timoth3y

Perhaps, but I'm not inclined to take their claims at face value.

Of course it is possible that all the managers and executives at BoA, and HSBC, Deutsche Bank, etc, etc are all innocent lambs and were completely shocked (shocked!) that they were making hundreds of millions of dollars facilitating money laundering.

That's exactly what the police investigation would, and should, determine.

Someone - an actual human person - needs to face criminal charges for these kinds of crimes.

The standard response is that it's too hard to determine exactly who is responsible since many people are involved and everyone is just doing their jobs and only sees a piece of it.

But that's not true, the police could start with whoever received bonuses for their work on the projects in question. After all, that's who the company thinks is responsible for it.

Of course that's just a starting point. Many people might have received bonuses and have had no idea what was going on. Some might have even raised concerns internally. They could share those emails and documents with the police investigators and easily clear themselves.

These corporations aren't the mafia. No one is going to spend five years in prison to protect their manager.

I have a a modest proposal. Any company wishing to use this kind of dynamic pricing should be willing to submit itself to "dynamic taxation".

Under dynamic taxation, we the public, would examine that firm's books at the end of the fiscal year and decide how much taxes they owe based on their ability to pay.

Note that companies are not natural people, they do not have a fundamental right to exist. Just like under dynamic pricing, if the shareholders and board think their dynamic taxes are too high, they are perfectly free to just dissolve the company and use their capital elsewhere.

This is not so much a problem with Musk himself, but with the massive media consolidation we've seen over the past 40 years in America.

With the recently approved mega-mergers its becoming even more consolidated and more restrictive of free speech.

An individual who makes a false insurance claim is committing a felony, but a manager who knowingly denies thousands of valid claims is rewarded with bonuses and promotions.

CEOs who who structures the company to denies as many valid claims as possible are handsomely rewarded by Wall Street for increasing margins.

Things really need to change at a core level in America.

> they are just enjoying hitting something with a stick

This is truly one of life's under-appreciated little pleasures!

I know this takes the fun out of it, and it is a fun project, but FWIW the speed of light is not an independent variable. It's woven into the fine-structure constant, the relationship between mass and energy, and how any kind of information is transmitted between objects in the universe.

This is more of a simulation of what if light was perceived as 5mph for you and kept the same for everyone else.

It is cool though.

I love my analog watches too dearly to give them up for a smart watch.

However, I just realized that analog watches also have "power users", and I am definitely not one of them.

My favorite watch (excuse me, "chronograph") has a stopwatch with lap memory, a tachymeter, support for multiple time zones, and a bunch of other features I have not thought about since the week I purchased it.

I don't really know how to use it all. I just like the watch.

This is a great move by France, but most of the rest of the world does not suffer from the telemarketing scam hell that Americans do.

I am a US citizen living overseas. I have a US cell number that is only used for 2FA for US financial institutions. No one else has that number. I get more scam calls every day on that number than I do in a year on my local number. It's crazy.

Most of the world has solved the worst of the problem by simply not allowing caller-ID spoofing and by blocking bad actors the way that ISPs block email coming from known bad IPs.

The US already has the STIR/SHAKEN authentication protocols, but the telcos seem to feel no financial or regulatory pressure to clamp down on all the sketchy intermediate carriers the scammers use to bypass them.

Maybe it's America's love of "market-based solutions" that prevents of from solving this problem the way everyone else has?

Rather then actually solve the problem via regulation, the US prefers to turn it into business opportunities to make the situation suck slightly less by letting the telcos sell subscriptions to moderately effective blocking programs and an creating an ecosystem of moderately effective apps.

It really seems like those meaningless, flashing YouTube kids videos, but for adults.

I've always found it somewhat ironic that the people who are least familiar with the actual research on the Dunning-Kruger effect tend to be the most confident in discussing it.

It's a sort of recursive Dunning-Kruger effect.

This is actually an easily solvable problem. In fact, most of the world has already solved it by not allowing caller-ID spoofing and by blocking bad actors similar to the way that ISPs block email coming from known bad IPs.

The US has the STIR/SHAKEN authentication protocols, but the telcos seem to have no financial are regulatory pressure to clamp down on all the sketchy intermediate carriers the scammers use to bypass them.

Rather then actually solve the problem, the US prefers to turn it into a business opportunity with the telcos selling subscriptions to blocking software and an entire ecosystem of moderately effective apps.

This is not specific to Silicon Valley. It's human nature.

People take the "vibe" from a work and assume the vibe is the meaning. Look at how things like Fight Club, The Punisher, and Wall Street are viewed in the general culture.

The Great Gatsby is a famous cautionary tale of the danger and pointlessness of unchecked pursuit of wealth. It's studied widely in US high schools. When the movie came out, all over the US people held "Gatsby Parties" which were 1920s themed parties focuses on ostentatious displaces of wealth.

No matter how profound and important the message, most people won't look beyond the vibe.

> frustratingly difficult to even get through the first lesson in which you are supposed to focus on your breath and minimize the wandering of your mind

Everyone experiences this. Please don't be frustrated by it.

The mind wandering is part of the practice. In fact, that instant where your mind has been wandering and you "snap out of it" is perhaps the most valuable.

That little skill carries over into real life. When someone cuts you off in traffic and you feel that flash of anger, your mind will catch itself and you'll just let it go and get on with your life.

You're probabably already doing things right.