- went back to the US several time after traveling to the DPRK despite being warned not to by the US state department
- had several consensual interviews with FBI agents
- consented to a search of his phone
It's hard to read this and not think that he brought this upon himself. If you really want to do what he did, get a lawyer, don't travel back to the US, don't speak to law enforcement.
Entrapment by what, reverse psychology? He didn’t walk into a sting set up by FBI agents; he went to a real conference in the real North Korea despite official warnings not to do so.
I'd imagine in three ways: (1) the host country refuses to admit you (2) the host country stamps your passport and you're totally SOL at the border on your way back in, or commit some sort of fraud if they ask you where you went and you don't answer truthfully which brings us to (3) exactly like this haha.
There host country could just admit you and not stamp your passport. I've been on several cruises and had to go out of my way to get my passport stamps. Honestly they seemed annoyed I even wanted the stamp.
Yeah the Israelis are known for doing this as many middle-eastern countries refuse to admit foreigners with Israeli stamps in their passports. If you ask, they'll stamp a slip of paper instead.
I think this is the norm for some of the more “controversial” countries. I went to Cuba (with permission from the State Department) before Obama eased sanctions and I was quite disappointed that they didn’t stamp my passport. Instead I got a little slip of paper that was about the size of a page in my passport. It was my understanding that the Cuban government had designed the visa system this way on purpose to allow Americans to more easily skirt the sanctions.
And once I got past border patrol and saw all of the items coming out with the luggage (car parts, toilet seats, televisions, a grill, etc.) it was clear that this system allowed the wealthier families to avoid most of the inconveniences of the US embargo.
It's even worse. That slide compares number of computer elements vs. number of cells in human brain. The graph starts at 1x the amount (CPU == brain), and ends 10^60x the amount.
You are forgetting that atoms mean nothing. It's about the hamiltonian, action, energy. There is no reason that you cannot use a shit ton of photons in flux with mirrored logic gates. You can pretty much create as many low frequency bosons you want... Remember relay lines as RAM? Electrons were used. Expensive compared to a lower energy particle like a photon. Photon relay lines :-)
How is the USD worth anything after some many bank robberies?
Bitcoin itself worked as expected, and the fact that no one can easily reverse transactions is one of the features described in the original whitepaper:
"Transactions that are computationally impractical to reverse would protect sellers from fraud, and routine escrow mechanisms could easily be implemented to protect buyers"
They're not really insured: the exchange has claimed they have a self insurance fund (they call it 'SAFU') that they will draw on to make their customers whole. We'll see if that happens.
> What is it giving you that's worth the enormous montain of precaution that you need to take to secure yourself?
It's giving you precisely the opportunity the Binance hackers seized: doing transactions that no one else wants done. You don't have to ask permission nor trust anyone but Bitcoin itself.
It's funny that the USDC website doesn't list the main use of stablecoins (especially Tether) these days: arbitrage.
When moving fiat between two exchanges can take days and flag your accounts for suspicious activity, moving the same value using Tether is much much faster (~30 mins to 1 hour).
If one observes how does USDT flows, you'll find that it flows between the 3 or 4 major exchanges that use it, with almost no use elsewhere: no major wallets, no merchant acceptance, etc..
Google has 88k employees and had a $32B revenue last quarter. Let's assume 25% of employees are R&D, each paid $250k/y: Google would spend $5.5B a year on R&D, or 4.2% of revenues ; not quite a "large portion of their capital".
Comparing to revenue doesn't make much sense. If you look at profit margins they could easily be spending more than all of their profit on R&D.
Also, that's a rather low estimate for average compensation for devs at Google. If, as you mentioned elsewhere, the 25% number is a purposeful overestimate, then combining it with an underestimate of compensation means that your total number is murky; it could easily be a drastic over- or under-estimate.
That said, 25% is also an underestimate - in 2016 Google reported that ~38% of full-time employees were in R&D. So it sounds like you think you're overestimating how much they spend on R&D, but in fact you're way underestimating it.
Comparing costs with revenues is right. Profit already accounts for costs, and can be razor thin in very large companies with lots of costs - a comparison of costs with profit in such a company would be highly misleading.
I think you're right that comparing to profit isn't right, but I still contend that comparing to revenue isn't either. What I meant is looking at per-unit profit margins (i.e. excluding things like R&D) - if just producing whatever they're selling costs 99% of revenue generated from it, then 5% of revenue on R&D looks pretty high - they're drawing on capital to do so. If, on the other hand, those costs are only 5%, then they're stashing away an enormous portion of revenue despite R&D and thus they're R&D spend looks pretty low.
It's arguably Machiavellian: "Hey you, minimum-wage security guard, you know all these engineers you greet at the gate? Each one of them is making x5 your salary! Capitalistic pigs, eh?"
(But let's not talk about the executives you never see, coming in through private entrances straight from their private landing strips and making x1,000 your salary.)
25% of people are researchers at Google? Are you saying that's what you think it is at the moment or hypothetically? Research is a tiny tiny proportion of Google's work.
"R&D" is what SWEs do. If you're developing anything new, such as a new software system, then you are doing R&D by definition.
"Production" is something like building the same factory that was built thousands of times before, to fabricate the same widgets that were fully designed by an R&D team.
The actual top researchers at a place like Google would be making way more than $250k.
Bitcoin gives the opportunity to answer those questions contrarily to the complex and somewhat opaque equities ownership rules.