Swift on Security, one of my favorite "Twitter accounts", wrote up their life story:

It's a deeply personal and reflective one. A thing I would like to underline: in between long stretches of showing up, there are occasionally leveraged choices.

https://x.com/SwiftOnSecurity/status/1777505144709550302

Sometimes, choices are made by people who have grossly insufficient ability to understand the tradeoffs presented or even that there is a choice to be made at all.

One of best acts of charity is noticing if you observe that and intervening to extent possible.

This is, FWIW, a fairly complicated area where the IRS’s position is “We won’t make trouble for small business owners unless you really go out of your way to turn your credit card into a business into itself.”

https://twitter.com/thesamparr/status/1778794352862515234

What many, many small business owners do is spend $50k on the business’ card and extract $1k of value (flights, cash back, whatever) for themselves personally without that value being taxed.

The IRS has a technical objection to this but doesn’t really care.

If you’re looking for an absolutely wild fraud story:



The details about horses/Hermes scarves/etc are salacious but the details about organizational design are the real scandal.politico.com/news/magazine/… The theft was discovered when the criminal got so distracted enjoying their ill-gotten gains that a non-conspirator needed to fill in for her and see the account statements, *this being the first time a non-conspirator had direct possession of the account statements in decades.*

This is the paradigmatic example of why we have securities laws: It’s usually a dentist not a pharmacist* but “Highly intelligent well-respected member of the community gets taken advantage of and loses life savings or more” can only happen so many thousands of times before guardrails get put in.

* Read this as a joke not a true statement

Me: Honey could you pick up my prescription for me.
Ruriko: Sure. Do you have it?
Me: *puzzles* Oh you mean do I have it on paper? No, it gets electronically transmitted to pharmacy.
Ruriko: Then how will they know I am authorized to pick it up.
Me: I asked last time I was in. Ruriko: Do they ask for proof of marriage?
Me: No.
Ruriko: Good because we aren’t even licensed in this country.
Me: I think they intend to allow a much larger range of people than spouses to pick up prescriptions.
Ruriko: You are about to terrify me.
Me: They will ask you for…

Apparently my trivial use of crypto (mostly to quiet my friends saying “You cannot understand it unless you have actually used it”) resulted in me getting an airdrop.

I’m a bit boggled by what I perceive as the incentive design here. PM: An airdrop uses legal-tells-me-I-can’t-call-it-equity to incentivize the behavior we want to see in the world.
Me: I get this concept.
PM: So projects used to just spray and pray with airdrops, but that ends up being wasteful.
Me: Yes giving your equity to entire world does.

I concur.

Also the rule book is much more interesting than anyone thinks it is. It’s Dungeons and Dragons with slightly different flavor text.

If you don’t like the flavor text, substitute your own. (Probably only against the rules a tiny portion of the time.)

https://twitter.com/nearcyan/status/1770005990479716488

I promise you you can tell interesting stories about Japanese regional bank wire transfer AML compliance, or tax procedure for small businesses, or the manifest failures of American banks to keep up with Regulation E compliance vis Zelle instant value transfers.

The amount of (plainly illegal) shenanigans between FTX/Alameda and select banking partners discovered by the lawyers for a civil suit subjects there will be an absolute mountain found by the independent examiner.

storage.courtlistener.com/recap/gov.usco… *suggests

As is typical, the main avenue for developing low-hanging-fruit evidence has been numerous violations of Stringer Bell’s dictum on keeping notes on a criminal conspiracy.

People don't usually associate the U.S. with being consumer-friendly with respect to regulation.

I express arbitrarily high confidence that this plumber would have gotten full restitution in the U.S., because Regulation E *really does work.*

https://twitter.com/newmoneyreview/status/1768650178473435532

"Bold of you to assume banks follow the law."

I spent years of hobby time writing letters to banks on behalf of people who had difficulty writing letters to banks. It worked much more than most people expect, precisely because they really do* follow the law.

*It's complicated.

There’s a particular kind of signature for issues in complex systems which people often find particularly enraging, where everyone makes locally reasonable decisions, the system as a whole fails, and (people find this part most enraging) no one admits fault. I have somewhat nuanced thoughts here but as an anecdote:

I wanted to take a sick child to see a doctor on Saturday for what seemed like an unusually severe but routine childhood illness.

There is an immediate care facility blocks from our home. So we went to it.

@kendrictonn I'd make independent betting markets on subclaims like "lawyers on standby" here but directionally agree.

There is a huuuuuuuge component here which is class and a component which is degrees of active complicity. When that waveform collapses, people get very, very upset. @kendrictonn It isn't conspiratorial to observe that e.g. the state can deterministically ruin the lives of criminals, that there is a playbook to do this (it involves corkboard), that participants do not expect this playbook to be brought to bear, that we've seen this movie before, and...

Please note that this is extremely, extremely true, and if you follow that to its logical conclusion, certain blogs are on the org chart of e.g. the U.S. in the same haha but absolutely serious way the NYT editorial page is.

https://twitter.com/gjmcgowan/status/1765344219202191446

I will also add that there are literally tens of thousands of people whose job is to read the newspaper then repeat what it said. This is a core intelligence gathering capability. You earn some brownie points in some circles for calling it OSINT. (“Open source intelligence”)

I have no particular reason to believe or doubt the IQ ranking here, but if I can highlight something: most people who care deeply about user interactions with software systems have not lived life constantly interacting with people 20 points of IQ above them.

https://twitter.com/tsarnick/status/1765292098117681233

There exist many people relevant to many systems who have 80 IQ. Many find those systems very hard to deal with.

It, ahem, matters very much whether systems choose to have those individuals interact with a human or an AI for various tasks, matters how systems present that fact…

This is a beautiful example of an engineering decision with a point of view behind it, a UX decision which is historical controversial for no reason, and how both of those decisions are actually also great marketing.

https://twitter.com/hitorilabs/status/1764133052828065888

I think it is this Obsidian (which does per docs support vim mode):

obsidian.md

Pro-tip for cryptocurrency criminals attempting to evade justice: Do not, under any circumstances, attempt to excuse your faked passport by asking the arresting government to contact the government which didn't issue the faked passport.

No one will be amused at what happens. "Sounds like that happened to someone."

Yeah seems like Do Kwon got convicted in Montenegro for it.

c.f. Exhibit 3 beginning on page 33 in the PDF.

document.epiq11.com/document/getdo…

Sometimes people not steeped in a subject want a list of representative incidents for whatever purpose. This is tough to Google for unless someone has already produced a list. People not steeped in subject often not familiar with literature to navigate it blind.

And so: 1) Ask ChatGPT for incident that would make a hypothetical list.
2) Google the particulars; verify using human judgement.
3) Ask for incidents like the first incident.

I find it less useful to ask for a list of incidents because ChatGPT sometimes explicitly gives wrong answers.

People have said “This didn’t happen” and given it is in the Atlantic I will bet you there is at least one other person who very definitely worked at the NYT and who knows how the game is played who confirmed to the Atlantic this happened.

https://twitter.com/hashtaggriswold/status/1762122916508860680

Of all the companies in the world the one company that high status media organizations will absolutely not invent a meeting for is the NYT, and they have very easy access to confirmatory evidence backed by “Burn me and your career; over have a nice day.”

Scaled crime is a result of a business process and it’s a very useful lens to understand how that business functions for the purpose of interdicting it.

https://twitter.com/caseysoftware/status/1761592561007763793

This often causes problems for Seeing like a State reasons. The state does not perceive crime to be an output of a business. It can, with immense effort, describe it in that fashion, but it will default to understanding it in concepts it understands like perpetrators/cases/etc.

At Ruriko’s urging, I got one of the kids a probiotic because they threw up yesterday. I had mild culture shock that pharmacies sell pills which are described on the box as repairing damage to the immune system caused by antibiotics. But *shrug.* You are allowed to sell magic to people who believe in magic, maybe?

Anyhow, my other child said “Daddy brought home medicine” and since I did not I said “I brought home something for the stomachache.” (This conversation was in Japanese.)

My other child, who is sharp, said:

The answers to all of these questions, happily provided by people old enough to remember them, are a good demonstration that the fairly recent past was actually radically worse than the present.

https://twitter.com/meghaverma_art/status/1758702149117116454

People sometimes lament the decline of e.g. travel agents, likely because they have a distinct memory of the pleasant young lady and forgot about the fee charged or hour spent on logistics for something which now takes a non-specialist less than five minutes from home.

Ruriko orders Japanese-manufactured mirin (cooking wine) from Amazon. A different bottle arrives from a Chinese manufacturer, labeled as the originally searched manufacturer.

Ruriko: Amazon is a fraud!
Me: Oh that’s probably a third party seller.
Ruriko: Fraud!
Me: Well honey… Me: … You will certainly get your money back when you apprise them of this
Ruriko: I can’t figure out how.
Me: Hand me the app.

*tries the usual way*

Amazon: This item is ineligible for refunds.
Ruriko: Fraud!
Me: Oh that isn’t their final answer.
Ruriko: Clearly it must be!