In the US, the trick is to attach chains to the ATM from a heavy truck, and haul it off to a warehouse somewhere to work on it. The ATMs that have a sizable amount of money are now typically built flush into a concrete wall to deny any good anchor points for that attack. People mostly rob the little ATMs in retail locations as a result of the big ones being hardened in many ways, but they don't get that much from one.
Yes. Welcome to the world of finance. Guess what "paying on time" means?
When I bought a house, they were more clear that they specifically needed money wired. Wire fraud is epidemic, so I jumped through hoops to be sure. I ignored the letter they sent me, found the phone number of the title agency through several search engines, called them to get the phone number of the local guys, and called them to find the right person to confirm the information.
Didn't want to discover that some clever dick had just sent me a letter with his bank account (and of course his phone# on the letterhead). You really have no recourse once the money is wired.
For a checking account: you can write a check at any time for the full amount in your account. Or do an electronic transfer. It's only cash in particular that's limited, for logistic reasons.
For a savings account, it's different. You've made a loan to the bank in hopes they'll repay it. They can legally take 90 days to return your money, if they have a cash crunch.
Rules aside, if too many people want to use their money all at once, the bank just doesn't have the assets. Required reserves for checking accounts in the US are something like 3%, and for savings accounts it's 0%. Yup, there is no reserve requirement. It's a bit optimistic to say we have a fractional-reserve banking system, although I guess 0/100 is technically a fraction.
Just like the police look for people watching TV without paying their BBC tax, a new breed of detector trucks will soon roam the streets of England.
*Knock knock knock* "Sir, we spotted you wanking without a wanker's license." "But, but..." "Don't try to deny it sir, we saw you clearly on the infrared."
For manufacturing all the plastic crap that America consumes?
For consuming their own share of plastic crap. Hint: the world doesn't consist of "people" in the West and "poor almost-humans who need our help" in the East.
Anyway, plastic in the environment isn't a problem with making things out of plastic, but one of littering. Plastic waste doesn't magically escape from landfills.
There are certainly "militant" atheists: evangelists who can't shut up about it. At least on the Christian side, somewhere around the turn of the millennium the "don't be an asshole for Jesus" movement happened, and strangers stopped "witnessing" to me. Sadly, at about that time atheists stepped into that space. These days both sides mostly keep their fighting on YouTube and forums, where I can ignore it, which is great.
Spent fuel rods lying around in pools is proof positive that nuclear is bullshit.
What are you going on about? Spent fuel is particularly dangerous for the first 5 years or so after it goes idle. The best possible place for it is untouched in an idle reactor: no chance for an accident in transport, even transport within the site. After it sits for 5 years or so, it's just industrial waste: to be handled responsibly but nothing special.
Nuclear's drawbacks are severe enough that the standard should be perfection. There should be failsafes for the failsafes for the failsafes, and no problem should ever actually result in a meltdown condition. If you can't guarantee zero meltdowns, then you simply shouldn't do nuclear, period.
Children think in terms of back-and-white, all-or-nothing, because they can't yet deal with the complexity of the real world. Adults can balance risk and trade-offs.
Three-mile island had a meltdown, as a result of the operators doing the wrong thing at every opportunity and creating a worst-case failure for its design. But it was a US plant built to a reasonable (for the day) safety standards. Per Wikipedia "A variety of epidemiology studies have concluded that the accident had no observable long term health effects." We've learned a lot since then about safety.
Perfection is not the goal. Making sure a worst-case failure isn't any worse than any other serious industrial accident is a reasonable goal. Designing industrial control systems that won't confuse operators in a crisis is a reasonable goal.
Nuclear is fine in space. There are radioactives in some asteroids, so we don't even have to launch them if we actually get space-based industry going
Nuclear in space for power generation for Earth is very silly. There's already a whopping great fusion reactor there, no need to build another. Orbital solar is already price-competitive using current SpaceX launch costs. But no one is going to take the risk for a new technology, whether new nuclear designs or orbital solar, just for "about as good". Technology will shift when its "much cheaper". That will happen soon enough for orbital solar, as launch costs keep coming down, but it's not clear that will ever displace "primary thermal" power use in industry (where the power is never electrical at all, such as a blast furnace).
The risk to THE PUBLIC is what we're talking about, mining deaths are nothing.
Read that again. What sort of unpeople are you happily shipping to the death camps? It's the working class, isn't it. You're looking for power generation that only kills the working class, right? Because they are "nothing"?
We only store nuclear waste because it's valuable. Once it has been idle for about 5 years (and usually spent fuel is left onsite, often in the reactor, for that time) it's just run-of-the-mill industrial waste. Not something to be taken lightly, but no heroic measures are required either.
"Superfund" sites of all kinds are generally caused by carelessness (or deliberate cheapness) onsite when the waste is produced. Reactor designs that make it easy to get those first 5 years right are a good thing.
More likely it's a difference in culture between areas. I just looked up that the longest bed you could get on the F-150 from 2009-2014 was 1/4" short of 8', [nerd]so technically there were no 8' F-150 beds.[/nerd] However, I suspect that's the actual minimum bed length for 4'x8' lumber to lie flat.
I've never understood the appeal for the non-practical truck, myself. When I was young small trucks were dirt cheap, but US fuel economy regs caused US manufacturers to drop all their fuel efficient light trucks. Go figure.
I can currently see about a dozen F-150 out the windows of my house. About half are work trucks (lots of houses going up), the other half in driveways. 0 of them have an 8' bed. I can't say I've never seen one, but they are quite the rare sight (you do occasionally see a bigger model pickup with an 8' bed, but those seem to be status symbols or mudding trucks, not practical trucks).
But then, I'm just at the edge of rural Texas - off in the country it might be different, Are you in a rural area by any chance, or are people driving those in the city?
Everyone I know that has a pickup truck actually uses it for a pickup truck; sorry don't live in your world. Not sure what you are talking about, the vast majority of F150s have boxes plenty big enough for an 8x4 sheet
Where the heck do you live? Here in Texas, where the pickup is king, an 8' bed is a unicorn. No one is hauling 4x8 sheets in a pickup: those come to work sites on real trucks. Even 6.5' beds, which can carry a 4x8 sheet with the tailgate down, are rare.
Pickups are mostly 4-door, 5.5' bed, especially work trucks. Usually a lockbox taking up half the short bed, to carry the actual tools needed, and just a bit of space to haul something unusual when needed.
I think that answers the questions you asked. Was he on US soil? The he may have committed a crime under US jurisdiction. Maybe not, though: ordinary US citizens don't break any laws by revealing US secrets either. You have to agree to give up some rights before you can be charged for that (which of course you must to to get access to anything secret). I suspect they'll go for a conspiracy charge, which is at least vaguely plausible, but only again if he was on US soil.
The jurisdiction of the US is its territory. We can dronestrike whoever we want, of course - intelligence agencies and extralegal recourse go together. A foreigner on foreign soil exposing US secrets? Not a legal issue, or should not be in any reasonable world. Now maybe said foreigner is in a nation with a treaty with the US to punish it's own people under its own laws for revealing US secrets, but that's a different matter.
I would become an actual fan of Trump if he pardoned Assange. I'm not holding my breath, mind you, but it would be a heck of a symbol that the US still has some tenuous hold on the rule of law.
Some people actually like cable bundles and channel surfing. YouTube TV is a modern version of that. It's a chance for Google to harvest money from people who grew up without cable bundles, but like that approach even so, and from people who just find $50/month cheaper than what they currently pay.
Oh, there's no lack of mysteries. There's still no data at all on what dark matter actually is, beyond "matter, cold, interacts weakly". Dark energy is just as mysterious. Heck, even inflation, which has been a primary focus of cosmology for over a decade, is merely a well-studied mystery.
Very few of the mega rich make large amounts of money off pay checks. Bezos gets paid $600k... and a ton of stock. Most of his money is from stock. Same for Gates, Buffet, Forbes, etc....
Bezos refused any stock from the board in 2018, IIRC. Income taxes are for people with income. (He did make 80k in salary IIRC, which I'm sure he paid taxes on). OTOH, he paid a tome of capital gains on the huge amount of stock he sold (mostly to fund Blue rigin).
Te point of taxes is to raise the revenue needed for the operation of the government. It's not to hurt people you don't like. There's no real point in a corporate tax, as long as there's no way for actual humans to get money out of a corporation without being taxed. A no-exception flat tax fixes that.
minimum corporate income tax, like 0.5% of gross revenue.
Plenty of corporations have profit margins very near 0.4% or revenue. A lot of old-school industry make 2% profits on a good year, and 0% through the bad years. We want heavy industry in the US, you know?
And a similar minimum on individuals, aimed roughly at a day's wages, like 0.4%?
There's no way to avoid taxes on wages in general, beyond about $3000/year. Everyone pays social security tax on wages, which is more than 10x your suggestion.
So who would you tax who's not being taxed now? People who only get Social Security? That's a bare subsistence already. Tax-free muni bonds are a federal subsidy to states and school districs, not anything advantageous to the bond holders.
You'd need a constitutional amendment for a national sales tax or VAT. Plus those are regressive tax schemes.
Interestingly, you could probably do a national sales tax if all the money went directly to some sort of UBI - the requirement is that the money be sent to the states in proportion to population, can't be spent directly by the federal government.
A flat tax on all forms of income (including dividends, interest, inflation-adjusted capital gains, and so on) would be ideal. Make it progressive by sending everyone a check for a fixed amount on top of that tax. No need for an income tax at all: a payroll tax will cover all wages, sine it's a flat tax. But we'll never get this, because the very rich would pay a lot more.
Now as soon as you allow any deductions whatsoever to the flat tax, it's ruined as loopholes will immediately be added for the 1%, and the tax rate will neeed to double to bring in the same total. But if there were no deductions or exceptions of any kind? Golden.
The narrative here seems to be "talk about white nationalists, and gangs of white nationalists show up to prove just how demented and determined to be assholes they are."
That's certainly the narrative. I'd bet the reality is "the chans saw this as a wonderful opportunity to troll, plus some actual white nationalists (who were also channers).".
Haha. I mostly get tired of the collaboration between government and the oldschool media to manipulate the people in a democracy.
Politically, I think we've swung way too far in the direction of globalism, and the pendulum needs to swing back towards at least a bit of populism. Or at least national sovereignty. Of course, it will tend to swing back far past the middle, as is human nature.
Slashdot Mirror
In the US, the trick is to attach chains to the ATM from a heavy truck, and haul it off to a warehouse somewhere to work on it. The ATMs that have a sizable amount of money are now typically built flush into a concrete wall to deny any good anchor points for that attack. People mostly rob the little ATMs in retail locations as a result of the big ones being hardened in many ways, but they don't get that much from one.
Yes. Welcome to the world of finance. Guess what "paying on time" means?
When I bought a house, they were more clear that they specifically needed money wired. Wire fraud is epidemic, so I jumped through hoops to be sure. I ignored the letter they sent me, found the phone number of the title agency through several search engines, called them to get the phone number of the local guys, and called them to find the right person to confirm the information.
Didn't want to discover that some clever dick had just sent me a letter with his bank account (and of course his phone# on the letterhead). You really have no recourse once the money is wired.
For a checking account: you can write a check at any time for the full amount in your account. Or do an electronic transfer. It's only cash in particular that's limited, for logistic reasons.
For a savings account, it's different. You've made a loan to the bank in hopes they'll repay it. They can legally take 90 days to return your money, if they have a cash crunch.
Rules aside, if too many people want to use their money all at once, the bank just doesn't have the assets. Required reserves for checking accounts in the US are something like 3%, and for savings accounts it's 0%. Yup, there is no reserve requirement. It's a bit optimistic to say we have a fractional-reserve banking system, although I guess 0/100 is technically a fraction.
Just like the police look for people watching TV without paying their BBC tax, a new breed of detector trucks will soon roam the streets of England.
*Knock knock knock* ..."
"Sir, we spotted you wanking without a wanker's license."
"But, but
"Don't try to deny it sir, we saw you clearly on the infrared."
For manufacturing all the plastic crap that America consumes?
For consuming their own share of plastic crap. Hint: the world doesn't consist of "people" in the West and "poor almost-humans who need our help" in the East.
Anyway, plastic in the environment isn't a problem with making things out of plastic, but one of littering. Plastic waste doesn't magically escape from landfills.
Your user name is humorous in this context.
There are certainly "militant" atheists: evangelists who can't shut up about it. At least on the Christian side, somewhere around the turn of the millennium the "don't be an asshole for Jesus" movement happened, and strangers stopped "witnessing" to me. Sadly, at about that time atheists stepped into that space. These days both sides mostly keep their fighting on YouTube and forums, where I can ignore it, which is great.
Spent fuel rods lying around in pools is proof positive that nuclear is bullshit.
What are you going on about? Spent fuel is particularly dangerous for the first 5 years or so after it goes idle. The best possible place for it is untouched in an idle reactor: no chance for an accident in transport, even transport within the site. After it sits for 5 years or so, it's just industrial waste: to be handled responsibly but nothing special.
Nuclear's drawbacks are severe enough that the standard should be perfection. There should be failsafes for the failsafes for the failsafes, and no problem should ever actually result in a meltdown condition. If you can't guarantee zero meltdowns, then you simply shouldn't do nuclear, period.
Children think in terms of back-and-white, all-or-nothing, because they can't yet deal with the complexity of the real world. Adults can balance risk and trade-offs.
Three-mile island had a meltdown, as a result of the operators doing the wrong thing at every opportunity and creating a worst-case failure for its design. But it was a US plant built to a reasonable (for the day) safety standards. Per Wikipedia "A variety of epidemiology studies have concluded that the accident had no observable long term health effects." We've learned a lot since then about safety.
Perfection is not the goal. Making sure a worst-case failure isn't any worse than any other serious industrial accident is a reasonable goal. Designing industrial control systems that won't confuse operators in a crisis is a reasonable goal.
Nuclear is fine in space. There are radioactives in some asteroids, so we don't even have to launch them if we actually get space-based industry going
Nuclear in space for power generation for Earth is very silly. There's already a whopping great fusion reactor there, no need to build another. Orbital solar is already price-competitive using current SpaceX launch costs. But no one is going to take the risk for a new technology, whether new nuclear designs or orbital solar, just for "about as good". Technology will shift when its "much cheaper". That will happen soon enough for orbital solar, as launch costs keep coming down, but it's not clear that will ever displace "primary thermal" power use in industry (where the power is never electrical at all, such as a blast furnace).
The risk to THE PUBLIC is what we're talking about, mining deaths are nothing.
Read that again. What sort of unpeople are you happily shipping to the death camps? It's the working class, isn't it. You're looking for power generation that only kills the working class, right? Because they are "nothing"?
We only store nuclear waste because it's valuable. Once it has been idle for about 5 years (and usually spent fuel is left onsite, often in the reactor, for that time) it's just run-of-the-mill industrial waste. Not something to be taken lightly, but no heroic measures are required either.
"Superfund" sites of all kinds are generally caused by carelessness (or deliberate cheapness) onsite when the waste is produced. Reactor designs that make it easy to get those first 5 years right are a good thing.
More likely it's a difference in culture between areas. I just looked up that the longest bed you could get on the F-150 from 2009-2014 was 1/4" short of 8', [nerd]so technically there were no 8' F-150 beds.[/nerd] However, I suspect that's the actual minimum bed length for 4'x8' lumber to lie flat.
I've never understood the appeal for the non-practical truck, myself. When I was young small trucks were dirt cheap, but US fuel economy regs caused US manufacturers to drop all their fuel efficient light trucks. Go figure.
I can currently see about a dozen F-150 out the windows of my house. About half are work trucks (lots of houses going up), the other half in driveways. 0 of them have an 8' bed. I can't say I've never seen one, but they are quite the rare sight (you do occasionally see a bigger model pickup with an 8' bed, but those seem to be status symbols or mudding trucks, not practical trucks).
But then, I'm just at the edge of rural Texas - off in the country it might be different, Are you in a rural area by any chance, or are people driving those in the city?
Everyone I know that has a pickup truck actually uses it for a pickup truck; sorry don't live in your world. Not sure what you are talking about, the vast majority of F150s have boxes plenty big enough for an 8x4 sheet
Where the heck do you live? Here in Texas, where the pickup is king, an 8' bed is a unicorn. No one is hauling 4x8 sheets in a pickup: those come to work sites on real trucks. Even 6.5' beds, which can carry a 4x8 sheet with the tailgate down, are rare.
Pickups are mostly 4-door, 5.5' bed, especially work trucks. Usually a lockbox taking up half the short bed, to carry the actual tools needed, and just a bit of space to haul something unusual when needed.
The jurisdiction of the US is its territory.
I think that answers the questions you asked. Was he on US soil? The he may have committed a crime under US jurisdiction. Maybe not, though: ordinary US citizens don't break any laws by revealing US secrets either. You have to agree to give up some rights before you can be charged for that (which of course you must to to get access to anything secret). I suspect they'll go for a conspiracy charge, which is at least vaguely plausible, but only again if he was on US soil.
The jurisdiction of the US is its territory. We can dronestrike whoever we want, of course - intelligence agencies and extralegal recourse go together. A foreigner on foreign soil exposing US secrets? Not a legal issue, or should not be in any reasonable world. Now maybe said foreigner is in a nation with a treaty with the US to punish it's own people under its own laws for revealing US secrets, but that's a different matter.
I would become an actual fan of Trump if he pardoned Assange. I'm not holding my breath, mind you, but it would be a heck of a symbol that the US still has some tenuous hold on the rule of law.
Some people actually like cable bundles and channel surfing. YouTube TV is a modern version of that. It's a chance for Google to harvest money from people who grew up without cable bundles, but like that approach even so, and from people who just find $50/month cheaper than what they currently pay.
Well, semantics. Social security is a federal tax on income. Label it as you will, it's hard to escape paying it.
Oh, there's no lack of mysteries. There's still no data at all on what dark matter actually is, beyond "matter, cold, interacts weakly". Dark energy is just as mysterious. Heck, even inflation, which has been a primary focus of cosmology for over a decade, is merely a well-studied mystery.
Very few of the mega rich make large amounts of money off pay checks.
Bezos gets paid $600k... and a ton of stock. Most of his money is from stock.
Same for Gates, Buffet, Forbes, etc....
Bezos refused any stock from the board in 2018, IIRC. Income taxes are for people with income. (He did make 80k in salary IIRC, which I'm sure he paid taxes on). OTOH, he paid a tome of capital gains on the huge amount of stock he sold (mostly to fund Blue rigin).
Flat tax, captures everything, it's the way.
Who would that be? Retirees with no income other than Social Security? Everyone with wages pays social security and medicare tax.
Te point of taxes is to raise the revenue needed for the operation of the government. It's not to hurt people you don't like. There's no real point in a corporate tax, as long as there's no way for actual humans to get money out of a corporation without being taxed. A no-exception flat tax fixes that.
minimum corporate income tax, like 0.5% of gross revenue.
Plenty of corporations have profit margins very near 0.4% or revenue. A lot of old-school industry make 2% profits on a good year, and 0% through the bad years. We want heavy industry in the US, you know?
And a similar minimum on individuals, aimed roughly at a day's wages, like 0.4%?
There's no way to avoid taxes on wages in general, beyond about $3000/year. Everyone pays social security tax on wages, which is more than 10x your suggestion.
So who would you tax who's not being taxed now? People who only get Social Security? That's a bare subsistence already. Tax-free muni bonds are a federal subsidy to states and school districs, not anything advantageous to the bond holders.
You'd need a constitutional amendment for a national sales tax or VAT. Plus those are regressive tax schemes.
Interestingly, you could probably do a national sales tax if all the money went directly to some sort of UBI - the requirement is that the money be sent to the states in proportion to population, can't be spent directly by the federal government.
A flat tax on all forms of income (including dividends, interest, inflation-adjusted capital gains, and so on) would be ideal. Make it progressive by sending everyone a check for a fixed amount on top of that tax. No need for an income tax at all: a payroll tax will cover all wages, sine it's a flat tax. But we'll never get this, because the very rich would pay a lot more.
Now as soon as you allow any deductions whatsoever to the flat tax, it's ruined as loopholes will immediately be added for the 1%, and the tax rate will neeed to double to bring in the same total. But if there were no deductions or exceptions of any kind? Golden.
The narrative here seems to be "talk about white nationalists, and gangs of white nationalists show up to prove just how demented and determined to be assholes they are."
That's certainly the narrative. I'd bet the reality is "the chans saw this as a wonderful opportunity to troll, plus some actual white nationalists (who were also channers).".
Haha. I mostly get tired of the collaboration between government and the oldschool media to manipulate the people in a democracy.
Politically, I think we've swung way too far in the direction of globalism, and the pendulum needs to swing back towards at least a bit of populism. Or at least national sovereignty. Of course, it will tend to swing back far past the middle, as is human nature.