Husband and wife, a rapper on TikTok, are accused in bitfinex hack

US married couple arrested for allegedly conspiring to launder $4.5bn in bitcoin

I resisted the temptation to put scare quotes around "rapper" in the thread title. When I first read about this yesterday, I thought that this was a niche story, but then I heard her rapping on the TV news this morning. I guess that Billions with a B gets your attention.

Ninja'd by SuburbanTurkey in the bitcoin thread, but I thought this could use its own discussion here.

Quote:

Originally Posted by SuburbanTurkey (Post 13726133) Husband-wife team arrested trying to launder money stolen in the 2016 Bitfinex hack: Quote: The Department of Justice (DOJ) announced on Tuesday that a married couple was arrested and charged for their alleged links to cryptocurrency stolen from a 2016 hack of Bitfinex, a virtual currency exchange. Ilya Lichtenstein, 34, and his wife Heather Morgan, 31, were arrested in New York City and charged with conspiracy to commit money laundering and conspiracy to defraud the United States, DOJ officials said on Tuesday. The duo repeatedly misled financial institutions and virtual currency exchanges about their identities and about the origins of their Bitcoin, according to federal prosecutors, who said the money was cashed out and used to purchase gold, NFTs and other items, such as a $500 Walmart gift card. The stolen currency from the hack is currently valued at $4.5 billion, and law enforcement has seized over $3.6 billion in connection to the incident. https://thehill.com/regulation/court...ests-couple-in Really surprising anyone doing this would be bold enough to remain in the Unites States. That's kinda the whole point of internet scams, you're not supposed to be someplace that police can get you. ....... Heather Morgan also seems to have been a contributor at Forbes for a bit. Very strange.

US supply chain failure

An interesting article on why the US supply chain is in such shambles:

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Why Trucking Can’t Deliver the Goods The yearly turnover rate among long-haul truckers is 94 percent. And you wonder why you’re not getting your orders on time? THE PLIGHT OF THE PORT TRUCKERS may seem extreme, but the plight of the great majority of long-haul truckers is dismal as well. It wasn’t ever thus. Until 1980, long-haul truckers were generally employed by regulated companies whose routes and rates had to pass muster with the Interstate Commerce Commission. Under the terms of the 1935 Motor Carrier Act, the ICC kept potential lowball, low-wage competitors out of the market. Drivers were also highly unionized, under a Master Freight Agreement between the Teamsters and close to 1,000 trucking firms. For which reasons, truck driving was a pretty damn good blue-collar job, with decent pay, livable hours, and ample benefits. The Motor Carrier Act of 1980 changed all that, scrapping the rules of the 1935 act so that startups, charging far less than the pre-1980 rates and paying their drivers far less as well, flooded the market. Facing that competition, established companies dropped their rates and pay scales, too. By 1998, drivers were making between 30 percent and 40 percent less than their pre-1980 predecessors had made. According to the Bureau of Labor Statistics, following the steep decline in wages in the decades after the 1980 deregulation, trucker income has flatlined for the past 20 years. The median income of long-haul truckers who are employees was roughly $53,000 in 2018; for contractors, it was $45,000—though drivers in both groups had to put in many more than 40 hours per week to reach these totals.

https://prospect.org/economy/why-tru...ver-the-goods/

Neoliberalism gutted the once respectable profession of trucking, making it an underpaid, overworked hell-job. Like most of these "nobody wants to work anymore" stories, low wages and terrible workplace conditions are ultimately to blame. So much of our society is based on huge swaths of barely making it impoverished workers living extremely precarious lives, and the shock of covid completely wrecked everything.

Specifically in regards to no-shows at the Port of LA, widespread and illegal miscategorization of truck drivers as independent contractors has placed all the burden of delayed shipments on truckers, who often find themselves waiting for shipments for hours without pay. No-showing is the obvious response to the prospect of working without pay.

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Perhaps one-fifth of port truckers actually are independent contractors; nearly everyone else is, like Alvarez, misclassified as independents. Over the past decade, dozens of lawsuits from misclassified drivers have resulted in judgments affirming that they’ve been misclassified and awarding them compensation from the companies that misclassified them. XPO recently paid a $30 million fine to a large number of its drivers. But neither XPO nor any of the other fined companies have stopped misclassification. It’s cheaper for them to pay a fine than to pay their drivers a living wage. Not surprisingly, given the long waits and meager rewards, a lot of drivers have simply stopped showing up. According to Gene Seroka, the executive director of the Port of L.A., fully 30 percent of the port’s 12,000 drivers no longer show up on weekdays, a percentage that rises to 50 percent on weekends. Once the waits exceed six hours, as they now sometimes do, drivers would run the risk of exceeding the 11-hour federal limit on trucker workdays if they then were to actually get a load—which means the port must turn them away, and they’ll have spent an entire workday for no pay at all. And you wonder why the supply chain isn’t working very well?

Death Penalty

Was somewhat surprised to find no reference to this on this forum when I did a search.

Given that a high percentage of posters here are from the US of A, and this being the last developed Western country retaining the death penalty in many states, I would like to hear their opinions.

Mind you I suspect that most here, being probably brighter that the average Joe Blogs on the street, would be anti the death penalty.

Robert Bigelow – 1 million USD reward for the best evidence of the afterlife

At the beginning of the 2021. the American entrepreneur Robert Bigelow, owner of the Bigelow Aerospace, offered a 1 million USD reward for the best evidence of the afterlife. In the end of 2021. the best essays offering that evidence were picked by the judges, all from the parapsychology community. The best essay was written by the parapsychologist Jeffrey Mishlove who got the reward worth of 500.000 USD. However, due to a high number od “high quality” work, Bigelow decided to reward writers of more than 20 essays and the prize money amounted to 1,8 million USD. More info can be found here: https://www.bigelowinstitute.org/index.php

As for the evidence presented in the essays, I didn’t have time to read all of them in detail. However, in the first reward essay written by Mishlove there are cases mentioned as the Scole sittings, the Watseka wonder, Leonora Piper… plus several personal accounts that are hard to verify at all. I got an impression that this essay lacks any critical evaluation even though many of the mentioned cases were fully or partially explained/debunked.

The essay of Leo Ruickbie was the most balanced one as the author says “As someone involved in research in this field, scientifically investigating alleged hauntings and mediums, amongst other things, the experiences I have had that could be interpreted as encounters with spirits, I have explained away as random coincidence, even trickery, or due to psychological factors”.

Bigelow is emerged into the field of paranormal for decades. He is probably best known for his Skinwalker ranch in Utah where “strange” things happen. He also financed some afterlife research programmes probably because he lost his son at young age. Bigelow Chair of Consciousness Studies at the University of Nevada Las Vegas had a programme worth of 3,7 million USD. Charles T. Tart and Raymond Moody became the first two chairs, but Mr. Bigelow shut down the program after several years. “Sadly, we just couldn’t make enough progress in research aspects,” Bigelow said. More info can be found in this NY times comment: https://www.nytimes.com/2021/01/21/s...ter-death.html

The Jews bought freedom for all of the UK's slaves

I just learned that the Jews, through the Rothschild bank, bought the freedom of every single slave in the British Empire, in 1833.

The UK felt the need to literally buy freedom for every slave in their empire. That cost a lot of money. 40% of the UK's annual budget in fact.

The Rothschild's gave the UK the money. They were finally paid back in 2014.

Nice of the Jews to buy freedom for all these slaves.

https://assets.publishing.service.go..._log__003_.pdf

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Rothsc...y_19th_century

What's the first rule of critical thinking?

I believe that it's not to assume anything, but what do y'all think?

Alex Cross by James Patterson

I just started reading the first book in the series (Along Came A Spider) and was wondering what other people thought about them.

Also, does anybody have suggestions for other characters that have their own literary series?

I'm retired and plan on doing a lot of reading, but I'd like to keep it within the mystery genre.