tardigrada

"Amazon insisted I report my missing package to the police". Although it was marked as ‘delivered’, it won’t believe it wasn’t.

Amazon, however, told me that without the report and crime number it couldn’t help. At a time when the police are under significant pressure, Amazon’s insistence on reporting missing packages is, at best, in bad taste and, at worst, contrary to consumer rights and protections.

In 2016, CEO and co-founder Matthew Prince told the BBC about the beginnings of Cloudflare.

Cloudflare's roots go back to 2004 when Mr Prince and Cloudflare co-founder Lee Holloway were working on a computer industry project they called Honey Pot.

The idea was that people with websites signed up for free, to install software which then tracked people who sent unsolicited emails.

Five years later Mr Prince was doing a Master of Business Administration (MBA) at Harvard Business School, and the project was far from his mind, when he got an unexpected phone call from the US Department of Homeland Security asking him about the information he had gathered on attacks.

Mr Prince recalls: "They said 'do you have any idea how valuable the data you have is? Is there any way you would sell us that data?'.

"I added up the cost of running it, multiplied it by ten, and said 'how about $20,000 (£15,000)?'.

"It felt like a lot of money. That cheque showed up so fast."

Mr Prince, who has a degree in computer science, adds: "I was telling the story to Michelle Zatlyn, one of my classmates, and she said, 'if they'll pay for it, other people will pay for it'."

And so the idea for Cloudflare was born, with Ms Zatlyn as its third co-founder.

That is a very sad story indeed. Mother told children to leave her so they could survive

The mother of the four young Colombian siblings who managed to survive for almost six weeks in the Amazon jungle clung to life for four days after their plane crashed before telling her children to leave her in the hope of improving their chances of being rescued.

They set an impossible standard for a technology

Maybe that's the case but it's not what the article says. Experts say that "the surge in Tesla crashes is troubling" and that "the number of fatalities compared to overall crashes was also a concern". And they are critical of Tesla as the company is obviously beta-testing a car on the highway without disclosing its data as others have already said.

I don't see someone setting impossible security standards, at least that's how I read the article. Tesla appears to value its profits more than the safety and lives of people.

A single chart about the wildfires in Canada - so far.

Even the Roman money -although it was issued by a central authority- was backed by gold, silver, bronze and other commodities, at least partially (inflationary debasement of coins became an important feature over the centuries).

But, yes, to a high degree this is hairsplitting, and you may agree that comparing currency systems of different historical epochs doesn't make sense as their economies and societies are too different for such a rough comparison.

What I say is that our current fiat currency system -the one we have since 1971- is unique in that it is largely created by banks themselves: The money volume created by the fractional reserve system is much larger than the volume printed by the central bank (~ ten times). This is unique in history to the best of my knowledge, l don't know of a similar example. And imo it is a huge part of the current financial problems we have been facing for some time, including the problems described in the linked article.

Fiat means decree, and fiat money is a currency that is decreed and backed by the government that issues it, meaning it is not backed by a commodity, such as gold or silver. This kind of currency has a short history as it arrived only in the 20th century (the only exemption were a few years in the 1860s in the US during the civil war, but that aside, fiat money was unknown in human history before 1913/14).

It has its name by the absence of this backing, but it has nothing to do with a threat to end one's life or a cage or something.

everyone will be better off when the banking systems collapse

I think no one would be better off if the banking systems collapse. We needed some reforms, including the fractional reserve system (I'd celebrate the comeback of the gold standard, for example), but no disaster, please.

giving power of currency to a very few people is bad for everyone.

Absolutely, I really couldn't agree more. In my humble opinion, however, it's not the power of currency to a very few people but rather the power of the only currency to a very few people which is bad.

This is why I'd say -once again- we need complementary currencies. Each of them will have its own drawbacks, but with a universe comprising fiat money and many alternatives at the local, national and maybe even global level for different use cases we'd be all better off imho.

"Have you any idea how much tyrants fear the people they oppress? All of them realize that, one day, amongst their many victims, there is sure to be one who rises against them and strikes back!"

He [Robert Kennedy Jr.] also criticized the inevitability of central bank digital currencies, or CBDCs, which he fears the U.S. government may weaponize for financial surveillance. He drew parallels to what happened to the 2022 Ottawa truckers, who had facial recognition technology deployed against them to log their identities.

"They had people going out looking at the license plates, facial recognition, and doing data mining on these people to find out who they were, and then shutting down their bank accounts, so they couldn’t pay their mortgages, they couldn’t pay their alimonies, they couldn’t pay for food for their families and children," he said. "If a government has that power, it can turn us all into slaves overnight."

"If they can get you out of your home cause you can’t pay your mortgage or your rent, and if they can starve you, most people are going to comply," he added.