"The banking industry promised that from mid-2019 name checks would be carried out when customers sent money to other people"
Wow. So far behind.
"Barclays said it asked the person who received the cash for permission to return the money, but he refused."
There is nothing to refuse. The law in my country would be pretty clear about this. Honestly, just to prevent the guy withdrawing and spending it, it would very likely pay him a visit. But that is me.
Okay but say I receive money from you, I send you goods or services, then you fraudulently claim to the bank that the transfer was erroneous. The law is as it is because arbitrating disputes between customers is correctly a matter for the courts not for banks. In normal circumstances the recipient would return the money and not try to steal it. The entire problem here is because the recipient fraudulently disputed the return of the money.
The better resolution is to make sure such errors don't happen in the first place.
This book was written in 1989 and was already skeptical about the stability of the soviet union and also thought what might happen to Ukraine if the the USSR disintegrates (attracted to EU/EC).
Real coca leaves? I don't think so, whole plant is banned basically everywhere apart from few places in South america. Unless you mean something altered that has no real cocaine alkaloid, like drinks with marihuana 'extracts' / seeds that contain 0% THC.
Not that I agree with this, had my share of teas and chew in Bolivia (with what locals called 'activator', at least thats how miners did it in Potosi), apart from local lack of sense in gum/jaw there wasn't any real effect... no more than a regular coffee (which doesn't have any tangible effect on me, but I enjoy the taste & ritual).
But from plant you can make cocaine, so I get the logic. Funny thing is, some botanical gardens in Europe have the plant, not marked in any obvious way apart from latin name. I can confirm that it contained alkaloid, the numbing gum sensation was quite strong.
ICs and computers may have been a huge part of the downfall, especially if you consider how important they are in warfare.
"1. its economic model was dysfunctional and a failure"
The USSR had a good economy for some time. During Stalins brutal industrialization, growth rates may have even outclassed Chinas. E.g. 13% p.a. over 12 years, the numbers are controversial. I have a paper about it. Fact is, in WW1 and WW2 Germany faced a very different country.
The later decline may also correlate with declining oil production. The USSR sold a lot of Oil and Gas to the west.
"The soviet union failed, because centralized, collectivism, and having all the output owned by the state is a failure as a model...."
This is also true fro China and the last word, if the system is sustainable or not, is not spoken in this regards.
I tell you a secret: The western market oriented, capitalistic system is also bound to fail.
1. Due to the inherent feature to use debt to prefinance production, the economy has always to keep growing. It is not possible to use our current capitalistic system in a steady state economy.
2. Since wealth and economic growth are interlinked and energy is more or less limited, the system has to come to a stop sooner or later.
"I'm not an economist but I've never heard of competition described as "negative-sum.""
It is obvious that, if competition is strong for a cake with a given size, that costs, e.g. for advertisement, may actually decrease the profits. While the size of the cake stays the same, the market players have less profits due to increased costs. So in the end everybody has a smaller slice. If I remember correctly, this has happened in a stagnant cigarette market where one player decided to increase his share. They spend a fortune on advertisement, as did the other since they don't want to lose their share. After some years the war stopped and everybody had more or less the same share as before, while having lost a tremendous amount of money on advertisement without gaining any benefit.
A zero sum game has nothing to do with consumers in this example. It means, the cake has a given size. If you want to increase the size of your slice, you have to take something away from another player.
A non-zero sum game would be were the cake (market) is growing. Every year you have a bigger cake. Then it is possible that you can increase your slice without reducing the slice of another player.
A non-zero sum game would be were the cake (market) is growing. Every year you have a bigger cake. Then it is possible that you can increase your slice without reducing the slice of another player.j
I meant zero-sum in the context of this article. Have Disney+, Netflix, etc stopped growing their offerings and market size? Has everyone who can afford to signed up to all of them at the same time?
To sack it may have been one of the stupidest decisions ever by a CEO (Apotheker).
After the blow out sale they had something they were lacking before: huge customer base. But the idea to make money with software and apps instead of hardware may not have been compatible with HP business culture.
Just a SEO blog post that posts something obvious.
They mention ThatOnePrivacySite.net but criticize him:
"Here's the difference. They include virtually every provider — the good and the bad — and present them at equal value to sort through. Instead of providing their readers with answers, they provide them with information that can be used to deduce their own recommendations, based on their values as an individual. "
1st: providing them all guarantees that there is no conflict of interest
2nd: "Instead of providing their readers with answers" You can not provide this answer since there a tons of reasons to use a VPN
"Your VPN provider should not be hiding away in Panama controlled by anonymous leadership."
This is also bullshit. In fact, some of the most resilient VPN provides provide no legislation at all. They only exists in Cyberspace. "Sue us!"
It is the only VPN that I am aware of that works out of the box with softether. I have not tried it yet. I currently use Astrill. Astrill is not cheap but works pretty well to circumvent censorship. A disadvantage of Astrill is that it often leaks DNS like a motherf....
This should prevent DNS leaks on Linux if UFW is installed.
> It is the only VPN that I am aware of that works out of the box with softether. I have not tried it yet. I currently use Astrill. Astrill is not cheap but works pretty well to circumvent censorship. A disadvantage of Astrill is that it often leaks DNS like a motherf....
Should also keep in mind a few years ago Astril was using weak keys like ExpressVPN. That really makes me wonder what they know about running VPN servers. I think you only get one chance with your reputation on things like this.
Access the internet via an anonymous SIM card (tethering), then use TOR to access your VPN (paid in Bitcoins, money order or whatever). This gives you a decent level of anonymity, if need be.
Wow. So far behind.
"Barclays said it asked the person who received the cash for permission to return the money, but he refused."
There is nothing to refuse. The law in my country would be pretty clear about this. Honestly, just to prevent the guy withdrawing and spending it, it would very likely pay him a visit. But that is me.