#try focusing on a larger problem. like how these kinds of arguments are designed to be divisive for our community

[vonclosen]

sometimes you see really really stupid queer infighting and you’re just like wow. this is something that some really online people would do. grow up?

[beatriceeagle]

Gonna toss off a couple of Good Place thoughts that aren’t quite formed enough for a full blog post:

I liked the idea of what The Good Place did with Simone and Chidi in the most recent episode. Simone is a character that we, the audience, fundamentally sympathize with, presenting an argument that I think the writers felt was missing from the show’s moral argument: Why should you go out of your way to help bad people?

In particular, Simone isn’t trying to answer that question. She’s introducing it. She’s problematizing the entire foundation of the The Good Place, a show about how people can become better by reaching out to each other. Simone is saying, “Well, wait. If I’ve given this guy chance after chance after chance to treat me with respect, and he’s never done so, what reasonable ethical code would require me to risk my life for him?”

And The Good Place, to its credit, doesn’t argue her down or explain her away. It recognizes her perspective as valid, if irreconcilable with its own. That’s why she and Chidi leave things the way they do: “I respect your position.” “And I respect yours.”

This is a vital piece of perspective, if you’re going to go from having four basically good-hearted fuck-ups gel as a team to trying to redeem The Face of Trump’s America. But there are two problems that keep this plot turn from really functioning effectively.

First, it’s just not set up very well. Simone’s ethical perspective has gotten exactly one episode of air time. She spent the first two episodes of the season in a solipsistic haze, then she was backgrounded almost entirely while we focused on Michael-and-Janet shenanigans, and finally we got her showdown with Brent in episode 6. But up until that point, Simone could hardly have been said to have a perspective. She was, in fact, the least developed of the experimental subjects, in the sense that I couldn’t have told you what she needed to improve upon. Simone and Chidi’s break-up, and Simone’s principled split from the group, should hit with the kind of inevitable-in-hindsight freight train oomph of—well, maybe not the season one reveal, but a baby version of that. Like getting mowed down by Thomas the Tank Engine. There should be a specific history to Simone and Brent, and Simone and Chidi, and Simone and Eleanor, that led us to this moment. This break should matter. Simone should matter.

Simone should matter. And she doesn’t, either to the emotional narrative of the show, or, if you really fundamentally dig into it, to the ethical narrative. Because Simone runs off in Brent’s Escalade, leaving Brent to his doom, and Michael and Eleanor lose their minds because oh no, oh no, we’re fucked, the humans didn’t overcome their basic selfishness to save the complete and total asshole, and nobody in the room stops to think that maybe Simone was right. I mean, Chidi says that he respects her perspective, but Chidi’s just a human. Michael and Eleanor are operating as higher beings, here. They don’t get to see the points, but they know the points exist. They know how they’re divvied out. They have some sense of what actions get them, and what don’t. But more to the point, they’re the people who designed this whole damn experiment. They’re the people who set its parameters. And the parameter they set was: People are going to make other people better.

And the thing is, I don’t think that Simone is inherently opposed to that idea. Her argument is that it’s unfair to ask her, specifically, to take on the responsibility of making Brent, specifically, better. Because why should that be Simone’s job? From Simone’s point of view, Eleanor and Michael are the authority figures, and she and Brent are either their charges or their victims or their subjects, depending on whether this is The Good Place or The Bad Place or some kind of weird experiment, but no matter what, Brent is their responsibility, not hers. Aren’t Eleanor and Michael people? Aren’t they the ones in charge here? Why aren’t they doing the work of trying to change Brent?

And of course they are, but the inherent weirdness of season four of The Good Place is that they’re trying to do so almost entirely through the medium of the other experimental subjects. There’s a weird mismatch of scope here, and it leaves Simone out to dry: She hasn’t done anything except try to protect herself, and argue, not incorrectly, that a man who has repeatedly insulted and demeaned her is not her responsibility—but the narrative requires that, in doing so, she doom humanity. It requires that she be wrong, even if Chidi says that he respects her position, because what we really need right now is a big point boost, and points come from selflessness, no matter the context.

The Good Place is a show whose societal and individual ethics are sometimes hard to disentangle. The first season is basically just about how to be a good individual person. But as the show has progressed, and its world has expanded, it’s become unavoidable that its ethical questions have become larger: What is an ethical system of punishment? How can “goodness” really be measured at scale? Is it possible to be an ethical individual when the consequences of our choices are so complicated that they are unknown to us?

Season four is addressing a fundamentally societal question—is ethical rehabilitation possible?—but it’s placing the burden of that work on the shoulders of four individuals. And by that I don’t just mean that Simone, Chidi, Brent, and John are the test subjects; I mean that they are being asked to do the work of rehabilitating each other.

But in a society, it is no one person’s responsibility to rehabilitate any other person. We do—we should—have a responsibility as a community to rehabilitate rather than take revenge, but we need systems for that, and volunteers, and procedures. Asking a random woman like Simone to live with and rehabilitate a random man like Brent isn’t just horribly unfair to Simone; it’s almost certainly going to fail.

Eleanor and Michael represent the authority, here, both within Simone’s point of view, and, to a certain extent, in reality; they set the parameters of the experiment. It was their responsibility to rehabilitate Brent, not Simone’s. These four people didn’t need to cohere as a group; they needed individuated therapy. Brent needed to be told he was in the Bad Place, and forced to accept (measured) consequences for his actions; Simone needed basically that one conversation with Chidi; Chidi needed to talk to Eleanor and/or whoever and get out of his shell; who the fuck knows what John needed, that character was barely part of the plot. Eleanor and Michael forcing everyone together was a failure both from Simone’s point of view (in that they’re not doing a good job of addressing problems within the neighborhood) and their own (in that they’re not effectively rehabilitating people).

None of which is to like, tear down Eleanor and Michael, who are very pointedly fallible, and who are trying their best to do right by all of humanity, including Simone. It’s just that as much as I appreciate the idea of Simone’s story, as much as I like that the writers of The Good Place saw the potential response to their moral argument and sought to acknowledge it, I think she represents more than an alternate perspective; she represents a real failing on the show’s part to separate “what we owe to each other” in an individual sense from “what we owe to each other” as a society.

(And this is all with the caveat that The Good Place doesn’t bring this all up and hash it all out in the next episode, of course, of course. But I suspect they won’t. Mike Schur is really all-in on altruism, and “I respect your perspective” had the ring of a thematic statement.)

[antwangertrude-blog]

How To Try To Eat Vegan Foods Similar Like The Italian Does

The problem is that the argument is not that straightforward. Certain vegetation that are substitutes for meat like soy products have a massive processing value. Turning soy into anything like tofu has a high environmental charge linked with it mainly because it does get fairly a little bit to approach. Everyone exchanging meat merchandise for these type of goods would essentially do no good. Turn the thermostat 5 levels colder at night time. Heap some more blankets on the bed in the evenings and turn down the heat a small lower. You'll decrease your vitality eat vegan monthly bill alongside with the temperature, and there's a thing incredibly cozy about sleeping under a big pile of blankets. Ravioli with Coconut Milk and Lemongrass - Simply because the title depicts it has bought the sour style of lemongrass employing inexperienced colo ur above it. Ravioli is 1 of the incorporates creamy coconut milk sauce, spring onions. Now ponder colo ur and the taste of it. It's completely cost taking with the mouth. Start off mastering Pasta Con Pomodoro e Basilico - You may possibly be an a excellent deal fond man or woman of Italian dishes and can't neglect the aroma of the flavor. For people sorts of persons, we to make the most giant plate of pasta entails present-day basil, roast tomatoes. This might su depend see relating to the decency of your cafe. Join their Back garden Club reward system. For each $250 you shell out in the retail outlet, you get $10 back again in the sort a coupon in your electronic mail box. Plus, each and every 7 days we'll ship you a publication with updates on revenue and promotions and unique offers, this kind of as discount coupons. Just indicator up with any cashier and you'll be on your way to discounts. The coupon for this week was $5 off of a $25 acquire. The cause why we insist upon ingesting vegan solutions is that they keep away from cardiac conditions. They when becoming given current the possibility to the kids have cholesterol with a good number of proportion of common forty%25. The young children even sitting down in the the more little by little large blood strain. Not only this , inital 1 thinks of absolutely the obesity. The youngsters in Italy of one:3 retain an bodyweight issues drawback because of to much more meat and pork . The information of fats within of the meat definitely the major issue for diabetes. The Darjeeling substantial heel boot is a Click At this website micro fiber suede bootie. Thos very little ankle bootsie are big this year and you can not beat a purple bootie! They also come in a lovely moss green. Although the idea of vegan seems good there are still individuals who are fond of meat and pork delicacies and they can't do away with it. Many cuisines are even now out with meat and they can not able of rejoice the model of authentic vegan product. It would look that this is satisfying at the time of now. B ut Italian merchandise has larger excellent individuality receive the consumers joyful as properly as to be felt deserved. The single point is mainly because probable clientele have to vary employing the diet information. Our cafe will undoubtedly could re align the look at of vegans at this level who could not tasted the vegan. Know you although working with queries to be answered? Just take trying to find tips from o ur cafe and fashion you'll generally don't forget the design . Bon a ppetite! The Japanese Orthodox Christians follow this vegan diet plan throughout the Easter time. Whilst you may assume that this is a religious ritual instead than a eat vegan plan, remember that these persons contemplate the entire body and spirit connected. This two thirty day period period of time is called Lent, and is a time of renewal, rest, and meditation. For the duration of this time, your human body is renewed by your vegan eating plan. It is reinvigorated and cleansed, making it less difficult for your thoughts and spirit to participate in meditation and prayer. Garlic - You are a hatter for your scent of Garlic? Garlic breath affords much more strengths and it is also finding used a medicinal worth solution. Aids you boost blood vessel and may well wipe out cancer cells. This is really exceptional for leisure and contradiction administration and aids in reducing blood tension. So , diabetic personal before avoiding garlic suppose 2 times. Sometimes people get annoyed by dietary changes mainly because they come to feel also limited and want to go back again to their outdated methods. This can be real for new vegans. On the other hand, as a substitute of focusing on what you can't have, flip your interest to what you can have. It's very likely that you'll learn new food items or appear at "old" meals in new methods. Go in advance and experiment. You just might like it. There is so much hostility when a single mention they want to be a vegan. So a lot of persons see Click At this website as holier than thou men and women that are extremely tough to relate to. What if they weren't? What if a vegan is essentially an individual down to earth and welcoming? Would that adjust your opinion of vegans as a total?

[hopefulfestivaltastemaker]

September 19, 2021

My roundup of things I am up to this week. Topics include peat in the Dutch Golden Age, research productivity, asteroid risk, and solar storms.

Peat and the Dutch Golden Age

That is the subject of this most fascinating article by Davis Kedrosky. The article outlines the role of peat in the prosperity of The Netherlands in the 17th century. We often split the long arc of history into the agrarian and industrial periods, with the Industrial Revolution as a transition, beginning in the 18th or 19th centuries in Britain. If so, then the Dutch Golden Age is a kind of intermediate period, with peat, the leading fuel, a transition between traditional biomass and fossil fuels.

One thing in particular jumps out at me.

Davis argues, fairly convincingly, that it was not energy limitations that brought the Dutch Golden Age to an end. During the decline, the Netherlands had as much access to coal at Britain, but they didn’t develop imports to a great degree. This is in contrast to the point of view generally associated with ecological economics, which gives energy availability and prices central importance in the evolution of an economy.

The whole substack is interesting and worth a browse. Davis focuses on economic history, particularly the history of the industrial revolution. The article about the timing is particularly interesting.

Are Ideas Getting Harder to Find?

This is the title of a paper by Bloom et al., on which I have commented a few times. Since the first preprint appeared around 2017, I haven’t seen a good counterargument to the paper, making it seem fairly strong. This essay, which came out this week, is the strongest I have seen so far.

Bloom et al. argue that ideas really are getting harder to find, and their evidence rests on three case studies (semiconductors and Moore’s Law, life expectancy, and agricultural yields) and total factor productivity (TFP). In each of the four cases, they argue that research productivity has fallen by dramatic margins. Research productivity is defined as the amount of progress in the area divided by the number of researchers.

Alexey Guzey’s essay, in contrast, makes several criticisms of Bloom et al.’s methodology. The main one is that the measure of ideas, and of “progress” in each of the four fields, is rather ad hoc. For example, with semiconductors, if the baseline measure of progress is taken to be a linear or quadratic growth of transistor density, rather than exponential, then productivity has gone up dramatically rather than down. There are a number of other criticisms as well, which I won’t enumerate fully. The essay is worth a read.

Regarding TFP, it is pointed out that TFP is not a very well-understood metric. TFP is the residual of economic growth when growth in capital investment and the labor supply are accounted for. TFP is often taken as a proxy for technological development, but really it is a sort of dark matter in macroeconomics that is only weakly correlated with technology.

The weakest point of Guzey’s argument, in my opinion, is a heavy reliance on mismeasurement. It is asserted that actual TFP is higher than the measured value because large contributions are not adequately accounted for. Operations like Google and especially Wikipedia, for example, capture only a small portion of the consumer surplus they generate. I have two problems with this argument. First, it is not clear that this is true. While Wikipedia only formally contributes to GDP a small fraction of the value it creates, easy access to knowledge should allow workers and firms to be more productive, increasing GDP indirectly. Second, even if this argument does hold up, it is not clear that mismeasurement has gotten worse over time, which would be necessary if there is recent growth in TFP not being captured by formal statistics. For instance, there is a great deal of informal household labor not captured in the economy, and if anything this value has been going down (e.g. home cooked meals being replaced by restaurant meals).

The above criticism notwithstanding, this essay is a useful contribution to the productivity debates. I think the weak correlation between TFP and innovation is the most important point. It should be borne in mind in trying to explain the paradox of how a sluggish economy seems to coexist with astonishing advances in synthetic biology, artificial intelligence, space flight, and other areas.

Asteroid Risk

The last asteroid impact to do significant damage to humans was the 2013 Chelyabinsk impact. That asteroid was about 20 meters in diameter, and though it airburst rather than hit the ground, the explosion caused about 1600 injuries, mostly from broken glass. The 1908 Tunguska impact is believed to have been caused by an asteroid about 50 meters in diameter. That did minor damage to humans because it hit in a remote area in Siberia. If it had hit a major city, the damage would have been catastrophic. Despite the light damage that has occurred historically, there is a small risk of a much larger impactor, and thus asteroids feature prominently on almost any list of existential risks to humanity.

This report from NASA has a chart (see p. 25) on the risk of impacts by size. The report is from 2006, but more recent material seems to say similar things. The risk of an impact with global consequences seems to be on the order of 1 in tens of thousands, maybe hundreds of thousands, per year, and 1 in millions before we get to extinction risk. I would be much more worried about other things.

Nevertheless, it is worth a modest investment of resources to identify and deflect asteroids. NASA’s budget to do so has grown considerably, though for a variety of reasons that are separate from planetary defense. As a result, the number of large asteroids found has also grown. As of 2018, about a third of 140+ meter asteroids are found; I think it’s about half now. Over 95% of 1+ km asteroids are found. We’ll probably never get to 100%, since there is the risk of an unexpected comet or something. Considering that the Tunguska impactor was estimated at around 50 meters, we are definitely far from finding everything that could do major damage.

It’s not clear to me what would happen if an asteroid with a high risk of impact was found. So far no deflections have been demonstrated, though there are plenty of ideas on the drawing board.

I don’t have too much to add that is novel. Having looked at this issue in more detail lately, I’m pleased to see that there has been a lot of progress, even if there is still a long ways to go. NASA now spends about $150 million/year on planetary defense, according to one of the articles above. That seems reasonable.

Solar Storms

One of the best known solar storms in recording history was the 1859 Carrington event. This storm disrupted telegraph lines and cause the Aurora Borealis to be visible as far south as Cuba. It is estimated that if a similar event happened today, the damage could be in the trillions of dollars.

This report has some figures on strengths of storms and their likelihood of happening (see Table 2 on p. 19), though they seem to misreport the strength of the Carrington Event.

Evidently there was a near-miss in 2012 of a major coronal mass ejection. It had a peak intensity is -1200 nanoteslas, while the Carrington event had a peak intensity of -850 nT. A direct hit would have been catastrophic.

Thanks to SOHO and other solar monitoring, we would have advance warning of up to a couple days in the event of a solar storm. The main thing to do would be to harden transformers and disconnect vulnerable equipment from the power grid. I would guess that some sort of Kuznets curve applies here. Since 1859, we’ve gotten much more vulnerable to solar storms because of the proliferation of power grids and electronics. But in more recent years we have gotten more resilient due to better forecasting, better design of equipment, and more knowledge of what to do. But unlike other areas where Kuznets curves apply, major solar storms are too rare to test this hypothesis rigorously.

Evidently it was proposed that the United States build a strategic reserve of transformers to prepare against solar storms or EMP attacks, but this was not deemed to be cost-effective.

[zenosanalytic]

Star Wars: The Last Jedi: Execution Strikes Back

Ok so I’ve been trying to write down my reaction to The Last Jedi for the last two days, but I have a lot of Thoughts and I’m beginning to think it’d be better if I wrote down Many Reactions to The Last Jedi, each focused on a particular aspect of my reaction, and so I’m going to do that.

OK SO: This Post will be my general reaction to the plot, story, etc. There won’t be much internal coherence to this as it’s just me jumping around, writing my general reactions to the aspects of the film that stood out to me enough to comment on without deserving their own post.

The tl;dr: It had problems, but they didn’t detract from it for me and it was really fun and I liked it, but the underlying rhetorical merchandising of “Rebel” and Related Things bugged me along similar lines to Rogue One.

TLJ follows in TFA’s footprints of having a really thin, basically tacked-on plot that’s really nothing more than the most basic background required to make the film’s true strengths -its character interactions, performances, worldbuilding, and structure- comprehensible, and to let them shine. I thought the action fun, focused, and not too busy(though occasionally Stupid); that the relationships between the characters and the larger ideas they were meant to convey were well done, clear, and engaging; and that, while the plot was Incredible Stupid(or maybe just stripped down?) and Barely Relevant, the structure of the story was quite Robust and well-built. The larger themes and rhetoric of the film were clearly conveyed, even if sometimes those themes and that rhetoric was, itself, in conflict, or just flat-out philosophically infuriating(hint: my Rogue One complaint about Disney’s commodification of “Rebellion” is amped up 1000% for TLJ, but I won’t get into that in this post). My one big problem was, as with TFA but even more so, the sheer volume of callbacks and parallels, which I found a bit distracting at points. I get that they WANT the films to feel cyclical and repetitive, but I feel like they just went too far in a few places here, and tried too hard to be “A Star Wars Movie” rather than doing their own thing, which gave it a very franchisey feel. There were moments, however, where they used those references and parallels to do some interesting stuff.

The idea of the bombing run at the beginning, the movie’s first set-piece battle, was, I thought, Very Stupid, but I get what they were going for with it and their execution of that was done well enough that I didn’t necessarily mind it. The basic idea: The FO is chasing the Resistance out of its hiding places and catches Leia’s crew in the midst of them evacuating their base from TFA; Poe and the fighters scramble to buy the evacuation time and stop a new FO siege-ship called a Dreadnought, from destroying the base before the evacuation can be completed. From practically the first lines they start introducing their themes; the opening(or maybe near-opening) shot is at the base, with one of the officers over-seeing it telling another to forget about the ammunition and intelligence and save the People instead. This idea, that it’s The People and Life that matter most and not resources, tools, and abstractions, gets repeated over and over in the film. It’s particularly important for Poe, who the lead evac officer(a woman; this becomes A Thing in his story in this film) mildly contrasts in this sequence. While she is putting the People first, Poe gets caught up in the opportunities for Victory afforded by the Dread’s vulnerability. After having won time for the evacuation Poe is ordered back but refuses, countermanding Leia’s orders to the fighter wings and ordering them to begin their bombing runs. They follow him over Leia(again: will become A Thing), and the sequence continues to needless tragedy.

So the Stupid: The bombers are big, unwieldy(I’m tempted to call them antimanuveurable), incredibly vulnerable, and just entirely impractical in their design. Their design is clearly inspired by the B-Wings but whereas those had heavy shielding, torpedo bays, and ion cannons, these are just sitting ducks with belly turrets, which are about as useful as you’d expect in a space-battle. Nothing about these is functional(they have to be over their target for pete’s sake, and they have frigging bomber scopes!), everything about these is meant to evoke WWII bombers, and all but one of them is immediately blown up to set up the death of Rose’s sister on the last bomber, heroically taking out the Dread right before her own ship kicks it. So Stupid But, like I said, it’s clear what they’re trying to do with this -establish that it is an unequal fight, emphasize that the Resistance are People and Individuals not faceless cogs in an institution, evoke WWII imagery to really drive home the anti-fascist nature of the Resistance and the Fascist nature of the First Order and further the film’s arguments, shine a spot-light on Poe’s flaws and their terrible costs even when he’s in his element, and make an engaging action scene while doing it- and they do it so well and so successfully that I didn’t mind the Stupidity of it. Unfortunately the movie then goes on to basically make this ALL about Poe, which undermines the PEOPLE!! message a bit as I’ll get into later, by having the only reaction to their entire bombing wing getting killed and plenty of fighter-pilots being Leia slapping and demoting him for his profligacy with his pilots’ lives and lecturing him about the leadership position she is STILL, after he got their entire bombing wing killed, grooming him for. Ugh. Like I said: Later.

The Last Jedi fits Very Well with This Theory by Diamanda Hagan on Youtube about Star Wars being a Cardassian “Repetitive Epic”. There are references out the Wazoo to the Original Trilogy, it’s an unabashed riff on The Empire Strikes Back(with hints of Return), characters openly reference the events of Return, Rey explicitly places herself in the role of Luke to Ren’s Vader in Return, explicitly conceives of herself and others within an ongoing historical teleology, it structures all of this about Family(while subtly subverting Family and Lineage as a theme in favor of loyalty to ideals/The State via Rey’s status as a orphan sold into slavery), and as such it cyclically fulfills the same function within the larger serial/cyclical narrative as Empire(I won’t get into the prequels that shall not be named).

Hamill plays Luke Wonderfully as a Filthy Hermit-Wizard Island-Hag XD His milking of that Totally Chill and Totally Cognizant Plesiosaulrus and subsequent raw-drinking of said milk was Inspired as Fuck :| :| 125% Malcontented Gremlin. I’ve tried to avoid review and discussion cause Spoilers, but I’ve seen some suggestion that people don’t like his characterization here and I disagree vehemently. Yes, he’s not the Luke of the OT, but the Luke of the OT didn’t blame himself and his “weakness” for the moral corruption and crimes of his nephew, nor for the deaths of half a dozen young students who trusted him. OT Luke hadn’t spent decades beating himself up for the “arrogance” and “pride” of his “Legend”, and the “weakness” that allowed this to led him to overestimate his abilities as a teacher and underestimate one particular student(I don’t think it did, but it’s clear that’s what he’s been telling himself). OT Luke isn’t punishing himself and projecting his own self-hatred and self-punishment onto “The Jedi”; This Luke is. Seeing his failure of Ben Solo as the result of Hubris, personal Weakness, and a loss of faith in Redemption at a critical moment, he projects that onto the Jedi Order who become, for him, Hubristic, Weak, and Hypocritical. He sees himself as irredeemable and deserving of death; so too he sees the Jedi. He’s been living with this negativity for years. He’s “cut himself off from the Force” -literally cut himself off from the universe itself and the Flow of all Being- out of disgust in himself(and via projection Jedi, the Force, etc) and as punishment. This is OT Luke after years of believing himself a Legend, after -as he sees it- his mortal flaws killing that Legend through a failure complete and deeply personal, and after even more years of swallowing the poison that resulted from that. I found it entirely believable, and wonderfully brought to life by Hamill.

I like Rey’s story much better than the other two, Finn&Rose’s story second most, and Poe’s story the least.

In fact I found Poe’s story to be kind of infuriating.

Here’s Poe’s narrative in this film: He’s a Heroic and Dashing Fighter-Pilot and he needs to Learn to Be the Leader He was Born to Be, no matter how many far more sensible and courageous women will have to repeatedly die, sacrifices to or for his grandstanding, for him to do so(it takes at least two, possibly three, pseudo-four, women given appreciable face-time on screen. There’s an unnamed A-wing pilot that may have died or may have made it through the movie I couldn’t really tell, and then there’s Leia’s near-death). He sees the Bomber attack as heroic and those who died as Heroic Martyrs to the cause, but Leia reminds him: they’re still dead. Those were people who didn’t have to go on that mission, who didn’t have to die, and that leadership means remembering what, exactly, you’re fighting for(Hint: it’s People! What Your Fighting For is PEEEOOOPLEEEEEE!!!!!!!! Of Course I did this :|). He sees Holdo’s cautious husbanding of their people and resources as betrayal, and so he instigates a mutiny in service of a hairbrained longshot plan that doesn’t work, putting everyone’s lives at risk in the process; AND his love for such Romantic longshots compromises that very mission, which in turn compromises Holdo’s plan, which puts Holdo in the position of having to choose between kamikaze and letting the Resistance be destroyed. Her death, I felt I was being asked to believe, showed him a True Leader’s approach to sacrifice; all I saw was an awesome figure of feminine leadership and strength, a perfect replacement for if not Leia(since Holdo wasn’t one of the Big Three) at least Akbar or Mon Mothma, well-crafted by writing and performance only to be dashed to bits at the last moment in service of Poe’s character development. And in a way that undermined the film’s larger message about leadership, risk, and sacrifice, no less. So I am Upset about this |:(

And during all this Leia’s fleet is in a slow-motion chase with the First Order through the actual middle of nowhere(so there’s no real sense of motion, either, aside from the occasional abandoned ship drifting back to be shot apart) while the Resistance manages to stay just barely one step ahead of them on low fuel reserves. IDK if TLJ introduces this(I kinda feel like it does) but this chase is necessitated by the conceit that hyperspace travel can’t normally be tracked but the FO has somehow figured out how to do it. Realizing they’ve done this is what sends Finn and Rose to Canto Bight in the first place(looking for a coder to help them break into the FO ship to disable their tracking), and Poe’s Doofery plays out with that backdrop. 

I’ve seen some folks complain about Canto Bight but I thought it was fine and pivotal to the political message of the film, and consequently to Rose’s role and Finn’s arc. Its decadence is presented as the other side of the First Order’s coin, and the poverty it inflicts on the jockeys, the slavery it inflicts on the Fathiers, the ultimate goal of the FO, the source of CB’s decadence, and the evil the Resistance is fighting to end. Finn’s political and moral awakening is even mirrored in his opinion of the place: when Rose and he arrive he loves it, but as his awareness of the exploitation and corruption it’s built on grows, so too does his conviction in the correctness of making sacrifices for the Resistance and its cause. It’d have been nice if they could have had this be a more natural process and rest less on Rose dropping exposition on him, but obvsl time is a factor and Rose needed to be pivotal to this process to fulfill her role in the film and his story. Finn’s arc is realizing it’s not just about him and Rey and their safety, and you can’t do that without another, new person for him to care about and be cared for by, and having her be, essentially, his moral mentor(Rose pretty nearly parallels Ben Kenobi’s role in Star Wars/New Hope for him here) made that even stronger and more satisfying for me. I also liked that they included del Toro’s character as her foil; having Finn’s choice be an actual choice, embodied by two different people relating to him for two different reasons, made that choice much stronger, even if you never really got a sense that Finn was tempted by DJ.

Rose was Delightful overall, and I love how they defied expectations by setting her up as a “Tech” only to have her basically be the emotional and moral heart of Finn’s story, and arguably the film in general. I don’t really have a lot to say here because it’s just very simple: she reminds Finn of the things he cares about, of WHY he runs risks, that other people are just as invested in their struggles as he is and that ultimately it is the People who matter. The Fight is for the People; Victory is the Freedom, Survival, and Rule of the People; his desire for peace and dignity is no different than anyone else’s and the Resistance is fighting for that against the Fascism, Aristocratic Hierarchy, and social corruption which the First Order represents. I feel like this point could have been made more strongly by tying the First Order more directly to the Star Wars upper classes in the Canto Bight section, and I also feel like -given Palpatine’s human-supremacist notions and racism- there should have been far more humans among the upper crust and far fewer aliens, but I recognize that, on the first point, TFA had kind of written them into a corner on this topic in how it chose to present the FO/Resistance conflict, and on the second, that the impulse to show their creature-making chops(and include a Cantina Scene in the film) would be quite strong. Also I’m sure that, while Johnson may be given the writer credit on this film, Disney had significant input on the film and its overall message, and tying wealth/the wealthy explicitly to conservative politics and its perennial abuses(slavery, corruption, war, extracting wealth for the non-wealthy through political manipulation[in this case, weapons-trading and the war-mongering that makes it most profitable]) is far too liberal/leftist a message for a company like Disney to tolerate in their films.

Rey’s story is just excellent in so many ways but a lot of my appreciation of it is tied up with TLJ’s choice to go with a more OT(original trilogy) and Zen approach to the Force which I’ll talk about separately so I don’t know how much I’ll say on this here. It was a very intimate and internal story, structured almost like Buddhist monk tales(so sort of fairytale)[1]. Like: She comes to Luke, Luke doesn’t want to teach her, then in response to her persistence he says “I’ll give you three lessons over three days”(which I remember as taking place at Dawn, Midday, and either Dusk or Evening on three consecutive days, but my brain might be making that particular referential bit up; I’d need to see it again), except these lessons are meant to teach her why she should give up on The Force. Of course(in eternal trophic tradition), her purity of purpose, will, and dedication ends up instead teaching Him that his choice to turn his back on The Force and the Universe was wrong, and bringing him back into engagement with the World.

Her interactions with Ren follow a similar trophic logic(which, again, I’ll talk about in another post) except along a more “two students” than “master and student” narrative. They are both pursuing the same thing(self knowledge and control; mastery and understanding of The Force) but for very different reasons and from very different backgrounds, and these reasons and backgrounds directly influence where they end up: Rey’s “success” at accepting and internalizing them with equanimity while also setting her desires aside, leading her to Balance; Ren’s “failure” to do so by seeking the “strength” to dominate and “kill” them, and thus continual consumption by and obsession with his past and his desires. Their interactions are deeply personal, concerning their emotions and confusion and fears, and also somewhat unsettling(which I think they should be) but I don’t think that they are, at all, romantic; though there is a simultaneously humorous and disturbing scene where Ren is topless, Rey asks him to get dressed, and he refuses. Humorous for the obvious reasons; disturbing as there’s a sense to all of Ren’s behaviors in these moments of trying to manipulate her. Rey is eternally reaching for understanding, even as she feels rage, sorrow, and disgust for the monster he has chosen to become, and he is eternally trying to use her reaching as a means to power, as he uses everything. Again, the “two student” dynamic: the “good” one who seeks enlightenment honestly, and the “bad” who enters the monastery for the political and social power a monk’s life can afford; even their relative social condition -her a nameless orphan, him an aristocrat from a bloodline filled with important monastic figures- plays into the dynamics and traditions of these stories.

Ok that’s about it for right now. The next one will probably deal more in-depth with Rey’s story and how The Force is presented.

[1]Though maybe I’m wrong about these particular parallels I’m drawing here. My exposure to these tales is very limited, and mostly I know Japanese ones(though some of those are transformations of earlier Indian, Chinese, and Vietnamese ones), so perhaps these aren’t the prevalent Buddhist narratives I took them as.

[techcrunchappcom]

New Post has been published on https://techcrunchapp.com/overview-of-alternative-education-research-results/

Overview of Alternative Education: Research results

Recent observations and research regarding the existing education system in the world have recorded trends such as college dropouts, lowering of graduation rates and a decrease in high school completion. Researchers have therefore concluded that for the youth whose needs are not met in traditional education systems should have alternative teaching and training opportunities.

Alternate education programme or alternative school curriculum are often defined as a system or organization of tutoring that meets the learning needs of students that are not met in a regular institute. Those looking for an alternative education service, may consider getting a personalized paper via a legal service that writes research papers from Edubirdie or outsourcing research to a writer for term paper service as an easier way to gather all needed information. It is important to study types and benefits of such education before deciding.

Thus, to make things even easier for you, I thought I can try to write my research paper and made kind of research myself. Check out this article to find further about what alternate education and learn more about alternatives that can meet the academic educational needs of students.

What is Alternative Education?

A study conducted in 2010 by Jennifer Sable, Chris Plotts and Lindsey Mitchell defines an alternative education as “a public elementary/secondary school that addresses needs of students that typically cannot be met in a regular school, provides non-traditional education, serves as an adjunct to a regular school, or falls outside the categories of regular, special, or vocational education”

This system of tuition can refer to any means of tutoring that goes beyond traditional classroom education. Although the mainstream definitions refer to institutes or colleges that offer an alternative education programme, it also includes any alternative school curriculum within existing/traditional institutes and the expansion of the teaching system.

Types of Alternative Education?

There are types of education programs under alternative education. Each type is designed to meet different education requirements needed for students.

Foodtech startup Grocemania announces nationwide expansion

Raywid (1994) introduces three models or three types of alternative schools. Type I are schools that have adapted as an alternative curriculum which the students can choose if they like it. These are often suggested for students who struggle with the traditional learning curriculums.

Type II, also called ‘last chance’ schools or discipline alternate schools are schools where students are placed as the last chance at school before they are expelled. Unlike type I, this does not allow the student the chance whether to select this programme or not. Type III are schools that focuses more on the mental/ psychological wellbeing of a student. They are established to serve students who are struggling with emotional or behavioural problems that challenge their progress in learning.

Benefits of Alternative Schools

It is necessary to know the benefits of alternative schools if you are to understand their function. Here are some of the major benefits they offer.

Student-Centred Education

In an alternative school, there is a better opportunity to understand the needs of each student individually. This allows the colleges to come up with personalized study plans or curriculums that the students can easily grasp.

Language learning app Memrise scores $15.5m Series B

Higher Graduation Rates

One weakness of the traditional teaching system according to a lot of experts is that many students either fail or drop out of school leading to lower graduation rates. In the 2002s, the rate has dropped to 35% according to Aron (2006). With the introduction of a system that meets the academic educational requirements of each student, the risks of dropouts and failings can be decreased to a larger extent.

Extra-Curricular Activities

The offering of extracurricular activities that come as a part of alternative school curriculum gives a chance for a better mental and social health development for the students. Laura Miner cites a study in 2007 by Cohen, Schuster, Taylor, Vestal and Zonta which observes that offering more extracurricular activities encourages student participation and engagement. It also states how it marks a reduction in juvenile arrests rates and teen birth rates

Inclusive Environment

One of the advantages of this system is the inclusive environment it creates. Instead of differentiating students as smart or weak, this system recognizes the different learning pace of each student and offers evaluation and assessment systems that can meet those requirements.

South Yorkshire tech firm Metalysis closes £20m funding round

What are Some Alternative School Examples?

Although they are categorized under three types, there are some outside the frame of these categories. There are several alternative schooling examples. If you are about to write a paper on the topic or want some additional information from a service that does research paper writer free of charge, this is a great addition. For people looking for an alternative education programme, see below.

Optional Schools

These are offered for those whose needs are not met at traditional institutes. These schools range from programmes for at-risk or expelled students and for those who are ‘gifted’. They could also be categorized based on the type of programme they offer or setting of the institute such as programmes in juvenile justice centres or home-schooling.

Career-Themed Schools

Career-themed or technical magnet schools are that allow students to follow a curriculum that focuses on a career while also participating in relevant work.

Online Education

Online education has gained popularity in the last decade. This gives the students access to education as a means of distance education. This is considered a great alternative in case the student cannot participate in the classroom due to health or other concerns. Considering the pandemic, online education has been adopted across the world as the most popular alternative learning method.

An alternative school or an alternative school curriculum is used as a means of catering to individual academic educational needs of students. When done under the proper management and organization, these are some of the best solutions to ensure every student is given a chance at a good education.

!function(f,b,e,v,n,t,s)if(f.fbq)return;n=f.fbq=function()n.callMethod? n.callMethod.apply(n,arguments):n.queue.push(arguments);if(!f._fbq)f._fbq=n; n.push=n;n.loaded=!0;n.version='2.0';n.queue=[];t=b.createElement(e);t.async=!0; t.src=v;s=b.getElementsByTagName(e)[0];s.parentNode.insertBefore(t,s)(window, document,'script','https://connect.facebook.net/en_US/fbevents.js');

[leac92]

Journal #6 02/24/2019

For this week’s session in 6400, we focused a bit more on our writing drafts for the graduate fellowship competition. This week, I was not able to make much progress on my animation due to my struggles with my 3D animation course where we are creating a rig and blend shapes, a task that is still difficult for me to do. So for this journal, I will share some things I learned in my narrative theory course that relates back to my potential theory topic, as well as my progress on my graduate fellowship writing draft. 

Approach

For the narrative theory course, we had to write two essays. One as an short analytical essay and the other a statement of understanding. Here were the guidelines for the analytical essay:

 “This assignment has two parts: (1) select a segment of one of the narratives on our syllabus that we have not spent a lot of time discussing in class and do a rhetorical reading of that segment; (2) follow that analysis with a short discussion of what the close reading taught you about rhetorical theory—how it helped and/or how it inhibited your analysis.“

The second paper dealt with the understanding narrative ethics, what the medical field is doing now with that understanding and what are the best ways to solve problems with patients using the methods of narrative ethics and narrative medicine. Though, I’m still a bit confused about narrative ethics, these are just some ideas to help me understand other ways of approaching my animation narrative (such as, what kind of narrative am I aiming for? Who is my intended audience? Do I want this to help others on a mental level? Physical level?) Here are the guidelines for the second paper:

“Think of this assignment as an extension of Rita Charon's emphasis on the relation between close reading and attentive listening.  Here  the reading and listening are directed not toward a literary text but rather toward a critical text: Chapter 5 of The Principles and Practices of Narrative Medicine, "Deliver Us from Certainty: Training for Narrative Ethics." And here I offer you a more systematic protocol (see below) to guide your reading and listening.   Your task is to follow that  protocol in order to write a one-page (single-spaced) statement of your understanding of the Chapter.”

On Reconstructing Critical Arguments

The assumption of this analytic practice is that understanding a critical argument involves more than identifying and remembering someone's thesis because arguments develop in response to questions and ongoing dialogues, by means of methods of reasoning, employing certain assumptions and principles, for certain purposes.  By identifying these parts of an argument, one in effect reconstructs a critic's general framework--whether the critic is conscious of employing that framework or not.  The reconstruction, then, has the following parts.

Question/Problem. What is the central issue driving the inquiry?  What is taken for granted and what is up for grabs?  Sometimes the problem will be identified explicitly in the first couple of paragraphs--but not always.

             In, say, Stanley Fish's "Interpreting the Variorum," the question isn't really clear until you've read the whole piece.  At the beginning it looks like he's asking, "why is the commentary in the Milton Variorum inadequate?"; but after reading the whole thing, one can see that this question is subsumed by something like, "how do my disagreements with the Variorumcommentators reveal the underlying structure of literary interpretation?"

The Answer. The thesis or “paraphrasable argument,” which may or may not be stated explicitly in the essay. The answer can generally be summarized in a sentence or two--and it should be put in terms of the question.  For Fish's essay, something like "These disagreements reveal that all interpretation is actually a process of writing rather than reading.  Our interpretive assumptions cause us to ascribe to the text those properties our interpretive strategies are designed to handle.  Different interpretive communities have different assumptions and different strategies for ascribing those meanings, so interpretive disagreement can never be resolved by appealing to the text."

Method. This part of the reconstruction has two components: A. the organization and progression of the essay's argument.  What are the steps of the argument and how do they relate to each other?  What is the controlling logic that governs the choice of just these steps in this particular order?  The striking methodological choice in Fish's essay on the Variorum is the switch from the argument for "affective stylistics" to the argument for the theory of interpretive communities.  Fish starts with the case for affective stylistics because he wants to show how seductive the logic of any one interpretive community looks from the inside (perhaps--the point is that this question of method needs to be addressed).

The kinds of reasoning employed. One of Fish's main strategies is to divide and conquer.  He characteristically posits two alternatives on an issue, makes one look bad, and then argues for the other.

Principles and Assumptions. The theoretical underpinnings of the argument, either explicit or implicit. Fish believes, in his affective stylistics mode, that the process of making meaning is the meaning.  In his interpretive community mode, he maintains, among other things, that there are no facts independent of our perceptions, that only so many interpretive communities can be authorized at one time, that it is possible to escape one's commitments sufficiently to see how other people's commitments work.

Dialogics. What discourses is the essay seeking to respond to? And is the dialogical stance one of “No” (my predecessors got it wrong), “Yes, but” (there’s partial truth in their work, but they got some key things wrong), or “Yes, and” (they did some excellent work that provides the foundation for me to build on it in these ways.)  l Fish, at this point, is most concerned with the traditional formalist view that meaning lies in the text, and he is saying “No” to it (even “No! In Thunder!”).  He is also, interestingly, in dialogue with an earlier version of himself, and, toward the end of the essay, in dialogue with general discussions about intentionality and about the relations between percepts and concepts.

Purpose. The larger point or significance of the essay, the answer to the “so what?” question. The purpose can often be expressed in a form such as this: “In light of this argument, the critical conversation should change in the following ways.” In Fish's case, his purpose is to lay the groundwork for a new explanation of how interpretation works, by giving a new account of the relations among critical frameworks and primary texts.

Choices Made

Based on these guidelines for the analytical paper, I decided to choose Aristotle’s “Poetics”. I tried to break down chapter’s 1-4 and how I felt it relates to my understanding of narrative theory. Here is what I wrote:

                                                Analytical Essay

  I decided to read more upon Aristotle’s “Poetics” because the first time we discussed the book in class the first time, I’ll be completely honest, I had no idea what was going on, nor did I really understand the book. So, I decided to read a segment of the book (chapters 1-4) about imitation and found this segment to be somewhat related to my thesis topic of embodied experience. Chapters 1-4 seemed to focus heavily on imitation of narrative, rather, it be poetics, visuals, dance, music, etc. and how the imitation of art differs from the perspective of the one doing the imitation. For chapter 1, it seemed like Aristotle went on to discuss narrative in different forms and how, used upon the capacity of said form, can we create stories which imitate that which we are trying to pursue (in which case imitation of rhythm, speech and harmony (pg. 19))? I was a bit confused when he began naming writers such as Sophron (sadly, I had to look him up because I had no idea what he was talking about) and Xenarchus. Aristotle also goes on to discuss stories as elegiac poets or one-line poems. I was a bit confused when Aristotle discussed the term “latter” and “meter”. When researching the term “meter”, it meant a regular pattern of stressed and unstressed syllables that define the rhythm of some poetry. Hearing the rhythm of a words in a poem create a sort of imitation of emotions based on the word and what it describes. Going into chapter 2, it seems as if Aristotle discusses imitation of status, stating “Since those doing the imitating imitate people acting, and it is necessary that the latter be people either of serious moral stature or of a low sort (for states of character pretty much always follow these sorts of line, since all states of character differ in vice and virtue), they imitate either those better than we are or worse, or else of our sort, just as painters do. For polyglots used to make images of superior people, Pauson of inferior, and Dionysius of those like us.”(pg.21) Reading this segment of the chapter, I found it as an insight to how people try and compare their life, skills, etc. with others because of this idea society has created to divide us based on social status, wealth, and how much we have. We imitate what we wish we had in order to feel a sense of completeness and accomplishment. Chapter 3 seems to focus on imitation of the other two chapter; imitation of narrative and imitation of status. How people imitate performances of actors, which could also be interpreted as a kinesthetic empathy, or the ability to experience empathy by observing the movements of another person. Chapter 4 was the most interesting and most relatable to what I’m researching for my thesis. One segment state, “For imitating is co-natural with human beings from childhood, and in this they differ from the other animals because they are the most imitative and produce their first acts of understanding by means of imitation; also, all human beings delight in imitations.” (Pg. 22) This brings me to an idea discussed by Walter Benjamin, a German philosopher, about the term “aura”, which questions the ideas of authenticity and of a work of art in regard to the actual object in reality. How an artist may imitate that object, however, it would be considered a technical reproduction and the idea of authenticity cannot exist. I know I might be going on a tangent with this, but I find it interesting to think that although we imitate life, it cannot truly be replicated in terms of authenticity. I believe this to be the same with people. We can imitate others around us (movements, status, etc.), but at the end of the day, you cannot be that person, you can only get so far as empathizing with that person due to us imitating them. In terms of my thesis, I want to create an embodied experience or focusing a relation between one’s own body to that of another boy. To imitate through visual interpretation and narrative.

Reading these chapters, I have come to understand that rhetoric theory is more than just words, it is a language of performance, rhythm, sound, art and speech. Though I’m still a bit confused on rhetoric in general, it seems as though the use of rhetoric is a technique used to persuade through speaking or writing using certain language techniques. So, in terms of reading chapters 1-4, I found imitation is a way to use this theory, specifically in imitation of status and narrative. It also seems to deal with a relationship of a given action and executing that with an action that contrast with the given action. Such examples include “Close Call”, where the main character almost dies on several accounts, but somehow survives, only to be haunted by one death he does not witness himself, rather, his encounter with the victim causes him to feel this way. Also going back to Walter Benjamin’s idea of aura, you can draw a realistic object, but it will never exist as authentic or “real” because it is merely a replica of reality.

This had some relation to my idea of embodied experience because these chapters seemed to focus on the subject of imitation and how we as humans imitate subjects that we find suitable in expressing ourselves and emotions. This can be in words, movement, music, art, etc. That we are merely expressing reality through means of narrative form.

For the second paper, I read Rita Charon’s  The Principles and Practices of Narrative Medicine, "Deliver Us from Certainty: Training for Narrative Ethics." and responded with this statement:

                                       Statement of Understanding

 It was around summer of 2015 when I began noticing changes in my health. I struggled to run, some things I ate, it made me nauseous. I had the urge to use the bathroom more and more. Come July through August, I began feeling light headed at work, even the customers asked if I was ok. Blood. For the most part, that’s mostly what I remember from that time, was how much blood I’d lost within a month’s time. Got so bad I ended up in the emergency a few times. They finally decided to perform a colonoscopy, as I grew weaker, lost weight because I couldn’t eat. The procedure was unsuccessful, as the inflammation of my colon was too high. Around this time, I’d say about September of 2015, I was diagnosed with Ulcerative Colitis, or U.C. for short, is a chronic inflammatory bowel disease that causes inflammation in the digestive tract. The symptoms had become so severe at this point, the level of blood I lost would have killed me had I not received a blood transfusion. I think one of the first things running through my mind at this time were, “why did this happen to me? Am can this be cured? Will I need a colposcopy bag?” This was a narrative of a new chapter in my life, something I’m still coming to terms with even after 3 years after the diagnosis. But it’s a story I want others to hear, as well as myself, because it’s a reminder that I am here, I am alive, I made it here for a reason and that I will be ok.

Arthur Frank proposes from Ricoeur’s ideas that “our very selves are perpetually recreated in stories. Stories do not simply describe the self: they are the self’s medium of being.” “Narrative account of oneself –autobiography, memoir, psychoanalytic transactions, clinical accounts, dreams, that which one tells oneself in secret, or casual tales one tells to friends–not only report one’s narrative identity but, more radically, create that which is experienced as the “self.”” (pg.110) Narrative exist from the experience of the one telling them, rather it be in a nonfiction way or in a fictitious view where reality and our imagination collide, it gives us some purpose. Not all the time, but it’s a way to organize our train of thought and recollect a moment or memory from a lifetime of memories. From my perspective of chapter 5, the question that seems to arise is, how can narrative medicine or a narrative assist with one’s situation in terms of, not much of an acceptance of situations, but rather understand of oneself and create stories that, instead give us information on a disease or issue, but rather about the patient as a whole? To understand a person is to understand the situation. Not everyone has the same issue/problem, so, understanding an someone on an individual level could help find the underlying issues that may cause patient’s issues such as death, change in lifestyle, etc. Consider narrative ethics, which is described as way of thinking about a particular patient’s situation instead of trying to fit sanctioned theories or rules to the individual case (pg.119). Within this idea, stories seem to be a way to say we’ve existed in this world and experienced things in which others have not. To create an embodied experience for others through words, visuals, movements, etc. To show their existence has/had meaning for themselves or to the world. For medical narrative, it’s a way to accept/acknowledge one’s life or situation in which that person feels they cannot escape fate. A way to escape the mind’s idea of an end, rather than a beginning. For example, as I described before, I was diagnosed with U.C. I thought this was the beginning of a painful journey. I thought my life would never be normal again (found out it never was). I would never have a normal love life and I could die from this disease, not only from my organs, but as a person in general. That this disease would be who I am, and I would no longer be me. I felt I would not escape that fate.

Based on our discussion of the chapter for Charon, I was able to come up with an answer for the principles and assumption part of the guidelines, but was not able to come up with an answer for the “Answer” and “Method” part of the guidelines, mainly because I am not familiar with the understanding of narrative ethics just yet and how to explain that in words.

After writing these, I wrote the graduate fellowship draft, and again, I only accomplished writing one part of the requirements. here is the first draft of the fellowship:

                                               Grad Fellowship Draft

 Animation is such a broad subject, trying to find out what it means, and its usage could go in to so many threads and discussions. The question now is, what does animation mean to me? What’s its purpose? Who am I directing my vision to? Who is my intended audience? What am I trying to gain? So many questions with not enough time to answer all, but enough to get my point across in terms of my own experiences in animation. Animation is a concept that has yet to be fully develop and continues to progress in areas such as film, VR, AR, health, and other forms of art. It’s aesthetically pleasing, empathetic, sympathetic, nostalgic, informative, educational. Animation to me is experience, an opportunity for others to experience myself through movement, emotions enabled the characters and even the environment that evokes the character’s moves and reactions. As stated in the Understanding Animation by Paul Wells, before the 1970s theorists essentially determined the audience as a subject, and not as a set of undifferentiated individuals and, thus, engaged with the idea of cinema as an ideological apparatus; and one which created certain structures of address which demanded than an audience recognize and participate in certain narrational codes and conventions informed by a number of discourses (i.e. political, representational, psychoanalytical etc.).[i] Based upon these ideas and theories, their focus counted for only one generalized audience member.

My goal is to expand the conversation involving animation as means to evoke eidetic memories, an ability to recall images from memory vividly after only a few instances of exposure of certain experiences from one’s past. This will be evoked by the idea of intercorporeality, or focusing on the relation between one’s bodily action (character) and that of another (audience). This in hopes to elicit a response from the audience depending on individual past experiences. Society cannot be defined by one idea of experience because of our individual thoughts and ideas, which include memories. When I think of memories, I think of past experiences, good or bad, that have culminated our growth into who we are today. However, over time, those memories are fragmented and skewed, which can easily be altered based upon the discourse of our development as we grow older. Now, this is just an assumption based on my own experiences and memories, however with this idea, I wish to prove, to some extent, that animation can bring forth a method to unlock fragment memories rather than skew them even further than they might possibly be. (NEEDS WORK)

Hand-drawn animation is a process which requires the artist to embodied themselves into the animation in order to understand the characters, environment, and the experiences the character develops within the narrative of the animation. The story of my project is based upon my own experiences of struggling with finding my identity as animator and if animation is the career path I wish to pursue. The story follows my past experiences and what caused my reluctant approach on this path, as well as my lack of confidence in my work and myself. I began the drafting stages of the animation, which focuses on the movement, camera motion and layout of the environment. (NEEDS WORK)

The focus of the project relates mostly to community (still thinking of the reason involving diverse relations, family, environment, community involving school, friends, cowrokers)

 Bibliography

[i] Wells, Paul. 1998. Pg. 222 Understanding animation.

Current Questions/ Next Steps

As stated previously, some questions I had in order for me to take the next steps in my research is, “what kind of narrative am I aiming for? Who is my intended audience? Do I want this to help others on a mental level? Physical level?” For my fellowship draft, some questions I need to consider are, “how will my project impact the community? Who is my intended audience in the community? What needs to be in my paper in terms of information about my project? How can I engage the reader about my project without boring them or confusing them about my approach?” I suppose my next steps would be to re-evaluate the structure of my paper, as well as my approach to my animation and figure out how my idea of embodied experience reflects on the animation and if the audience will respond to the film the same way I imagine them to (somewhat imitation approach).

[art5posts]

Co design

Co design is an approach which looks into creative approaches, mainly within the public. Participatory designs roots were developed in Scandinavia in the 1970s.[1] co design is used as another term for participatory design. Co design looks at the traditional client and designer relationships and looks and makes a change within these relationships.  The co design approach, enables everyone to make a creative contribution.[2] Thus meaning, the clients are also involved in the design process. The Co design approach is different from the other design approaches as in the designing, it uses people from the community, rather than just the client and a professional. Co design uses clients who will be able to have a say in the design process, as they may be impacted, this could either be negatively or positively. The clients working within the design process, may want to know where the project is going, and how it is being developed, and therefore this will lead to professionals sharing their roles in the decision-making process. This enquires telling the clients about any up and coming changes that may be happening in the design, as this is an important part of the co design process, by sharing these ideas it will means the clients will have a higher contribute level, thus therefore making them happier and therefore they will want to contribute more as a whole, however by doing this it will come with positives and negatives. The positives of this being, that it will create a community that will come up with a solution to any possible problems that may arise. This is a positive because instead of being told a solution and how they will be able to fix it, clients are coming up with their own, by giving the clients creative input this will create ownership towards the end outcome. It also focuses on the client’s strengths by looking at everyone individually, their skills and knowledge etc. This is a positive to co design because if the clients can see what they can offer to the designing process, it will create a more positive design process as a whole, this can therefore build confidence in the clients and can also build communities of people, who are able to work together and who can communicate and solve problems together. Also, the Co design approach creates a chance for others to meet and work together. This will therefore be more social and will strengthen communities of people, this therefore meaning the clients and professionals can get to know each other better, and with this they will become more of a team and thus likely of working as a better team as a whole. Although, with this does come negatives, one being to get all clients and professionals on the same page. This will be hard as both the clients and professionals will be wanting different outcomes, not everyone will be on the same page,  and therefore individually everyone will be wanting a different outcome, therefore, this will have a higher chance of creating arguments and this less likely of a good team work. There are some tools and techniques that can be used to help with the co design process, by incorporating these tools and techniques into the design process, it will help the clients create user storyboards, and personal journeys. Any problems that may arise in the design process, that will; need solutions to fix them, may be tested through prototyping and scenario generation techniques. An example of co design is Montgomery Roth, Architecture and Interior design, they are very client based centered and they are mainly focused on the client’s creative visons. They like to keep the communication open between the clients and their professionals. They understand that throughout the design process the clients ideas may change, and therefore they have created a Collaborative Composition tool which gives the client the opportunity to share their new ideas, which they can then put forward into the project.

[1] Steen, M., Manschot, M., & De Koning, N. (2011). Benefits of co-design in service design projects. International Journal of Design, 5(2), 53-60.

[2] Steen M,. Manschot M., & De Koning, N. (2011). Benefits of co-design in service design projects. International Journal of Design, 5(2), 53-60 

L’Auberge Casino Resort, Lake Charles, Louisiana, 

(Montgomery Roth) 

Le Pavillon Hotel, New Orleans, Louisiana

(Montgomery Roth)

 Design culture  

A business with a good design culture teaches everyone that works within to understand and value design. Design is often misunderstood, and some may think its all about making objects look pretty. When design isn’t valued, it often comes second to many business decisions, thus will result in poorer outcomes that business produces. In a design culture that is healthy, the team as a whole, which includes designers and non-designers, both understand that that design is a whole thing, not just part of a thing, and therefore should be applied throughout the business as a whole. In a healthy design culture, not only is design applied the its products, but also to the business. This could be very small details of the business, coming down to the lighting or tables and chairs. But also, the products from the business tend to reflect the business. So, for example, a business that is well designed as a whole, will therefore tend to produce well designed products. Chloe Park of OpenTable described some of the cultural changes that occurred after the company was bought by the corporate Priceline, “But I think that design has increased the level of intentionality behind the company’s culture. I was just talking to another designer about this, and she was commenting about the little things that have changed throughout the office—things that seem so fundamental or basic but make a difference. We get flower deliveries, for example, and our receptionist separates them into multiple arrangements throughout the office, especially in the larger open spaces where people congregate and talk. We also have this thing where people don’t have individual trash cans; we only have group trash cans in open areas, and I’ve heard that was to get people to come out and talk to each other. Little things like that, or the placement of coffee, add an increased quality of presence to things. When you’re talking to a very design-centric company or a smaller startup where everyone has control over these things it’s kind of like “duh,” but when you’re scaling this large and no one is being intentional or careful about the little things, it can get quite messy. And so, I feel like design has introduced a certain level of care.”[1] 

[1] Chloe Park of OpenTable, Invision App 

Inside Design: OpenTable

When working in a healthy design culture, everyone working withing that business should feel empowered to participate within the design process, and everyone should be encouraged to use design thinking to any problems that may arise in the business that are not design related. Many business that have good design cultures have a higher chance of failure, this is only because employees who work withing the business are encouraged to experiment, this will often lead to mistakes. Therefore, they should feel free to take many risks as they will be able to learn from their mistakes, this will lead to them being able to make those mistakes without having the fear of being fired from their jobs.   

 Design thinking

Design thinking is an approach that is used for practical and creative problem solving. It is based on the methods that designers use, but it has developed from a range of different areas for example, architecture, engineering and business. Design thinking can also be applied to any aspect, so it doesn’t have to be design specific. Design thinking focuses mainly on humans first, this meaning it helps understand people's needs and then it helps create effective solutions to meet the needs of these people. It is mainly how designers communicate with people and each other, in order to get their ideas across and known to everyone. However, for people to do this, thy must know how they take information that they have been given. This is so they know what they are talking about when informing others about their ideas, and how they can talk about these ideas and give as much information about them as they can. David Kolb has identified the different types of learners. The first being activists, these are the people who learn thru doing, they need to get their hands dirty and they dive in with both feet first. These learners have an open mind when it comes to learning, and they involve themselves fully and without any bias in any new experiences that they may encounter. The second is a theorist, this type of learner likes to understand the theories behind the actions. They usually need models, concepts and facts in order to engage in the learning. They tend to prefer to analyse and synthesise, drawing new information into systematic and logical theories. They usually tend to be perfectionists who wont rest until things are tidy and fit into rational schemes. The third is the reflector, these people learn by observing and thinking about what happened. They may try to avoid leaping in and they tend to prefer watching from the sidelines. They collect data, both firsthand and from others, and usually prefer to think about it thoroughly before concluding. And the final one is Pragmatist, these learners are keen on trying out ideas, theories and techniques to see if they work in practice. They are the sort of people who return from courses who want to try out the new ideas they’ve been told. They like to get on with things and act quickly and confidently on ideas that attract them.

  Thinking differently about fashion

  Humans consist of mainly, water 80% of the human body weight, sugar, from glucose to proteins, elastic bands, soft, responsive, tissue like cartilage. New fabrics like Hydrogels, that are used in fashion, are made mainly from water, sugar and can be highly elastic. Within the global fashion industry worldwide it generates 2.5 $ turnover, employees 60 million people worldwide and is the 7th largest economic sector.  UK fashion industry 66 £ turnover and employs 550,000 people. These stats show that fashion is getting bigger and could possibly be a “history of all our futures”. Fashion is about feeling happy and confident about oneself, and it’s about reflecting the modern world. The future of fashion is capturing the mood of the moment (no past, not future), just reflecting what’s happening in the world at this specific point in time. In order to move forward in fashion, we must look back, the fashion in history involve; Renaissance, enlightenment, Victoriana, 20th century, 21st century. A lot of predictions suggest that “fashion in the future will be the same as fashion in the past.” Fashion will always rely on strikingly creative talents who challenge existing tastes and accept norms of the day occasioned by the changing and uncertain conditions of the modern world. There are new technologies that will be included in the fashion in the future, these known as ‘wearable technology’, e.g. SMART fabrics. Ideally, they will be wearable, functionable, useful, so called “calm technology” M. Weiser 1986. But the human form is a complex 3,4D assembly that has 5 orders of magnitude of curved surfaces and is always dynamic. Elementary strap on gadgets and widgets which make a lot of money for brands like, Nike, Adidas, Apple & Samsung, this is attachable technology.  Wearable technologies consist of small boxes housing micro electronic circuitry, antenna, batteries and metal wire interconnects that are attached to the body, not worn. The future of fashion will have true wearable technology that can help improve people’s everyday lives they will evolve through intrinsic, responsive botanical & biological based material systems that can be embedded into knitted, woven or embroidered fabrics to create both beautiful and functional clothes and textiles. The role of colour chemistry, chromogenic materials and topologically responsive materials will have increasing usage as they satisfy some of Weisser’smain criteria. The 21st century is the age of ‘designed materials’ crafting new products with increasingly surprising performance characteristics. In a sense, these have already been explored over the last 2 centuries through the inherent, responsive, natural properties of wool, cotton, linen and silk. From materials + fabrication to materiality A dual competing future based on, being human and technologies. Humans are made from sugars and elastomers, but there can be many technologies, for example nanotechnologies and metamaterials that can helps with the way that us humans are formed, there will also be 4D constrictions which can work with our complex curved shapes and movements. Being human we usually trust in the natural world but with the technologies we will have in the future we can be radical in the way designers think about clothing. Perhaps GNR (the Genomics, Nanotechnology and robotic bridge.) This will only be driven by creative minds gathering and reflecting ideas through the ever changing, uncertain environment in which we all live. 

Madame Gre 1975-2011 

Coco Chanel 1963-2016 

Mariano Fortuny 1922-1974-1990

The environment under stress

Our appetite for natural resources and large-scale industrial activity is making species extinct, warming the oceans and disrupting the global climate balance. As a result, we are entering a new global period which is known as the Anthropocene. For most of our history, it has been our environment that has shaped us. Now, it is us who is shaping the environment. Left unchecked as we are doing, human driven climate change and adverse biodiversity will shape our social and economic future as much as the planet did previously. There were many early warnings, some including, in the 1920’s the paleontologist and realist philosopher Pierre Teilhardde Chardin forecast the increasing complexity of present-day society that would lead to a shock in evolution. Rachel Carson's book ‘silent spring’ alerted us to the way industrialization and consumption has altered the equilibrium of the eco system’s biodiversity (insects, birds, reptiles, mammals and fish, plants and fungi) [1964]. Dennis Meadows book ‘The Limits of Growth’ further highlighted the need for conservation of energy and protection of the environment [1972]. A further, practical warning came with ideas on how to limit the growth of waste in the publication by Braungart and McDonough’s book ‘Cradle to cradle: Remaking the way we make things’ [2002]. There is evidence of global warning because in 2018, the IPCC published a report on climate change, now in 2019, we have the results of the IPBES 7 year study on the Natural World change which clearly demonstrates that habitat loss, climate change, pollution, depletion and exploitation is the greatest threat to the planets biodiversity. IPBES is the Intergovernmental Panel for biodiversity and Ecosystem Services (1800-page report + 40-page summary, Pub. 6th May 2019). FUNGI to SOIL to INSECTS to PLANTS to FORESTS to ANIMALS to CROPS to FOOD to PEOPLE. It is Circular Biodiversity rather than the Circular Economy that is at the absolute heart of the Environment under Stress which is driving our social and ecological emergency. The parties involved in attempting to find a solution is Governments and politicians, who look at short and long-term solutions. The industry, agriculture, manufacturing, consumer goods, automotive and aerospace. Academe, Science & Technology, who look at long term solutions. A consuming human population and the continuing conundrum that is, food which is eaten by everyone, paper which is trusted by everyone, plastic which is used by everyone, textiles which is worn by everyone, and water which is needed by everyone. In a fusion reaction, energy is released when Deuterium(D)and Tritium(T) atoms are fused together by heating to high temperature (approx100,000,000deg C), the products of this reaction being Helium and High-speed neutrons.  [D + T-------à 4He+ n + Energy]. Successful full-scale processing will yield clean, free energy for everyone.1 liter of water, for example, will yield enough energy conversion to power London for a day. The timetable shows that in 2000 Science was shown to be feasible, 2030 Operating pilot plant, 2050 Half full-scale demonstration plant, 2070 Industrial scale plant comes online to the grid, 2100 Clean & free energy for everyone, in 2020 here will be little or no change in environmental stress, in 2025 Perhaps politicians will finally support the rigorous IPPC and IPBES recommendations on climate change and Ecological emergency, in 2030 Little or no change if the US, China, India, Brazil, pay no heed to the critical environmental messages, in 2040 If Exxon, Shell, BP and Aramco move away from fossil fuel exploration, a little more change, with full up take of electric & hydrogen fueled cars and Europe leaves coal and fracking behind, and the global supermarkets chains remove plastic when unnecessary, in 2050 Some hope with the progression of Fusion, but if no other urgent actions are taken, there will be a catastrophic loss of species including pollinating insects that will see an irreversible decline in biodiversity and the future of humans as a species. 

Mountain. Hood Oregon 1984-2006

Critical and speculative design

Critical design is a theory-based design approach[1], it foregrounds the ethics of design practice[2]. Critical design uses design fiction, (near future design, combines science fiction and design, science fiction is used as a design approach to imagine and create near future products)

[1] Wikipedia

[2] Bardzell, J. & Bardzell, S. (2013) ‘What is “Critical” about Critical Design?’ 

The Minority Report (2002). A film by Steven Spielberg.

and speculative design proposals[1], and challenges assumptions about the role objects play in everyday life[2]. Critical design also plays a role in product design but does not emphasize an objects commercial purpose. Critical design is a tool that creates ideas, not things or objects, it looks at the possible “what ifs” that the future may hold for us, and it helps question and open up debates that may be concerned with it. Critical design origins are from the Frankfurt school of critical theory, and the works of Horkheimer, Adorno, and Marcuse. They create products of mass media and consumer culture are politically regressive. Adornos concept of reification fits this, as it speaks of illusion, which is created and maintained by the dominant social classes, that would have us believe the position we hold is both ‘natural and beyond question.’ One of the main mechanisms that is used to maintain this certain illusion is consumer culture.[3] Early conception 2001, ‘there is a place for a form of design that pushes the cultural and aesthetic potential and role of electronic products and services to its limits.’ ‘Critical design is related to haute couture (high dressmaking, which is a one-off fashion and concept pieces),

[1] Wikipedia

[2] Wikipedia

 [3] How, A. (2003) ‘Critical Theory’ in Bardzell, J. & Bardzell, S. (2013) ‘What is “Critical” about Critical Design?’

Pierre Cardin, Space Age Collection, 1966

Concept cars, 

The Silver Fox built for the Turin Motor Show in 1967 by OSI (Officina Stampaggio Industriale)

design propaganda (visions of the future), 

La-domenica-del-corriere-cover (16th December 1962) Cover by Walter Molino 

2020. Internazionale cover by Lorenzo Mattotti.

but its purpose is not to present the dreams if industry, attract new businesses, anticipate new trends or test the marked. Its purpose is to stimulate discussions and debate amongst designers, industry and the public about the aesthetic quality of our electronically meditated existence.’[1] Speculative design is inspired by radical design (1970), conceptual design (1990) and fine art, drawing in our power to dream. Speculative design is critical of designs commercialization and is mindful of sustainability. The disadvantages of critical design are that it may be viewed as elitist ‘first world’ perspective that ‘makes light’ od conditions that already exist in poorer regions of the world. It is also set outside the usual design feedback loop of client and stakeholder collaboration, issues may ne highlighted but never acted upon. There may also be concerns with naïve, simplistic post-apocalyptic scenarios that are often negative.

[1] Dunne, T. & Raby, F. (2001) ‘Design Noir – The Secret life of electronic objects’.

Moto undone, Joey Ruiter 2011

Plant Fiction: selfeater (agave autovora) Troika, 2010

 Experience design

We now have advanced technology, for example, we are now able to play music through an IWatch. 

Apple IWatch

The definition of Interactive design is the practice of designing interactive digital products, environments, systems, and services. Interactionist designers’ perspectives and identities X promotions. The National Trust App Digitas Bi, London. Wanted to create an app that encourages people to discover new places. The design concept was like a buggy app. The design had to align with their business criteria. They want to inspire return visits, so they built an app to be a real time guide, helping visitors discover something new every time they opened the app. They also use geo-fencing technology to detect when users were at a property and offered them relevant information so they could make the most of their visit. Since they have launched the nation trust app, they have experienced an 80% increase in the app sessions and 68% increase in new users. The app has great reviews and users spend an average of 9 minutes on it. In the latest survey of the National Trust survey, over 3% said that the app had inspired their visit that day, equaling 650,000 days every year. “We are delighted to have launched this app, which helps our visitors make the most of their time with us when they visit.” – Tom Baker, Head if Digital at National Trust[1].Issues Digitas found and their solutions to resolve these issues were; connectivity, this shows that the app should work without WIFI, but a lot of locations on the app are very remote, therefore meaning no service, which means the app wont work. Another is accessibility, many people who will be using the app may be colour blind and some may have disabilities, this will therefore mean they will struggle to use the app. It’s one design challenge was to provide consistent functionality across three different operating systems[2], Thus therefore showing that it is one app, with three platforms. Interaction design often addresses more than one problem. Project teams have become obsessive documenters.

[1] National Trust App

[2] National Trust App 

Wolff-Olins, London (Brand Identity Specialty)

Designed the ‘Oi’ Brand. Wolff designs some ‘creative territories’ (concepts). Workers have 2 weeks to create the Brand Identity (Graphic Designs). All of the workers have an open mind towards the tech. They use Generative design, partnered with a Berlin based studio. Oi blobs change in correspondence to the audio (of you saying your name). The visual language, designers need to adaptable specialists[1]. Our tools are becoming more numerous and specialist. New Idioms, natural langue, Vs Performance Experience. Squermerfic Design plays a real-world aesthetic to make you comfortable.[2] Their strategy is to help identify opportunities you can uniquely own by analyzing your business, your market, and cultural shifts, in the world. The design is to activate the purpose and proposition of your brand with the creative building blocks all brand need, this can range from the logo to the colour palette, through to the typography and the imagery that may be used. They want to help define your future business, and what it offers employees. Their clients consist of apple, Biossance. Belkin, Indesit, Kodak, Sony, Littlesun, and many more.

[1] Oi Brand website

[2] Oi Brand Website

Komodo Digital, Newcastle, they create police drones. These drones have recenetly replaced Helis due to expense. They recreated the black book in digital. They service blueprints, 3D maps. Digital transformation, they work in Wagile ways, waterfall and agile ways combine (design). “As experienced digital consultants, we know that no two organisations are the same. Our core offering of design, development and consultancy allows us to bring a proven approach to your unique circumstances, building digital products with your users at the forefront of every decision.”[1] Their clients consist of ITV, Northumbria Police, Street stream, onward.

[1] Komodo Digital

Locale Project, they create synthetic biology- GMO, Dolly the sheep etc. It’s a locative project as they had to design an exhibition based on DNA depending on the configuration of blocks on the model it would create a certain creature in screen, visual petridism. 

[cryptowavesxyz]

The Cracks Are Showing in Iran

Running up against limited experience and resources for monitoring potentially illegal use of digital assets, United States authorities delegate sanctions monitoring to cryptocurrency exchanges and industry players. But do current practices do more harm than good?

Who will watch the watchlist?

Within the U.S. Treasury, the Office of Foreign Asset Control (OFAC) is responsible for sanctioning individuals and entities the country considers threats to national security.

Earlier this month, OFAC added two Chinese nationals accused of laundering money for North Korea’s infamous Lazarus Group. Notably, OFAC’s designation included crypto addresses for these individuals, a measure OFAC first introduced near the end of 2018 while targeting two Iranians for sanctions.

Regarding the newly sanctioned targets, Jesse Spiro, head of policy at leading blockchain transaction tracer, Chainalysis, told Cointelegraph:

“This action is particularly notable because it was brought against people who helped a previously sanctioned entity — Lazarus — transfer stolen funds through a complex money laundering process. This signals that the Treasury is not only using advanced blockchain investigative techniques but also taking action against people who facilitate illicit activity in any way.”

Adapting to new technology, but slowly

It’s no wonder that OFAC is wary of crypto’s role in countries under U.S. sanctions. Between North Korea’s prolific exchange-hacking program, Venezuela’s (admittedly floundering) oil-pegged Petro, and calls by the Iranian president to create a crypto that the U.S. can’t touch, many U.S. authorities remain reflexively suspicious of the whole industry.

Despite periodic designations of specific crypto wallets, OFAC has limited their direct engagement with crypto and other branches of the U.S. government. More comfortable with traditional financial systems, authorities have been hard-pressed to adapt to this new ecosystem.

Vice President at the Financial Integrity Network, Senior Director at the Foundation for Defense of Democracies, Eric Lorber, confirmed that authorities have been hard at work in this new field.

“There’s been a huge focus in the U.S. government on this in the last couple of years,” Lorber told Cointelegraph. “There is a good sense that the U.S. government has a general sense of what’s going on.”

Jesse Spiro agreed that the relevant financial regulators were hard at work:

“We also know that the Treasury Department — FinCEN, OFAC and even the policy office of TFFC (Terrorism Financing and Financial Crimes) — is actively ramping up their work on cryptocurrency and identifying and targeting potential bad actors that abuse the ecosystem.”

Yaya Fanusie, a former CIA counterterrorism analyst and current fellow at a number of national security-focused think tanks, was less impressed. Regarding uptick in regulatory crypto-fluency, Fanusie told Cointelegraph, “It’s been a slow burn […] There’s probably a problem in terms of getting up to speed.”

It is partially the nature of crypto — which, as an industry, adapts incredibly quickly — that has proved problematic. The CEO of Policy 4.0, Tanvi Ratner, commented on OFAC’s resources for crypto:

“They’re quite well equipped. There are only being beat by the rate of innovation in masking transactions.”

OFAC’s dependence on crypto exchanges and industry players to track their clientele

OFAC’s established practices require financial institutions operating in the U.S. to act as the front lines in searching for sanctions violations. OFAC has limited resources when it comes to actively tracking transactions themselves.

“Maybe I can dispel a myth. It’s not so much that the government has to focus on what’s going in and out,” Yaya Fanusie explained. “You have to rely on others, you have to rely on exchanges flagging things, you have to rely on investigative reporters.”

Regulators have shown striking unity in expecting anti-money laundering (AML) and countering the financing of terrorism (CFT) programs of businesses in the crypto space. Such measures are already familiar to traditional financial institutions, but they involve mechanisms that don’t always fit in with crypto. A large part of the argument for crypto is speed of transactions, accessibility to people left out of traditional finance, and ease of crossing borders — traits that run in opposition to traditional controls like sanctions.

Director of research at the Foundation for Defense of Democracies, David Adesnik, said of OFAC’s dependence on existing laws for enforcing sanctions in crypto, “I’m not sure if statutes have adapted yet. The Treasury is more trying to use what’s already on the books.”

John Roth, head of compliance at crypto exchange Bittrex, agreed:

“OFAC’s approach to crypto is pretty much the same as fiat. OFAC designates, but they expect exchanges to have programs in place to prevent transactions to/from prohibited persons/countries. […] It is really not that much different from a traditional bank.”

While positive about OFAC’s openness, Roth did agree that crypto had its sticking points: “I think the requirements are clear. The challenge is adapting those requirements to the unique nature of cryptocurrency.”

Roth’s commentary is particularly useful given Bittrex’s history with OFAC. Bittrex controversially froze Iranian accounts for two years before receiving an OFAC license in November. Unlike the Treasury’s specifically designated nationals list, the details of how OFAC and Bitttrex resolved this dispute are not publicly available.

In conversations with experts on this topic, the names of blockchain analytics firms like Chainalysis and Elliptic cropped up frequently. Chainalysis, in particular, has grown in importance, working with government officials as they investigate blockchains for suspicious transactions. The firm has standing contracts with the IRS, the Drug Enforcement Administration, and Immigration and Customs Enforcement. As of March 9, Chainalysis netted over $1.1 million in contracts with the FBI over recent months.

While government agencies may be newcomers to the technology, even crypto-central companies have to enlist help from firms like Chainalysis to cope with regulatory obligations. Roth noted that:

“All of the US exchanges use the same services (Chainalysis and Elliptic) that scour the blockchain to look for links to those kinds of customers, and have other internal controls in place.”

Heightened compliance requirements are sending crypto exchanges and other firms in the space to government-approved blockchain analytics firms in droves. A representative from Chainalysis explained the firm’s success amid compliance concerns to Cointelegraph:

“We’ve increased our customer count by 290% over the past two years, and new cryptocurrency exchange customers cite regulatory compliance as a top reason for adopting our technology.”

Problems with current approach: Are we safer or just pushing crypto operations out of the country?

As with all sorts of security concerns, if the precautionary measures work, they will seem like overreactions. However, these safeguards may actually be punishing well-intentioned entities, while failing to cope with the most threatening technical challenges.

Cointelegraph previously reported on the question of U.S. sanctions hitting Iran’s mining industry — an initiative that ultimately seems beyond the Treasury’s technical reach, though they could make it inconvenient for Iranian miners.

Another lingering technical question is the subject of privacy coins like Monero (XMR) and Dash (DASH). On the subject, Fanusie observed, “I don’t think anyone has cracked that yet.”

Blockchain analytics firms have yet to come up with software that can consistently trace transactions on privacy coins. The CEO of one such firm, Ciphertrace, predicted that treating crypto financing in the same way as banking would push users to privacy tokens that OFAC will have even less of a grasp of:

“As we get more of this deanonymization and it becomes more like banking, I think an unintended consequence will be that there will be concerted effort to use these privacy-enhanced coins.”

The other side of this security debate is its effect on business. There is no question that increasing regulations and expectations have taken their toll on exchanges. At an event last week at the IRS, representatives from Coinbase and Kraken insisted that excessive scrutiny from regulators was hitting their bottom lines.

Compliance with OFAC expectations is essential for any crypto exchange trying to operate in the United States, and requires additional legal teams and external contracts. As John Roth said:

“A compliant crypto exchange absolutely needs a dedicated compliance department, with the kinds of third-party tools necessary to ensure that they aren’t doing business with bad actors. This is the price of admission for doing business in the US, and most crypto companies understand that. If you don’t, I think the risks are significant.”

And while the expenses required to keep track of OFAC’s requirements — which change, and are not always clear in public — may be simple annoyances for larger exchanges, they can be untenable expenses for newer players. What happens as a result is simple: businesses leave.

Binance famously left the U.S. last year, setting up Binance.US to offer much more restricted services within the country. More recently, crypto exchange Digitex disavowed all KYC requirements following a data breach. In a video announcing the change, Digitex CEO Adam Todd explicitly called out U.S. authorities for expecting such information at the expense of consumer data protection.

While the United States may be the world’s largest economy, pushing exchanges out of the country does not necessarily solve the problem. Bad actors using crypto are fully capable of adapting, of manipulating regulatory arbitrage to funnel money in whatever form is least regulated. The parties most vulnerable to more aggressive expectations from OFAC are exchanges trying to operate legally.

Beyond hurting major exchanges and companies in the short term, these measures clearly limit America’s access to crypto services. Taking the long-term view, overbearing sanctions can encourage even nations friendly to the U.S. to operate in economic systems that the U.S. is simply not part of — limiting economic growth and the effectiveness of future sanctions.

U.S. overreach alienating the global economic system

The risks to the United States extend beyond crypto. In January, the Economist published a piece warning that aggressive sanctions and economic warfare could push the international market to abandon the dollar.

Returning to the example of Bittrex’s freeze on Iranian accounts, fear of angering OFAC prompted Bittrex to shut off access to Iranian accounts that OFAC itself would not have had legal recourse to target. “Let’s say that the Iranians who are involved in these transactions are just mom and pop vendors in Tehran,” said Eric Lorber, “The US government actually has no legal authority to block their assets.”

Using exchanges to sidestep legal restraints is not the way to win the hearts and minds of Iranian citizens suddenly bereft of potentially major portions of their life savings, nor does that reflect well on the promoted ideals of American capitalism.

Lorber continued to explain the limits to OFAC’s ability to exert its influence in jurisdictions abroad, even those allied with the United States. “If you’re a European firm and there’s an Iranian SDN who sends money to your European financial institution, that European financial institutions may not have the legal authority to block those funds,” Lorber said.

Tanvi Ratna, who recently wrote a piece for Foreign Policy entitled “Iran Has a Bitcoin Strategy to Beat Trump,” elaborated on the issues facing the U.S. in mustering international support for continued sanctions:

“The U.S. unilaterally changed stance and others don’t necessarily want to play along. You can’t impose sanctions unilaterally. […] Nor is everybody uninterested or threatened by Iran. Look at the attitudes of the Europeans, Chinese, Indians towards Iran.”

Crypto’s role in the grand scheme of sanctions

Within the broad arsenal of OFAC sanctions, crypto is a small player. It is, however, notable both for its dynamism and for some of its fundamental virtues, including speed and apathy to national borders. Cryptocurrencies also represent a clear challenge to financial systems that the U.S. has used to its political benefit, like SWIFT for international payments.

The coming years will be critical to establishing not just the U.S. Treasury’s relationship to crypto, but also its ability to adapt to changing financial systems. In these terms, OFAC’s reaction to crypto will be an important barometer to gauge its priorities and comfort with innovation.

Cointelegraph has reached out to OFAC a number of times, but the office has never responded. This article will be updated with their commentary should it come in.

window.fbAsyncInit = function () { FB.init({ appId: '1922752334671725', xfbml: true, version: 'v2.9' }); FB.AppEvents.logPageView(); }; (function (d, s, id) { var js, fjs = d.getElementsByTagName(s)[0]; if (d.getElementById(id)) { return; } js = d.createElement(s); js.id = id; js.src = "http://connect.facebook.net/en_US/sdk.js"; js.defer = true; fjs.parentNode.insertBefore(js, fjs); }(document, 'script', 'facebook-jssdk')); !function (f, b, e, v, n, t, s) { if (f.fbq) return; n = f.fbq = function () { n.callMethod ? n.callMethod.apply(n, arguments) : n.queue.push(arguments) }; if (!f._fbq) f._fbq = n; n.push = n; n.loaded = !0; n.version = '2.0'; n.queue = []; t = b.createElement(e); t.defer = !0; t.src = v; s = b.getElementsByTagName(e)[0]; s.parentNode.insertBefore(t, s) }(window, document, 'script', 'https://connect.facebook.net/en_US/fbevents.js'); fbq('init', '1922752334671725'); fbq('track', 'PageView'); Source link

The post The Cracks Are Showing in Iran appeared first on Crypto Waves.

from Crypto Waves https://ift.tt/2UjGKQb

[noisyunknownturtle]

The Cracks Are Showing in Iran

Running up against limited experience and resources for monitoring potentially illegal use of digital assets, United States authorities delegate sanctions monitoring to cryptocurrency exchanges and industry players. But do current practices do more harm than good?

Who will watch the watchlist?

Within the U.S. Treasury, the Office of Foreign Asset Control (OFAC) is responsible for sanctioning individuals and entities the country considers threats to national security.

Earlier this month, OFAC added two Chinese nationals accused of laundering money for North Korea’s infamous Lazarus Group. Notably, OFAC’s designation included crypto addresses for these individuals, a measure OFAC first introduced near the end of 2018 while targeting two Iranians for sanctions.

Regarding the newly sanctioned targets, Jesse Spiro, head of policy at leading blockchain transaction tracer, Chainalysis, told Cointelegraph:

“This action is particularly notable because it was brought against people who helped a previously sanctioned entity — Lazarus — transfer stolen funds through a complex money laundering process. This signals that the Treasury is not only using advanced blockchain investigative techniques but also taking action against people who facilitate illicit activity in any way.”

Adapting to new technology, but slowly

It’s no wonder that OFAC is wary of crypto’s role in countries under U.S. sanctions. Between North Korea’s prolific exchange-hacking program, Venezuela’s (admittedly floundering) oil-pegged Petro, and calls by the Iranian president to create a crypto that the U.S. can’t touch, many U.S. authorities remain reflexively suspicious of the whole industry.

Despite periodic designations of specific crypto wallets, OFAC has limited their direct engagement with crypto and other branches of the U.S. government. More comfortable with traditional financial systems, authorities have been hard-pressed to adapt to this new ecosystem.

Vice President at the Financial Integrity Network, Senior Director at the Foundation for Defense of Democracies, Eric Lorber, confirmed that authorities have been hard at work in this new field.

“There’s been a huge focus in the U.S. government on this in the last couple of years,” Lorber told Cointelegraph. “There is a good sense that the U.S. government has a general sense of what’s going on.”

Jesse Spiro agreed that the relevant financial regulators were hard at work:

“We also know that the Treasury Department — FinCEN, OFAC and even the policy office of TFFC (Terrorism Financing and Financial Crimes) — is actively ramping up their work on cryptocurrency and identifying and targeting potential bad actors that abuse the ecosystem.”

Yaya Fanusie, a former CIA counterterrorism analyst and current fellow at a number of national security-focused think tanks, was less impressed. Regarding uptick in regulatory crypto-fluency, Fanusie told Cointelegraph, “It’s been a slow burn […] There’s probably a problem in terms of getting up to speed.”

It is partially the nature of crypto — which, as an industry, adapts incredibly quickly — that has proved problematic. The CEO of Policy 4.0, Tanvi Ratner, commented on OFAC’s resources for crypto:

“They’re quite well equipped. There are only being beat by the rate of innovation in masking transactions.”

OFAC’s dependence on crypto exchanges and industry players to track their clientele

OFAC’s established practices require financial institutions operating in the U.S. to act as the front lines in searching for sanctions violations. OFAC has limited resources when it comes to actively tracking transactions themselves.

“Maybe I can dispel a myth. It’s not so much that the government has to focus on what’s going in and out,” Yaya Fanusie explained. “You have to rely on others, you have to rely on exchanges flagging things, you have to rely on investigative reporters.”

Regulators have shown striking unity in expecting anti-money laundering (AML) and countering the financing of terrorism (CFT) programs of businesses in the crypto space. Such measures are already familiar to traditional financial institutions, but they involve mechanisms that don’t always fit in with crypto. A large part of the argument for crypto is speed of transactions, accessibility to people left out of traditional finance, and ease of crossing borders — traits that run in opposition to traditional controls like sanctions.

Director of research at the Foundation for Defense of Democracies, David Adesnik, said of OFAC’s dependence on existing laws for enforcing sanctions in crypto, “I’m not sure if statutes have adapted yet. The Treasury is more trying to use what’s already on the books.”

John Roth, head of compliance at crypto exchange Bittrex, agreed:

“OFAC’s approach to crypto is pretty much the same as fiat. OFAC designates, but they expect exchanges to have programs in place to prevent transactions to/from prohibited persons/countries. […] It is really not that much different from a traditional bank.”

While positive about OFAC’s openness, Roth did agree that crypto had its sticking points: “I think the requirements are clear. The challenge is adapting those requirements to the unique nature of cryptocurrency.”

Roth’s commentary is particularly useful given Bittrex’s history with OFAC. Bittrex controversially froze Iranian accounts for two years before receiving an OFAC license in November. Unlike the Treasury’s specifically designated nationals list, the details of how OFAC and Bitttrex resolved this dispute are not publicly available.

In conversations with experts on this topic, the names of blockchain analytics firms like Chainalysis and Elliptic cropped up frequently. Chainalysis, in particular, has grown in importance, working with government officials as they investigate blockchains for suspicious transactions. The firm has standing contracts with the IRS, the Drug Enforcement Administration, and Immigration and Customs Enforcement. As of March 9, Chainalysis netted over $1.1 million in contracts with the FBI over recent months.

While government agencies may be newcomers to the technology, even crypto-central companies have to enlist help from firms like Chainalysis to cope with regulatory obligations. Roth noted that:

“All of the US exchanges use the same services (Chainalysis and Elliptic) that scour the blockchain to look for links to those kinds of customers, and have other internal controls in place.”

Heightened compliance requirements are sending crypto exchanges and other firms in the space to government-approved blockchain analytics firms in droves. A representative from Chainalysis explained the firm’s success amid compliance concerns to Cointelegraph:

“We’ve increased our customer count by 290% over the past two years, and new cryptocurrency exchange customers cite regulatory compliance as a top reason for adopting our technology.”

Problems with current approach: Are we safer or just pushing crypto operations out of the country?

As with all sorts of security concerns, if the precautionary measures work, they will seem like overreactions. However, these safeguards may actually be punishing well-intentioned entities, while failing to cope with the most threatening technical challenges.

Cointelegraph previously reported on the question of U.S. sanctions hitting Iran’s mining industry — an initiative that ultimately seems beyond the Treasury’s technical reach, though they could make it inconvenient for Iranian miners.

Another lingering technical question is the subject of privacy coins like Monero (XMR) and Dash (DASH). On the subject, Fanusie observed, “I don’t think anyone has cracked that yet.”

Blockchain analytics firms have yet to come up with software that can consistently trace transactions on privacy coins. The CEO of one such firm, Ciphertrace, predicted that treating crypto financing in the same way as banking would push users to privacy tokens that OFAC will have even less of a grasp of:

“As we get more of this deanonymization and it becomes more like banking, I think an unintended consequence will be that there will be concerted effort to use these privacy-enhanced coins.”

The other side of this security debate is its effect on business. There is no question that increasing regulations and expectations have taken their toll on exchanges. At an event last week at the IRS, representatives from Coinbase and Kraken insisted that excessive scrutiny from regulators was hitting their bottom lines.

Compliance with OFAC expectations is essential for any crypto exchange trying to operate in the United States, and requires additional legal teams and external contracts. As John Roth said:

“A compliant crypto exchange absolutely needs a dedicated compliance department, with the kinds of third-party tools necessary to ensure that they aren’t doing business with bad actors. This is the price of admission for doing business in the US, and most crypto companies understand that. If you don’t, I think the risks are significant.”

And while the expenses required to keep track of OFAC’s requirements — which change, and are not always clear in public — may be simple annoyances for larger exchanges, they can be untenable expenses for newer players. What happens as a result is simple: businesses leave.

Binance famously left the U.S. last year, setting up Binance.US to offer much more restricted services within the country. More recently, crypto exchange Digitex disavowed all KYC requirements following a data breach. In a video announcing the change, Digitex CEO Adam Todd explicitly called out U.S. authorities for expecting such information at the expense of consumer data protection.

While the United States may be the world’s largest economy, pushing exchanges out of the country does not necessarily solve the problem. Bad actors using crypto are fully capable of adapting, of manipulating regulatory arbitrage to funnel money in whatever form is least regulated. The parties most vulnerable to more aggressive expectations from OFAC are exchanges trying to operate legally.

Beyond hurting major exchanges and companies in the short term, these measures clearly limit America’s access to crypto services. Taking the long-term view, overbearing sanctions can encourage even nations friendly to the U.S. to operate in economic systems that the U.S. is simply not part of — limiting economic growth and the effectiveness of future sanctions.

U.S. overreach alienating the global economic system

The risks to the United States extend beyond crypto. In January, the Economist published a piece warning that aggressive sanctions and economic warfare could push the international market to abandon the dollar.

Returning to the example of Bittrex’s freeze on Iranian accounts, fear of angering OFAC prompted Bittrex to shut off access to Iranian accounts that OFAC itself would not have had legal recourse to target. “Let’s say that the Iranians who are involved in these transactions are just mom and pop vendors in Tehran,” said Eric Lorber, “The US government actually has no legal authority to block their assets.”

Using exchanges to sidestep legal restraints is not the way to win the hearts and minds of Iranian citizens suddenly bereft of potentially major portions of their life savings, nor does that reflect well on the promoted ideals of American capitalism.

Lorber continued to explain the limits to OFAC’s ability to exert its influence in jurisdictions abroad, even those allied with the United States. “If you’re a European firm and there’s an Iranian SDN who sends money to your European financial institution, that European financial institutions may not have the legal authority to block those funds,” Lorber said.

Tanvi Ratna, who recently wrote a piece for Foreign Policy entitled “Iran Has a Bitcoin Strategy to Beat Trump,” elaborated on the issues facing the U.S. in mustering international support for continued sanctions:

“The U.S. unilaterally changed stance and others don’t necessarily want to play along. You can’t impose sanctions unilaterally. […] Nor is everybody uninterested or threatened by Iran. Look at the attitudes of the Europeans, Chinese, Indians towards Iran.”

Crypto’s role in the grand scheme of sanctions

Within the broad arsenal of OFAC sanctions, crypto is a small player. It is, however, notable both for its dynamism and for some of its fundamental virtues, including speed and apathy to national borders. Cryptocurrencies also represent a clear challenge to financial systems that the U.S. has used to its political benefit, like SWIFT for international payments.

The coming years will be critical to establishing not just the U.S. Treasury’s relationship to crypto, but also its ability to adapt to changing financial systems. In these terms, OFAC’s reaction to crypto will be an important barometer to gauge its priorities and comfort with innovation.

Cointelegraph has reached out to OFAC a number of times, but the office has never responded. This article will be updated with their commentary should it come in.

window.fbAsyncInit = function () { FB.init({ appId: '1922752334671725', xfbml: true, version: 'v2.9' }); FB.AppEvents.logPageView(); }; (function (d, s, id) { var js, fjs = d.getElementsByTagName(s)[0]; if (d.getElementById(id)) { return; } js = d.createElement(s); js.id = id; js.src = "http://connect.facebook.net/en_US/sdk.js"; js.defer = true; fjs.parentNode.insertBefore(js, fjs); }(document, 'script', 'facebook-jssdk')); !function (f, b, e, v, n, t, s) { if (f.fbq) return; n = f.fbq = function () { n.callMethod ? n.callMethod.apply(n, arguments) : n.queue.push(arguments) }; if (!f._fbq) f._fbq = n; n.push = n; n.loaded = !0; n.version = '2.0'; n.queue = []; t = b.createElement(e); t.defer = !0; t.src = v; s = b.getElementsByTagName(e)[0]; s.parentNode.insertBefore(t, s) }(window, document, 'script', 'https://connect.facebook.net/en_US/fbevents.js'); fbq('init', '1922752334671725'); fbq('track', 'PageView'); Source link

The post The Cracks Are Showing in Iran appeared first on For Crypto.

from For Crypto https://ift.tt/2wngzAf

[coinfirst]

The Cracks Are Showing in Iran

Running up against limited experience and resources for monitoring potentially illegal use of digital assets, United States authorities delegate sanctions monitoring to cryptocurrency exchanges and industry players. But do current practices do more harm than good?

Who will watch the watchlist?

Within the U.S. Treasury, the Office of Foreign Asset Control (OFAC) is responsible for sanctioning individuals and entities the country considers threats to national security.

Earlier this month, OFAC added two Chinese nationals accused of laundering money for North Korea’s infamous Lazarus Group. Notably, OFAC’s designation included crypto addresses for these individuals, a measure OFAC first introduced near the end of 2018 while targeting two Iranians for sanctions.

Regarding the newly sanctioned targets, Jesse Spiro, head of policy at leading blockchain transaction tracer, Chainalysis, told Cointelegraph:

“This action is particularly notable because it was brought against people who helped a previously sanctioned entity — Lazarus — transfer stolen funds through a complex money laundering process. This signals that the Treasury is not only using advanced blockchain investigative techniques but also taking action against people who facilitate illicit activity in any way.”

Adapting to new technology, but slowly

It’s no wonder that OFAC is wary of crypto’s role in countries under U.S. sanctions. Between North Korea’s prolific exchange-hacking program, Venezuela’s (admittedly floundering) oil-pegged Petro, and calls by the Iranian president to create a crypto that the U.S. can’t touch, many U.S. authorities remain reflexively suspicious of the whole industry.

Despite periodic designations of specific crypto wallets, OFAC has limited their direct engagement with crypto and other branches of the U.S. government. More comfortable with traditional financial systems, authorities have been hard-pressed to adapt to this new ecosystem.

Vice President at the Financial Integrity Network, Senior Director at the Foundation for Defense of Democracies, Eric Lorber, confirmed that authorities have been hard at work in this new field.

“There’s been a huge focus in the U.S. government on this in the last couple of years,” Lorber told Cointelegraph. “There is a good sense that the U.S. government has a general sense of what’s going on.”

Jesse Spiro agreed that the relevant financial regulators were hard at work:

“We also know that the Treasury Department — FinCEN, OFAC and even the policy office of TFFC (Terrorism Financing and Financial Crimes) — is actively ramping up their work on cryptocurrency and identifying and targeting potential bad actors that abuse the ecosystem.”

Yaya Fanusie, a former CIA counterterrorism analyst and current fellow at a number of national security-focused think tanks, was less impressed. Regarding uptick in regulatory crypto-fluency, Fanusie told Cointelegraph, “It’s been a slow burn […] There’s probably a problem in terms of getting up to speed.”

It is partially the nature of crypto — which, as an industry, adapts incredibly quickly — that has proved problematic. The CEO of Policy 4.0, Tanvi Ratner, commented on OFAC’s resources for crypto:

“They’re quite well equipped. There are only being beat by the rate of innovation in masking transactions.”

OFAC’s dependence on crypto exchanges and industry players to track their clientele

OFAC’s established practices require financial institutions operating in the U.S. to act as the front lines in searching for sanctions violations. OFAC has limited resources when it comes to actively tracking transactions themselves.

“Maybe I can dispel a myth. It’s not so much that the government has to focus on what’s going in and out,” Yaya Fanusie explained. “You have to rely on others, you have to rely on exchanges flagging things, you have to rely on investigative reporters.”

Regulators have shown striking unity in expecting anti-money laundering (AML) and countering the financing of terrorism (CFT) programs of businesses in the crypto space. Such measures are already familiar to traditional financial institutions, but they involve mechanisms that don’t always fit in with crypto. A large part of the argument for crypto is speed of transactions, accessibility to people left out of traditional finance, and ease of crossing borders — traits that run in opposition to traditional controls like sanctions.

Director of research at the Foundation for Defense of Democracies, David Adesnik, said of OFAC’s dependence on existing laws for enforcing sanctions in crypto, “I’m not sure if statutes have adapted yet. The Treasury is more trying to use what’s already on the books.”

John Roth, head of compliance at crypto exchange Bittrex, agreed:

“OFAC’s approach to crypto is pretty much the same as fiat. OFAC designates, but they expect exchanges to have programs in place to prevent transactions to/from prohibited persons/countries. […] It is really not that much different from a traditional bank.”

While positive about OFAC’s openness, Roth did agree that crypto had its sticking points: “I think the requirements are clear. The challenge is adapting those requirements to the unique nature of cryptocurrency.”

Roth’s commentary is particularly useful given Bittrex’s history with OFAC. Bittrex controversially froze Iranian accounts for two years before receiving an OFAC license in November. Unlike the Treasury’s specifically designated nationals list, the details of how OFAC and Bitttrex resolved this dispute are not publicly available.

In conversations with experts on this topic, the names of blockchain analytics firms like Chainalysis and Elliptic cropped up frequently. Chainalysis, in particular, has grown in importance, working with government officials as they investigate blockchains for suspicious transactions. The firm has standing contracts with the IRS, the Drug Enforcement Administration, and Immigration and Customs Enforcement. As of March 9, Chainalysis netted over $1.1 million in contracts with the FBI over recent months.

While government agencies may be newcomers to the technology, even crypto-central companies have to enlist help from firms like Chainalysis to cope with regulatory obligations. Roth noted that:

“All of the US exchanges use the same services (Chainalysis and Elliptic) that scour the blockchain to look for links to those kinds of customers, and have other internal controls in place.”

Heightened compliance requirements are sending crypto exchanges and other firms in the space to government-approved blockchain analytics firms in droves. A representative from Chainalysis explained the firm’s success amid compliance concerns to Cointelegraph:

“We’ve increased our customer count by 290% over the past two years, and new cryptocurrency exchange customers cite regulatory compliance as a top reason for adopting our technology.”

Problems with current approach: Are we safer or just pushing crypto operations out of the country?

As with all sorts of security concerns, if the precautionary measures work, they will seem like overreactions. However, these safeguards may actually be punishing well-intentioned entities, while failing to cope with the most threatening technical challenges.

Cointelegraph previously reported on the question of U.S. sanctions hitting Iran’s mining industry — an initiative that ultimately seems beyond the Treasury’s technical reach, though they could make it inconvenient for Iranian miners.

Another lingering technical question is the subject of privacy coins like Monero (XMR) and Dash (DASH). On the subject, Fanusie observed, “I don’t think anyone has cracked that yet.”

Blockchain analytics firms have yet to come up with software that can consistently trace transactions on privacy coins. The CEO of one such firm, Ciphertrace, predicted that treating crypto financing in the same way as banking would push users to privacy tokens that OFAC will have even less of a grasp of:

“As we get more of this deanonymization and it becomes more like banking, I think an unintended consequence will be that there will be concerted effort to use these privacy-enhanced coins.”

The other side of this security debate is its effect on business. There is no question that increasing regulations and expectations have taken their toll on exchanges. At an event last week at the IRS, representatives from Coinbase and Kraken insisted that excessive scrutiny from regulators was hitting their bottom lines.

Compliance with OFAC expectations is essential for any crypto exchange trying to operate in the United States, and requires additional legal teams and external contracts. As John Roth said:

“A compliant crypto exchange absolutely needs a dedicated compliance department, with the kinds of third-party tools necessary to ensure that they aren’t doing business with bad actors. This is the price of admission for doing business in the US, and most crypto companies understand that. If you don’t, I think the risks are significant.”

And while the expenses required to keep track of OFAC’s requirements — which change, and are not always clear in public — may be simple annoyances for larger exchanges, they can be untenable expenses for newer players. What happens as a result is simple: businesses leave.

Binance famously left the U.S. last year, setting up Binance.US to offer much more restricted services within the country. More recently, crypto exchange Digitex disavowed all KYC requirements following a data breach. In a video announcing the change, Digitex CEO Adam Todd explicitly called out U.S. authorities for expecting such information at the expense of consumer data protection.

While the United States may be the world’s largest economy, pushing exchanges out of the country does not necessarily solve the problem. Bad actors using crypto are fully capable of adapting, of manipulating regulatory arbitrage to funnel money in whatever form is least regulated. The parties most vulnerable to more aggressive expectations from OFAC are exchanges trying to operate legally.

Beyond hurting major exchanges and companies in the short term, these measures clearly limit America’s access to crypto services. Taking the long-term view, overbearing sanctions can encourage even nations friendly to the U.S. to operate in economic systems that the U.S. is simply not part of — limiting economic growth and the effectiveness of future sanctions.

U.S. overreach alienating the global economic system

The risks to the United States extend beyond crypto. In January, the Economist published a piece warning that aggressive sanctions and economic warfare could push the international market to abandon the dollar.

Returning to the example of Bittrex’s freeze on Iranian accounts, fear of angering OFAC prompted Bittrex to shut off access to Iranian accounts that OFAC itself would not have had legal recourse to target. “Let’s say that the Iranians who are involved in these transactions are just mom and pop vendors in Tehran,” said Eric Lorber, “The US government actually has no legal authority to block their assets.”

Using exchanges to sidestep legal restraints is not the way to win the hearts and minds of Iranian citizens suddenly bereft of potentially major portions of their life savings, nor does that reflect well on the promoted ideals of American capitalism.

Lorber continued to explain the limits to OFAC’s ability to exert its influence in jurisdictions abroad, even those allied with the United States. “If you’re a European firm and there’s an Iranian SDN who sends money to your European financial institution, that European financial institutions may not have the legal authority to block those funds,” Lorber said.

Tanvi Ratna, who recently wrote a piece for Foreign Policy entitled “Iran Has a Bitcoin Strategy to Beat Trump,” elaborated on the issues facing the U.S. in mustering international support for continued sanctions:

“The U.S. unilaterally changed stance and others don’t necessarily want to play along. You can’t impose sanctions unilaterally. […] Nor is everybody uninterested or threatened by Iran. Look at the attitudes of the Europeans, Chinese, Indians towards Iran.”

Crypto’s role in the grand scheme of sanctions

Within the broad arsenal of OFAC sanctions, crypto is a small player. It is, however, notable both for its dynamism and for some of its fundamental virtues, including speed and apathy to national borders. Cryptocurrencies also represent a clear challenge to financial systems that the U.S. has used to its political benefit, like SWIFT for international payments.

The coming years will be critical to establishing not just the U.S. Treasury’s relationship to crypto, but also its ability to adapt to changing financial systems. In these terms, OFAC’s reaction to crypto will be an important barometer to gauge its priorities and comfort with innovation.

Cointelegraph has reached out to OFAC a number of times, but the office has never responded. This article will be updated with their commentary should it come in.

window.fbAsyncInit = function () { FB.init({ appId: '1922752334671725', xfbml: true, version: 'v2.9' }); FB.AppEvents.logPageView(); }; (function (d, s, id) { var js, fjs = d.getElementsByTagName(s)[0]; if (d.getElementById(id)) { return; } js = d.createElement(s); js.id = id; js.src = "http://connect.facebook.net/en_US/sdk.js"; js.defer = true; fjs.parentNode.insertBefore(js, fjs); }(document, 'script', 'facebook-jssdk')); !function (f, b, e, v, n, t, s) { if (f.fbq) return; n = f.fbq = function () { n.callMethod ? n.callMethod.apply(n, arguments) : n.queue.push(arguments) }; if (!f._fbq) f._fbq = n; n.push = n; n.loaded = !0; n.version = '2.0'; n.queue = []; t = b.createElement(e); t.defer = !0; t.src = v; s = b.getElementsByTagName(e)[0]; s.parentNode.insertBefore(t, s) }(window, document, 'script', 'https://connect.facebook.net/en_US/fbevents.js'); fbq('init', '1922752334671725'); fbq('track', 'PageView'); Source link

The post The Cracks Are Showing in Iran appeared first on Coin First.

from Coin First https://ift.tt/395lBPi

[angryconnoisseurface]

The Cracks Are Showing in Iran

Running up against limited experience and resources for monitoring potentially illegal use of digital assets, United States authorities delegate sanctions monitoring to cryptocurrency exchanges and industry players. But do current practices do more harm than good?

Who will watch the watchlist?

Within the U.S. Treasury, the Office of Foreign Asset Control (OFAC) is responsible for sanctioning individuals and entities the country considers threats to national security.

Earlier this month, OFAC added two Chinese nationals accused of laundering money for North Korea’s infamous Lazarus Group. Notably, OFAC’s designation included crypto addresses for these individuals, a measure OFAC first introduced near the end of 2018 while targeting two Iranians for sanctions.

Regarding the newly sanctioned targets, Jesse Spiro, head of policy at leading blockchain transaction tracer, Chainalysis, told Cointelegraph:

“This action is particularly notable because it was brought against people who helped a previously sanctioned entity — Lazarus — transfer stolen funds through a complex money laundering process. This signals that the Treasury is not only using advanced blockchain investigative techniques but also taking action against people who facilitate illicit activity in any way.”

Adapting to new technology, but slowly

It’s no wonder that OFAC is wary of crypto’s role in countries under U.S. sanctions. Between North Korea’s prolific exchange-hacking program, Venezuela’s (admittedly floundering) oil-pegged Petro, and calls by the Iranian president to create a crypto that the U.S. can’t touch, many U.S. authorities remain reflexively suspicious of the whole industry.

Despite periodic designations of specific crypto wallets, OFAC has limited their direct engagement with crypto and other branches of the U.S. government. More comfortable with traditional financial systems, authorities have been hard-pressed to adapt to this new ecosystem.

Vice President at the Financial Integrity Network, Senior Director at the Foundation for Defense of Democracies, Eric Lorber, confirmed that authorities have been hard at work in this new field.

“There’s been a huge focus in the U.S. government on this in the last couple of years,” Lorber told Cointelegraph. “There is a good sense that the U.S. government has a general sense of what’s going on.”

Jesse Spiro agreed that the relevant financial regulators were hard at work:

“We also know that the Treasury Department — FinCEN, OFAC and even the policy office of TFFC (Terrorism Financing and Financial Crimes) — is actively ramping up their work on cryptocurrency and identifying and targeting potential bad actors that abuse the ecosystem.”

Yaya Fanusie, a former CIA counterterrorism analyst and current fellow at a number of national security-focused think tanks, was less impressed. Regarding uptick in regulatory crypto-fluency, Fanusie told Cointelegraph, “It’s been a slow burn […] There’s probably a problem in terms of getting up to speed.”

It is partially the nature of crypto — which, as an industry, adapts incredibly quickly — that has proved problematic. The CEO of Policy 4.0, Tanvi Ratner, commented on OFAC’s resources for crypto:

“They’re quite well equipped. There are only being beat by the rate of innovation in masking transactions.”

OFAC’s dependence on crypto exchanges and industry players to track their clientele

OFAC’s established practices require financial institutions operating in the U.S. to act as the front lines in searching for sanctions violations. OFAC has limited resources when it comes to actively tracking transactions themselves.

“Maybe I can dispel a myth. It’s not so much that the government has to focus on what’s going in and out,” Yaya Fanusie explained. “You have to rely on others, you have to rely on exchanges flagging things, you have to rely on investigative reporters.”

Regulators have shown striking unity in expecting anti-money laundering (AML) and countering the financing of terrorism (CFT) programs of businesses in the crypto space. Such measures are already familiar to traditional financial institutions, but they involve mechanisms that don’t always fit in with crypto. A large part of the argument for crypto is speed of transactions, accessibility to people left out of traditional finance, and ease of crossing borders — traits that run in opposition to traditional controls like sanctions.

Director of research at the Foundation for Defense of Democracies, David Adesnik, said of OFAC’s dependence on existing laws for enforcing sanctions in crypto, “I’m not sure if statutes have adapted yet. The Treasury is more trying to use what’s already on the books.”

John Roth, head of compliance at crypto exchange Bittrex, agreed:

“OFAC’s approach to crypto is pretty much the same as fiat. OFAC designates, but they expect exchanges to have programs in place to prevent transactions to/from prohibited persons/countries. […] It is really not that much different from a traditional bank.”

While positive about OFAC’s openness, Roth did agree that crypto had its sticking points: “I think the requirements are clear. The challenge is adapting those requirements to the unique nature of cryptocurrency.”

Roth’s commentary is particularly useful given Bittrex’s history with OFAC. Bittrex controversially froze Iranian accounts for two years before receiving an OFAC license in November. Unlike the Treasury’s specifically designated nationals list, the details of how OFAC and Bitttrex resolved this dispute are not publicly available.

In conversations with experts on this topic, the names of blockchain analytics firms like Chainalysis and Elliptic cropped up frequently. Chainalysis, in particular, has grown in importance, working with government officials as they investigate blockchains for suspicious transactions. The firm has standing contracts with the IRS, the Drug Enforcement Administration, and Immigration and Customs Enforcement. As of March 9, Chainalysis netted over $1.1 million in contracts with the FBI over recent months.

While government agencies may be newcomers to the technology, even crypto-central companies have to enlist help from firms like Chainalysis to cope with regulatory obligations. Roth noted that:

“All of the US exchanges use the same services (Chainalysis and Elliptic) that scour the blockchain to look for links to those kinds of customers, and have other internal controls in place.”

Heightened compliance requirements are sending crypto exchanges and other firms in the space to government-approved blockchain analytics firms in droves. A representative from Chainalysis explained the firm’s success amid compliance concerns to Cointelegraph:

“We’ve increased our customer count by 290% over the past two years, and new cryptocurrency exchange customers cite regulatory compliance as a top reason for adopting our technology.”

Problems with current approach: Are we safer or just pushing crypto operations out of the country?

As with all sorts of security concerns, if the precautionary measures work, they will seem like overreactions. However, these safeguards may actually be punishing well-intentioned entities, while failing to cope with the most threatening technical challenges.

Cointelegraph previously reported on the question of U.S. sanctions hitting Iran’s mining industry — an initiative that ultimately seems beyond the Treasury’s technical reach, though they could make it inconvenient for Iranian miners.

Another lingering technical question is the subject of privacy coins like Monero (XMR) and Dash (DASH). On the subject, Fanusie observed, “I don’t think anyone has cracked that yet.”

Blockchain analytics firms have yet to come up with software that can consistently trace transactions on privacy coins. The CEO of one such firm, Ciphertrace, predicted that treating crypto financing in the same way as banking would push users to privacy tokens that OFAC will have even less of a grasp of:

“As we get more of this deanonymization and it becomes more like banking, I think an unintended consequence will be that there will be concerted effort to use these privacy-enhanced coins.”

The other side of this security debate is its effect on business. There is no question that increasing regulations and expectations have taken their toll on exchanges. At an event last week at the IRS, representatives from Coinbase and Kraken insisted that excessive scrutiny from regulators was hitting their bottom lines.

Compliance with OFAC expectations is essential for any crypto exchange trying to operate in the United States, and requires additional legal teams and external contracts. As John Roth said:

“A compliant crypto exchange absolutely needs a dedicated compliance department, with the kinds of third-party tools necessary to ensure that they aren’t doing business with bad actors. This is the price of admission for doing business in the US, and most crypto companies understand that. If you don’t, I think the risks are significant.”

And while the expenses required to keep track of OFAC’s requirements — which change, and are not always clear in public — may be simple annoyances for larger exchanges, they can be untenable expenses for newer players. What happens as a result is simple: businesses leave.

Binance famously left the U.S. last year, setting up Binance.US to offer much more restricted services within the country. More recently, crypto exchange Digitex disavowed all KYC requirements following a data breach. In a video announcing the change, Digitex CEO Adam Todd explicitly called out U.S. authorities for expecting such information at the expense of consumer data protection.

While the United States may be the world’s largest economy, pushing exchanges out of the country does not necessarily solve the problem. Bad actors using crypto are fully capable of adapting, of manipulating regulatory arbitrage to funnel money in whatever form is least regulated. The parties most vulnerable to more aggressive expectations from OFAC are exchanges trying to operate legally.

Beyond hurting major exchanges and companies in the short term, these measures clearly limit America’s access to crypto services. Taking the long-term view, overbearing sanctions can encourage even nations friendly to the U.S. to operate in economic systems that the U.S. is simply not part of — limiting economic growth and the effectiveness of future sanctions.

U.S. overreach alienating the global economic system

The risks to the United States extend beyond crypto. In January, the Economist published a piece warning that aggressive sanctions and economic warfare could push the international market to abandon the dollar.

Returning to the example of Bittrex’s freeze on Iranian accounts, fear of angering OFAC prompted Bittrex to shut off access to Iranian accounts that OFAC itself would not have had legal recourse to target. “Let’s say that the Iranians who are involved in these transactions are just mom and pop vendors in Tehran,” said Eric Lorber, “The US government actually has no legal authority to block their assets.”

Using exchanges to sidestep legal restraints is not the way to win the hearts and minds of Iranian citizens suddenly bereft of potentially major portions of their life savings, nor does that reflect well on the promoted ideals of American capitalism.

Lorber continued to explain the limits to OFAC’s ability to exert its influence in jurisdictions abroad, even those allied with the United States. “If you’re a European firm and there’s an Iranian SDN who sends money to your European financial institution, that European financial institutions may not have the legal authority to block those funds,” Lorber said.

Tanvi Ratna, who recently wrote a piece for Foreign Policy entitled “Iran Has a Bitcoin Strategy to Beat Trump,” elaborated on the issues facing the U.S. in mustering international support for continued sanctions:

“The U.S. unilaterally changed stance and others don’t necessarily want to play along. You can’t impose sanctions unilaterally. […] Nor is everybody uninterested or threatened by Iran. Look at the attitudes of the Europeans, Chinese, Indians towards Iran.”

Crypto’s role in the grand scheme of sanctions

Within the broad arsenal of OFAC sanctions, crypto is a small player. It is, however, notable both for its dynamism and for some of its fundamental virtues, including speed and apathy to national borders. Cryptocurrencies also represent a clear challenge to financial systems that the U.S. has used to its political benefit, like SWIFT for international payments.

The coming years will be critical to establishing not just the U.S. Treasury’s relationship to crypto, but also its ability to adapt to changing financial systems. In these terms, OFAC’s reaction to crypto will be an important barometer to gauge its priorities and comfort with innovation.

Cointelegraph has reached out to OFAC a number of times, but the office has never responded. This article will be updated with their commentary should it come in.

window.fbAsyncInit = function () { FB.init({ appId: '1922752334671725', xfbml: true, version: 'v2.9' }); FB.AppEvents.logPageView(); }; (function (d, s, id) { var js, fjs = d.getElementsByTagName(s)[0]; if (d.getElementById(id)) { return; } js = d.createElement(s); js.id = id; js.src = "http://connect.facebook.net/en_US/sdk.js"; js.defer = true; fjs.parentNode.insertBefore(js, fjs); }(document, 'script', 'facebook-jssdk')); !function (f, b, e, v, n, t, s) { if (f.fbq) return; n = f.fbq = function () { n.callMethod ? n.callMethod.apply(n, arguments) : n.queue.push(arguments) }; if (!f._fbq) f._fbq = n; n.push = n; n.loaded = !0; n.version = '2.0'; n.queue = []; t = b.createElement(e); t.defer = !0; t.src = v; s = b.getElementsByTagName(e)[0]; s.parentNode.insertBefore(t, s) }(window, document, 'script', 'https://connect.facebook.net/en_US/fbevents.js'); fbq('init', '1922752334671725'); fbq('track', 'PageView'); Source link

The post The Cracks Are Showing in Iran appeared first on Tip Crypto.

from Tip Crypto https://ift.tt/2IX6wog

[coinretreat]

The Cracks Are Showing in Iran

Running up against limited experience and resources for monitoring potentially illegal use of digital assets, United States authorities delegate sanctions monitoring to cryptocurrency exchanges and industry players. But do current practices do more harm than good?

Who will watch the watchlist?

Within the U.S. Treasury, the Office of Foreign Asset Control (OFAC) is responsible for sanctioning individuals and entities the country considers threats to national security.

Earlier this month, OFAC added two Chinese nationals accused of laundering money for North Korea’s infamous Lazarus Group. Notably, OFAC’s designation included crypto addresses for these individuals, a measure OFAC first introduced near the end of 2018 while targeting two Iranians for sanctions.

Regarding the newly sanctioned targets, Jesse Spiro, head of policy at leading blockchain transaction tracer, Chainalysis, told Cointelegraph:

“This action is particularly notable because it was brought against people who helped a previously sanctioned entity — Lazarus — transfer stolen funds through a complex money laundering process. This signals that the Treasury is not only using advanced blockchain investigative techniques but also taking action against people who facilitate illicit activity in any way.”

Adapting to new technology, but slowly

It’s no wonder that OFAC is wary of crypto’s role in countries under U.S. sanctions. Between North Korea’s prolific exchange-hacking program, Venezuela’s (admittedly floundering) oil-pegged Petro, and calls by the Iranian president to create a crypto that the U.S. can’t touch, many U.S. authorities remain reflexively suspicious of the whole industry.

Despite periodic designations of specific crypto wallets, OFAC has limited their direct engagement with crypto and other branches of the U.S. government. More comfortable with traditional financial systems, authorities have been hard-pressed to adapt to this new ecosystem.

Vice President at the Financial Integrity Network, Senior Director at the Foundation for Defense of Democracies, Eric Lorber, confirmed that authorities have been hard at work in this new field.

“There’s been a huge focus in the U.S. government on this in the last couple of years,” Lorber told Cointelegraph. “There is a good sense that the U.S. government has a general sense of what’s going on.”

Jesse Spiro agreed that the relevant financial regulators were hard at work:

“We also know that the Treasury Department — FinCEN, OFAC and even the policy office of TFFC (Terrorism Financing and Financial Crimes) — is actively ramping up their work on cryptocurrency and identifying and targeting potential bad actors that abuse the ecosystem.”

Yaya Fanusie, a former CIA counterterrorism analyst and current fellow at a number of national security-focused think tanks, was less impressed. Regarding uptick in regulatory crypto-fluency, Fanusie told Cointelegraph, “It’s been a slow burn […] There’s probably a problem in terms of getting up to speed.”

It is partially the nature of crypto — which, as an industry, adapts incredibly quickly — that has proved problematic. The CEO of Policy 4.0, Tanvi Ratner, commented on OFAC’s resources for crypto:

“They’re quite well equipped. There are only being beat by the rate of innovation in masking transactions.”

OFAC’s dependence on crypto exchanges and industry players to track their clientele

OFAC’s established practices require financial institutions operating in the U.S. to act as the front lines in searching for sanctions violations. OFAC has limited resources when it comes to actively tracking transactions themselves.

“Maybe I can dispel a myth. It’s not so much that the government has to focus on what’s going in and out,” Yaya Fanusie explained. “You have to rely on others, you have to rely on exchanges flagging things, you have to rely on investigative reporters.”

Regulators have shown striking unity in expecting anti-money laundering (AML) and countering the financing of terrorism (CFT) programs of businesses in the crypto space. Such measures are already familiar to traditional financial institutions, but they involve mechanisms that don’t always fit in with crypto. A large part of the argument for crypto is speed of transactions, accessibility to people left out of traditional finance, and ease of crossing borders — traits that run in opposition to traditional controls like sanctions.

Director of research at the Foundation for Defense of Democracies, David Adesnik, said of OFAC’s dependence on existing laws for enforcing sanctions in crypto, “I’m not sure if statutes have adapted yet. The Treasury is more trying to use what’s already on the books.”

John Roth, head of compliance at crypto exchange Bittrex, agreed:

“OFAC’s approach to crypto is pretty much the same as fiat. OFAC designates, but they expect exchanges to have programs in place to prevent transactions to/from prohibited persons/countries. […] It is really not that much different from a traditional bank.”

While positive about OFAC’s openness, Roth did agree that crypto had its sticking points: “I think the requirements are clear. The challenge is adapting those requirements to the unique nature of cryptocurrency.”

Roth’s commentary is particularly useful given Bittrex’s history with OFAC. Bittrex controversially froze Iranian accounts for two years before receiving an OFAC license in November. Unlike the Treasury’s specifically designated nationals list, the details of how OFAC and Bitttrex resolved this dispute are not publicly available.

In conversations with experts on this topic, the names of blockchain analytics firms like Chainalysis and Elliptic cropped up frequently. Chainalysis, in particular, has grown in importance, working with government officials as they investigate blockchains for suspicious transactions. The firm has standing contracts with the IRS, the Drug Enforcement Administration, and Immigration and Customs Enforcement. As of March 9, Chainalysis netted over $1.1 million in contracts with the FBI over recent months.

While government agencies may be newcomers to the technology, even crypto-central companies have to enlist help from firms like Chainalysis to cope with regulatory obligations. Roth noted that:

“All of the US exchanges use the same services (Chainalysis and Elliptic) that scour the blockchain to look for links to those kinds of customers, and have other internal controls in place.”

Heightened compliance requirements are sending crypto exchanges and other firms in the space to government-approved blockchain analytics firms in droves. A representative from Chainalysis explained the firm’s success amid compliance concerns to Cointelegraph:

“We’ve increased our customer count by 290% over the past two years, and new cryptocurrency exchange customers cite regulatory compliance as a top reason for adopting our technology.”

Problems with current approach: Are we safer or just pushing crypto operations out of the country?

As with all sorts of security concerns, if the precautionary measures work, they will seem like overreactions. However, these safeguards may actually be punishing well-intentioned entities, while failing to cope with the most threatening technical challenges.

Cointelegraph previously reported on the question of U.S. sanctions hitting Iran’s mining industry — an initiative that ultimately seems beyond the Treasury’s technical reach, though they could make it inconvenient for Iranian miners.

Another lingering technical question is the subject of privacy coins like Monero (XMR) and Dash (DASH). On the subject, Fanusie observed, “I don’t think anyone has cracked that yet.”

Blockchain analytics firms have yet to come up with software that can consistently trace transactions on privacy coins. The CEO of one such firm, Ciphertrace, predicted that treating crypto financing in the same way as banking would push users to privacy tokens that OFAC will have even less of a grasp of:

“As we get more of this deanonymization and it becomes more like banking, I think an unintended consequence will be that there will be concerted effort to use these privacy-enhanced coins.”

The other side of this security debate is its effect on business. There is no question that increasing regulations and expectations have taken their toll on exchanges. At an event last week at the IRS, representatives from Coinbase and Kraken insisted that excessive scrutiny from regulators was hitting their bottom lines.

Compliance with OFAC expectations is essential for any crypto exchange trying to operate in the United States, and requires additional legal teams and external contracts. As John Roth said:

“A compliant crypto exchange absolutely needs a dedicated compliance department, with the kinds of third-party tools necessary to ensure that they aren’t doing business with bad actors. This is the price of admission for doing business in the US, and most crypto companies understand that. If you don’t, I think the risks are significant.”

And while the expenses required to keep track of OFAC’s requirements — which change, and are not always clear in public — may be simple annoyances for larger exchanges, they can be untenable expenses for newer players. What happens as a result is simple: businesses leave.

Binance famously left the U.S. last year, setting up Binance.US to offer much more restricted services within the country. More recently, crypto exchange Digitex disavowed all KYC requirements following a data breach. In a video announcing the change, Digitex CEO Adam Todd explicitly called out U.S. authorities for expecting such information at the expense of consumer data protection.

While the United States may be the world’s largest economy, pushing exchanges out of the country does not necessarily solve the problem. Bad actors using crypto are fully capable of adapting, of manipulating regulatory arbitrage to funnel money in whatever form is least regulated. The parties most vulnerable to more aggressive expectations from OFAC are exchanges trying to operate legally.

Beyond hurting major exchanges and companies in the short term, these measures clearly limit America’s access to crypto services. Taking the long-term view, overbearing sanctions can encourage even nations friendly to the U.S. to operate in economic systems that the U.S. is simply not part of — limiting economic growth and the effectiveness of future sanctions.

U.S. overreach alienating the global economic system

The risks to the United States extend beyond crypto. In January, the Economist published a piece warning that aggressive sanctions and economic warfare could push the international market to abandon the dollar.

Returning to the example of Bittrex’s freeze on Iranian accounts, fear of angering OFAC prompted Bittrex to shut off access to Iranian accounts that OFAC itself would not have had legal recourse to target. “Let’s say that the Iranians who are involved in these transactions are just mom and pop vendors in Tehran,” said Eric Lorber, “The US government actually has no legal authority to block their assets.”

Using exchanges to sidestep legal restraints is not the way to win the hearts and minds of Iranian citizens suddenly bereft of potentially major portions of their life savings, nor does that reflect well on the promoted ideals of American capitalism.

Lorber continued to explain the limits to OFAC’s ability to exert its influence in jurisdictions abroad, even those allied with the United States. “If you’re a European firm and there’s an Iranian SDN who sends money to your European financial institution, that European financial institutions may not have the legal authority to block those funds,” Lorber said.

Tanvi Ratna, who recently wrote a piece for Foreign Policy entitled “Iran Has a Bitcoin Strategy to Beat Trump,” elaborated on the issues facing the U.S. in mustering international support for continued sanctions:

“The U.S. unilaterally changed stance and others don’t necessarily want to play along. You can’t impose sanctions unilaterally. […] Nor is everybody uninterested or threatened by Iran. Look at the attitudes of the Europeans, Chinese, Indians towards Iran.”

Crypto’s role in the grand scheme of sanctions

Within the broad arsenal of OFAC sanctions, crypto is a small player. It is, however, notable both for its dynamism and for some of its fundamental virtues, including speed and apathy to national borders. Cryptocurrencies also represent a clear challenge to financial systems that the U.S. has used to its political benefit, like SWIFT for international payments.

The coming years will be critical to establishing not just the U.S. Treasury’s relationship to crypto, but also its ability to adapt to changing financial systems. In these terms, OFAC’s reaction to crypto will be an important barometer to gauge its priorities and comfort with innovation.

Cointelegraph has reached out to OFAC a number of times, but the office has never responded. This article will be updated with their commentary should it come in.

window.fbAsyncInit = function () { FB.init({ appId: '1922752334671725', xfbml: true, version: 'v2.9' }); FB.AppEvents.logPageView(); }; (function (d, s, id) { var js, fjs = d.getElementsByTagName(s)[0]; if (d.getElementById(id)) { return; } js = d.createElement(s); js.id = id; js.src = "http://connect.facebook.net/en_US/sdk.js"; js.defer = true; fjs.parentNode.insertBefore(js, fjs); }(document, 'script', 'facebook-jssdk')); !function (f, b, e, v, n, t, s) { if (f.fbq) return; n = f.fbq = function () { n.callMethod ? n.callMethod.apply(n, arguments) : n.queue.push(arguments) }; if (!f._fbq) f._fbq = n; n.push = n; n.loaded = !0; n.version = '2.0'; n.queue = []; t = b.createElement(e); t.defer = !0; t.src = v; s = b.getElementsByTagName(e)[0]; s.parentNode.insertBefore(t, s) }(window, document, 'script', 'https://connect.facebook.net/en_US/fbevents.js'); fbq('init', '1922752334671725'); fbq('track', 'PageView'); Source link

The post The Cracks Are Showing in Iran appeared first on CoinRetreat.

from CoinRetreat https://ift.tt/2xI1RUE

[thecoroutfitters]

A speech that is motivational a kind designed to deliver a convincing and inspiring message – this oftentimes messages listeners are required to do something upon/ implement inside their very own everyday lives/ communities to boost themselves or their instant environment.

Focusing on how to provide a brief or speech that is long motivational particularly very important to pupils from a specialist viewpoint simply because they might get handling roles and could need certainly to motivate or guide individuals from time for you to time. This article comprises big selection of motivational message subjects along with pair of recommendations for structuring a successful motivational message.

Motivational Speech Value & Construction

Motivational message is essential since it helps concentrate peoples attention on reaching opinion on an issue or even for leading and synchronizing individual or collective efforts towards doing an action, trying to find or applying methods to a provided issue.

It doesn’t matter what speech that is motivational they are derived from, such speeches frequently share some traditional structural elements – they focus on extremely interesting, shocking remarks or with very appropriate information for public whose attention needs to be captured.

This is explained, supported with evidence, reasoning, or real-life examples after that, either a problem is stated or an argument/ position is presented – for both cases. A reasonably typical closing for motivational speeches is just a proactive approach, be it a noticeable improvement in behavior, worldview, or something like that else.

In the event that you a “write my speech for me” demand, Edubirdie may take proper care of all aspects linked to structure, style, formatting, grammar, content, sources, and also assisting with picking some inspirational message subjects. Just in case due dates are especially tough or budget restricted, you may additionally start thinking about requesting prewritten speeches from our professionals.

Monroe’s Motivated series

Monroe’s motivated series is an approach of persuading a gathering or interlocutor, which can be relevant to a variety that is wide of subjects which have persuasive component. This series is comprised of five important components/ actions:

Capture attention – do that through storytelling, making use of humor, shocking statistics, inspiring quotations, rhetorical questions, etc. You can do that through 1 moment to 5 moment intervention dependent on just how much you need to state right right right here and according to exactly just how long you have actually allocated for whole message.

Illustrate the need – you ought to illustrate/ encourage audience so it possesses emotional or other types of need that isn’t likely to disappear completely on it’s own and which requires action for attaining desired outcome. This means that you ought to show (using arguments, persuasion, proof) that there’s a significant issue, that adversely impacts market, and therefore handling it can bring significant advantages whilst not doing this will have negative consequences. The point that is main to help make market desperate to embrace proposed way to this issue.

Fulfill the need – present solutions that address certain dilemmas. Solutions as well as your place should always be well-explained, viable, according to convincing examples or data, on top-notch and data that are trustworthy sources. During this period, presenters should always be additionally prepared to convincingly refute counterarguments.

Visualize the long run. This may be done for starters or each of after situations: if option would be used as well as in situation it’s not. You ought to be since detailed as you are able to in depicting each situation deficient that is– current drawbacks must be presented obviously, the same as great things about a brighter future ensuing from adopting mentioned solution. To make certain credibility, it is necessary why these visions are practical and never exaggerated/ inflated.

Inspire action – inform market about certain actions they take for handling/ solving problem. This may be done through a quick 2 moment to 3 minute intervention but a whole lot more time must be devoted with respect to the subject as well as on exactly exactly exactly what part action posseses a story that is overall. Don’t set exaggerated and many objectives but involvement that is rather encourage detail by detail solutions, you may earnestly be involved in or arrange follow-up occasions.

100 Motivational Speech Topics for Pupils

Below is a genuine and comprehensive listing of motivational speech subjects designed for university students, for youth as a whole, for anybody else interested and that could be applied straight or could act as motivation source for relevant subjects:

Company & Management Topics

Beginning your business that is own in United States – key classes about determination

Art of coping with problems

Many failures that are epic my specialization industry and after that individuals recovered gloriously

Key features effective startups have actually in accordance

Teamwork importance in a business that is emerging

Exactly just How nowadays, innovative a few ideas result in corporations in record terms

Smart contracts enabled by blockchain technology – a large transformative potential.

exactly just What would world seem like whenever cryptocurrency is completely used & incorporated?

Key technologies that are innovative final five years analyzed as investment possibilities

Making use of customer comments by companies for self-improvement

Business duty being a tool that is valuable humanizing face of organizations

Inspiring responsibility that is corporate (jobs implemented in developing communities, environmentally targeted campaigns, etc.)

Benefits for resilience related to larger organizations

Triumph in enforcing clear and reasonable operations that are financial

Spaced repetition part in perfecting study product, its reliance that is direct on

Present generations will bring that radical modification required for addressing worldwide warming & air pollution issues

Preparing for a tremendously quickly evolving employment market – just what abilities should US students give attention to?

Academic Topics

Learning or employed in a multicultural environment advantages

Showing on privilege of profiting from an education that is high-quality

Lifelong learning value & constant expert self-improvement

Advantages caused by being the first ever to master appearing technologies

Underestimated competence to be in a position to effectively & quickly find extremely information that is specific Web (using search formulas, scripts, etc.)

Pro success key determinants according to statistical studies

Training beyond professional attainment

Class curriculum as unifying/ binding force

Schools without research – prospective advantages connected with such paradigm change

Effective stories the usa learns from – Finland system that is educational

Free university/ college training should always be a universal right in United States Of America

Ecological Topics

Avoiding polarization pertaining to ecological dilemmas among present pupils

Great tips on steering clear of the many problems that are common by United States pupils after graduation

Balanced life that is social & entertainment for scholastic success

Inspiring tales and methods of handling mental challenges and anxiety when having a medical or medical work

Individual gratitude believed towards medical & medical workers as a motivation that is important employed in this industry

Supportive groups and environments as a benefit that is important of jobs

Medical jobs are rewarding for social individuals because of possibilities for social relationship

A lengthy average lifespan all over the world as a significant merit of present advanced level medication

Crisis injections with oxygen-containing lipid microvesicles as a way that is innovative save your self everyday lives

Injections with expandable beads into available wounds as a way to end bleeding that is severe accidents and conserve life

Utilizing temperatures that are low surgery (to stop mind harm)

Advantages for the united states culture ensuing from more assets in preventive medication measures

Exactly just How some substances that are psychedelic aid in dealing with despair relating to technology

Growing the kids in closer connection with nature – a real means to prevent asthma

Educating behavior that encourages charitable functions in your kids

Nature vs Nurture Topics

Women empowerment – a take on the final 3 generations (with examples from actual life)

Exactly What it indicates become a guy into the twenty-first century (concentrate on values, worldview)

just How families should cope with the difficulties of modern life

Being truly a model for the young ones from various views: professional, individual development, part played in the neighborhood, household, etc.

Need for exposing kiddies and adolescents to types of effective and people that are honorable

Need for interacting actually together with your young ones in their everyday lives

Underrated art of patience & quiet observation

Sound head, sound human anatomy

Learning meditation that is basic for better self-control

Meditation kinds & that which we study from each

Scientific proof that meditation somewhat affects our gene phrase

Certain kinds of meditation make feasible empathy “training”

Meditating minds under Magnetic Resonance Imaging – inspiring classes and conclusions

How exactly to be open-minded & adaptive – the difficulties of self-improvement in a world that is increasingly dynamic

Why you ought to constantly attempt to be better but be realistic regarding the expectations

Self-improvement – why changing our actions may be the shortcut to changing whom we have been

Tales coping with character change – the grail that is holy of

Looking for the evasive formula of originality in modern art

Types of heroic deeds done by experts throughout history

Topics about Technology

The revolution in effectiveness brought by AI and device learning

Opting for the future that is green just exactly exactly what key actions are anticipated from us?

just exactly How people changing their lifestyles could reshape entire cities – the illustration of biking in Copenhagen & Amsterdam

Ways that metropolitan areas may encourage lifestyles that are environmentally friendly

Electric cars mean the air in future megalopolises will be breathable

Fast transition to solar power will deal with numerous health conditions produced by smog

Shift in profitability – solar power has become less expensive than thermoelectric power in a lot of countries

Will transitioning to Tesla automobiles be because fast as transitioning from horses to cars

Exactly just How hefty opportunities in renewable power sources trigger really cheap or electricity that is free

The boost that is economic possible by free electricity created from renewable sources

Irrigating deserts with desalinated water running on renewable energy

Harnessing wave and energy that is tidal

Analysis on nuclear fusion products (stellarators, tokamaks) in a position to deliver energy that is virtually unlimited

Mastering nuclear fusion might have a profound civilization-wide effect

Cities as a method to truly save on infrastructure expenses while delivering high criteria of life because of its inhabitants

Techniques for applying more powerful relationships between city inhabitants and nature

Diet plans that assistance reduce impact that is environmental animal enduring

Why even non-vegetarians alter their food diets in environmentally ways that are impactful

Simple guidelines any home could follow to alter effect on environment

Changing our shopping practices and philosophy to reduce impact that is environmental

The impact that is positive electric container barges introduced by Tesla might have on maritime transport and environment

Science Subjects

just What possibilities are exposed by drones for package delivery

Sharing self-driving electro-cars for passenger transportation – will this end up being the future taxi solution?

just How would Hyperloop replace the world with regards to transport rate and schedules that are reliable

Impactful price cuts for room research permitted by reuse and recovery of first phases (rocket boosters)

Curiosity Rover – the miracle of watching Martian sunsets

Why computer scripts are completely indispensable for successful drone landing on Mars

Leads of developing self-sufficient colonies on Mars

Opportunities exposed by a thorough variety of satellites that may monitor every square inch on world in real-time ( very early warnings about tsunamis, earthquakes, enhanced farming, essaypro reddit re solving traffic congestion, better climate forecast, etc.)

Leads for handling the false information epidemics on online

Individuals undermine empires – success tales of people whom brought modification to entire nations/ areas

Revisiting the part of church in a society that is modern

Good thinking – training yourself in mastering this art

Effective Motivational Speech Topics

Humans – animals on two feet and ungrateful (F. Dostoevsky)

Democracy cannot succeed unless people who express their option are quite ready to choose knowledgeably. The genuine protect of democracy, therefore, is training. (Franklin D. Roosevelt)

“There’s no key of life. Life’s aim, if it offers one, is just become constantly interested in temptations.” (Oscar Wilde)

“If there should be difficulty allow it to be during my time that my kid could have peace.” (Tom Paine)

“Whatever you are doing may be insignificant, however it is important it. which you do” (Mahatma Gandhi)

“Ability is really what you are with the capacity of doing. Inspiration determines everything you do. Personality determines how good it is done by you.” (Lou Holtz)

You’ll also find more topics for motivational speeches on our site, such as for instance our commemorative message tips rubric or our demonstration message topics rubric. Numerous funny motivational subjects are located in our comprehensive listings of funny topics (as an example, among our lists of funny persuasive message topics).

Experiencing essay research?

Our article writers have already assisted 2,000+ students conquer their research objectives. Allow them to assist you to.

Instant Speech Help and More

We wish that the choice supplied above helped you identify at the very least a few good motivational speech topics for further pursuit. As previously mentioned, our expert article writers assist the two of you with subject selection along with composing up your complete message. Our policies enable you to choose your selected writer according to performance ratings and also to keep in touch with him/her for the task by giving extra guidance and feedback and also by reviewing message outlines and drafts.

This clear procedure will make sure your message is maximally tailored to your requirements. Understand that you can easily require numerous free revisions if delivered work will not completely match guidelines or quality degree set, that hardly ever takes place. Spot an order and we’ll try to complete our better to make you pleased.

from Patriot Prepper Don't forget to visit the store and pick up some gear at The COR Outfitters. Are you ready for any situation? #SurvivalFirestarter #SurvivalBugOutBackpack #PrepperSurvivalPack #SHTFGear #SHTFBag

[biofunmy]

Can Your Personal Choices Curb Climate Change? Not Even Scientists Agree.

Kim Cobb traveled to the Kiritimati coral reefs in the spring of 2016 and found, to her horror, an underwater graveyard.

A climate scientist at the Georgia Institute of Technology, Cobb was alarmed to see this precious research site in the Pacific Ocean in such visible distress. The reefs were mostly dead after months of being in abnormally warm ocean waters.

Then that fall Donald Trump was elected president, dashing Cobb’s hopes of the US implementing the environmental rules needed to prevent a warmer world. “It became clear after the election not only was that hope misplaced, but it was actually never going to be enough,” Cobb told BuzzFeed News.

And so, she underwent a “wholesale reorganization” of her life, she said, including biking to work, rarely flying, going vegetarian, investing in expensive residential rooftop solar panels, and getting involved in her community’s new transportation plans.

A growing number of scientists and activists are, like Cobb, taking dramatic personal steps to decrease their personal carbon footprint. But stopping the activities that make a real difference — flying, driving, eating meat, and having children — is for most people a big sacrifice, and even climate experts disagree about whether they have a moral imperative to do so.

The camp that’s going all out includes a 400-person Facebook group called #BirthStrike, formed in December 2018, for people who have decided “not to bear children due to the severity of the ecological crisis.” And hundreds of climate scientists have vowed to scale back on flying.

“I think it’s a good thing for climate messengers to ‘walk the talk,’” said Peter Kalmus, an associate project scientist at the University of California, Los Angeles, who has stopped flying altogether and created the website No Fly Climate Sci for others to publicly share why they are flying less. “It makes the message much more effective.”

Other scientists point out, though, that without strict laws to curb carbon emissions, no individual’s choices matter all that much. For them, the most important action is political — to try to change the direction of national and global policies.

If everyone who already cared about climate change “reduced their carbon emissions to zero, it doesn’t actually change very much,” said Gavin Schmidt, director of the NASA Goddard Institute for Space Studies. Making your home energy efficient is nothing compared to laws that would require all buildings to be greener. Buying solar panels for your roof doesn’t pack the same climate punch as electric companies relying more on solar farms, and less on coal plants, to feed the grid.

“Agitating and voting and writing letters and op-eds,” Schmidt said, “make far more sense” for promoting systemic change.

Many people who care about climate change are wrestling with what, if anything, they can do about it. Although many of the most popular consumer choices, from ditching plastic straws to using an electric vehicle instead of a gas-guzzler, have some environmental benefits — they don’t put a dent in global emissions. Meanwhile, carbon pollution is approaching frightening levels: According to an influential report published in October, the world could experience dangerous warming as early as 2030 if we don’t rapidly cut emissions.

And yet, President Trump has reversed course on a lot of US climate policies. His administration has repealed the Clean Power Plan designed to curb pollution from coal plants, gutted stricter climate standards for cars and trucks and, just this month, signed executive orders aimed to streamline the development of new fossil fuel projects. Trump also pledged to withdraw the US from the Paris climate agreement, slowing momentum for global action.

The one-two punch of witnessing coral reef carnage and then seeing Trump get elected sent Cobb spiraling into depression. She decided to try engaging with climate action on a personal level, focusing on changing things within her control, such as how she got to work and what she ate, and found a new sense of hope and energy along the way. “It became a daily part of my self-care,” Cobb said.

But talking about her transformation on social media sparked a backlash. “I brought the haters out,” Cobb said.

She has been accused of virtue signaling, and touting a lifestyle that some say is only attainable for the rich. Cobb said she’s not out to shame or judge anyone — instead, she’s trying to show that living a climate-friendly life doesn’t have to be a sacrifice.

As scientists have debated these issues, outsiders have piled on. Climate skeptics have repeatedly called out scientists and activists for their carbon-intensive lives.

For these people, Schmidt of NASA has no patience. “People who use the personal choices of climate scientists as some kind of excuse for not understanding science or refusing to accept science, those are not good-faith arguments, and we shouldn’t really entertain them,” Schmidt said.

Peter Kalmus’s journey down the path of a carbon-limited life started years before Trump’s presidency, back in 2006. He was a graduate student in astrophysics at Columbia University at the time, and a new father. One of the department’s weekly talks featured then-NASA climate scientist James Hansen, and his presentation had Kalmus on the edge of his seat. In the years since, he switched careers to focus on climate change, cut meat from his diet, and gave up flying. He shares his passion with his two sons, 10 and 12, who regularly strike before school on Friday to spread awareness about climate change.

Similar to Cobb, upending his lifestyle was a way for him to find meaning and hope in the face of a terrifying future.

“I’m basically freaking out about carbon emissions,” he said. “If I feel like, This is so urgent and I can’t even reduce, I would probably feel pretty hopeless.”

And more than many of his peers, Kalmus sees individual action as instrumental in bringing about larger change. “You can’t have systematic change unless a whole bunch of individuals are essentially voting for it and voting for it with their actions,” he said.

T. Jane Zelikova, an ecologist at the University of Wyoming, said she’s struggled with what to do. ”Climate change is a collective problem,” Zelikova said. “I think putting the onus of climate change solutions on climate scientists — it doesn’t seem fair. But I also realize we have to lead by example.”

Schmidt is fine with people changing their lives because it’s fulfilling. But he doesn’t want the public to get the impression that the only way to save the planet is by abstaining from certain products or not traveling. “I don’t think that is where we want to end up,” Schmidt said.

His philosophy is: “Individual actions are not really the solution, but there’s no reason that you should unnecessarily pollute the atmosphere.”

Neither Schmidt nor Zelikova have given up flying entirely, but they have tried to cut back by combining trips or using virtual conferencing software. Schmidt became a vegetarian, driven both by animal welfare and climate concerns, and Zelikova aims to only buy meat from ranchers with sustainable grazing practices.

Zelikova said she is “really lucky” to have a good-paying job and live in a place that makes such choices possible.

Zelikova has also mulled one of the biggest decisions of all: whether to have kids. Adding to the more common concerns, such as financial security, Zelikova told BuzzFeed News that, in the wake of increasingly catastrophic predictions from climate models, she and her partner have talked about “whether it’s responsible to bring new kids into the world or whether we should adopt.” They haven’t decided yet.

The top actions you can take to cut your own emissions, in order of impact, include having one fewer child (equaling, for someone in a rich country, an estimated 58.6 tons of carbon dioxide equivalent per year), living car-free (about 2.4 tons per year), avoiding air travel (about 1.6 tons per round-trip transatlantic flight), and eating a plant-based diet (roughly 0.8 tons per year), according to a 2017 study in the journal Environment Research Letters.

The study authors also looked at what recommendations were being shared in textbooks, government material, and other sources. They found the biggest actions, mentioned above, were often omitted, whereas moderate- and low-impact choices — like recycling, buying energy-efficient products, and taking public transportation — were featured. For example, the Environmental Protection Agency’s “What You Can Do” website includes a “green vehicle guide” and “fuel economy guide” but doesn’t suggest ditching cars altogether.

Climate scientist Katharine Hayhoe of Texas Tech University regularly engages with the public about climate change. She gave a TED Talk and created a YouTube series. Over and over again, she’s been asked the same question: What can I do about climate change?

This has led her down a multiyear journey of experimentation, giving up certain things and seeing how it felt. Over the past decade, she’s invested in solar panels for her home, bought an electric vehicle, and switched from a dryer to a drying rack. Increasingly, she’s been giving virtual talks to cut down on travel.

Hayhoe’s biggest climate impact, she said, is not cutting her own emissions or serving as a model for others on this front. It’s simply talking to as many people as possible about the perils of climate change.

“The most important thing I’ve done is restructure my life to tell as many people in as efficient and effective ways as I can,” Hayhoe said. “It is real. It is us. It is serious and there are solutions if we act now.” ●

Sahred From Source link Science

from WordPress http://bit.ly/2USckYh via IFTTT

[douchebagbrainwaves]

THE LIES ARE RARELY OVERT

Fortunately reporters liked us. When they sign a termsheet, they want to work at Yahoo. It's as if a chunk of genetic material from the old-fashioned robber baron business world got incorporated into the startup world, most good ideas seem bad initially. Back in the 90s. Maybe this will change, but I bought it, for the first time, with misgivings.1 It's fabulous.2 The companies that win are the ones that set the trends, both for other startups and for VCs.3 At Yahoo this death spiral started early. If a successful startup could make a clean break just by taking a pill. Isaac Newton Newton has a strange role in my pantheon of heroes: he's the one I reproach myself with.4

Whatever gets you your target growth rate to make all your decisions for you; anything that gets you the growth you need is a running back.5 That was the phrase they used at Yahoo. Google about some nasty trick their corp dev people can do. Thomas Huxley said Try to learn something about everything and everything about something. But are these just outliers? Steve Wozniak's problem was that he did so many different things that were admirable. I was explaining it badly, or he was just very poker faced. In the Q & A period after a recent talk, someone asked what made startups fail. This seems one of the reasons his achievement is hard to appreciate is that it forces you to start before that, just say the most important quality would be intelligence.6 If you use this method, you'll get roughly the same answer I just gave.

Some may have been necessary. A lot of our energy got drained away in disputes with investors instead of going into the product.7 He's not just generally correct, but also because generating returns from dividends. In an efficient market, the number of failed startups don't quit their day jobs, and graduate school. If you can't, you're on the wrong track.8 I saw a documentary on pollution that put me into a panic. Should you hire another programmer? But while you don't literally need math for most kinds of hacking, in the broader sense of the word 'is' is.9 It's too complicated for a third party to act as an intermediary between developer and user.10 But as Larry and Sergey couldn't find stuff online, because an audience makes you write more, and thus generate more ideas; print out drafts instead of just passing through on their way to other destinations, as they did at a search engine you have to make it a much more common. How did Apple get into this mess?

Another reason parents don't want their kids to believe, parents either pressure the school into keeping quiet or move their kids to a new idea every week will be equally fatal. Or business users. That's why there's a distinct word, startup, for companies designed to grow fast, I mean it in two senses. It's so easy to change, its design can benefit from evolution.11 You may notice a certain similarity between the Viaweb and Y Combinator logos. In fact, when we funded Airbnb, we thought we were meeting so we could show him our new technology, Revenue Loop.12 I just bought a new 27 iMac a couple days ago. If things go well, this shouldn't matter. A few seconds later she told me that it was a little alarming to have users who got lots of traffic. Having to hit a growth number every week forces founders to act, and acting versus not acting is the high bit of succeeding. A few Thanksgivings ago, a friend of mine dislikes VCs.

It's hard for us now to understand what it must have felt like for him. For example, philosophy talks, among other things, about our obligations to one another; but you can still end up constrained in a. If Microsoft was the Empire, they were the Rebel Alliance. You can of course build something for users other than yourself. I save up because they'll be so much fun to write about, then write down what you said; expect 80% of the ideas in an essay to happen after you start writing it, and learn what they know. Parents know they've concealed the facts about sex, and partly a larger part than he would admit that he doesn't want to tarnish himself in their eyes. There's no name for what Steve Jobs is, because since meeting Robert I've tried to do in software what he seems to do in software what he seems to do in software what he seems to do in college would be to learn what lies are told to kids, we may be able to try out software online.13 We assumed his logo would deter any actual customers, but the way to make yourself work on hard problems.14 My parents never claimed that people or animals who died had gone to a better place, or that we'd meet them again.

Notes

If a company with benevolent aims is currently undervalued, because companies then were more dependent on banks for capital for expansion. We don't call it procrastination when someone gets drunk instead of working. This point is due to Trevor Blackwell, who would have met 30 people he knew.

Everyone's taught about it.

Not even being deliberately misleading by focusing so much to maintain their percentage.

My first job was scooping ice cream in the message. Photo by Alex Lewin.

The original version of the things we focus on building the company, though, because the proportion of spam, for example, if they do. Historically, scarce-resource arguments have been lured into this sort of community. Anything that got fixed. If it failed it failed it failed.

In high school football game that will sign up quickest and those are guaranteed in the same time. I think in general we've done ok at fundraising is because other companies made all the red counties. Living on instant ramen would be enough to guarantee good effects.

So it may be some formal measure that you decide the price of a city's potential as a first approximation, it's not enough to do others chose Marx or Cardinal Newman, and others, no one would say we depend on Aristotle would be very unhealthy. But do you really need that much of a more general rule: focus on the x company, and no doubt often are, but countless other startups, but rather by, say, of course. There is usually a stupid move, and large bribes by Spain to make money from the truth to say that IBM makes decent hardware. One source of them material.

I've been told that Microsoft discourages employees from contributing to open-source browser. There is something in the narrowest sense. In judging both intelligence and wisdom the judgement to know about a startup we had, we'd have understood why: If doctors did the same price as the little jars in supermarkets. There are lots of options, because by definition if the growth rate as evolutionary pressure is such a baleful stare as they get to be like a wave.

Copyright owners tend to focus on their ability but women based on that? You can get rich by creating wealth—university students, heirs, professors, politicians, and this is mainly due to Trevor Blackwell, who probably knows more about hunter gatherers I strongly recommend Elizabeth Marshall Thomas's The Harmless People and The CRM114 Discriminator.

Proceedings of AAAI-98 Workshop on Learning for Text Categorization.

Anything that got fixed.

Since I now believe that successful startups get on the expected value calculation varies from person to person depending on how much you get, the assembly line, the CIA runs a venture fund called In-Q-Tel that is exactly the point I'm making, though. Though nominally acquisitions and sometimes on a valuation from an eager investor, lest that set an impossibly high target when raising additional money.

Thanks to Paul Buchheit for the same, but you get stock as if having good intentions were enough to do some research online. None at all but for blacklists nearness is physical, and we did not help, either, that he could accept it. When I use.

Correction: Earlier versions used a TV as a motive, and configure domain names etc. If the Mac was so widespread and so depended on banks, who adds the cost of writing software goes up more than you expect. Beware too of the most general truths.

Thanks to Robert Morris, Jackie McDonough, Jessica Livingston, Geoff Ralston, Neil Rimer, Chris Anderson, and Shel Kaphan for sparking my interest in this topic.