Here is a thing that happened
dashes.com
dashes.com
OFAC publishes the contents of the SDN and updates to it.
(This comment is descriptive, not normative).
[0]: http://www.iranwatch.org/library/government/united-states/st...
Would you expect anything else from the US gov't?
Yes, that's a hyperbolic statement.
If you're gonna have a say on the issue, then at least not base it just on the singular information of the article. This is a common occurence. Here's another example, posted just a few weeks before:
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=7240777
And there are many, many more.
>we should conclude that it is entirely reasonable to state that the whole US government -- every single branch and agency -- is incapable of carrying out any action competently, at every level all the way to the very top?
No, who is retorting to hyberbole? Did he say anything about them being incapable to carry out any action competently? IIRC, he wrote: "did you expect anything else" from them, which could be read as related to this particular handling of the situation. Which, as we saw, is not uncommon at all. See also TSA, et al.
Yes.
> Would you expect anything else from the US gov't?
You're being obtuse to continue this line of pseudo-intellectual reasoning. His statement is quite obviously implying that the government can't do anything right (aww shucks!), and he's using this article as his "evidence."
While you're at it, retransmit bitcoin transactions that have been slightly altered but that still have valid signatures.
That's called American syndrome. "Yea! Let's all stand up to the gov!"... * waits for someone else to do it first
Also - this is Hacker News, not Hacker News USA, so if something is important enough that it's brought to the attention of the worldwide population, then that population should be able to voice their opinion on the matter.
in Civil Disobedience, by Henry David Thoreau, 1849
"I'm going to write "Blue Sky" on checks sent to Time Warner Cable so they can never take online payments from anybody."
And so we're going to end up with a government like Google, where people come to HN to beg for attention just so they can be treated like a human being.
I think it's time we just all acknowledge that the U.S. has the most onerous and insane financial laws in the world. The only reason other countries put up with them is because the U.S. is the sole remaining superpower.
There really needs to be some kind of correction here, but I don't see it happening anytime soon.
EDIT: Just to be clear, I am specifically referring to the Treasury Department handling of overseas payments and expats living abroad, not internal tax or financial regulations. There's a lot out there Google if you want to go look for it, including how various countries have protested being forced to comply with U.S. law, expats giving up citizenship at record rates (though still small in the grand scheme of things), and so on.
I'm gonna guess you don't have a whole lot of stamps on your passport.
You should really repeat this to an italian (italian born in Italy, speaking italian as his first language, not italian born in New York) entrepreneur.
But please record a video then share it. I'd really like to see their face :D
I just so happen to have spoken with a practicing Italian banker (in English), practicing financial professionals from several other Anglophone nations, and from Germany as well. (these conversations were friendly and not professional in nature - I was not seeking their services, should any future Treasury/IRS folks be reading this!)
Never have I once - ever - heard a single one of them suggest even for a second that there is any financial/economic system as heavily regulated, asinine, filled through with bizarre rules, and just overall insane as that found in the US.
Now, Russia - that's a different ballpark; companies transferring significant money to/from abroad there involves not only tricky bureaucracy, but a bunch of hidden-gotcha-landmines as well; no wonder their companies tend to open a subsidiary in Switzerland or Crete or even Italy just to handle their money flow.
- taxes
- mafia
- masonry (the italian one, Grande Oriente d'Italia, is not as good as others)
- taxes
- less-than-robust legal system
- taxes
And, of course, also for the taxes.
Onion link:
http://blueskyplzv4fsti.onion/
edit: screenshot of the market homepage:
[1] turns out it was launched in the first week of December, which makes it nearly 3 months old - enough time to get it noticed and flagged by the us.gov.
This is kind of funny I recently purchased a bunch of second hard server parts from the excess department of a mid-sized bank and they insisted on checking my name against the OFAC list before completing the transaction. Insane.
Making everyone accept a system which doesn't make sense is just another step on the path to a dystopia. You'd be surprised at the number of such rules that existed in communist dictatorships.
The goal of the OFAC regulators is to stop money from going to terrorists and other bad people. So they prohibit the banks from transferring money to "blue sky" and anyone else on the list. There is no leeway here -- if a bank does not comply the banking regulators have the authority to immediately close the bank an seize its assets and give them to a different bank.
The goal of the IT and operations departments in the bank are to implement the requirements. The IT guys put a simple string match against the text of the online payments. There is no way to add a clause that checks whether it's "really" a payment to the prohibited individual or just someone who stuck a note in the memo field, because computers can't go out and interview the recipient to find out who they are. They also stuck in code to block that recipient from receiving payments in the future because otherwise anyone could circumvent the block completely by simply changing the name on the payment.
The goal of the bank representative that Mr. Dash spoke with was to help her customer. So she suggested sending the paper check. For what it's worth, the OFAC office isn't too worried about the person collecting payment on the check because banks are also prohibited from giving bank accounts to people (or organizations) on the OFAC list.
I agree that too much editorializing is bad, but textual titles are also bad. In the last weeks I feel that the rules had been relaxed a little, but I haven't done any systematic measurement.
Why do you hate your bank? Chase is probably the best large bank I've ever dealt with and their online/mobile tools are excellent. It's very likely they're just complying with their legal obligations.
If you're just using their standard online bill pay, I'd be curious to see what would happen if you simply added a new payee and slightly changed their name and attempted to pay them.
Legal != !stupid
And if it is the former, am I contributing to your security for not posting the simplified version? :)
Their online and mobile tools are a big part of that. Their military support is also pretty good (my daughter is USCG) with true cost free banking and low activity military accounts. In fact, they beat USAA on almost every gauge (the exception being USAA makes pay and allowances available a few days early).
1. High fees for international bank wires.
2. Befuddled telephone support when money isn't where it's supposed to be (for whatever reason) with frequent transfers to other departments.
3. Bankers on-site often don't know anything about the more complicated aspects of business accounts.
4. International travel with a Chase card is...an adventure. It took me three or four phone calls to Chase after I was already deep in the rain forest in Chiapas, Mexico in order to free up money to simply buy gas and other stuff. I never got the Chase card working for directly buying gas (while other cards did work, most of my funds were in Chase). I would have to go to an ATM, pay exorbitant fees, and use cash for everything. This was incredibly stressful...being 1000 miles inside Mexico on a visitor visa in a motorhome that gets 10 MPG (so, I needed a pretty big chunk of change to get back home, just on the fuel front, not to mention all the other living expenses).
The online experience has finally gotten better in the past few years, but it used to be pretty awful. One still had to call for almost everything interesting; I used to have to pay them for old statements, to boot!
I didn't choose Chase. My first bank was Texas Commerce. Chase acquired them. I stuck with them for a while after, despite my discontent (it's a lot of trouble to move banks, especially for a business that has incoming credit card payments, and outgoing payroll, among other things). When I moved to California, and formed a new corporation for my company, I opened an account at Washington Mutual. A year later, Chase acquired WaMu as part of the mortgage bailouts. So, Chase has been following me around all my damned adult life. I've given up on getting away from them, though I do have a credit union account for my personal money.
Also, they don't treat their employees very well (an ex-girlfriend worked there for a while in college, before going on to work at Google, and she hated it, especially after uniforms became required).
In short, if I were starting anew, Chase would not be on the list of banks I would consider.
Seconding the highway-robbery international bank wire fees - in addition to charging far too much for wires, they also use a bad exchange rate to plunder even more from you, while not telling their employees that this is what's going on.
I get the dim sense, knowing nothing about this stuff, that the job of that office is one of the more headache-inducing ones in administrative government. Preventing people to sending money to (or receiving money from) a list of bad actors is a horridly difficult thing to begin with, but then when they screw up (either like this or in the more common case of money getting through), placing the blame is easy.
On another note, I haven't the faintest idea what the meaning of "blue sky" is, and I can't find anything by searching. Anybody know?
/sarcasm
On the other hand, I know that the next time I'm coming back gone to the U.S. from abroad, especially being a brown dude with a beard who has family in Sourh Asia, I'm gonna have to deal with this. That was part of my reason for publishing it now.
I fear that the answer is something stupid like "we put you on a list, and now that you're on the list you can never get off." Which seems like a policy designed to make life easier for Treasury (or whomever maintains The List) rather than for the wrongly identified parties who now have to suffer for the rest of their lives due to somebody else's mistake. At a minimum there ought to be a process for people who end up on The List by mistake to appeal their inclusion.
"You already had this terrorist-funding org on the list and you took them OFF?!?!?"
vs
Some blogger complaining that the gummint is stoopid. (Something everyone already knows).
http://dictionary.reference.com/browse/blue-sky+thinking and http://en.wiktionary.org/wiki/blue-sky_thinking
> Customs when returning home to the United States. See? It was all just a harmless mixup.
I suppose it was meant as a joke, but I find it chilling.
http://www.irs.gov/Individuals/Pay-by-Check-or-Money-Order
You can probably arrange to make the payment electronically.
http://dashes.com/anil/2014/02/a-checklist-of-stupid-things-...
Maybe karma works in mysterious ways
Basically the girl/woman boundary involves sex, mental maturity, age and other things I don't really want to touch.
In professional and unknown context, you can't really go wrong with woman for anyone above drinking age. (It's the most polite and neutral possible, I'd say.)
Probably true!
> can’t really go wrong
Hahaha. ha.
I really wish you were right, but the thing about ladies/women/girls/females/dames/womyn/gals/femmes is, being individuals, they have individual opinions on the matter. And being human, they just may have specific fears and wishes regarding their perception. So some girls hear “woman” as “old!” and some women hear “girl” as “object!” and so on and so forth.
Just as in anything else messy and human, there isn’t an easy answer.
I wonder if Anil retweets trans women? Can I qualify for his retweets if I become woman? But then I spent most of my life being overrepresented so maybe not?
And wait: trans women as a group are also likely already overrepresented in tech compared to the rest of the population; so maybe one should NOT retweet trans women?
It is literally impossible to address gender in a way that doesn't offend somebody.
"Ladies" and "guys" always seems to go down pretty well for me.