Regarded, by whom? Not by financial experts such as Matt Levine. It looks like the prosecution followed the books and the law and the long-held SEC position. If you’re honestly interested, Levines newsletters at the time carry a lot of detail, the given reasoning beyond politics, and historical comparison to non-crypto decisions.
It’s too easy of a spin to later declare events as all political; one should be careful to make that claim unless accompanied with good arguments.
Regarding plea deal/guilt: there is sufficient material publicly available to come to the conclusion that yes Binance willingly and knowingly invested effort into circumventing the law and SECs policies. Regardless of whether that law was set up for “political purposes“ or not, it was not some honest mistake or differences of interpretation. Don’t fall into the trap of rewriting history.
The wallets attributed to Satoshi have not seen any coin movement so it only shows that one can publish code pseudonymously, not that one can use BTC anonymously.
> European law enforcement agencies have the same powers.
No they don’t, not in the way that is implied here. A German court can subpoena German companies. Even for 100% subsidiaries in other European or non-European countries, one needs to request legal assistance. Which then is evaluated based on local jurisdiction of the subsidiary, not the parent. Microsoft Germany as operator is subject to US law and access. See Wikipedia “American exceptionalism” for further examples.
Are you implying that it is paranoid and irrational regardless of circumstance to want this?
Sorry to disappoint. I’m working in the human rights space, with dozens of real world experiences by people I work with. I got raided once myself. They were unable to locate any computer on my premises. They however took my phone and a couple of encrypted hard drives for forensic analysis. They asked for the device PIN, which I did not provide. A court later ruled the raid and seizure and temporary confinement illegal. I did not reuse the returned phone. They didn’t pay for the replacement, or the lawyer.
Did you ever work a job or were friends with people who did where tipping is a big part of the income?
You make it sound like a general rule, but I don’t see how it is that “simple”. There are few things if any that you have to do in life. It’s all a decision and a tradeoff. Nobody forces you to breathe. Or to be friendly with your neighbors. Or a stranger.
I worked in the service industry for a while and have literally never cared about tips, in the sense that the default expectation in 99% of cases is no tip and the rare time I got a tip it was a few euros extra at most. Of course, I didn't care because it actually paid an actual wage, vs the weird shit you yanks are up to.
Hell, I know some people who have been working at restaurants as waiters for a long time now, and they live perfectly comfortably with 0 expectations around tips.
I still don't tip, basically ever, my only exception is the rare time I get food delivered, because unlike a regular service job the apps don't pay a livable wage and the cut they take is gargantuan compared to what the drivers get.
Your point is valid because waiters earn more money when they have low salary and big tips than high salary but no tips. The problem is though, I simply don't care about how much waiters earn, just like waiters don't care about how much I earn. I will start tipping the day waiters start honestly caring about the software job market collapse.
Most of my friends worked restaurants or bars when I was younger, tips were something some tourists would sometimes do and it would generally go into a pot for throwing a party for the staff few times a year. I have never tipped or seen a local tip in my home country.
Tips weren't a part of my friends income. The restaurant/bar paid them a salary.
I immediately enabled “reduce transparency” and “strong contrast” in the accessibility settings and didn’t really notice much difference to 18 then. Not a big deal at all.
Reduced transparency is somewhat ugly (the giant bars on the top and bottom of the screen in the web browser for example. But it isn’t obviously awful like the giant transparency thing.
> Until GDPR web professionals fought tooth and nail to keep modal dialogs out of web applications, mostly successfully.
Like the comment above rightfully states, GDPR does not require banners at all. It’s up to the site to decide if they want to (ab)use collected data for other purposes than what is required. If it was the goal of “web professionals” to avoid modals like you say, it could perfectly well be achieved also today. Also, don’t you remember all the popup dialogs and modal ads and “in your face subscribe to our newsletter before you can even see our content” that sites had, well before GDPR? So many that browsers had to basically disable popups? So much for “tooth and nail”.
None of the sites I’ve ever built require any cookie banners. Never have. I would refuse to build something that does, because the use cases that require them are unethical, unnecessary, and a cancer for society. Very simple.
What about AWSALB? Google Analytics? I'll agree I don't like the "third-party" aspect of GA but users of the most rudimentary product of that sort want to know how many unique visitors that got in various time intervals.
Unique visitor counts are definitely useful, and you dont need Google Analytics just for that. A self-hosted solution [0] can give you the basic numbers and trends you need without using third-party tracking.
There are many things I would want to know but don’t press people on, out of respect. I have seen many industries and not one really needs these numbers, beyond what you can already deduce from GDPR-compliant logs. I know people and businesses can act greedily, but don’t let us collectively fool ourselves into thinking it was an inherent necessity of commerce. It is our decision whether we want to live in and contribute to a humane society.
He has very selective skepticism. It always applies when talking about US, Israel, and others on his list of bad guys, but is mysteriously dropped when discussing whether e.g. Khmer Rouge are "democratic" or whether Russian invasion of Ukraine was "provoked" by US.
He has double standards and cherry-picks for everything. He selects sources, dishonestly. Quotes people out of context, makes wrong moral equivalences.
Any tyrant or autocrat who opposes America is somehow not that bad. For example: The Cambodian Genocide by Khmer Rouge in 1970s were exaggerated by "Western propaganda", The Srebrenica Massacre, some killings but not genocide.
Russia. He argues that the U.S. "provoked" Russia by expanding NATO eastward. Russian attack against Ukraine was American fault. In his logic superpower like Russia should having a "neutral" buffer zone is a legitimate security concern. Smaller European countries can't have their own sovereignty. They must be either US puppets or part of reasonable Russian sphere of influence. At the time he is against US sphere of influence in the South America.
You must also have noticed that he never engages his critics honestly. He just dismisses them as "elite propaganda".
Noam Chomsky, the man who has spent years analyzing propaganda, is himself a propagandist. Whatever one thinks of Chomsky in general, whatever one thinks of his theories of media manipulation and the mechanisms of state power, Chomsky's work with regard to Cambodia has been marred by omissions, dubious statistics, and, in some cases, outright misrepresentations. On top of this, Chomsky continues to deny that he was wrong about Cambodia. He responds to criticisms by misrepresenting his own positions, misrepresenting his critics' positions, and describing his detractors as morally lower than "neo-Nazis and neo-Stalinists."
It’s too easy of a spin to later declare events as all political; one should be careful to make that claim unless accompanied with good arguments.
Regarding plea deal/guilt: there is sufficient material publicly available to come to the conclusion that yes Binance willingly and knowingly invested effort into circumventing the law and SECs policies. Regardless of whether that law was set up for “political purposes“ or not, it was not some honest mistake or differences of interpretation. Don’t fall into the trap of rewriting history.
reply