy beyond that.
If you don't like it, then avoid products with continuous payments and favor ones that don't as much as you can. If businesses see there is more appetite for buying things permanently than renting them, then they will sell things. DVD beat DivX.
If you want to own things cancel your streaming service subscriptions and buy movies and TV shows and books and music instead. Stop posting the same tired, worn out quote and do something.
The problem is the "as much as you can". Even for devices that you can still "buy" you are often not really the one in control of that device and the maker will continue to try to extract more money from you using that device.
> DVD beat DivX.
And streaming beat physical media. Movies and TV are a really bad example for your point as it is prohibitively expensive to "buy" these compared to a streaming subscription and that difference is only going to get bigger as less and less people make the effort to own things. This isn't something you can affect on your own.
It's getting referenced a lot because people can actively see the rug getting pulled beneath their feet.
> This guy was predicting where things were going based on the principles of capitalism; it's more profitable to charge people in perpetuity than to charge them only once. It is not a conspiracy beyond that.
I think it's actually being driven by a rise in cost of living, with an expected standard of living that is unchanging. You aren't for example going to downgrade your phone or car whilst working at the same company, and if they thing itself is getting more expensive, the only thing left is the type of ownership.
It's already here in terms of loans, where you make lots of small payments (rent) to eventually own the item. In the UK there is a scheme "right to buy", where the rent is counted towards your eventual bid to buy a property.
> If you don't like it, then avoid products with continuous payments and favor ones that don't as much as you can.
That's not how it will happen. To work at X company and interact with Y service (which allows you to live), they require you have some minimum piece of equipment. You can either buy it outright (which your wage does not allow for) or loan the item (essentially rent it). You end up being forced into the system.
An example could be a car to get to work, but you have to drive through a low emissions zone which is dictated by car manufacturing year. Another example could be an app on a phone where it requires a minimum OS version, only supported my the latest and greatest model.
> If you want to own things cancel your streaming service subscriptions and buy movies and TV shows and books and music instead.
You're preaching to the wrong person - but these things are only a matter of time. Music for example is becoming less and less of a choice, many artists have nothing but digital versions, and those are purposefully setup to prevent distribution, locking you into some hellish platform.
It'll give our sustainability leaders a raging せみ.
A simple illustration of what might trigger people to thing of the other side of this might be "Why is it so hard as a U.S. citizen to get an offshore bank account that the U.S. absolutely completed can't get access to no matter what?"
The U.S. government thinks they have very valid reasons they should be able to see the details of the accounts of all U.S. citizens regardless of where those accounts may be. For the most part I agree with the concept, because as an entity responsible for collecting and running off of taxes, allowing otherwise is antithetical to their existence, and I'd rather the U.S. government continue to run. That doesn't mean I think they should have access to everything about all accounts, but they should have access to some information. At the same time, I don't think they should access to nothing about certain accounts, for similar reasoning. Both extremes are unacceptable, as is often the case.
Most of the world doesn't agree with that concept. AFAIK, the only countries which tax citizens instead of just residents are the USA and Eritrea.
It looks to me like they're both taxes.
That said, I was being a little loose when saying citizenship. The U.S. has various laws many of which are regarding taxation of business within its borders, with entities housed in its borders, or citizens abroad. They will seek to enforce those laws. I think that's for the most part that's fairly standard.
There are of course a myriad of ways in which the issue becomes more complicated, and I'm not trying to claim the government can do no wrong and all their actions are justified, I just think it's important to look at the issue holistically. The government should be capable, which appropriate checks and balances, to enforce the laws. People should have the ability to have some expectation of privacy from the government unless there's a specific reason the government seeking otherwise that's valid.
Here's my opinion, I think the US should do what virtually every other country in the world does - accept that its power is not absolute, and tax its citizens based on residence, not on citizenship.
Do you have skin in this game? If not, get off my back and stop trying to make my life worse. Expats are already screwed by the tax code. We have FATCA and FBAR and we get denied basic financial services when we're outside the US. Many banks in other countries now deny American expats bank accounts because they're terrified of repercussions from the US government if the foreign bank doesn't fill out US tax forms correctly.
We don't need more of this crap you're pushing. Stop screwing up ordinary people's lives. I will make the most charitable interpretation I can here and assume that you want to hurt other Americans and tell them if they don't like it they can stop being American out of ignorance, not out of malice.
The US gives expat citizens a huge tax deduction. You only pay taxes if you're a wealthy expat. The paperwork is to enforce it.
Otherwise, wealthy people in the US could just "live" in tax havens and evade US taxes.
> If not, get off my back and stop trying to make my life worse.
I wasn't aware I had such power. Who knew my random comments on the internet could cause financial law and policy to change?
In all seriousness you and I have the same ability to enact change here, which is to vote and advocate for a position. The point at which you don't, that is if you gave up your citizenship and right to vote, it would no longer effect you.
That's a concrete example of a benefit you get from citizenship, which comes with rights and responsibilities. The fact you don't want to give it up is evidence that you see it as beneficial.
The last thing I'll say is I specifically left opening in my statement so someone could argue that the burden is harder than it needs to be on expats, because my point isn't that they should pay all the costs they currently do, but that some cost for the benefits they get is in my opinion acceptable. Maybe a slightly less knee-jerk reaction to my comment may have made that apparent.
If you want to advocate for these policies you have to address the harm that they're doing to people, you don't get to just "leave them an opening." You've advocated for harm. You've made yourself the bad guy here. Do you explicitly support these harms as a cost of governance? Are these individuals sacrifices for the greater good of prosecuting financial criminals? Or are you simply oblivious to this problem? So far you've dodged the issue, lectured us on how the democratic process works, and implied that if anyone doesn't like it they can renounce their citizenship, which is phenomenally condescending, believe me I understand these things very well so spare me those lectures.
Which is pretty expensive, and you still get taxed for ten years afterwards.
To be clear, in case I wasn't enough above, I'm not saying I completely agree with all the specifics of the U.S. current law on what and how much to tax expats, just that on a conceptual level I don't have a problem with some amount of taxation in exchange for representation (among other things), and people that disagree with that entirely should consider what their best choice is.
Citizens have the right to vote though, so they can try to effect change like all the rest of us, and that includes efforts to change how expats are taxed.
Some kind of theoretical minimal citizenship taxation might be reasonable. The current US taxation regime certainly isn't.
Isn't the US one of the few (the only?) countries which makes this really hard?
Like, if I wanted to get rid of my citizenship (European country) all I need to do is get another one, it is void the second that happens. And even if it wasn't, I do have the right to get rid of the citizenship at any time, no reason or justification needed.
If I remember in the US it is not only expensive but also they for some reason have this system where they can deny you renouncing your citizenship.
I'm not sure the specifics of when they deny renouncing citizenship, but if you don't have citizenship somewhere else or your visa to that country is as a U.S. citizen, I could see those as being valid cases for rejection until those are resolved (also if you have outstanding warrants or are under investigation for something).
You can only renounce US citizenship if you have citizenship somewhere else. There are millions of Americans that live outside the US that only have US citizenship and therefore cannot renounce.
It's a situation the host country is obviously happy with as well, otherwise they would offer citizenship and the problem would be solved.
In all developed countries there is an on-going effort to make sure that off-shore assets are identified so they can be taxed appropriately.
Canada requires it.
https://farbertax.com/cra-foreign-assets-and-income/reportin...
Edit: s/Europe/The EU.
Back in the day this "extreme" was called the 4th Amendment to the US Constitution. But law enforcement doesn't respect the highest law of the land, and neither do the courts, and neither does the government. IMHO that makes the whole lot of them criminals.
That said, hiding evidence from law enforcement/money from the tax authorities is a crime anyways, regardless of where you hide it.
There is no duty to provide evidence of a crime to law enforcement in the US, anyway - merely to comply with warrants or the like, if issued. There is a difference.
It is also not illegal to hide money - just illegal to not pay taxes due. There is also a difference there too.
The goal isn't to lock all money down and infringe on personal rights, it's to keep it from being hidden and untaxed en masse by many very rich entities.
others have had this opinion, and it's short and sweet:
Fourth Amendment
The right of the people to be secure in their persons,
houses, papers, and effects, against unreasonable searches
and seizures, shall not be violated, and no Warrants shall
issue, but upon probable cause, supported by Oath or
affirmation, and particularly describing the place to be
searched, and the persons or things to be seized.
There are even government sites with fun visualizations you can explore: https://datalab.usaspending.gov/americas-finance-guide/
Budget is what they ask Congress to put in spending bill which is signed into law. Then funds are appropriated. Then funds are spent. Pentagon spending audit is overdue by a couple decades. https://text.npr.org/997961646
Donald Rumsfeld gave a speech and pledged to get to the bottom of the missing $2.3T. He even created office space just for that effort and put everything there so the bookkeepers could get the job done. Guess where the Pentagon was hit the very next day? https://www.cbsnews.com/news/the-war-on-waste/#app
A few years ago the Admiral who was Chairman of the Joint Chiefs shocked me by publicly throwing out the number (if I remember correctly) of $7 trillion that the DoD couldn’t account for. That would buy a lot of lunches for hungry children in our country. Anyway I was shocked by his admission, although I think his estimate is too low.
What our country needs is more patriotic people like that Admiral who at least occasionally inform the public.
Do you have a source for that? The article you linked does not promote this thinly-veiled conspiracy theory.
Here is a link to the satelite agency having enough funds in a secret slush fund that they avoided the budget process and simply bought land and built a top-dollar building. No accountability in early 1990s! https://www.washingtonpost.com/archive/politics/1994/08/10/b...
In the US, it's as if there's an informal agreement that secrecy, like copyright, may obtain for up to a typical human lifespan. If you buy into Plato's concept of the 'noble lie', that governments must deceive their populace to some extent for their own good, then it's sort of inevitable that there would be a tacit agreement to let sleeping dogs lie until everyone involved is dead. The benefit is social harmony (not least because disagreement is an easy way to identify malcontents), the cost is an erosion of institutional trust.
* https://www.npr.org/2011/04/20/135578901/cia-declassifies-it...
That tradeoff was sustainable for a long time; fans of secret history, the paranormal etc., always knew the government had a lot of secrets, but the scope was somewhat steady and comprehensible (atomic secrets will get you executed, other things can be discreetly admitted to after they become obsolete). I think three factors have upended that: the lurch toward a security state after 9/11, the rapid speed of information transmission (and diminishing half-life of utility) as society has become more networked, and economic inflation (which is to an extent a factor of the other two). I include the last because paranoia seems to correlate with inflationary anxiety because it functions as a hidden variable that throws off estimates of supply and demand, and that in turn means strategic considerations move from policy choices towards other means.
Security considerations expand in inverse proportion to institutional confidence, and where social consensus is lacking this can have a runaway feedback effect. Hence the proliferation of hybrid war information operations that are designed to leverage normal skepticism/cynicism into anxiety and paranoia. Educational and economic asymmetries across a polity are like a gap into which wedges can be driven, because more effort must be put into reducing the asymmetry than refuting the IO directly and this is perceived intuitively if not rationally.
A simple example is the idea that the moon landings are fake, often tied to flat-earth or nuclear weapons denial. Space literate people rightly point out the existence of laser reflectors on the lunar surface and their accessibility by booking telescope time, but those alleging its fake can easily spread confusion around this. NASA wants to do original science and avoid disturbing the landing sites, which is understandable; but the upshot is that nobody under the age of about 50 has ever seen live footage from the moon, and so 'debunking the fake footage' is more viscerally exciting to the uninformed or uneducated viewer than gathering the abstract knowledge required to evaluate such claims.
1. The "ground" in question shouldn't be your own property, or tied back to you by paper trail. A trusted ally's property with a handshake agreement, or poorly-trafficked public land. When the Feds decide to make you a target, they can and will use ground-penetrating radar on your property.
2. Regarding the radar, bury the pipes along with plenty of shrapnel to mess with the signature, in the event that your chosen location was not as anonymous as supposed.
3. Use any any all methods to avoid tracking when traveling to/from the location. Eliminate RF signatures from phones, etc, avoid license plate readers and cameras, use bicycles or older vehicles without telemetry collection, wear clothes you wouldn't normally wear and discard afterward, etc.
E.g. maybe just do some crappy furniture or something and throw the valuables in a cushion? Something like that.
I don’t know much about the private ones (there aren’t any near me) but I’d imagine the market is less in demand than compared to the past. The high end of this market buys their own vaults, and the lower end of this market no longer stores wealth in physical form. My grandma had stock certificates and gold coins. People today have 401ks.
After all, it was never a primary business for banks, it was just a value-add.
Then there's the self-storage market that takes a good chunk of this now, they're secure enough for grandma's heirlooms and you get a significantly bigger box.
You can apply leverage to almost any business model.
E.g. seems to be some overlap with the pawn broker lending business here in my view.
Here in the UK lots of moderately wealthy but illiquid individuals keep their illiquid collectables (art, wine, cars, jewelry) with upmarket pawn brokers, who store their stuff securely and provide them with a healthy loan to value. Most of them pay the loans back, and many of them do this continuously.
Otherwise I agree on the labour intensive, hard cost part.
it seems perfect for automation. just a box retrieval system. all that the bank should add is physical security.
that said, banks are providing the usual shady upsell shit (loans, mortgages, credit cards, "premium" services) and that market is already pretty competitive, but basically it's not "free" because the costs of the labor intensive internal workings of these non-slim companies (plus regulatory compliance)
Civil asset forfeiture became such a cash cow, jurisdictions are constantly looking for new ways to apply it.
The problem isn't "our society"; the problem is the FBI being lawless and the DoJ refusing to hold them to account because they regard them as the "same team".
Somehow, our news media still reports FBI statements as implicitly true, and the media-consuming public takes it all at face value. This is astounding to me.
However, the number of places where you can more securely store small objects with excellent and armed security exploded in recent years. They are currently used to host servers and other internet facing computers. I'm sure they'll store a similar rack-mounted box containing your will if you offer to pay them.
That's $2500/sqm
Full access control with background checks.
They aren't putting anything of yours in their building
Also, with so much digitization that's occurred, assets tracked in electronic accounts, fewer and fewer people have need for a such a service anymore. Eg. In the late 20th century you can imagine somebody putting stock certificates in a safe deposit box. Why would you do that now?
Society has to compromise: we cannot monitor all or monitor nothing, so we delegate maybe imperfectly to a subset of people vetted a bit more rigorously to breach expectations sometimes for a reasonable greater good.
If they hid the raid to cover up a screwup, we'll have to sue. If they hid the raid to find more criminals, we'll have to accept it.
Lots of stories about safe deposit boxes getting drilled by accident, stolen, lost etc. Banks don’t really care about them or the business and you have limited ability to do anything if something bad happens.
it’s perhaps hard in the US, but it’s not impossible, it’s just more expensive than most people want to pay, because it’s actually an expensive service to provide. physically resistant boxes at scale, with per-box isolation and per-box access by randoms?
Sadly, this is a big ask for many in the world and trust has been redefined with modernization.
Make no mistake, the idea is to prevent you from retaining valuables. If you have something of value it must be invested to further growth. That is the paradigm of the system.
Otherwise you can place them with a corporation, with insurance, and pay. Hoping that they don't have the ability to deny your claim
https://www.thedailybeast.com/co-owner-of-shady-beverly-hill...
The business recently pled guilty to laundering for drug traffickers:
> The company admitted that it recruited drug traffickers as customers and used the illicit proceeds to run the business. It also acknowledged that people at the company sold cocaine, arranged drug deals at the store and instructed customers how to structure cash transactions to dodge currency reporting requirements.
https://www.latimes.com/california/story/2022-03-03/beverly-...
Not sure what you're getting at here. Beverly Hills has a very large population of Iranian Jews, many of whom do not trust safe deposit boxes in banks because of their own lived experiences in Iran in 1979. This was a business filling a need in our community.
The fundamental due process issue doesn't seem to be in dispute, though remedies for that are being litigated.
What the article is focussed on is not the due process issues, but the right of people outside of those directly affected and whose rights related to involved property are being litigated to law enforcement background information relating to the planning for the operations, which is a completely separate issue.
What "ethics" you following?
If you leave your gun on the floor of your car, someone smashes the window and steals it and shoots up a convenience store: you should be charged criminally and subject to civil liability.
If someone breaks into the gun safe in the trunk of your car and shoots up a convenience store? No crime, no liability - you took reasonable precautions.
Blaming someone because their car or gun was stolen sounds a lot like victim blaming to me. And to the comment about breaking the window, I'd like to point out that most safes are practically as easy to break open as a window is. I recall buying one safe, and another customer explained to me in detail how they had pried one open in only a few seconds.
This is punishing one of the victims.
"Nests of safety deposit boxes and keys, and documents and records referring or relating to them since 2019. This warrant does not authorize a criminal search or seizure of the contents of warrant does not authorize a criminal search or seizure of the contents of the safety deposit boxes. In seizing the nests of safety deposit boxes, agents shall follow their written inventory policies to protect their agencies and the contents of the boxes. Also in accordance with their written policies, agents shall inspect the contents of the boxes in an effort to identify their owners in order to notify them so that they can claim their property;"
They were allowed to "inspect" the contents, but literally only with the goal of returning the property (which they still haven't done).
And this is the distinction that I was trying to address with my first comment. It is perfectly possible that long time users of those vaults (not a rare thing at all in that particular line of business, ask any bank) did not visit the place for a long time and found that they had unwittingly parked their money with a bunch of criminals even though when they entered into the contract that was not even on the horizon.
My point was - in case it wasn't clear enough yet - that if Spamhaus, a non-commercial entity that must have been positively drowning in inbound information - could do the legwork to figure out that exactly one of a class 'B' block of IPV4 addresses was used legitimately and without any prompting by us or anybody else as far as I am aware that it would stand to reason that the authorities could - and should - do the same thing.
That the owners of the company operating the vaults were criminals is similar to the owners of the DC where we hosted probably being well aware of what their customers were up to, but that this had no bearing on us.
I personally prefer for the law to tread carefully in such cases because those rights are important.
This publication also seems to have a habit of sensationalism. Just read another of their articles.
> Fauci conceded that the cloth masks that most people were required to wear indoors throughout the pandemic do not substantially prevent the transmission of COVID-19.
Infact quoted is him actually saying :
> "Right now, we are very, very clear that masks do work in prevention of acquisition and transmission," said Fauci. "But you've got to get a well-fitted mask that is of a high quality. And the two we know are high quality are N95 and KN95."
No mention of the surgical masks at all there, but 'reason' wrote an assumption as fact. So grain of salt for me personally.
Reason is to American libertarianism as Jacobin is to American socialism.
Of course, many avowedly utilitarian institutions do the same thing at scale and radical political journals are trapped within a paradigm of trying to leverage a dysfunctional status quo to turn one way or the other while trying to compete in the field of abstractions at the same time.
Cloth masks don't meet any standard of quality or well-fittedness, so I'm having difficulty seeing what problem you think exists in the restatement by Reason.
I also can't tell what you mean by "no mention of the surgical masks". What surgical masks? Surgical masks aren't mentioned in the quote from Fauci or the quote from Reason.
> Surgical masks aren't mentioned in the quote from Fauci or the quote from Reason.
Nor where cloth masks mentioned by Fauci yet they were by 'Reason' so it's the same difference.
> Cloth masks don't meet any standard of quality or well-fittedness
Where are you getting that info from ? I had a cloth mask with n95 filter slips that seemed to fit exceptionally well. No study was done on mine though.
Yes, Reason mentioned "the cloth masks that most people were required to wear indoors throughout the pandemic".
And Fauci did not mention them, but he did make a statement about them, which was that the category "masks that work in [the] prevention of acquisition and transmission [of covid-19]" doesn't include them. And that is the same statement that Reason reports.
>> Cloth masks don't meet any standard of quality or well-fittedness
> Where are you getting that info from ? I had a cloth mask with n95 filter slips that seemed to fit exceptionally well.
Well, I'm familiar with the standard that cloth masks do meet, which is "any piece of cloth, such as part of an old t-shirt, with ear straps attached". You're free to wear something that meets a higher standard than that, but it's never been a requirement. What was Reason talking about again?
(I should also note that your personal cloth mask wasn't meeting a standard of fit either. N95 masks are quite painful to wear, because they have to maintain a seal.)
It's hard to hold the government accountable when you don't even know what the government did.
They display the dangerous balance of huge scale and access with an inability to hire well outside of key roles (legal for people trending DoJ, special agents in flagpole jobs, etc).
So it’s not like a random FBI agent or even office decided to do this, it was assuredly brought high up into the DoJ and approved.
Let’s not forget that federal or local judges then approved the warrants.
So it’s more accurate to say the federal persecution machine did this, not just the FBI.
The organizational prowess and intent that people assume is present there rarely is. It’s present when you get to certain teams and levels.
More often than not It’s civil servant teams trying their best to replicate organizational processes taught in an MBA program.
The warrant was approved, but the issue at hand is that these safety deposit boxes were raided when "the warrant authorizing the raid explicitly forbade the FBI from seizing the safe deposit boxes or their contents."
We saw so much science and tech progress during the world wars and the cold war, because the best engineering jobs were working for gov contractors. Now, the best paid jobs are working for CRUD app widget factories that serve ads.
The government needs to seriously step up its efforts to recruit exceptional talent, pay exceptional salaries, and be ruthless about cutting the fat (especially people who sit in easy jobs and contribute little).
If not, it will only be a couple more decades before the government is completely unable to carry out many of its core functions such as law enforcement effectively.
Govt tech jobs I got into late stage interviews via a special talent initiative:
- GS 7/9, would not budge, even with my existing pay stubs that I provided.
- FBI specifically was the offer to move to Huntsville AL, while I lived in a coastal tech center. They built a new facility there for logical govt reasons, illogical for tech recruiting though.
- An askance look/nasty attitude from the initiative when I was laid it out - I make $120k in my first Eng job, can you get anywhere close to that/not $60k/yr for a job in DC? If not I have to drop this scholarship/w-e they called it. I did, and got a job in private sector a month later at $150k and remote. They’re killing their talent base.
Totally absurd. And I’m a candidate that would take a pay cut for a compelling govt job.
https://ij.org/press-release/security-deposit-box-owners-ste...
https://ij.org/press-release/fbi-offers-to-return-property-t...
https://ij.org/ll/fbi-vaults-over-the-constitution-to-illega...
EDIT: > Everyone has the right to contract for a safe, private place to store their property. That’s what Jeni Pearsons and Michael Storc wanted for their retirement nest egg. But now Jeni, Michael, and hundreds of other innocent people must fight to keep what’s theirs after the federal government broke into their safe deposit boxes, rifled through their belongings—and stole them all.
> Jeni and Michael live in Los Angeles. Seeking to diversify their savings, they bought a few hundred dollars of silver whenever they had extra cash. To keep their property safe, they rented a safe deposit box at a California company called U.S. Private Vaults.
I think the only reason this hasn't completely blown up in their face is they did manage to nab some shady characters, but the ends don't justify the means.
Does it go back into circulation at that point?
The government will deposit the face value of the currency as opposed to its collectible value. So someone who stored an old $1,000 bill doesn’t get the actual value of the bill (probably twice that on collectibles market)
But that's the government's problem. Either they will have to pay the collectable value to the collector (if the property is to be returned to them) or not pay anything to the collector.
Well, it's also a "destruction of historical artifacts" problem.
> PINE LAWN, Missouri - Curtis Smith Senior wants his $1000 bill back. He carried the rare one-grand note in his pocket for 20 years. It was seized by police in the St. Louis suburb of Pine Lawn, when Smith was arrested during a traffic stop. Officials gave Smith a check last April in return, but he wants his really big bill. Now, the one-grand bill is in the City Hall safe of the mayor - who considers it novelty. Collectors say the bank note is worth much more than its face value. The $1000 bill was last printed in 1934 and was taken out of circulation in 1969. Officials say Smith can have the bill back, once it's no longer considered evidence. But they say he'll have to pay for it.
While it isn't available to borrow, here's what the search text of https://archive.org/details/banknotereport32n6krau/page/n11/... reports:
> The article was from the Jan. 24 edition of the St. Louis Post- Dispatch, written by Heather Ratcliffe. It said that Pine Lawn, Mo., police had allowed Mayor Adrian Wright to “trade” $1,000 of his own money for a $1,000 note seized from Curtis Smith, who had been arrested on suspicion of dealing drugs and being intoxicated at the wheel of his pickup truck. Prosecutors did not file drug charges and ordered the money returned. Pine Lawn officials initially offered to pay Smith by check. They returned the-$ 1,000 note after a reporter inquired about the situation. Smith had carried the note around in his pocket for years as a novelty to show friends.
Yeah presumably except any bills that may be too damaged/dirty/contaminated, which is the same for any cash, in which case it gets destroyed.
https://www.marketwatch.com/amp/story/this-is-exactly-how-of...
https://www.npr.org/2017/11/20/563889510/preventing-police-b...
> some cops jokingly refer to the dogs as "probable cause on four legs.
> And there are powerful incentives not to change how things are done, says Andy Falco, a former police K9 handler who now trains dogs and works as an expert witness for defense attorneys.
> "All [police departments] care about is how many cars you're pulling over, how much money is being seized because your dog alerted," he says, referring to departments that use civil asset forfeiture to keep money and other property found in cars after a K9 alerts to the scent of drugs.
> "They go, 'It's easy! All I gotta do is walk my dog around, and look for him to change his behavior slightly, and then we can go inside and sometimes we'll find a million dollars and then we can seize it!'"
> "There's been cars that my dog's hit on... and just because there wasn't a product in it, doesn't mean the dog can't smell it," says Gunnar Fulmer, a K9 officer
Not like the judge can ask the dog what happened.
For example, this is not a murder, somehow: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=VBUUx0jUKxc&t=190s
And even if you want to buy the most expensive gram of coke, remember that money likely has more literal shit on it than cocaine. There's a reason food service staff is trained to always wash your hands after handling money.
"... to always wash their hands ...", I presume?
The average is much higher at 29 mcg, so each gram is a far more reasonable $35k. But the variability is enormous. Choose the right bills and it'll cost you just under $8k (and a fortune in acetonitrile, but you can recover that!).
"Results demonstrated that "92% of the bills were positive for cocaine with a mean amount of 28.75 ± 139.07 micrograms per bill"
Can I get the one with the negative 110 micrograms in it?
I assume a fair portion of the variability is in the bill amount, so the $35k dream is unreachable and the eight thousand bills likely requires mostly hundreds.
Civil asset forfeiture is generally used under this premise - that having large sums of cash suggests some criminal intent.
But of course, that only makes sense on the surface if you're out in public with it. (There are of course, many reasons you would have a large sum of cash in public other than drug deals.)
Seizing cash which is in a safe deposit box is a few steps further, which raises the hairs on the back of my neck. What is next? Having more money in your bank than the police believe you should have?
that is how Al Capone was taken down, isn't it? That is the reason government pushes you to use banks by in particular attacking even very modest cash piles. And you do have that $10K bank transaction limit triggering law enforcement check.
Even the Joker wont take on the IRS.
Even the stuff which is from criminal activity.
https://www.irs.gov/publications/p17
That is, presumably, someone else's problem if you report money received from money laundering or bribes.
So when we legalized marijuana, most of the possible infractions have sentences up to 14 years and that’s no coincidence.
Bringing marijuana across a border? Up to 14 years!
Making an extract? Up to 14 years!
Sharing with a minor? Up to 14 years!
(vs actually triggering any sort of law enforcement check on that particular transaction)
"FINTRAC analyzes approximately 19 million transactions per year. In 2017, FINTRAC made 2,000 disclosures to police forces." according to Wikipedia.
Or less! Obeying the law is illegal!
For example, if a bank detects an anomaly, they report it. What they DO NOT do is transfer the suspicious funds to a police bank account.
Swiss banks ain't what they used to be. Cayman islands too.
Yes, an "Unexplained Wealth Order" in the UK. If you appear to have too much wealth you can be obliged to explain how you lawfully acquired it on pain of seizure.
The UWO must target an individual who is either: Politically exposed (e.g. (ex)leaders and senior officials of a country and their families) or Reasonably Believed to be involved in Serious Crime (e.g. bank robbers) and whose wealth lacks an apparent explanation. If the target either can't or won't explain their wealth it may be seized.
UWOs are supposed to be reformed to make them work even when you've paid lawyers to make the apparent ownership very opaque. Right now if you're benefiting from an opaque "trust" arrangement maybe spanning several countries it may be impossible to show how that wealth is really "yours" legally, without the co-operation you would have been required to show as part of the UWO.
In practice it often happens, as I understand it, that the UWO target decides the best way out is to just hand over the wealth, because the real answer to "Why do you have this wealth?" is "I did a bunch of crimes" and that is a confession of crime, for which you might do prison time, and either they don't trust lawyers or the lawyers they hired couldn't come up with another story that would hold water.
Sadly the current (Tory) and former (Tory, Tory, and Tory back many years now) UK governments have been much better at talking up their commitment to transparency than at actually taking any steps to prevent the UK (and especially London) functioning as a laundromat and dormitory for crooks to wash their dirty money and sleep comfortably knowing the people they stole from can't reach them...
I guess that's strictly "better" than the nearly-zero-recourse civil forfeiture travesty we have here in the US, but... still not great.
The presumption of innocence does not mean you're entitled to obstruct investigators. "But you haven't proved that I'm guilty" also doesn't work to stop detectives entering your home with a search warrant.
I'm ok with having large amounts of cash with no obvious legitimate source triggering an investigation, but that's not what's happening.
They just sneak past it by not actually sentencing you of a crime.
Is it unreasonable that law enforcement asks how did you aquire an amount of money that is greater than you could ever earn in your lifetime?
it's nearly the same mechanism as what was used against alcapone to jail him for inocme tax evasion -> he had access to absurd amount of wealth, and there is no way the could have aquired it legally.
Triggering the investigation is fine and reasonable.
Confiscating the wealth without evidence of a crime is the issue.
Civil Asset Forfeiture in the US is regularly confiscating not tens of millions of dollars, but mere thousands of dollars for the simple reason of it being in cash. And this case is even worse - the cash was not on anyone's person out in public, but in a safe deposit box, not doing anything in particular.
Sometimes the case is never brought to trial [1]; in other cases the owner of the assets is never even charged with a crime [2]. When the forfeiture creates a financial burden [3] or the asset has the potential for depreciation [3], the accused may have even a financial incentive to settle rather than go to trial.
[1] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=31446215
[2] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=8588268
[3] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=10365463
[4] https://cre.org/wp-content/uploads/2017/03/37_2_3_Federal_Fo...
Actually, it wasn't that Capone had "an absurd amount of wealth," the amount was irrelevant. Just ask J.P. Morgan, John D. Rockefeller and others who weren't put in jail for being "too wealthy." It was because Capone didn't pay taxes on that income
In fact, the US Internal Revenue Service (IRS) treats "illegal" income[0] exactly the same way it treats "legal" income for tax purposes.
[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Taxation_of_illegal_income_in_...
I'd much rather live in a place where that dang mobster that "no one can touch" gets a little rich and evades the law (until that day he doesn't), than to live in a dystopian totalitarian mega-state (e.g. China).
> Is it unreasonable that law enforcement asks how did you aquire an amount of money that is greater than you could ever earn in your lifetime?
Yes, very much so. It's very, very, incredibly dangerous to fall into the trap of allowing a system that asks someone to prove their innocence and that is exactly what your question is asking.
> it's nearly the same mechanism as what was used against alcapone to jail him for income (sic) tax evasion
Nearly the same is not the same. In other words, it'd be OK to check that the $10,000,000 dollar bank account owner did pay taxes on it. If not, well, ooof. But also, how do we know he had a $10M bank account in the first place? That info had better be obtained legally too.
Scenario:
John Doe has 10 million dollars appear in his bank account. No evidence that it was obtained legally and no evidence that any taxes were ever paid.
Option IRS/Alcapone - he goes to jail for Tax evasion
Option 'Unexplained Wealth Order' - UK government seizes assets because they should it could not be obtained legally. He is still free and out and about
If anything the option you are advocating is "worse" as in it is harsher.
It's more like "we see a lot of smoke coming out of your house, satisfy us there isn't a fire or we're coming in with the hoses". Viewing that through the "innocent until proven guilty" lens is like trying to argue the fire crew have to stay outside until they see actual flames
The police? Shit, this is exactly what the youth are demanding now. Wealth confiscation is all the rage with Gen Z and younger millenials.
I'm going to go out on a limb here and guess you're not for smaller government though, right?
I am happy with the concept of 'small government', but typically folks who use it dont mean what I think it should mean.
They are happy to spend a lot of my tax money on the prosecutor that will charge me for jaywalking, but want to cut spending on the public defence attorney that will defend me from the very same 'small government' they advocate.
They tend to invoke 'small government should not interfere' when I ask whether a companies should be able to screw me over, but they want 'full force of the law' when I do anything they dislike.
Because otherwise I can answer the same way you did and say that my experience is the people who complain the most about us burdening future generations with debt are the same ones demanding expensive far-reaching government programs for everything under the sun.
Originally I expressed no opinion about national debt, I merely point out hypocracy of making demands of future generation, but acting angry and righteous when those generations make requests of us.
also I spesifically stated that I do not buy into ideology typically attached to 'small government'.
also the premise that the only way to deal with national debt is to have smaller government is wrong, we could have higher taxes or print money
Lastly the idea that smaller government is more efficient or cheaper is wrong too - industries where the government is the only buyer, like prisons, tend to do terribly when they are given to the private sector - it creates insentive for corruption and fraud and is actually harder to manage as a market than it is for a government to run them directly. In every meteic, from recisevism to in prison murder rate, private prisons do worse.
I recall one story where the lawyer asked the judge for a dollar tested it and it came back positive. Quote at the time was Something like 97% of all money has been exposed to drugs.
This is my memory of events, so take with grain of salt.
I have been sued before.
I looked up "fraudulent conveyance", and it doesn't appear to have anything to do with merely withdrawing money from accounts; it's about transferring money to another person or entity with the intent to avoid paying debts. Merely being a party to a civil suit does not confer a debt upon you, and even if you do get to the point where there's a monetary judgment against you, mens rea is a thing: actual intent to defraud must be proven.
Unlike some of you, I have actually been in that situation and withdrew a bunch of money from my various bank accounts while the suit was pending for a couple years. This was 100% legal. (And in the end the suit was dismissed anyway.)
All assets are subject to seizure, whether they are in a bank or not.
And sure, "all assets are subject to seizure", except that assets legible to the system are much more at risk, whereas assets that are private will remain yours. If you see the legal system as an attacker rather than defining it to be always just, then this distinction matters.
Relatedly, I'd trust the technical operation of bearer tokens more than the legal operation of an offshore trust, especially with the small amounts of wealth us plebs tend to have.
Let's say I'm buying a rental property, and during the closing process I'm served with this lawsuit. Are you saying it's illegal for me to close that sale?
Only one of those examples would be suspicious to the court, and only if I was attempting to claim insolvency during the proceeding or in dragging my heels on a judgement.
You would have to answer to that under oath. It's called a Debtor's Examination, assuming you lose, or fail to answer the lawsuit, or it does not get dismissed. A bank account statement showing a large withdrawal shortly after being served would be a major red flag. The idea behind asset protection is to move the assets to a secure place or set up protections before you get sued.
Yep. Been there. Done that.
I killed someone with a vehicle and was sued over it.
While the lawsuit proceeded, I was under no obligation to or take special measure to record how I disposed of my property while the lawsuit was pending.
That's because I (or anyone else) can fill out a form saying "PaulPauper owes me twelve gajillion dollars because he caused me harm in some way."
You can pretty much sue over anything. But filing a lawsuit doesn't force the defendant to hand over control of their finances/resources.
Yes, in some criminal cases assets can be frozen by prosecutors. But in a civil lawsuit, there's none of that -- as someone claiming you owe them money isn't the same as actually having a judgement against you requiring that you pay.
I tell you what, go ahead and sue me. Pick a reason. It doesn't really matter. As long as you utilize the correct format and pay for the filing that's it. Lawsuit filed.
The idea that a civil lawsuit deprives you of the right to dispose of your property as you see fit is risible at best.
Not when the thieves are the government and the banks themselves.
Nobody will even get a slap on the wrist because the organization intentionally spreads responsibility so thin that it's "nobody's fault". The legislature and the courts permit the continued existence of this structure because some animals are more equal and this is a feature not a bug.
In a two tier society like the US (the govt class vs the productive class) the government class protects their own with made up legal doctrine like "qualified immunity" which gives them carte blanche to steal, rape, and murder the productive class.
If the blame were to lie with one single individual at the FBI who committed multiple crimes effecting this illegal search that person would still not be held accountable by the courts, the FBI, nor any other government agency.
QI protects agents of the government, you can't personally sue a cop for violating your rights. (Either because he was following illegal orders, or because he's an idiot who doesn't know/doesn't care about the law.)
You are correct that QI was a legal fabrication, and is in its current form an incredibly poor one at that.
Sure, QI doesn't protect the government, but sovereign immunity does.
> QI protects agents of the government, you can't personally sue a cop for violating your rights.
Yes, you can. And you can win in some cases. But, if they were within the scope of non-discretionary job duty, even if illegal, though, they are protected by absolute immunity, if their act was an illegal exercise of discretion but not within a pattern unambiguously previously litigated as such, they are protected by qualified immunity.
> You are correct that QI was a legal fabrication
It is no more or less a “legal fabrication” than, say, the exclusionary rule.
UPDATE: FBI Warrant DID NOT Cover Deposit Box CONTENTS! https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=LjXTV5xmIMk
Judge Shuts Down FBI on Safe Deposit Box Forfeiture https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=vFh61CvhB80
Feds Now Want to Keep Safe Deposit Box Contents https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=O4OVzbg5CM0
Feds Still Fighting for Safe Deposit Box Contents https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=6N79rkaKar0
Considering most people that own bitcoin use custodial services like Coinbase, and Coinbase uses safety deposit boxes to store their code wallets + keys, am I wrong in thinking the US government has the ability to identify all of the safety deposit boxes Coinbase uses and steal those keys?
good podcast, actual reference starts here:
Tracking would not change that.
Man, if you're worried about gift tax for birthday presents, I wish I was related to you and was a recipient. Quite a lot of money needs to change hands for those gifts to be taxable.