Re: Business partner porn...
"I later found links to an organisation who were *helping* him to overcome his addiction"
A helping hand, so to speak?
1798 publicly visible posts • joined 26 Apr 2019
I remember a similar sale for another big multinational that went bang at around the same time. Everyone was hoping to pick up bits of electronic kit on the cheap, and of course bid each other through the roof. No-one had any interest in the very nice c-suite furniture that was up for grabs, though, and it sold (mostly to me) at prices that weren't even close to a whole penny in the £ - in most cases I paid more for the fees to bring stuff down to the loading dock. I ended up hiring a Luton box to collect my swag, selling most of it off for about 100x what I paid, and keeping a few particularly nice pieces for myself.
Only one company here "improperly recognized [the payment] as revenue". It is unclear from the justice dept's statement whether the other party was the whistleblower, or whether someone there was happy to enable Kubient's fraud, but did not do the same thing at the other end.
I would note that if the other party is indeed Zeta, that is a much bigger company with much more scope for someone relatively low down the food chain to do something the company did not approve of. A plausible explanation for everything you mention is that someone tried to boost their department's revenues via this circular fraud, but failed to get it past Zeta's accountants, who excluded it from the accounts and notified the SEC of the shenanigans. Alternatively, someone tried to help out a crony at Kubient, never tried to include the transaction in the accounts, but it still came to light and Zeta informed the SEC. Explanations along those lines are far more plausible than that there is a large-scale fraud at Zeta the authorities are ignoring.
You should try going to a supermarket where they don't expect most of their customers to shoplift, and so let you scan your stuff as you walk around. Infinitely preferable to queuing up at the till behind some oldie who questions every scanned item, and then gets surprised at the end when they're asked to pay.
Because that isn't the end with the security. The payment processor will notice the suspicious transactions and block pay-outs. Even with less obviously suspicious transactions, it's unlikely you'd be able to get enough to be worthwhile, there's a fairly lengthy delay before pay-out which would give people a chance to notice they've been charged (at which point, multiple complaints of fraud will result in the whole account being blocked until it's resolved), and this all has to be done having given the payment processor some very good proof of ID.
So, basically, if you're ever in a position to do it and get away with the money - say, having stolen a terminal and the account details for a legit business - you'd be in a position to do some much more lucrative stuff without even needing the card terminal.
One of the few really valuable lessons I learnt from working for idiots is that you don't have to be good at running a small business to have a successful small business: you just have to be good enough at bringing in new clients faster than you lose old ones. The key skill is sales.
I was once tasked with writing idiot-proof documentation for new starters at a big 3 accountancy firm to follow to set up their accounts with a well known provider of accountancy training. One of my co-workers had brought her ~6 year old son into the office that day, and he was sitting quietly playing with crayons, so I borrowed him to test the how-to. Some of the users were still unable to follow the instructions, so the training provider complained to my manager, who asked me about whether the instructions were tested, and I said 'come on, a 6 year old could follow them'. A bit later, I got to say 'no, literally a six year old followed them successfully'.
I was not allowed to suggest to the ultimate client that this would be useful in winnowing out unsuitable applicants.
Absolutely cuckoo. It basically put an end to the fake-contractor scams. No-one in their right mind insists on going to court (or tribunal) over what they know to be a scam, so all the chancers and liars and tax evaders simply stopped, rather than fight. There were, as before IR35's introduction, a handful of borderline cases requiring adjudication.
I think you've misunderstood my comment - which is ironic, given the definition I presented of 'correct English' - if you think I said countable/uncountable nouns don't exist. I said that the distinction between fewer and less is not countable v uncountable. And that the distinction is language-elitist nonsense, which I'll stand by unless anyone can present an example of somewhere ambiguity would be introduced by using one instead of the other.
Incidentally, you aren't wrong about billions. When I was a kid there were still plenty of older books around which said it was 10^12. But it was already being superseded by the common-sense international standard version.
Countable/uncountable is definitely wrong. Plural/singular at least makes some sense.
But...
English only has one rule: your usage is correct if it leads the people you are attempting to communicate with to understand what you intended them to understand. Fewer/less is a difference manufactured by prescriptivists, which has become somewhat established over many, many years - mainly as a form of elitism. Can anyone suggest any example(s) where using one word or the other actually makes something ambiguous or otherwise hard to understand?
Cuckoo!
Any information like that will be worked out on the basis of the observations that can be made and what we know about physics. It'll have been written up and published so it can be checked by everyone else working in the field.
You could have just googled it to find out how they worked out the wind speed, but no, better pull that tinfoilhat on tight.
https://science.nasa.gov/universe/exoplanets/5400mph-winds-discovered-hurtling-around-planet-outside-solar-system/
"try taking an infrared measurement off of a speck of dust drifting in front of a raging fire, from a mile away."
Without an atmosphere in the way, that's a technical challenge, but not impossible at all. With, say, 10,000x magnification*, that's like taking a picture of something 10x the size of a dust particle (so, say, 0.1-1mm across), from 5 feet away. Obviously, with an infrared filter on the camera, a picture _is_ a temperature measurement, so all you need to do is then look how bright those pixels are on your image.
[*This is not actually how space telescopes work. But it's good enough for the purposes of debunking that nonsense.]
On the contrary, I have read the reports, and you won't find any respectable source saying anything else.
The simple fact is there were many MCAS incidents for every one that led to a crash. The linking factor between the crashes was that the pilots were inexperienced and overworked. Experienced pilots managed to deal with MCAS problems even without any specific training. Those are the actual facts here.
Boeing didn't 'game the regulatory system', though people clearly fucked up the implementation. The idea was sound: there should be (and were) fewer incidents with a plane that flies like an old one than there would be when pilots have to learn and qualify on a whole new plane.
It should be noted that the stuff Boeing is being fined for had no impact on the crashes. Those were down to inexperienced, overworked pilots at corner-cutting regional airlines in parts of the world with a non-Western approach to safety standards. None of the other MCAS incidents led to crashes. Unfortunately in all the Boeing-bashing, that is being overlooked, and it's by far the bigger safety issue here. There have been several more crashes (of all kinds of planes) since due to the same practices.
Yes, and still better than Le Pen is. I'll take the people who won't admit to themselves that they're Nazis over the people who lie about what they are to others, because at least the ones lying to themselves accept that it's vile - so if, maybe through some method reminiscent of Clockwork Orange, you could get them to understand what it is they actually believe, they might stop. But, like I said, it's 'choose your favourite from the Bristol Stool Scale' stuff.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bristol_stool_scale
And yet, 'austerity' is still just Tory propaganda; money was spent that wasn't allocated to those areas. If you're calling for a bigger increase, be honest about it.
I have no problem saying more money should have been spent on things. I have a problem with 'austerity' bullshit. It was Tory propaganda, and Labour decided it was more beneficial to them to go along with the narrative than to challenge it; this is a tactic that has been empirically proven not to work. It's much better to dispute the narrative and attack the Tories for profligacy and waste, and/or to state clearly that NHS funding requires increased borrowing, if that's what you mean.
Of course Jewish people are just as capable of believing antisemitic things as non-Jews. It's pretty normal that in any oppressed group some of the members come to believe that the oppression is justified by the group's alleged misbehaviour.
"things have become so politicised that any criticism of the Israeli government gets the dog-whistle of antisemitism"
The idea that Jewish people make false allegations of antisemitism for political ends is itself an antisemitic conspiracy theory.
The reality is that some people perceive racism where there is none, but that much more commonly the victims of racism are better placed to spot it than those who are not involved. Speaking specifically about 'criticism of the Israeli government', it's sometimes not antisemitic per se, but usually comes from people who are antisemitic and have said many other antisemitic things; mostly, though, it's just plain old antisemitic. It's notable that despite Israel having a fucked-up government at the moment, most of the criticism purporting to be of it is not based on reality, but on Iranian propaganda.
Yes. I provided a link earlier to the actual facts. Whatever Paul Krugman says - there are two types of Krugman articles, the ones where he speaks about economics, and the ones where he tackles social issues as an amateur - the facts are that the UK spent more every year, not less, and it was the deficit spending he approved of.
There is of course an argument to be made that the UK should have spent even more, but calling not doing so 'austerity' is falling into the Tory propaganda trap.
Vanishingly few of the people pretending to be pro-Palestine have ever said anything that is actually about helping Palestinians. They are anti-Israel (and mostly, let's be honest, overtly antisemitic). Ironically moderate Zionists - those who believe in Israel's right to exist, and even military action against Hamas, but don't support the current government - are pretty much the only people who ever express any actual concern for Palestinians, or do anything to support them.
That doesn't sound like what I'd call 'small'! I've had a shock from mains wiring that was about like banging your funny bone, which seems more the kind of thing to lead idiots to think mains voltage can't really hurt you.
Then again, there are lots of idiots out there. I've seen someone trip a breaker - but fortunately not get hurt - working on a bathroom extractor fan, which, of course, has both switched and unswitched live, after turning off the light switch 'so there's no power to it'. I've also seen an electrician strip live wires with his teeth; he claimed that a good electrician can taste the difference between phases :)
Places like that _used_ to sell them. They are strongly discouraged in the UK by safety bodies, because UK sockets are safer without them. They're bendy enough to make it much easier to retract the shutters on L and N than any other way short of poking a screwdriver (or similar) into the earth.
"I genuinely think people fail to understand how dangerous mains electricity is because you cannot see or hear it unlike gas and water."
I think part of it is that lots of people - especially the kind of bodgers we're talking about here - have at some point experienced a small mains-voltage shock, and think that's as bad as it can get.