> The gambling industry produces no value.
Entertainment or "a thrill" is a form of value, and whatever gives one a thrill is highly subjective.
628 karma · joined July 3, 2021
Entertainment or "a thrill" is a form of value, and whatever gives one a thrill is highly subjective.
Why would an American working in software in the mid 90s expatriate to Tonga, a tiny island nation, population ~100k, virtually no tech industry, with little or no internet back then? (assuming Eric is American).
Maybe a govt IT contract, but it sounds at odds to "working on various internet startup schemes".
Everyone says that but I've had the opposite experience, possibly due to my location (near Orchard Rd). Can easily pay $15 to essentially go around the corner.
Europa Clipper, launched 2024, starts Europa flybys on March 2031
Dragonfly, hopefully launching July 2028, arriving on Titan 2034
"Half of all flights in the world are under 2 hours." Then they give examples of Fjord-town hopping in Norway, or Island hopping in Hawaii, which seem very niche.
Will they be able to compete in any of the busiest routes? Could it take me Melbourne-Sydney in 1 - 2 hours for < $100? I'd sacrifice some time and $ for an eco-friendly option, but obviously there's a limit.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_busiest_passenger_flig...
Shouldn't any wealth creation viewed positively due to tax, not to mention value to consumers/society?
Or is the view that people on average produce more value when employed by a large corporation?
Without domain validation, what is this user's intention other than fraud/impersonation?
I've already got an active impersonator running a website under my brand name and confusing my customers.
> We want you to tax us. We can afford it.
If you're so desperate to distribute your wealth for the greater good, then do it already. Why wait for the govt to mandate it, and over many years, eventually distributing it to causes which you may or may not align with? Bizarre.
> We're not talking about higher taxes on those who get up and go to work for their income every day
Of course not, because I'd wager the author fits this profile. This isn't about taxing "millionaires". It's about taxing people who have more money than you, but definitely not you. Let's draw the tax threshold at your wealth + a comfortable margin.
The linked site https://patrioticmillionaires.uk/ claims "80% of millionaires support a 2% wealth tax over 10m pounds". Ignoring how this was measured (and that's a big thing to ignore), I wonder what % support the tax over 1m?
My points aren't for or against the tax in question, they're intended to call BS on this org's claims. I cannot believe a group of wealthy individuals are begging to be taxed. Rather, a group of people with some wealth (of unverified amount) want people with much more wealth to be taxed.
I guess I'm surprised at the absence of flue stacks and cooling towers at the facility shown in the video.
Perhaps the facility in the video only shows "cleaner" downstream processing for marketing appeal, or separation processes are fundamentally different?
The sudden loss of working capital while awaiting a refund would be extremely disruptive for even large businesses.
I think that's if you're lucky enough to receive an early fraud warning, in which case, you have maybe ~12 hours to refund the money, but who knows, it's completely opaque to the merchant. As a merchant, I've even had previously refunded payments become disputes hours after issuing the refund.
Most of the time, the charge back is sprung on the merchant without warning. It can be worth fighting some. I've successfully countered several, it feels like I win maybe around 50% of those that I counter. I usually counter when the reasons are nonsensical, such as "Subscription renewed after cancelling", yet there was only one payment for the subscriptions creation.
To add insult to injury, Stripe charges an additional fee to counter the dispute (which you might get back if you win).
The whole process is infuriating. Charge backs are a tiny % of transactions, but cause a large amount of distress. I can't see why Stripe / banks don't offer an early dispute window, in which the merchant has say 7 days to refund without penalty. If they ignore or decide not to, it becomes a standard dispute.
I have systems running in us-east-1, and over the course of the incident, I noticed unexplainable intermittent connectivity issues that I've never seen before, even outside of az4.
AWS EC2 outage in use1-az4 (us-east-1)
Ordinarily this would result in failed health checks and auto service restart, but in this case, the service simply died without logs or alerts.
The list is missing Lakeman's recent travels in Afghanistan: https://mattlakeman.org/2026/01/05/notes-on-afghanistan/
They can, they will be available on the black market along with every other widely used illicit recreational drug.
Banning tobacco won't make the problem disappear, people want their poison, including sensible rational people who accept the risks and use in moderation.
Banning tobacco will push it underground, giving criminals a new revenue stream which can fund more harmful activities.
Not only will the govt lose out on tobacco tax, they may have to ramp up law enforcement expense to crack down on the now illicit tobacco trade and ever more empowered criminals.
Users of the black market products will have no guarantee of quality assurance, products may contain additional harmful additives.
There's an optimal level of tax and regulation to keep distribution out of criminal control, educate the general public, and offer support to the serious victims, all the while collecting tax to fund these activities.
This is precisely what many countries are already doing to varying degrees.
And the same argument can be made for many vices, including gambling and alcohol.
Do you have a source for this?
> All HTTPS traffic was decrypted and logged. No modifications were made to the traffic. The app was used as any normal user would use it.
Is it really that simple to inspect network traffic on an iPhone, namely to get it to trust the user-installed cert? I do quite a bit of network inspection on Android and I find it to be painful, even if the apps don't use certificate pinning.
Regardless, it highlights the importance of having control of our own devices, including the ability to easily inspect network traffic. We have the right to know where our data is being sent, and what data is being sent.
I recall during COVID it was discovered that Zoom was sending traffic to China. There was also the recent case of Facebook tracking private mobile browsing activity and sending it to their servers via the FB app. Imagine how much questionable traffic goes unnoticed due to the difficulty in configuring network inspection for apps.
Maybe describe why you're interested in Netherlands & Estonia.