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“[…] a whole new set of risks are emerging from […] the threat of western sanctions on China, either because of its support for Russia or what might unfold in Taiwan.”
“In addition, China’s newly amended law against foreign espionage exemplifies its increasing wariness when it comes to foreign investors.”
These might be the two major reasons, the second one is maybe even more crucial and has a long-lasting impact imo. For example, a few weeks ago China detained consultants over charges of “espionage” because they conducted market research for corporate clients. If even such information is considered a state secret then foreign investors have practically no choice other than leaving the country.
This is weird. I don’t know what happens here (this banner suggests you’re not logged in), but the best thing is to ask an admin at beehaw.org/c/support. Sorry, but that’s beyond my knowledge.
@ericjmorey Not sure whether I understand the question. You can simply do that the same way as you replied to this thread, just go to the post or comment you want to reply to and hit the reply icon 😊
I don’t reject crypto regulation, but the way how this is done across the world is bad for innovation and prevents competition.
To give an idea what I mean: One of the more prominent crypto scams of late has been the FTX case. Back in the fall I read FTX’s bankruptcy declaration. As far ax I remember, it said that 2 out of the 4 FTX companies never had an audited report, they never had a cashflow forecast, major decision about cash reimbursements were made via chat, budget responsibilities were unclear, assets bought were not on the books, and many other points. But none of the things had anything to do specifically with crypto. They simply had no investor reporting and the investors -with big names among them like Sequoia Capital, Tudor Investment or Robert Kraft- apparently didn’t ask questions.
With a proper reporting and by applying and enforcing the existing laws, though, the FTX case would never have happened. And this is also true for many other crypto scams imho. But, again, I’m not at all against regulation, it should just done wisely without preventing technical and social innovation.
I respectfully disagree. There has been a longer discussion here about that you may be interested in.
The website of course is through a third party and charges a fee of $2.50 per transaction.
If I understand that right you pay 2.50 for every transaction of 3. That’s 83%.
This is not completely related to school meals, but it is a good example imo which explains why big tech and banks have been lobbying for a long time to shut down and ban crypto money and other community currencies. There are many decentralized currency solutions available which parents could use at costs next to nothing, but lawmakers claim to ‘protect’ people by shutting them down or introduce regulations that trigger a similar effect.
(To also say that: There are many crypto scams and of course there should be strong consumer protections, but using complementary currency systems as a means of payment -not as a means of value storage- would be a great benefit for the society. The monetary policy and financial regulations we have in any country are increasingly causing trouble for the society imo.)
I don’t think that BTC is an appropriate solution currently for use as a means of payment given its high volatlity, but as a principle I agree that appropriately designed crypto could be a solution. What the world needed imo is a mix of different currencies for different use cases globally, regionally and locally.
I can’t comment on Lula, but there is no doubt that this currency would take a very long time to gain the necessary trust even among the participants. China has been trying to push its Yuan as a new world reserve currency for some time, but this would be even harder given their economic and political regime.
What they obviously really try to do is to -understandibly- ‘escape’ the USD and in part the EUR systems, though for the currency to be successful it would require political, social and economic reforms within most BRICS+ countries before the introduction of such a new money. Unless these reforms are made, I see little chance for this project. Many articles about it across the web are highly sensationalizing imo.
What the article does not say is that MiCA appears to also ban so-called privacy coins like Monero.
The so-called “travel rule”, already used in traditional finance, will in future cover transfers of crypto assets. Information on the source of the asset and its beneficiary will have to “travel” with the transaction and be stored on both sides of the transfer.
Crypto exchange Binance appears to have already informed its clients in Poland, Italy, Spain and France about the changes.
people not familiar with him thinking he’s a good Kennedy
I certainly belong to them :-) I’m not American and don’t follow politics too much (not even here in Europe). But the name Roger Stone is not completely new to me as this was the guy who allegedly used WikiLeaks information against Hillary Clinton during the 2016 campaign if I’m not mistaken.
He [Robert Kennedy Jr.] also criticized the inevitability of central bank digital currencies, or CBDCs, which he fears the U.S. government may weaponize for financial surveillance. He drew parallels to what happened to the 2022 Ottawa truckers, who had facial recognition technology deployed against them to log their identities.
“They had people going out looking at the license plates, facial recognition, and doing data mining on these people to find out who they were, and then shutting down their bank accounts, so they couldn’t pay their mortgages, they couldn’t pay their alimonies, they couldn’t pay for food for their families and children,” he said. “If a government has that power, it can turn us all into slaves overnight.”
“If they can get you out of your home cause you can’t pay your mortgage or your rent, and if they can starve you, most people are going to comply,” he added.
… will always be opt in.
‘Always’ is a long time. No one knows what the future holds, and the statements are not exactly helpful if they want to build trust imo.
And even if you opted in, it’s somewhat strange to say that “governments only issue subpoenas in the case of a serious act like terrorism or one involving drugs.” In many countries you are obviously a ‘terrorist’ nowadays if you protest for climate change (e.g., in Germany), if you protest for democracy instead of monarchy (UK), if you protest to end the war (Russia) or if you simply criticise the government (China).
So I’m not sure who this ‘average person’ is who doesn’t get ‘subpoenaed every day.’
No one knows what exactly would happen as it would be the first-ever default on federal debt, but the consequences would likely be severe and it’s almost irrelevant where you live and what you do for a living. Asset managers around the globe -e.g., your pension fund, your insurance- would suffer heavy losses. Especially countries like China and Japan would suffer given as they are the two largest foreign investors in US debt (together they hold more than 20% of all US credit held by foreigners, around 2 trillion dollars).
Interest rates -for public and private debt such as your mortgage or commercial loans- would likely rise across the globe as asset managers focus on risk, and if a nation like the US defaults on its public debt, this must certainly be seen as a very strong risk event.
World trade would suffer. China’s exports, which contribute a fifth to its GDP, depend on a strong US market (China’s largest trading partner is the US) for their own growth and job creation. And so do other countries.
Some countries especially in the global South would or could no longer use the dollar as a replacement for their own weak currencies, which would further accelerate a chain reaction.
If the US government doesn’t agree on the matter soon, the Secretary of the Treasury could principally decide to continue paying bond holders and thus avoiding a technical default for a certain period (I’m not sure how long this is and can’t find it quickly). But even this would harm the US and global trade irreversibly in the long term imho.
I could continue endlessly on this, but in a nutshell: We need a lot of change in global economics and politics, including a new currency regime, but we’ll certainly never need something like a debt default, so let’s hope the change comes without such a chaos. And I’m very convinced it will. I don’t think the US will default on its debt. It’s a safe bet that everyone knows that there would be only loosers and no winners.
The cited report (as pdf here) says:
The typical rescue loan by Chinese banks requires interest rates of 5 percent. These rates are […] considerably higher than the average IMF [International Monetary Fund] rate, which has been around 2 percent for non-concessional lending operations over the past 10 years. Other multilateral institutions, including the world bank, offer even lower rates for budgetary support.
We see historical parallels [of Chinese activities] to the era when the US started its rise to a global financial power, especially in the 1930s and after World War 2, when it used the US Ex-Im Bank, the US Exchange Stabilization Fund and the Fed to provide rescue funds to countries with large liabilities to US banks and exporters […]
The cited report (as pdf here) says:
The typical rescue loan by Chinese banks requires interest rates of 5 percent. These rates are […] considerably higher than the average IMF [International Monetary Fund] rate, which has been around 2 percent for non-concessional lending operations over the past 10 years. Other multilateral institutions, including the world bank, offer even lower rates for budgetary support.
We see historical parallels [of Chinese activities] to the era when the US started its rise to a global financial power, especially in the 1930s and after World War 2, when it used the US Ex-Im Bank, the US Exchange Stabilization Fund and the Fed to provide rescue funds to countries with large liabilities to US banks and exporters […]
According to Unstoppable Wallet’s market overview the only PSY/ETH trading pair is at gate.io, but I’m not sure whether this is a real trade or some fake. There’s a lot of crypto scam around, but also much bullsh*t news. Would like to see this verified tbh.
I hope that no investor will get back money because this is not “only” a scam but foremost a massive failure of investor due diligence. Theranos was supposed to be a blood testing start-up claiming to have found a new technology for this kind of research, but the first technical due diligence was made around 2015, ten or so years after the company was founded and had already raised hundreds of millions of dollars.
Don’t get me wrong I don’t defend Ms. Holmes, but investors threw money at her without knowing where they exactly invest in. They couldn’t have had the faintest idea what they were doing. If and when investors acted responsibly, a criminal case like Theranos (or FTX to name another recent disaster) where they burn that much money weren’t possible.
(Edited for a typo.)
There is a good report by Lighthouse, a Dutch media collective, about the families falsely accused by their state. There’s a high number of similar cases like the one of Prof. Torley’s, and such ‘false positives’ will always happen as they are inherent to such analyses.
The point for me here is that this guy from Microsoft likely knows that (or, in case he doesn’t, there are certainly a lot of experts at MS who know it as we can reasonably assume). What I don’t understand is that executives get often away with such statements, journalists rarely raise the issue of biases these models have. I feel that is not understood by the masses, and companies and governments exploit that use it against the people.
Ron DeSantis Explodes When Asked About His Role in Guantánamo Torture
Two former detainees have called out DeSantis specifically for his role in the unbearable situation at Guantánamo. One, Abu Sarrah Ahmed Abdel Aziz, told The Washington Post he is “100 percent” certain he spoke to DeSantis multiple times. Abdel Aziz spoke fluent English and was trying to report mistreatment claims to JAG officers.
Another former inmate, Mansoor Adayfi, said he saw a photo of DeSantis on Twitter in 2021 and recognized the governor immediately. “It was a face I could never forget. I had seen that face for the first time in Guantanamo, in 2006—one of the camp’s darkest years when the authorities started violently breaking hunger strikes and three of my brothers were found dead in their cages,” Adayfi wrote in an essay for Al Jazeera.
Adayfi said he shared a photo of DeSantis with several other former inmates, and they all recognized him from Guantánamo. Adayfi vividly remembers DeSantis watching from behind a fence as he was force-fed, “smiling and laughing with other officers as I screamed in pain.”
This is very impressive. I would have tons of questions, though, as I don’t understand :-)
How did the device know that he accepts the call? He didn’t do something as far as I am aware.
And how did the device know that he wants the translation into French, or that he wants a translation at all?
He says that it’s private. But how? Doesn’t have the device sync with other data, e.g., some health data base (regarding the chocolate example)? Where does the data sit, in the cloud or on the device? Meaning, does the device also work offline or do you need a cloud (or a network)?
And how does the device learn and store new data (e.g., that he ate a chocolate)? And when he eats the chocolate, does this go into some database? If so, who controls this data?
I am wondering whether this technology could enable communication with non-human species. There’s a fair evidence from research that animals have someform of intelligence, e.g., the paper posted yesterday. I mean, if this decoder can be trained on an individual human being’s brain activity, why not on any non-human being’s?
A lot of research has been going on for some time around “intelligence” with some books published in the last 10 or so years. There is an interesting long read reviewing some of these books.
From AI to cephalopods, a new strain of “nature writing” explores the frontiers of non-human sentience […] Octopuses are having a moment. So are slime moulds and honeybees. Mushrooms are in vogue. After 250 years of humanity (well, some of humanity…) confidently atop the great pyramid of being, we in the west are becoming more aware that we might, perhaps, have company.
It’s all written in the linked article and this thread already imo, but as I just stumbled about this:
If you post any content to the Bluesky Web Services, you hereby grant Bluesky and its licensees a worldwide, perpetual […] licence to use, reproduce, publicly display, publicly perform, modify, sublicense …
That’s from BS’s Terms of Service.
And this is somewhat at the other end of the spectrum: Texas governor decried for ‘disgusting’ rhetoric in wake of mass shooting
Republican Greg Abbott condemned for calling […] victims of Friday night shooting in rural Cleveland ‘illegal immigrants’.
The victims, which included a young boy and two women who were shielding children from gunfire, were all from Honduras.
After reading this site (btw, they appear to be using Cloudflare for their decentralized service) it doesn’t change anything. They indeed “may soon be able to migrate”, may “federate soon”, and all that, but it simply isn’t. It is a centralized service, and they promise once again that this time everything will really be better.
ActivityPub has a over 20k different independent instances, mostly federating with one another. BlueSky has one, and if you try to set up an independent one, it won’t federate.
Yes, and the current owners have no economic incentive to change that. It’s a project backed by financial investors, which means they’ll want to get back as much money as possible as soon as possible.
Don’t get me wrong, this is not some “venture capital bashing”. It’s their full right to earn their money back and do with their companies whatever they want. If I were a financial investor, I did the same (what is ignored in many discussions on this is the fact that the vast majority of VC investments fail due to their high-risk nature, but that’s a different story). I just argue that if you want a distributed and/or decentralised system, you likely need a different kind of funding and a more decentralized form of decision making.
it decentralizes the cost to the central authority by pushing data load onto volunteers
the sad reality is that people will buy the hype
I have been discussing BlueSky some time ago with a friend of mine, and we soon agreed exactly on these two things. This is an excellent article, thanks for sharing this.
“Have you any idea how much tyrants fear the people they oppress? All of them realize that, one day, amongst their many victims, there is sure to be one who rises against them and strikes back!”