Usually this is a PR code phrase for anything between there were some problems and the valuation was low, or it was a complete fire sale. I've seen it done when PE buys smaller businesses because they don't want to disclose how much they're paying, but VC funded companies usually announce the value they sold at unless it's...low.

I mean, MBS of Saudi did have his guys use a zero day, zero click WhatsApp exploit to hack Jeff Bezos and extort him over nude selfies. https://ancillary-proxy.atarimworker.io?url=https%3A%2F%2Fen.m.wikipedia.org%2Fwik... The exploit probably came from NSO group, an Israeli company. So the rational fear here on Iran's part is that they have other undisclosed zero days they can deploy for complete remote ownage of phones with WhatsApp installed.

That said, for a country (Iran) boasting of its hacking prowess and with so many of their hackers on bug bounty sites etc, their inability to defend and resorting to announcements like this is pretty comical.

Again, you're really attached to semantics here. Sure, USSR = Soviet Republics. That means they also called themselves Republican. Those terms are meaningless in the way they used them. In fact, the USSR was socialist in name only. After Lenin gave way to Stalin, it was a Stalinist state..simply put, totalitarian. Do you think that the Democratic People's Republic of North Korea is either democratic or a republic?

You have no idea just how meaningless that whole left-right thing actually is. But I can already hear your argument right now "that's what political scientists at colleges say" which isn't an argument at all. Again, that whole logical fallacy thing. People here call me far right all the time, every time I ask why or what that's supposed to even mean, none can ever answer, including people who have claimed to have majored in political science.

The map is not the territory, but that graphic is a lot more accurate than your conflated soup. It is possible to be economically libertarian and socially liberal, and economically socialist/liberal but socially conservative. Ultimately, it depends upon the inclusiveness of the hegemony of a state if it qualifies as a polyarchy or concentrated, which on the far left and right always becomes a concentrated-power system. Here's a classic diagram.

Because anarcho capitalism (while never actually instituted in the real world) devolves into hegemony of the rich and totalitarianism. Think German Free States in the Medieval period being dominated by the landed elites. It doesn't form a polyarchy, but rather an oligarchy of the richest. Today that might look like Elon Musk ruling over a large swath of land because he owns everything on it.

What progressives want is a hybrid system which has center-left socialist elements on top of the capitalist system. America already has a hybrid capitalist-socialist economic system with Medicare, Social Security, etc. Even the staunchest conservatives won't touch Social Security despite it being well, socialist. Progressives generally advocate for expanding this system, such as making Medicare free for all instead of for 65+. On the other hand, fascist states tend to advocate for free healthcare in the context of creating healthy members of the military and society, but eliminating assistance for or euthanizing those who aren't useful e.g. Aktion T4. The center-right advocates for a private system of healthcare, the center-left for a private system highly regulated.

I don't actually use reddit but pasted an image from it for convenience. But as far as your political allegiance, you seem to be a pretty bitter person who doesn't have a well-formed philosophy but rather picks sides of arguments based on what they like to argue about, with a strong conservative bias in many areas. The sheer volume of comments and amount of time you spend posting on Slashdot betrays the fact you're probably pretty lonely, which is a side effect of your crackpot personality and beliefs.

Bill Ayers actually came to my liberal college and gave a presentation I and many others attended. I remember it because it was great advice for us who were about to graduate. He didn't brag about his terrorist exploits or encourage anyone to follow in his footsteps of what happened 30+ years prior. What he talked about was his early days in the Chicago area, going around canvassing and having to talk to people of walks of life he hadn't encountered. He learned to relate to people of all sorts of socioeconomic status, different races, political beliefs, religions etc. He described it as very difficult, but an experience that forced him to leave his comfort zone and ultimately grow. And that was his piece of advice to us, if you want to accomplish anything in life, you have to leave your comfort zone. Again and again. It will be hard but you will eventually grow from it. If you stay in your comfort zone he said, you won't do the things you've aspired to do.

That was great advice I kept coming back to in my 20s and 30s. I took calculated risks in business, and repeatedly left my comfort zone when opportunities to grow presented themselves. I ended up retiring in my 30s because that paid off.

While I don't excuse Bill's previous actions (those were excused de jure because the FBI committed so many crimes investigating the Weather Underground the charges were tossed), the person he became and what he teaches students isn't what you'd like to label it as. What you're saying is akin to saying the cryptocurrency community is being trained by radical would-be-murderers like Ross Ulbricht because he's speaking at the Bitcoin conference. The reality is he's just one person in the community with a checkered past, and he's not encouraging people to use darkweb markets or do murders for hire anymore. Ulbricht actually tried to kill multiple adversaries 15 years ago, and Ayers/WU tried to avoid any human casualties...50 years ago. Trump thought Ulbricht is worth a pardon. Why isn't Ayers?

I think you need to attend one of those colleges and actually learn what you're talking about. "Economic Fascism" is not a term used in political science, but rather something made up by internet trolls and writers looking for clicks -- in this case a conservative/libertarian think tank employing it as a headline. What you're describing about communism being in fact "socialist" is also poor semantics -- in the political spectrum from right to left, left of center heads to socialism and then the furthest left is communism. What you're describing is actually totalitarianism, which occurs at the furthest left (communism) and the furthest right (fascism) of the political spectrum. In such a way it can be hard to distinguish a far-right totalitarianism and far-left totalitarianism in practice.

What you're doing is conflating the left (progressives, social democrats) with the much further left that devolves into totalitarianism. That's the same as equating the center-right (think Mike Johnson) with fascism, which also devolves into totalitarianism. This graphic might be useful for you to see the actual political spectrum you've made a soup of.

I mean, I went to one of those "liberal" schools, and I learned a lot about democracy from authors such as Robert Dahl and Samuel Huntington; and a lot about how communism sucks and what led to the fall of Soviet Russia. The same professors I had less than 20 years ago are still there, at least all of them in the Political Science department. I'm not sure what you think goes on for the majority of students in these schools, but someone has to teach people who in the future will work in campaigns and elections, or at the State Department, etc etc. There's of course people into radical politics and ideology, but that's true for many institutes of higher education on the other side too -- like Liberty University, or Brigham Young. I'd rather my children be exposed to "radical communist ideologies," which they can disagree with and make fun of the scatterbrained hippies should they choose; than be made to memorize logically-impossible religious "facts" like how Joseph Smith read gold plates sent by an angel.

When I was in college we did not protest the war in Afghanistan, which I supported. But we did (peacefully) protest leading up and during the War in Iraq. Now, Trump agrees and it is mainstream Republican thought that the War in Iraq was a mistake and Iraq had neither WMD or anything to do with September 11 attacks. That's the thing about these college protests -- they tend to age well. We had the benefit of being correct.

Those debates resulted in an Article III which basically said nothing but there has to be a Supreme Court, and only in Marbury v. Madison years later did the Court assume that power. Because it's not in the written constitution (which does allow for among other things, FDR's court-packing scheme) the Court has been very protective of its power over the country's history, knowing full well decisions profoundly unpopular with Congress could lead to the Court losing its power entirely.

It's also only in recent times that the Constitution has been seen as this sacrosanct, work of scripture, and the debates between the founding fathers like some kind of companion reader to the Bible. It was never viewed as that previously, it's a messy hodgepodge that's been amended many times. Article III was a dodge to get the Constitution done and the debate over, leaving the consequences to later generations.

And if you were to listen to many of the people in those debates, they would have told you because of my descent I only count as 3/5ths of a person.

At those schools you indicate favor Soviet influenced liberalism, they actually aren't that into communism and are really into democracy. At least the one I went to is. Think Robert Putnam, Making Democracy Work. And one of the key components of liberal democracy is institutions and electoral process. The US, with its majoritarian system of elections (a poor system compared to modern ones like the STV in Ireland) and super-strong executive is actually a challenging system to maintain. In Latin America constitutions that are modeled after the American system tend to devolve into dictatorship because the president is too powerful and can ignore the courts which have minimal enforcement power. The US relies on its leaders to follow norms and respect courts, a prototype of a Montesquieu-esque separation of powers system. What does this have in common with the Soviet system? They both devolve into statism, which is the opposite of liberalism. So if you're into western liberalism you should be appalled by recent news.

The minority of mosquitoes species, that interact with humans, are actually not an essential part of the food chain or major pollinators if you just remove them, keeping the other species for bird and fish food.

Sounds like you take the standard deduction and don't have complicated taxes. If you itemize, this method would likely cost you lots in not finding tax breaks. Even not itemizing, I'm sure you miss out on tax credits using this system...e.g. the credit for getting an efficient water heater. Also you're giving the government an interest free loan if you're owed a refund since paper refunds take much longer to process. In the meantime they float the balance, not you.

Anti trumpers have looked at it resulting in doge removing numerous entries from the site along with many exaggerations and errors. And uesy, DOGE has made massive cuts to the IRS. Heres info from a conservative think tank: https://ancillary-proxy.atarimworker.io?url=https%3A%2F%2Fwww.cato.org%2Fblog%2Fdoge...

There is quasi withholding in that the contractor must pay estimated taxes on a quarterly basis. Missing those or underestimating incurs a fat penalty. I've paid it enough times to regularly overpay quarterly now.

Unless your tax situation is extremely simple, it is nearly impossible to do them correctly on paper without current expert-level knowledge of the tax code. One W2 job? No problem. If you're a consultant, and/or have investments (which have capital gains, dividends and other tax considerations) it's basically impossible not to overpay without the assistance of software. The stamp is cheap, missing deductions is expensive. Most paper returns are generated by software and printed to be mailed in, usually in edge cases such as amended returns where e file isn't available.

Back in 1996, our MUDs (upon which Cyberpunk's internal mechanics appear largely based on) had plenty of bugs, too. Shit, they had me as a noob teenager trying to C++ to fix them and add new features. And they went down for hours, all the time. Ultimately though, having played Cyberpunk, it is probably the best and coolest RPG implementation I've seen. Bugs got fixed faster than we fixed em in the 90s in CircleMUD or Diku. Only major thing is if it had multiplayer could it be better.

If Krebs was based on Russia, he'd be in the Gulag by now...maybe Black Dolphin prison. He's a thorn in the side of Russian hackers, exposing their methods, forums and identities publicly. Those hackers bring in tons of money from ransomware and scams, some of which ends up in Putin's slush fund. Chances are if Krebs visited Russia (which he definitely is not stupid enough to do) he'd be locked up for a prisoner exchange like Evan Gerskovich.

They don't even have to because that's for US entities. Looks like they were a Dubai entity buying a Hong Kong entity. Good luck finding a court of competent jurisdiction on this.