Hawala always provided the kind of money transfer services that cryptocurrencies are specifically designed for, so it's no surprise that they are in this game now.

As usual, though, this take on hawala focuses on drug trade, and completely ignores the fact that it's also the system used for routine long distance transfers between family members etc.

Why build roads if they're getting bombed into rubble every decade?

I love how it's mostly self-entitled Westerners who never had to deal with an oppressive government extolling the virtues of monetary regulation here.

Russians, meanwhile, lived through a default and a bunch of reforms that were borderline fraud (like the govt giving one weekend to exchange the old banknotes for the new). Ransomware is peanuts in comparison.

It really depends on how radical you want to get. If your only reason to not run your own email server is the lack of free time and/or desire to administer it, then maybe consider Helm ( https://thehelm.com?

I can think of plenty of small businesses with fewer than 10 employees who need access.

How about "fuck them both"?

A simple solution to this is to ditch copyright terms altogether, but tax copyright (and other forms of intellectual property) like we tax real estate. Then copyrights will only last for as long as sufficient profit can be made to sustain them, and content will fall into public domain immediately after.

Better yet, make the tax progressive over time, starting with zero for the first few years (to give author some time to market it), and then exponentially increasing. This would reflect the lost (to the commons) value of directly or indirectly derived works that would have being created if not for copyright restrictions - since every potential derived work would itself be the basis for more works, this value grows exponentially over time.

Keep in mind that the "natural" price of a book is the cost of making a copy. The only reason why it's possible to charge significantly more than that is because of copyright, which is itself an artificial construct created by the government. As such, it can come with arbitrary strings attached, including "price fixing".

As far as having less choice - is that a real problem these days? If anything, we're drowning in content, especially once you include self-publishing. I read every day, and yet my reading queue has grown non-stop for the past decade or so, at an increasingly accelerating rate.

Did you graduate top of your class in the Navy Seals, by chance?

Allow me to demonstrate, then.

Two days ago, you wrote - and I quote directly from your comment: "regardless of the fact that we are attacking your fundamental rights or limiting your fundamental rights, and the charter says that is wrong, we're still going to go ahead and do it".

Sounds like you hate freedom. Should you hang?

I'm no fan of Trudeau. I'm merely pointing out that you're spreading outright misinformation. "He's a bad guy anyway" is not a valid excuse for that. If you want to criticize him, cite data that actually supports that argument, don't fudge it.

You mean the video in which Trudeau specifically criticized the "notwithstanding clause" that allows the provincial governments to override the Charter?

I doubt that's what OP had in mind by "leftists", but libertarian left is a thing.

It's fair as a general principle, but there are other considerations at play when some private platforms become so large that the "public space" becomes controlled by a small oligopoly.

It wouldn't be the first time the textbook gets reused like that. In a similar vein, some states enacted "nullification" laws that prohibit state law enforcement agencies from helping feds to enforce federal gun laws, modelling them after similar state and local laws on immigration (sanctuaries etc).