Why would the US start this in the first place? Be assured that however this comes out, a “Truth” will be posted assessing it as the Greatest Deal Ever and a Total Win, end of story.
a major reason would be that they didnt think iran could selectively close the strait, and the intelligence about how not liking the current government is not the same as supporting the US
It’s been repeatedly stated by officials that we fought this war for Israel. We had nothing to gain and much to lose, and lose we did. Thankfully Israel also lost and I think this was their last chance at using the US as their attack dog.
People are looking for conspiracy theories when the truth is simple - trump did it because he thought it would be an easy quick win that will put him in the history books.
It’s not a conspiracy theory if Trump and all parties involved explicitly state this was for Israel. The simplest explanation is that they are telling the truth, which makes sense since the US had nothing to gain from this.
Netanyahu has wanted to do this for decades. If you rob a bank, you don't get to say "oh, well, my crazy friend down the pub has been saying we should rob a bank for ages, and I suddenly decided he was right"; you do have some personal responsibility.
Sidenote; there's this weird thing that people sometimes do wrt to Trump (and I think it's both his supporters and detractors to an extent) where they kind of treat him as if he's without agency, and stuff is just happening to him. I think it might be a kind of subconscious response to him being old and coming across as a bit senile, but it is nonsensical.
You had Claude create a team of agents imitating actual specific people? That’s a bit…creepy…but also I wonder if it was distracting for the agents, as opposed to just generally describing their roles.
Assuming that people vote a certain way out of spite is narrow-minded. Talk to people outside of your bubble and try to understand them instead of reducing them down to caricatures. I don’t judge people on the left the way that I get judged by them. I genuinely think that my choice of political party is better for my family’s quality of life.
I follow sport climbing, which has always seemed like a great example of this.
Climbing ability isn’t just a matter of strength or any other single dimension. E.g., the women’s routes are set on the assumption they’re more flexible than the men, not just less strong. Climbers come in many different shapes and sizes. Some climbers look like string beans, others look like they grew up lifting cows.
And BTW, there are women (Janja Garnbret, and Akiyo Noguchi before her) who dominate the women’s competition for years, to the degree that everyone else is almost playing for second place. It’s routinely speculated that Janja could regularly reach the men’s semi-finals.
Rock climbing is one sport known for small differences in performance between men and women. This is unlike about any other sport out there where a difference is huge (the worst male aspiring semi-pro is often better than a top woman).
Well, on the other hand, software isn’t all about checking emails.
I know someone who worked for a nonprofit that made pregnancy health software that worked over text messaging. Its clients were women in Africa who didn’t have much, but they had a cell phone, so they could get reminders, track vitals, and so forth.
They had to find enough funding to pay several software engineers to build and maintain that system. If AI allows a single person to do it, at much lower cost, is that bad?
So, here is a case where AI was a technical fix to a social problem: that as a global society, funding is skewed away from things which benefit people. Google can find the budget for as many ad-touchers as it wants, but nonprofits have to scrounge and make do by paying for "metered intelligence" from a megacorp.
So in isolation, I think it's great that they managed to achieve this. But I mourn that the only way they achieved it was via this rapacious truth-destroying machine.
This isn't a new trend - AI didn't cause it. It's just the latest version of it.
Are they? Or do you just mean that it's few and far between that we hear about them? If it's the former, I think there's a much bigger universe of this kind of stuff than most people realize. Otoh, if you're just commenting on the lack of coverage, then, yeah I agree I wish more publicity was paid to small software like this. Maybe we need a catchy term - "organic software"? "Locally grown software"?
I talked to my friends who aren't in tech a lot about what they would want with software. A lot of the benefits of small software like this would actually be compliance and reporting issues with non-profit. Sifting through large amounts of data with very unstructured inputs.
The actual community building is fairly not as automated unless you have very specific problems. Like even in the example above, having an automated message is useful but staffing the team to handle when things are NOT in a good spot would probably be the real scaling cost.
That’s simple CYA, and also ensures you’ve not only done the illegal activity, you’ve defrauded the brokerage and breached your contract with them, and they get a weak KYC defense as well.
Similar to the “Al Capone” instructions from the IRS:
>Income from illegal activities, such as money from dealing illegal drugs, must be included in your income on Schedule 1 (Form 1040), line 8z, or on Schedule C (Form 1040) if from your self-employment activity.
On the other hand, if you want to talk about these stickers all over Seattle saying you’re not allowed to conduct illegal activities on the premises…
For the majority of banks, they do not want people to conduct illegal activity via their bank. For the minority of banks which don’t mind it, nothing stops them from adding the clause anyways. A cartel bank probably cannot use the existence of the clause as a defense if they’re still allowing illegal activity.
If the purpose is to allow the bank to terminate accounts suspected of illegal activity, my assumption is they can already terminate for much less than that.
> You might look at the standard KYC questionnaire for a new retail account and think “Really? You ask questions which have obviously correct answers. You give people less than a tweet worth of space to answer them. How could this possibly catch any criminals not stupid enough to write Occupation: Drug Dealer?” […] this is not the only mechanism by which KYC questionnaires have a stochastic effect; they’re also useful in an entirely different part of the crime lifecycle. Many, many crimes involve lies, but most lies told are not crimes and most lies told are not recorded for forever. We did, however, make a special rule for lies told to banks: they’re potentially very serious crimes and they will be recorded with exacting precision, for years, by one of the institutions in society most capable of keeping accurate records and most findable by agents of the state.
> This means that if your crime touches money, and much crime is financially motivated, and you get beyond the threshold of crime which can be done purely offline and in cash, you will at some point attempt to interface with the banking system. And you will lie to the banks, because you need bank accounts, and you could not get accounts if you told the whole truth.
> The government wants you to do this. Their first choice would be you not committing crimes, but contingent on you choosing to break the law, they prefer you also lie to a bank. […]
> Particularly in white collar crime, establishing complicated chains of evidence about e.g. a corporate fraud, and mens rea of the responsible parties, is not straightforward. But then at some point in the caper comes a very simple question: “Were you completely honest with your bank?” And the answer will frequently be “Well, no, I necessarily had to lie in writing.”
> And congratulations, you have just eaten a wire charge fraud for every transaction you’ve ever done.
It’s not just that they don’t want it, it’s that they’re liable for it themselves if they should have known it was happening. Asking you adds one more small layer of “we discouraged illegal activity and we didn’t know about any”.
Bank 1 has the CYA clause and a cartel uses them for a decade for illegal purposes.
Bank 2 does not have the clause and a cartel uses them for a decade for illegal purposes.
In neither case does the clause prevent the illegal activity or make the bank any more or less aware of what customers are doing. They have to do KYC regardless of what the TOS says.
The point of the CYA clause isn’t to prevent illegal activity or make the bank more aware of what customers are doing. The point is that when Bank 1 is defending itself in court, it has one additional thing they can point at when arguing that it should not be liable for the illegal activities.
The bank that actually welcome the AlCapone will be first to have that form. If the court can be affected by something like that, it says something really bad about the legal system.
The point is, no judge or jury should be fooled into thinking putting “don’t do illegal stuff” in a TOS actually should matter. Forget the TOS. They allowed illegal activity.
Yes, and any functional legal system would then tell them that asking the subject directly and explicitly whether they're trying to use your bank for money laundering does not count as "taking measures".
If you have actual measures (such as asking for source of funds and then asking for proof if the evidence looks incongruent with what was stated), you have no need for the silly question; if you don't, the silly question won't save you either.
This should go for both the asker and the subject of the question: Illegal things are already illegal. If a given legal system requires the silly question to be able to "tack on wire fraud charges" to something that would otherwise go unpunished(?!), I think what should be fixed is the legal system, not every single banking form.
Banks can (and in fact are highly incentivized) to close your account if you're using it for criminal activity with or without you lying about it on some silly form.
I'm curious if anyone has ever said yes to income from illegal activities. Moreover, I wonder if something like this would be protected under 5th amendment.
I recently chuckled when doing my taxes and reporting miscellaneous income when I saw that one possible income category in my tax software was "bribes, received".
There is quite a stretch from “unacceptable risk to national security” to “absolutely any foreign-made equipment”. And that stretch has everything to do with the current administration.
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