The pattern is "take a place name and change the last word to America" (Gulf of America, Lake America, New America)
The fact that applying that to produce "South America" which is a real place--and a continent at that--precisely amplifies the absurdity
I have to say, though: inverting the trope of "you can't make people laugh at a joke by explaining why it's funny" by trying to stop people from laughing at a joke by explaining why it isn't funny is a truly Kaufman-esque bit of comedy
> I've had banks straight out ask me, on the phone, what a wire transfer that I executed via their online system was for
Wire transfers are also a common source of fraud; it's common for banks to ask about them so their customers don't unwittingly send their money into a black hole
That might make sense if the bank wasn't also acting as an agent for the government, with potentially severe, life-changing consequences if they hear something they don't like.
If the question was purely for my protection, then I could simply answer "I don't wish to share that information."
But I can't actually answer like that, because it's too risky.
There's also no option to opt out of such investigations. I didn't request the bank to protect me from my own actions. When there's a credit card transaction that they suspect is fraudulent, they ask "did you authorize that transaction?" That's fine, and that's all they need to know. Asking me who I'm paying and why, with implied duress, is a completely unwarranted violation of my privacy.
There's also a serious issue with an assumption of guilt in these cases. Look at the case of Donald Trump right now, suing Capital One because they closed over 300 Trump business accounts due to suspected money laundering. In Trump's case, I can well believe that there was some kind of corruption, money laundering, or other criminal activity going on. The man is a documented criminal. But the bank is making a decision to penalize someone, potentially severely, without any meaningful due process. Guilty until proven innocent. For someone without the resources Trump has to challenge something like that, what chance do they have of getting a fair outcome?
This is all completely unacceptable in a supposedly civilized society, and you should not be defending it.
> If the question was purely for my protection, then I could simply answer "I don't wish to share that information."
Fraudsters would tell you to answer the question by saying "I don't wish to share that information." but the bank would still be on the hook for paying you back from the fraudster.
In a sane society, though, you could say "I'm buying wholesale drugs to distribute on the street" and then bank wouldn't care.
> Fraudsters would tell you to answer the question by saying "I don't wish to share that information."
Fraudsters breathe air, therefore we should criminalize breathing air? You need to think just a teensy bit harder about what you’re saying.
> the bank would still be on the hook for paying you back from the fraudster.
You’d need to explain that. If I send a wire transfer, and I tell the bank that I chose to send it voluntarily if they ask, how would they be on the hook?
You’re trying to use an imaginary and unrealistic situation to justify a dystopian surveillance state. Are you Peter Thiel perhaps?
Firstly, you seem to be conflating "know your customer"/anti-money-laundering stuff with "please explain why you're wiring this money because we don't want you to get scammed"
But let's assume you're 99th percentile and won't get scammed or will own up to it and eat the loss (talk is usually cheap and plentiful on that point). I'm not sure how often you interact with the general public but suffice it to say that the "expected value" of banks asking why their clients are performing an unusual and largely irrevocable transaction (in contrast to paying a merchant with a credit card) is probably pretty good, just like a cashier asking why you're spending hundreds on Apple gift cards. But also you're assuming that it's always going to be "you" that they are asking: if your account was compromised (and everyone thinks they're too smart to be tricked), should it be easy for someone to just wire all the money out, aaaaaand it's gone?
That's separate from KYC/AML, which I think is a trickier issue. I will say this though, if a bank showed me the door and I had to take my money elsewhere, that would be less problematic than one of the tech giants capriciously deciding to close my account, which I think illustrates the larger issue about a lack of recourse for being arbitrarily locked out of commerce with private businesses in disruptive ways. Itself a cousin of terms of service that force you to give up rights, and can be changed at any time
As an aside, I don't think you need to make sneering personal attacks to make your points
> Firstly, you seem to be conflating "know your customer"/anti-money-laundering stuff with "please explain why you're wiring this money because we don't want you to get scammed"
Do you have any way to back that up? Because the question about what the transfer is for is pretty clearly an AML question.
> should it be easy for someone to just wire all the money out, aaaaaand it's gone?
Yes, you have to resort to extreme cases to try to support your point. That wasn't what I was talking about.
> I will say this though, if a bank showed me the door and I had to take my money elsewhere, that would be less problematic
> As an aside, I don't think you need to make sneering personal attacks to make your points
You're defending the actions of a reprehensible and despicable regime with ridiculously simplistic “think of the children” style arguments that doesn’t even attempt to address the points I’ve raised. You didn't even respond about the guilty until proven innocent point. Perhaps you're just blitheringly ignorant and lack the cognitive capacity to recognize that, but from where I stand you deserve far worse than I've given.
You're arguing US imperialism is the best interest for the whole world. It was definitely after WW2 considering the alternative but the only way to keep the US honest is a little friendly competition.
You may be assuming the author of the comment you’re replying to believes that what is in the best interest of the US is also in the best interest of Europe and the world.
there are many vulns that are sitting idle waiting to be chained like this. plus in some cases adjacent bugs can be found once you find a bug like this.
Britain’s Black Arrow could, but it launched from a RAF base in Australia. Definitely not continental Europe, but part of Europe if you consider it from the Eurovision point of view.
A real shame Britain abandoned their own research.
From a sovereignty perspective, does a launch from continental Europe actually matter when Arianespace/CNES/ESA has been launching from France for decades?
But French Guiana is a geographically distant ex-colony, so there will always be a higher probability of future inaccessibility. Same applies to New Caledonia, Martinique, etc.
Although you're right about the history of French Guiana, using that term to put on the same level as New Caledonia is nonsense. (Same goes for Martinique.)
I wasn’t talking about the historical aspect. Same applies = the same risk also exists due to geopolitics and distance. Heck, didn’t New Caledonia see a wave of protests that were crushed in the past year or two?
> Heck, didn’t New Caledonia see a wave of protests that were crushed in the past year or two?
Yes, that's why the risk is NOT the same between French Guiana and New Caledonia. Both of them are oversea territories far from the mainland with a colonial past, but their current relationship with the mainland is very different.
Around a quarter of the population of New Caledonia has been calling for independence for decades at this point, with 3 referendum organised during the last 10 years to resolve this issue. Only half of the population was able to vote to the referendums (and some local elections, like Congress of NC), due to local rules than are about to change–this, incidentally, is the cause of the protests you are talking about. On the geopolitical side of things, the independentists are probably propped up by Azerbaijan (https://www.courrierinternational.com/article/geopolitique-n...) and maybe China (https://www.lefigaro.fr/international/ambitions-geostrategiq...).
None of this holds for French Guiana. The risk between these territories is not the same. At all. Putting them on the same level by reducing them to their status as former colonies is nonsense.
Thanks for explaining. But I am not sure how this contradicts my point?
Sure, placing launch infrastructure in French Guiana is probably less risky than setting up shop in New Caledonia. Clearly, the risk profile is not the same for all of Overseas France.
My point is that if the decision is between mainland and Overseas France, the latter introduces elevated risk in the long term in general. French Guiana could be fine today, but it is not impossible that the next few years could see the rise of a populist pro-independence movement that would eventually impact launch infrastructure (similar to how it did for the USSR).
I do not think so, but anyway, it is definitely not a proof that we are further decoupling ourselves from the US, which is the claim made in the root comment. France has launched rockets from France for decades. Being an ocean away does not make Kourou reliant on the US.
I think the opposite because in this specific case we have the US which has the world's strongest navy, and the strongest navy by far in the Atlantic.
My opinion is that there is an implied reliance on the US "allowing" Europe to ship the rockets to Kourou and launch them there.
If our relations ever completely sour, the US might, for example, take over the shipping vessels going to Kourou, kinda like Europe takes over Russian shadow fleet vessels.
Now all of a sudden Europe has no means of launching rockets, except now it can launch to polar orbits. It might seem a stretch, but there is a non-zero chance that could happen, therefore it is better to have an alternative.
“Vulnerable to the US” can mean so many things that it practically loses all meaning. Even with a launchpad in continental Europe, they have many ways to interfere with this project, from disrupting the supply chain to carpet bombing the launch site.
A ship crossing the ocean is much more vulnerable than a launch site with sophisticated air defences.
The US can also decide to “free” and “bring democracy” to the French Guiana because the rich oil deposits of its continental shelf won’t free themselves.
The point is that a slow ship crossing the ocean with hard to replace is very vulnerable in transit.
The sovereignty perspective here is the perspective of the sovereignty of the states that make up Europe not the sovereignty of the entity of the EU/Europe.
Though not every sovereign state has an army, see Iceland, Costa Rica, theoretically Japan, etc.
Well, there was Goddard, Korolev & quite a few others. But it could indeed have taken longer if the military implications were not clearly demonstrated by Von Braun.
Still, an interesting possibility of a fully civilian space program from the start & how it would look like & how it would be different.
Not only the military aspect. His staff literally were absorbed into the Russian sand US space programs. Von Braun himself famously designed the Saturn V.
>His staff literally were absorbed into the Russian sand US space programs.
Not really in case of the USSR. German group in Russia was isolated and Korolev didn't like competition. Soviet space program started by replicating German rocket, but once all production chains were created, it was off on its own course.
I highly recommend English translation of memoirs of Boris Chertok[0] to anyone interested in the history of Soviet space program.
That was just because the Russian's didn't trust "their" Germans as much as the Americans trusted "theirs". Operation Osoaviakhim was mostly about knowledge extraction, not about cooperation. The other difference was that the "Russian Germans" didn't go to Russia on their own will (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Operation_Osoaviakhim).
Once the knowledge was "extracted" the Germans were allowed to return though (good thing Stalin was already dead at that time).
Former Junkers engineer Brunolf Baade then went on to build the first and only German jet airliner for East Germany - which then of course was cancelled as soon as it was ready to enter production: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Baade_152).
Americans didn't trust either. But then Sputnik happened and Americans only had oopsnik[0], so they turned to neglected Redstone made by von Braun[1][2]
> Have there been other rocket launches from continental Europe?
Yes. A Spanish private company launched the Miura 1 from Huelva (South of Spain) in 2023.
In any case it was programmed to reach only 46 Km high in the first attempt, and suffered damages after landing in the ocean at the expected coordinates.
It seems that a loan to finish its successor, the reusable rocket Miura 5, were granted in April of this year and that its first test flight is expected for the end of 2026, so Germany is not the only European country trying this.
There’s a reason I use Firefox (Gecko). Also, Ladybird—another completely different web engine—is really promising. I spent five hours building it from source, having it take about 8 gigabytes of space, and it perfectly renders my own webpages and blogs.
I have a feeling someone’s going to make an open source browser using Ladybird’s engine before Ladybird has official binaries.
The reason why I support Gecko and Ladybird’s engine is because I am opposed to monoculture, however. Even if Gecko (Firefox) is less secure than Chromium (Chrome, Edge, etc.), by not having a monoculture, a Chrome exploit will only take down the subset of people using the Chromium ecosystem, and not affect Gecko users. Alas, most people are in the Chromium ecosystem right now so that means malicious hackers only need to target one codebase.
It’s the same reason I wrote MaraDNS back in 2001—back then, there was only one open source DNS server[1,2] so I wrote another one.[3]
[1] Djbdns was around back then but wasn’t open source, which limited its adoption.
[2] MaraDNS was and is optimized for running at most a few dozen domains on a system running a bunch of other services, where one does not want the DNS server causing security problems for the server, and where the DNS server needs to be lightweight as possible.
This! Anything unproven makes the flight certification process longer. They already have to get their electric side certified, might as well make the backup generator as easily certified as possible.
As an aside, reminder to consider keeping your status page on a separate domain lest the problem be e.g. with DNS. You can see cloudflare does this (and we all know github does too as they give us frequent reasons to check it)
I think young exposure to real computers (where you create, and have to figure things out; not consumption machines) provides access to a level of fluency that is otherwise difficult or impossible to achieve, just like many other skills (language, music...)
I'm pretty sure we ran these experiments in France in the late 80s/early 90s, it was pretty clear that exposure to real computers was useless in elementary school, and even in middle school technology teachers weren't a big fans of teaching computer skills before 14 (basically around the same time as they taught tin soldering).
I think that can be done without having them sit in front of a computer or even really using a computer, though. Lots of kids have stories about wandering over to a college campus when they were in middle school, wandering into a room with the keypunch machines, and learning about computers that way. Very few of those kids directly used a computer, but they learned it anyway.
Colleges with key punches? Probably pretty close to zero.
My point was more that, I think it's incorrect to assert that it's necessary for kids to directly use a computer in order to effectively learn about them. We have tons of concrete evidence of kids learning to be excellent at programming and understanding computers without directly using one. It happened with the kids I described.
https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html#:~:text=Ple...
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