salamanderss

Can you name a single American prosecuted for fighting for the YPG? Yes my passport was flagged and I was harassed for years but I think you're uninformed on this issue. I have openly been living an admitted to DHS ex-YPG for nearly a decade. It's not illegal and although Turkey may consider the YPG as PKK the DoJ does not.

I sleep without a care in the world on this issue, if they jailed me I would simply smile knowing I fought for something I believed in.

>Also, I don't think you've ever travelled to actual developing countries or have a background with them. Going from one undeveloped country to another makes absolutely no sense. Stuff is still fucked in developing country B as it is in developing country A. Developing countries simply do not have the resources to adequately manage a population of refugees.

>Put yourself in the shoes of a refugee from Aleppo - do you want to go from Aleppo to some random country in Africa with a GDP per Capita of $800 that is probably falsified [0], isn't fully English speaking yet, and is still overwhelmingly agricultural (aka you will be working in a field for less than $2 a day) [1], or would you rather just go across the border to Türkiye where median incomes are $400/month, there is a semi-functioning healthcare system, and there are half decent universities so your kids will absolutely have a shot of emigrating to the first world.

Awesome you brought those points up. I lived in Syria. Rojava to be exact. I also fought in their militia the YPG. It's awesome you dismissively bring up Turkey, where the Kurds I fought alongside would have been imprisoned or killed -- but yeah just go to Turkey!

>A stateless individual, migrant worker, or refugee does not have half a million dollars to spend on a random citizenship! If they did they would already have an easy time emigrating to a first world country above board.

Not sure if you're serious but this is a real problem for stateless people and Vanuatu, Dominica etc have developed due diligence methods specifically for their stateless CBI clients. Stateless or refugee does not mean they have to be poor. In many cases gaining nationality even a low HDI one is a huge step up in access to global markets and KYC/AML.

>Because it's direct fork of Australia's "Pacific Solution". Look at the data from that - asylum applications DROPPED as asylees from Afghanistan, Sri Lanka, etc simply decided to return to their home country (even it was dangerous like Afghanistan during the surge or Sri Lanka towards the end of the civil war) instead of waiting indefinitely for processing.

Bait and switch (from the viewpoint of asylee) is a bit different here. It's one thing to enter another country as a citizen, quite different than aiming for AUS and ending up in PNG without citizenship and maybe not even work authorization. That's much worse psychologically to many than roughly knowing what you're getting and having citizen footing.

>"Legal gray area"

Lol the US fought alongside YPG. DHS, CBP, and probably others have known for the better part of a decade I was in the YPG. They know who i am, where I've been, where I live and they've interrogated many times at port of entry. Nice scare tactics but I'm gonna guess after a decade of no US YPG getting prosecuted for a non-crime this is a dead issue.

There are 55k Palestinians diaspora in Yemen and that has an even worse HDI than Rwanda. The number of fallacies you've presented I'm starting to lose track. You've used anecdote of an afghan family, general population HDI of origin to measure subpopulations fleeing, you said "not really" to a statement that you could do worse but then did the opposite and instead argued that there were other better possible choices (I never denied this).

It's baffling that you're so dismissive some could use the option, particularly when circumstances and wealth and connections often dictate where you can flee. Low HDI Comoros (now discontinued ) and Vanuatu have CBI programs that have sold tens of thousands of passports to stateless and others in bad situations in the third world ( most of whom have no chance at US visa), despite in theory with the right means other options being better.

The market case is well established, frankly I suspect it's only a matter of time until these incentives open up such doors again in these regions.

I never meant to imply Rwanda is better than the aforementioned on a general level. When you are legitimately fleeing rather than economically migrating though that typically means your individual HDI of sorts was already near zero. It doesn't make much sense to use population HDI of origin for such persons.

Worked great for Zimbabwe!

You could do a lot worse than Rwanda if you were fleeing Russia or the West Bank or something. Usually CBI are investment only in name, they're seen as a total loss.

It's astonishing there's no bare bones citizen by investment scheme in sub Saharan Africa. Given the corruption and access to Rwanda and Kenya it seems like an obvious easy money printer.

Not sure I'd want to live in Ambazonia but they speak English and would likely not have many that recognize his face. It also would have been easily accessible by yacht transatlantic from the Bahamas into a difficult to patrol estuary. But this is all pure fantasy, I understand why he didn't do that.

There's no riskless path remaining after you've defrauded billions of dollars. Iirc the white girl who bombed the subway in london is thought to be still hiding in such a territory like two decades later.

That's hilarious considering neither Mexico nor US checks passports when you walk into Mexico in CA/az west except maybe San Ysidro crossing. She literally could have walked across and nobody would know, instead she did the dumbest thing possible of buying a one way last minute air ticket on a flagged passport. That would have triggered some cursory check for anybody let alone Holmes.

How the hell people this dumb become CEOs.

Why would they need go to a country subject to treaties. Unrecognized territories like transnistria (weev!),rojava,Somaliland,Ambazonia, western Sahara, Palestine (before invasion), fractions of Myanmar, idlib, rebel held congo fractions, etc. Basically no diplomatic relations and they will likely not eject someone seen locally as supporting their cause.

Its a big world out there and a shockingly large portion is free of recognized government control. In such places you pretty much live by your own bootstraps rather than what some far away western country says, at least on the individual level.

What really really shocks me though is that SBF didn't just jump on a yacht out right after the failure as he easily could have done. If he had sailed to the right part of Latam or West Africa he'd have a decent chance at not getting caught.

Minority, but not small. Something like 40% do not complete probation.

Uber explicitly lets you drive under an EIN/LLC. If you want to IC it you can as well.

You ( not you you but you hypothetical driver) may consider yourself as an employee but it would be if your own company, or self employed. Not Uber's employee except in a few jurisdictions. If you want employee protections by all means drive under your LLC for Uber and declare yourself an employee of your contracted self owned LLC... It sounds doable but IANAL.

I would argue Lyft/Uber are merely shitty brokers. You can definitely contract with a broker to use take it or leave it price fixing, it's just not a quality I would particularly desire.

Your and other comments below are fascinating, but she was already sentenced to life instead of death, and after her jailbreak was granted asylum as a free woman in Cuba

Cop killing fugitives iirc, that Cubans won't hand over (Assata Shakur et al)

Hmm seems possible although unlikely. Last time we had more than a decade of free trade with Cuba we had quite the incentive to support Batista and various us interest dictators. The embargo probably helps keep certain interests out of their hair.

The Uber driver is basically a business owner fulfilling contracts to customers brokered through an online clearinghouse. They're hyper capitalists exploiting regulatory advantages over taxi drivers then sad face at the downsides to that.

Isn't Uber/Lyft a broker/market? Wouldn't it be the driver cheated himself, or the passenger contracting the driver cheated him?

Malicious industry capture is more likely explanation than stupidity IMO. Sell bigger more expensive shit while shutting down economical competition.

SUV OGs were body on frame. Enclosed trucks basically.

Soccer moms and dads driving to the grocery and back with their three spawn though have more market share. So they sell you a unibody oversized car that would be absolutely destroyed if used as the OG truck frame vehicles, and the soccer dad can pretend his oversized car is some off-road hauling machine.

And yet when I actually go building the only place I could afford it was to go to a place with no code or safety inspections. This make HN mind melt, many folks here want to maintain the house crushing regulatory machine because all said they'd rather an extra homeless guy freeze behind a dumpster than elevate risk of fire spreading to their home.

Pickup trucks are huge in large part because of fuel efficiency regulations like CAFE which regulate fuel use per unit area. Ironically deregulating fuel efficiency would make small efficient pickups sellable again. Also repealing chicken tax would help allow economical imports. The domestic demand for remaining compact ranger/s-10/Tacoma is massive. But it's basically illegal economically to sell more.

I'd have definitely driven a compact in from Mexico were it not also illegal to permanently import them before 25 years old under most circumstances .

Yeah it also causes the problem of making it a real pain in the ass to buy cheaper plots of land. Realtor often don't give a flying fuck about the sale of stuff under 50k, not worth it for them. Can be hard to get representation.

How many lives of man hours are lost from overhead for these costs and compliance? The issue is people enforcing these regulations see the dead bodies from the burned out home but not the dead bodies of the homeless or the kids with less food or the dude with untreated cancer because regulatory costs and materials safety margins sucked away money that could've been spent on other life critical things.

At this point it seems completely plausible more lives would be saved through complete deregulation including setting loose uncle joe the methhead electrician.

RE:

>cities to turn into dangerous shanty towns where anyone who can lean a piece of corrugated sheet metal against a mud pile can call themselves a home builder.

My whole county did this. No inspections or building plans. It turned out fine. I became a legal 'home builder' with nothing more than filing my signature with the county. It's the only way I can even afford a house.

re county: believe the options are unincorporated burrows of Alaska, greenlee or cochise Arizona, Jackson Wayne and several other county in Tennessee, bunch of others.

My town solved the guilty until proven innocent issue regarding permits by just giving people carte blanche. Imo this is far more rational: if the county can't/won't verify paperwork they should default towards freedom and let the property owner have at it rather than presuming guilt and saying you haven't the money/people to check it.

Granted people aren't rich where I live so we'd rather them live in potentially a subpar house and maybe have it fall in on them than be homeless and die from the elements.

Re below: USA / Arizona. Pick the right county and no code inspections.

They usually aren't it's an argument used to scare people into making housing stock replenishment more expensive and lock in property values.

I'm building a house now. I sent the county... A picture of a square on a map. No plans no inspections nothing. Fuck all that. I build based on what seems reasonable after a cool Busch Light and then I just do it without asking permission from anybody.

Half my county did the same. It's not rocket science, and the world here hasn't fallen apart or burned down. But you will be told the opposite to get locked into expensive contractors and corrupt inspectors and the cash extracting nightmare licensing and permitting systems that surround that.

And before anybody gets too excited... this is all 100% legal if you pick the right spot.

Cool let's deconstruct:

>Didn’t vice catch a bunch of flack for over sensationalizing their “reporting?”

Awesome ad hominem against the people recording actual Nigerians testimony.

>Regardless I’d be more inclined to believe an actual Nigerian than a YouTube video

And I provide video with actual Nigerians yet it's crickets from you when some guy just flippantly says I'm wrong with no supporting facts. Unless by actual Nigerians you want one to jump through the screen and talk to us... we're going to have to settle for electronic communication. It's what worth noting the Nigerian commenter above denied ransomware related activities but never denied the rest.

>That person didn’t say there were zero people doing this, they said it wasn’t likely Nigeria had a widespread and systemic issue with organized crime doing this.

They said what they said, not what you've retranslated them to say. I never said the issue was systemic, but if they really said that then their flippant dismissal was just as invalid as they'd be addressing a strawman.

Cool here's a documentary with an English speaking hostage negotiator in Nigeria with family in the other side of the business (talks start around 4:30).

I'm afraid, YOU are wrong. My opinion wasn't idle thought but derived from research on Nigeria rather than some weird borderline racist baseless rhetoric that Nigerians don't have this level of organization.

https://youtube.com/watch?v=nG09Bo3uvAw

I responded to a comment on hostage and ransom negotiation business. Hostages aren't normally considered ransomware, although said negotiators would have excellent overlapping skill set.

Travel.gov has an advisory for hostage taking in your country. I can assure you there are well spoken negotiators in your nation to deal with that.