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He is plainly a vexatious litigant. Can you get him declared as one? It's a very high bar though and I've no idea what the process is.


In the UK one must lose multiple cases under the same subject matter. He uses shell companies to bring the cases and brings them under wildly varying subject matter. It's pretext, but until it's attempted it'll be unclear if it'll be possible to get the court to see through the pretext.


Wachovia laundered more and received a much smaller fine. https://www.theguardian.com/world/2011/apr/03/us-bank-mexico...


According to an article in The Times years ago (early 2000s?) the money was used notes from the Bank of England that was going to be burned anyway. With insurance, security, and a BoE employee to supervise it was expensive, but not a million pounds expensive. That said, I could imagine the KLF inventing this story too, so I don't know what the truth is.


I heard at least part of this version of the story a few years ago from someone who was in the British music industry at the time. I seem to recall getting the impression that he was relaying what he'd heard at the time, but of course I can't rule out that he got it from the Times article you mentioned.


A bus ticket is something "that confers value or benefit to its owners".


That's not what capital means. The bus ticket is an everyday expense that doesn't bring you anything by itself long term, you stop owning it as soon as you use it. Otherwise food would be capital too and the word would become useless.


Thought experiment: why is a one month software license to operate a conveyor belt to move product stock considered productive capital, but not a one month license for the employee to ride to the product stock. Indeed in at least one city I lived in, the taxes were deducted from my transit pass as the state counted it as a capital expense for my employment (technically the pass was not supposed to be used for anything else, but no one is checking).

In the grim thought slavery still existed, I would say food would be considered productive capital. In modern day (from the view of the company) that value is just captured in the wage so it would be inappropriate to double account it into capital expenses (a business lunch I think would count though).


Software licenses are not considered capital; they’re expenses. This is why they’re preferred for tax reasons, as expenses are fully written off in the first year, but capital purchases are gradually depreciated.


In that situation, food would still be an expense. The capital would be the slaves. Weird example though.


On your second point the History menu has a Restore Last Session option (or something like that) when you reopen the browser after inadvertently closing a bunch of tabs.


Scientifically speaking, the human death rate is a surprisingly low 93%. This is the obvious calculation: the number of people who died divided by the number who were born.


Sure, but you still don't know who or what actually wrote the text that got posted.


Yep, that's the best part of the idea IMO.


My understanding from the book was that CO2 is an essential part of the mechanism that transfers oxygen to your muscles. If you breathe too much you have too little CO2, your muscles can't get enough oxygen and they don't work efficiently. I've no idea if this is true, but since I read the book I breathe less when exercising and it seems to help. Edited to add: I'd forgotten, when I first started breathing less during exercise it made a huge difference, like coming down from altitude. I recommend it.


An example in the UK yesterday. Climate protesters glued themselves to a petrol tanker and were charged with tampering with a motor vehicle. The protesters argued that the bit with the petrol was a trailer, not a motor vehicle. The judge agreed and acquitted them. https://www.bbc.com/news/uk-england-london-64403074


You can bootstrap the compiler. It's a chore but not impossible. More usefully, you can check that your builds are identical to other people's, so at least your compiler isn't uniquely compromised.


I don’t think it’s possible since you’d need the original compilers from the 70’s and bootstrap other compilers up to a modern one. Otherwise your existing compiler could taint your new one.


Many years ago I wrote a C compiler in assembly language. It wasn't hard, and C hasn't changed that much. The complexity in modern compilers is in the optimisation, which you don't need if you're bootstrapping. It's not impossible.


A pragmatic approach!


There are people who spend time trying to solve this issue!

https://bootstrappable.org/

https://www.gnu.org/software/mes/

The idea here, is that if you can get a very basic C compiler, you can start building TinyCC, and eventually build a pre-C++ version of GCC, and from there build up to modern GCC. This is a lot easier said than done of course, but not quite as bad as needing the original compilers from the 70s!


No, you only need two compilers that have not been subverted by the same adversary.

https://www.schneier.com/blog/archives/2006/01/countering_tr...


That’s a good point


It'd be a fun exercise to write a tiny Forth in machine code (sans assembler) and use it to write enough of a C compiler to build tcc, or something along those lines. From there I think you can chain old (but accessible) gcc versions up to modern gcc.


> You can bootstrap the compiler. It's a chore but not impossible.

And specifically, only one person needs to do this once... I'm surprised there isn't some project doing this...



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