Working in France, I remember having to provide a "Scan of an original of Bank Account information slip" (approximate translation). It's just a number! That I could have copy/pasted in an email to make sure the secretary won't fuck it up, or I could download the document from my bank and email it, but no, HR insisted it had to be an original.
I eventually downloaded one from my bank, converted it to JPEG, added a light coffee stain with Gimp and sent that, to pretend it was an actual scan of an actual document actually printed by the bank.
Had the same experience, but that I could not do, as my bank would only give out some crude Netscape era HTML laid out with a borderless <table>, that might just as well have been plain text. I literally had to fake something that looked like a pretty paper one, complete with the bank cooler palette and slapping a semi-transparent logo in the background.
Another marvel: once I received some paperwork, and was asked to sign and scan, which I did.
I had a nice scanner. It produced perfectly noise free, upright scans. I had a nice pen. It produced very clean scripture.
Apparently too nice as the recipient lectured me that I had to print, physically sign, and scan, that they could not accept a digital signature on a digital document. The fact that I received the paperwork on actual paper by snail mail and never could have had access to a digital version completely eluded them.
That almost made me nostalgic for the French love of paperwork. 'La paperasse' I seem to recall. Watching an official in action is like performance art.
It's probably the same in other countries, but some day I did rent a field to plant some vegetables and run a small business. Every single day for one entire month I had to fill forms, sign papers, ask the field owner to give me some random information queried by some french institutions related to : nature, forest, ecology, commerce, entreprenership, business, water, rental etc..
Most of the time the field owner had to go to the "mairie" of his town to get the proper informations which would contact other services (--recursively) so I could get the information that I need to fill the forms. I am pretty sure the field owner has administration-related PTSD if he sees me again.
I sold a few piece of furniture on Marketplace, and had so many occurrences of "My employer is relocating me and I need to furnish my new place, I'll send movers to pick up the piece". Looking at the seller profile, it's often an account that has seen no activity for a while, and the job rarely matches the type of position that would get an envelope for relocation (e.g.: Amazon warehouse workers surely don't get a package to move to a new location).
The infuriating part is how easy it apparently is to highjack dead people / inactive accounts, and use them for fraud.
Case in point, I never use FB except for the marketplace every now and then. I naturally forgot my login/password, hit the "Forgot password" option, put my phone number and... got given access to someone else's account, that they've not used in years. They likely had my number before, I guess, passing away.
I contacted FB and did my best to try to lose access to the account, starting with login out, but I kept receiving notifications through text messages, and was permanently given the option to "switch account" with no authentication whatsoever. Out of option, I ultimately deactivated the account in question, but that pisses me off because I really really did not want to alter it in any way.
Long story short, it's not a surprise Facebook is riddled with shit like that.
That's because they are one of the most global bank, therefore a prime choice when it comes to moving money from countries to countries. Most bank have a much smaller global footprint and can't be used as such.
Banks don't benefit from their customer laundering money just like landlords don't benefit from drug trafficking in their building: it's a hindrance and it costs a lot to do anything about it.
By what metric? I’d argue the driving factor is their proximity to dirty money. Same with Russian banks. Then other people notice you’re used to looking the other way and you get word-of-mouth network effects. With money launderers.
I don't know much about HSBC's history with dirty money, but they are well known to be one of the most global banks. Only Citibank and Standard Chartered operate in more countries.
Don't they? Surely they make some interest on the money if it is parked for any length of time? Plus transaction fees and such? And individuals probably get bonuses etc. based on volume in some way? (IANAB(anker), just wild guesses here.)
One thing I appreciate with Taubes (having read his early books, not the more recent ones -- I really liked The case against sugar), is that he has an epistemologically correct approach to the problem. He looks at it through the eyes of a rigorous scientist, unlike most people in nutrition science.
For the most part, he was very cautious in his claim and spent most of his time discussing why claims accepted as correct are completely full of shit. It's likely that, through time, he built a corpus of knowledge and understanding that allow him to be a bit more assertive today (again, I've not read his recent work), but really, his early books are, in my opinion, remarkable for their thoroughness and intellectual honesty.
There is no shortage of studies whose conclusions were later found out to be false or overly-simplistic.
Nutrition science isn't bad because nutrition scientists are bad.
The truth is that nutrition is a very very young science, and it also happens to be one of the most difficult health sciences. It will take a very long time for the body of knowledge in that field to take form.
From all the diabetic I know, in France, Asia or North America, you're the only one I ever heard of with such recommendation. A friend of mine in France was actively advised _against_ a low-carb diet to control her diabetes. She did it anyway and saw incredible results. Nevertheless, and despite improvement on all indicators in her blood test, her doctor advised her to return to a normal diet and control it with insulin and "complex" carbs. That was in 2019.
My mother’s doctors do similar things - partly because they have internalized the “cultural impossibility” of old Asians to cut carbs and if someone says they are cutting carbs, according to their experience it’s often a lie. It’s also possible that some of these doctors have indoctrinated themselves into believing this can never work.
I feel Canadians get particularly shafted: lower wage, higher cost of life on essentials, stupid high rent in first tier city (where the jobs are!).
On the wages only, I wonder what justifies that Canadians make so little in comparison to their American peers living just an hour away across the border. Taxes alone don't seem enough to justify that gap. My take is that Canadians just... accepted it.
This reads like a disguised ad for AirGradient, which pops up here every now and then. I fell for it because it claimed to be "open". Well, although it is definitely more "open" than most, it feels like an afterthought.
Somehow, the source code for the new version has been overwritten by an older (CC-BY-NC) version, yet the issue has been left to rot, both on the support forum and on Github, letting me to think that the "openness" is mostly a posture to lure the HN crowd. Additionally, the -NC clause is definitely a deal breaker, and I should have investigated further before giving them my money.
(it sucks to air it out in public here, but apparently the AirGradient folks don't care much about issues raised on their own forum).
Achim from AirGradient here. First of all, I appreciate your openness and I hope the following helps to clarify a few things:
1) All our monitor kits are licensed under CC-BY-SA (and not as mentioned above CC-BY-NC). There was a short period where we had them under NC license but since NC is not truely open-source we switched to the more permissive SA license. We wrote in more detail about this on our blog [1]
2) We are aware that our open-source firmware is currently lacking the quality level we would like to see because we have been very busy with the hardware side of the project. I do hope that in the coming months we will have more time to look after the firmware side and I already had a couple of calls with contributors in the last few days who are happy to help. It's definitely an area we need to improve.
We are currently setting up a focus group and I would love to have people included that might have a more critical view on the project. Please contact me if you would be interested to participate.
An easy first step would be to do a minimum of engagement with those people kindly putting effort into submitting PRs to the repo. You could even assign a community maintainer to help with testing and managing PRs and issues if you don't have the time.
Your comment about "disguised ad" also gave us some food for thought and I just wrote an article how we want to be transparent about our own product promotions and some changes we have implemented [1].
> Somehow, the source code for the new version has been overwritten by an older (CC-BY-NC) version, yet the issue has been left to rot, both on the support forum and on Github, letting me to think that the "openness" is mostly a posture to lure the HN crowd. Additionally, the -NC clause is definitely a deal breaker, and I should have investigated further before giving them my money.
As an AirGradient customer, I just don't care about that. The software side isn't complicated, and I prefer running these things with ESPhome rather than their Airduino sketch anyway. The value of AirGradient for me is that they've curated a nice collection of sensors, designed a good enclosure and matching PCB mask for them, and are offering them at a very affordable price for DIYers.
Same. I buy my hardware from airgradient, I flash ESPHome onto it, I ignore the airgradient software (sorry airgradient!).
I appreciate that they are open with their hardware, and make it seamlessly easy to do the above, and also that they provide information into the industry like with this article. So I give them my money for their hardware rather than purchasing the components separately.
I eventually downloaded one from my bank, converted it to JPEG, added a light coffee stain with Gimp and sent that, to pretend it was an actual scan of an actual document actually printed by the bank.