If you are talking about Gaza, there were reports a few days ago that Israel is considering cutting back on the amount of aid allowed in once Trump is in office, claiming that Hamas is still able to fund itself by "taxing" aid.
The "money laundering" at focus in the article is receiving money directly from people who are being scammed, and moving it quickly enough that the police cannot freeze or recover it when the scam is discovered. That's different from usual money laundering.
The assumption has been that Telegram provided significantly more access to Russia years ago, as it remains unblocked (with channels even run by the government), and Pavel Durov wasn't arrested when he visited Russia after laws were passed that would apply to Telegram but he claims they were refusing to follow.
I have however thought that the actual reason was because Russia depends on it.
They seriously even use it to coordinate artillery strikes although lately I have seen evidence they now sometimes use Discord.
I am not sure, and being convinced that Pavel Durov has actually visited Russia several times the last few years make me question my assumptions.
However I still see Russian opposition being more scared now after Pavels visit to France because now the terms of service has been updated to tell us that they will ahare our ip address and phone number with law enforcement if they feel compelled to or something to that effect.
>At the early stages of TikTok there was some controversy that diverse, disabled, marginalized etc people were being underrepresented compared to other platforms and we now see how that turned out.
The controversy was that they were being actively suppressed as a moderation decision.
There is more than one way to give people what they want, and in my haste I clumsily muddled two of them. All the platforms are being moderated heavily with thumbs on the scales to advantage one group over another.
My personal preference would be to have no thumbs on the scales.
Additionally I hate TikTok for the intentional addictive mechanism that requires an attention 'ante' to find out if a video is interesting by preventing jumping to a later point in the video to see where it is going. Basically gambling but with attention instead of currency, the algorithm optimized to give the user just enough to keep them coming back but not too much to satiate their desires.
Search Science is one of those research domains where it appears things are going backwards, google barely works anymore, facebook videos was terrible from the start and AFAIK stayed that way, YouTube only works for me because I have a subscribe list to people I support on Patreon. Amazon is being flooded with duplicate listings which should be trivial to de-dupe and clean up but I guess they suck at search science as well. If Amazon doesn't fix their search and fake good problem people might as well buy from Temu. Almost forgot, Twitter can't find bots that are so easy to find that they become 'X in bio' memes.
FWIW, you can fast forward or jump to any point in a TikTok video - just start dragging on the bottom of the screen and a scrubber will appear. Or tap to pause and a playback bar will dispay.
In practice, you are right that there is an attention ante; most videos are short enough to sit through them to see the payoff without making the effort to scrub.
When I see out of band management at remote locations (usually for a dedicated doctors network run by the health authority that gets deployed at offices and clinics) it's generally analog phone line -> modem -> console port. Dialup is more than enough if all you need to do is reset a router config.
Not 100% out of band for a telco though, unless they made sure to use a competitors lines.
Here in Australia, POTS lines have been completely decommissioned, UK will be switched off by end of 2025 and I'm assuming there's similar timelines in lots of other countries.
They're on the way out in France, too. New buildings don't get copper anymore, only fiber.
However, as I understand it, at least for commercial use, the phone company provides some kind of box that has battery-backing so it can provide phone service for a certain duration in case of emergency.
The tricky part with that is that, at least in Canada, the RJ11 ports on the ONT are generally VoIP. They provide the appropriate voltages for a conventional POTS phone to work but digitize & compress the audio and send it along to the Telco as SIP or whatever. That works fine for voice but you're probably going to have a hard time using a conventional POTS modem over that connection. I've never tested it and am honestly pretty curious to see how well/poorly it would work.
However, I’m only familiar with the emergency phone call use case, for which voice is enough. I’m not familiar with any legal obligation to provide data service, so I guess that if you need that, it’s up to you to negotiate SLAs or have multiple providers.
In the linked article the only check the IDF was still using on the target list provided by the AI was discarding any and all targets it selected who were women, as they don't believe Hamas would use them as fighters.
Oregon decriminalized simple possession by end users. You would still need to purchase the drugs from the exact illicit supply chain the DEA is profiling here, so it's no surprise it didn't solve the overdose crisis. Under legalization you could buy an exact dose from a licensed supplier.
I’m not sure legalization would change much: fentanyl is so popular as a street drug because it is so cheap. Providing a much more expensive alternative isn’t going to suck away demand from the illicit version
These are not intrinsically expensive chemicals. A small charity could give it away for free. I would wager dysfunctional drug addicts don't value their time too highly, and wouldn't be put out by having to talk to someone every day to get their fix. Meanwhile it's a great place to push interventions. It's obvious fundamentalist prohibition is straight up not working.
I don't believe what I read.
Giving away fentanyl for free?
You have a romantic view on drugs. In such, you either are really young (and still idealistic, which is good but lacking life's experiences) or you never drink more than a beer and don't really have contact to the addicted.
The aim should be to get them off this, so they stop doing EVERYthing just for getting the next high. The aim is not to even supply more of these highs to them.
You have to take it away and to help the people. Or they will take something away from you (just as it is meant in EVERYthing for the next high..)
Where did I say the goal was to "supply more of these highs" ?
You say "take it away" like there is a magic wand that hasn't been used, and just needs to be waved to make drugs disappear from existence. But rather this idea is actually just the widespread approach of prohibition, which has been tried for the past five decades, with its main result of causing great personal and societal harm.
Currently, we already have plenty of opiate addicted people seeking out their next high, and they have little problem getting it. If there is a problem getting it, it's basically a lack of money - which means it can be straightforwardly solved by stealing. Their dealer, in the best case, wants to keep them alive and addicted rather than ever pushing them to seek help. And every fix they get has a large chance of outright killing them due to lack of quality control and standards.
So no, I don't buy into this vague handwaving that the ongoing highly corrosive and grossly ineffective legal regime deserves credit for keeping the problem from being somehow worse. At this point we've already had five decades of trying fundamentalist prohibition, and it is squarely responsible for the current state of affairs.
I can understand you, but I'm thinking it doesn't have anything to do with prohibition. If it were so, then the addicted to opiates would be distributed evenly through All countries. It's not the case with, I'm from Germany, in Germany. We have drug addicts too, but it's not a problem here. You know why?
Because opiates are forbidden and you have to fear your freedom if you handle them with lack.
For example it's not possible to get them prescribed easily. If you got them prescribed, it's an act of getting it. We have the BTM law where everything is written down.
Instead, America's physicians prescribed that to easily in former times and still doing it (pain killers on oxy basis?). The drugs and addiction epidemic started much earlier. And now it's already full swinging.
It's not the problem of prohibition, it's the problem of way too easy to get access and hands onto. And you call it prohibition.. I name it regulation. There is a difference between these both two words. So, America should regulate it much more. Each world's country should regulate this the much the people can't by compounds or ready for usage stuff. This is the case for addictive drugs, which in my eyes includes alcohol too.
But, may be I'm wrong in here and I don't see the true "why"
But I'm thinking, I'm not wrong in here though.
So what you want basically is to open the market, to talk to people not to do it (so they educated enough to decide on what they want) and then hope that the abuse of drugs won't get more and even sink? And that with highly effective and addictive stuff? NO, H3LL!
You seem to have absolutely no experience with drugs. Absolutely No Experience with opiates. I have, I one got it in the hospital and I remember it as a wonderful time. I would like to repeat that experience, but I know, if I do , I might get into big trouble and am strong enough not to touch it. But if one would give me 1 pill. I would take it because it was high pleasure experience. There my drug addiction career would have started.
You talk about quality controls and standards. I'm talking about ban it completely, make everything unreachable for everyone. Make it highly regulated. That's the only way not to have people easy try it and get hooked on the feeling, like me. You can think what ever you want, but I'm happy that we're living on a democracy and laws are for each and every ;) and there are still enough people who so No, like me :) I do it out of experiences.
If you gave it away for free, how would the OD rate not go up? You will still have the street market if you are at least somewhat restrictive however; that is unless we start enforcing laws against dealers again, but that isn’t going to happen without any leverage over users.
At best what we can achieve is what Portugal achieved, which is mixed success that no one is really happy about.
> After years of economic crisis, Portugal decentralized its drug oversight operation in 2012. A funding drop from 76 million euros ($82.7 million) to 16 million euros ($17.4 million) forced Portugal’s main institution to outsource work previously done by the state to nonprofit groups, including the street teams that engage with people who use drugs.
"We had a great success. Then we defunded it and it quit working."--Cue shocked Pikachu face
There is always money for treatment, actually, just never enough money for an ever expanding problem. And it’s all locally allocated, while the problem is national, can Portland or even Oregon solve a problem that spans several states? Vancouver nearby (BC not WA) has similar problems, better funding (and more federal help as well), but it is still far from enough.
How would the OD rate go up? I'd say that most overdoses are caused by people not knowing exactly what they're taking. The pathological case being someone buying pills they expect to contain no opioids, but yet still ending up being cut with fentanyl because it's cheap to smuggle and provides a stand-in psychoactive effect.
Also I don't see why there needs to be leverage over users to enforce laws against dealers. Does buying food need to be illegal in order for the government to regulate food safety? Of course those laws for dealers need to be sensible like only selling pills made with Good Manufacturing Practices and other quality control, otherwise we're right back to draconian prohibition.
There is dumb high school kid OD, the drug they think is safe is actually laced with too much fent. I assume you aren’t going to let these kids buy from legit sources anyways, so I’m not sure how they are avoiding buying from the homeless encampment next to their city bus stop (something that actually happened here in Seattle). Then there are people that don’t care, and do as much drugs as they can get their hands on, the people who are in crisis all the time.
If you can’t go after the users, you have to find some other way to get to the dealers. Portugal has that problem, since they can’t go after use, the police aren’t finding an effective way to go after dealers either.
How many high school kids buy alcohol and cigarettes from homeless encampments? And when they do, how much of that is dodgy hand-crafted mixtures of unknown provenance, versus sealed packages directly from the regulated supply chain?
One thing to be aware is that for older CPUs, the limiting factor is often compatible motherboards. The original ones are more likely to have died than CPUs from the same generation, and new ones aren't being made.
I was thinking that an old motherboard may require a BIOS update for a relatively newer, but socket compatible CPU. I remember having to ebay in a random CPU just to able to turn on a motherboard to update the BIOS for the better CPU I bought earlier.
It's pretty clear if you read the article, and even more explicit in the news paper articles in her photos. She was a single mother with zero family support. She couldn't just work odd or long hours (and was forced to leave her existing better paid job) because there was nobody to care for her young child.
The article didn't say that - are you relying on another source of information?
She mentions her family, but implies she wants to remain independent:
Sometimes I just want to run back home and live with my parents, at the age of 32, and beg them to take care of me. I’ll be very quiet. I can cook, and I promise not to say f*ck in front of the children, Mum. I won’t fold the corners down on your books, Dad.
Without more info, hard to say how her family did or didn't help.
"My brother was in the RAF last time we spoke, a couple of Christmases ago, when he described Iain Duncan Smith as the best thing to happen to this country and told me I had chosen to have a baby outside of marriage so deserved everything I got. It’s fair to describe us as ‘estranged’ these days."
That's one member of the family not being supportive. Doesn't equate to zero support from the whole family. The paragraph quoted above seems to imply that going back to her parents was an option.
Checking the article again it might have been one, but not one she was capable of taking at the time.
"Back – or forward – to 2012, and as my world shrank into a tiny flat, as friends fell away and I started to isolate myself from my family in shame and self-loathing and depression"
When she got pregnant she tried to hide it from her family (parents in particular) because she felt shame and feared the kid would be taken away.
Her parents fostered lots of kids and so she saw lots of kids going into the system and didn’t want that for hers. I disagree that would have happened, but understand how from her life experiences she may have thought that.
Similarly, once her parents did find out, they bought her lots of food to help her during the pregnancy as during that time she was very underweight.
She also shares parenting her sons father.
Again, all this is based on info from the Guardian article.
I lived in the UK during the period of her rise to fame and honestly I don’t remember her in the news. But that bit about it costing £3300/month to run her home (rent + services + food etc) seems rather high. You could easily get a 2 bed in London for under £2000/month plus expenses, so seems rather odd to be living in such an expensive area outside of London yet still cry poverty and woe-is-me.
It feels like a lot of it is due to her mental health - not just the ADHD, but general insecurities, and also alcoholism (drinks as both a symptom and cause).
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