Yeah from the structure of the headline I know I'm supposed to be outraged but from a criminal standpoint that's a pretty good deal if you get away with it.

I guess it does show that cryptocurrency mining is less than worthless now. Maybe that was what the author was trying to show but didn't want to stated bluntly for some reason?

The way x.com did? I guess they kind of had to otherwise they would have had to exit the country. I do think it's funny that they pull out of the country for not being allowed to violate privacy across their various companies but not for selling out the civilians in those countries. Suppose I shouldn't expect anything less from a corporation

There's so little money and you're so likely to get caught because of the inevitable paper trail that anyone doing this is going to be in the kind of dire straits that would cause them to make bad decisions.

People do not make good decisions when under pressure despite what 80s action films would have you believe and low pay for customer service jobs coupled with skyrocketing rents have put hundreds of thousands if not millions under some very heavy pressure in the form of homelessness or threats of homelessness

Are so well paid and so well treated by their employer that they would never consider taking this risk. I'm just glad large swaths of them aren't paying so much in rent that they are facing serious risk of homelessness that would make them vulnerable to making a bad decision...

the Fed return was already free, the state was $15 bucks. I need to be able to file my state return for free, otherwise it's kinda silly.

w/o those monopolies you wouldn't have just a few mega corps deciding what everybody listens to.

There was a little bit of a break with mp3.com but they saw the threat and came down *hard* on it.

there's been decades of focus group testing and refinement to determine what's going to sell. Also music is much, much less popular because it has to compete with other forms of entertainment (VHS cassettes, computers, video games and now streaming and podcasts) so that's going to narrow the market substantially resulting in less complex and experimental music.

Before everyone jumps in no, it's not that people are getting dumber, it's that businesses are smarter about what will or will not sell. Big Data means they don't need to throw nearly as much at the wall to see what sticks. And it means that the occasional pop star that's more complex and nuanced has less chance of making it through. You're not gonna get a Kate Bush in today's market. Not enough room and the focus group's will shut her down long before she does something as crazy as "Babushka" or "There Goes a Tenner".

because they're practices are deceptive. If you click something by mistake you're locked into the upsell with no way to disable it, even if you haven't used the service (which itself is of dubious value).

This doesn't happen until well into your tax prep work. So switching over to a competitor becomes a major pain. This is by design.

It's the kind of user hostile UI design that normally gets /. up in arms.

and you being one of the guys or gals setting policy are two very different things.

I'm not going to bother digging up the quotes for you, so don't ask, but a little googling and you'll find the people who set policy for the cops walking the beat like you were said they were holding off for the sake of "innovation".

I question their motives because anyone with half a brain can see crypto was only ever going to be useful for money laundering and ponzi schemes.

I guess it *is* possible they're all completely incompetent nepo-babies. But that's probably worse then them just being mildly corrupt and holding off in the hopes they and/or their buddies can make some quick cash on a new scheme.

and saying they're holding off for the sake of "innovation". So yeah. The question is are they really so dumb they think crypto is "innovative"?

We figured out ages ago it was useless as a currency and little more than an expensive gift card program when used as such.

If you think the regulators and various law enforcement didn't figure that out too you're not paying attention.

There's a bunch of them at the top who know exactly what crypto is and are letting it swim to see if it makes money. A small handful of them are die hard, some might say extremist capitalist types who will let anything slide and then there's a bunch who are just kind of squeezy and corrupt and want to see if them and their buddies can make some scratch off this new scam.

Those guys have been protecting crypto for some time from the beat cops that make up the SEC law enforcement. Basically providing mixed signaling whether cryptocurrency was going to see regulation or not.

The actual legal system though, that looks like it's had enough with judges getting cases in front of them because people are losing money.

But the regulators know what's going on they're just not doing anything about it. These are the same Jokers that brought us the 2008 market crash and would have brought us another market crash in 2020 except covid through that off. Basically all the ex Goldman Sachs people we never seem to be able to get rid of.

The only reason they haven't is that there's a law against it. So yeah you're not going to get anything but a handful of high profit blockbusters out of the studios. Especially with how weak and he trust law enforcement is right now. There's damn few cops walking that beat and the judges they're collared criminals go in front of are corrupt as hell...

the problem is right now we have a slightly uneasy balance between billionaires in the ruling class and the military where they have to treat them fairly well or risk a military coup.

Killer robots blows that dynamic up. Suddenly the 1% don't need to fear the army because they're machines. And it's easy enough to control the handful of eggheads needed to keep them running with a mix of threats and rewards.

Basically, picture a world like Saudi Arabia with a tiny 0.01%, a tiny 1% that services them and maintains the kill bots and then everyone else living in horrifying squalor.

The trouble is everyone reading this right now imagines themselves in that tiny 1% (and a few in the 0.01%). Nobody thinks they'll end up in the squalor, even though that's obviously the likely outcome...

They still drag this all back into the office 3 days a week. Which was more than enough to accomplish the task of maintaining their commercial real estate holdings.

They won. Of course they won they have unlimited money and power because we refuse to take even a smidge of it away from them.

that the Russians are funneling money to Trump, his sons and the Republican party in general. In particular we found out that they were using the NRA to do it and, well, we all just collectively shrugged our shoulders and said "meh, whatayagonnado?".

It's nuts. We do this crap every few years when something declassifies (Gulf of Tonkin, Iran Contra, etc) but at least there's time involved there. We can pretend it's ancient history or some shit. But the NRA scandal was less then a decade ago.