mcintyre1994

Personally I'm skeptical of Tether. But you don't need to trust them to believe that if they permanently freeze Z USDT and then mint Z USDT then their ratio of reserves to USDT is unchanged.

Because if they permanently freeze 2 billion in a wallet, that Tether can never move or cash out, so their liabilities go down 2 billion. They can mint an equivalent amount to a non-frozen wallet without affecting their reserve ratio.

And yes they can print money, you have to trust their reserves that are off chain.

From the BBC’s Lazarus Group reporting, they mostly seem to launder the money they steal through casinos in unregulated jurisdictions.

I think the idea is that they freeze them indefinitely, and then they no longer count against the centralised reserves, since they can never cash out. Now they can mint the equivalent amount back to Binance and remain solvent.

It’s somewhat meaningful, in that you know he’s lying so the journalists reporting the opposite have good sources.

I think they mean compared to the self-driving road vehicles they've been using for evac, not compared to abandoning the soldier.

> How has Meta responded? With a failed phone and speculative headset.

I guess their spin on Muse would be, by building the AI agent that Apple has shown it's nowhere near being able to build

Which American law has forced Starlink to introduce the brand new restrictions on Ukraine's use in the last day?

I’d guess their concern is their user’s data that is probably part of providing the AI features.

I can't think of any e2ee app that's banned in the EU. I know Signal and WhatsApp are not.

I wonder how little time "immediate" means though. They probably have an overwhelming amount of incoming - from journalists, security service providers, and opportunist scammers posing as both of those groups among other things.

I can understand how that causes issues, but surely it also shows that alerts don't work either? These companies were presumably missing/ignoring alerts with scary messaging that they're about to get shut off, and would also miss/ignore alerts with scary messaging that their bill is getting too high.

I agree with this to the extent that it works. As a non-American the ESTA system is the main way to get phished, google it on a bad day and you get endless scams in the ad slots. “Check ESTA status” here links you to the CBP site, which is enormously better than Google.

They probably need to teach it the keyword though, I started with “ESTA” and it replied to me in Spanish telling me to ask it a question :)

The article mentions this - Canada was the largest foreign buyer of American wine.

I suspect wine is extremely susceptible to this effect too. It’s basically always stocked alongside produce from many other countries, the origin is most of the marketing, and there aren’t really any stand out brands. I’ve probably had a Californian wine before but couldn’t name a single one.

If you own a venue or store and decide to stop stocking American alcohol, someone will probably notice you don’t have Jack Daniel’s but not that you’ve stopped selling Californian wine.

One day these people will find a new word to call everything they don’t like or disagree with.