You can't constrain an idea whose time has come. China will continue developing AI regardless of whether we will. We have to do it just to stay in the race.
It's the same thing with the atomic bomb. There wasn't really a choice not to do it. All the theoretical physicists at the time knew that it was possible to develop the thing. If the United States hadn't done it, someone else would have. Perhaps a few years or a decade later, but it would have happened somewhere.
You're not wrong. But Liberty Reserve was able to be shut down because it was centralized. Banking regulators in various western countries leaned on the Costa Rican authorities to shut it down.
Try doing that with crypto. Who are you going to arrest?
Everyone's social security number is available. If you go download the leak referring to in this HN post [1], your SSN is certainly in it. Mine was, everyone in my family's was, almost all of my friends' were.
The world needs to stop pretending that SSNs are secret. They aren't.
I have been living outside the United States for twelve years.
I always had problems with SMS until I got Google Fi. And that's a problem because, as the article here says, many banks insist on SMS these days. There are various services that give you a virtual number. But they always suffer from one of two problems: (1) VOIP numbers are 'blacklisted' by some banks for security reasons: they want a real cell phone number (2) I simply don't get SMSs in some cases some technical reason
Google Fi works everywhere. Even when there is no cell phone service: it will tunnel over WiFi.
Google shuts off the data on Fi after you've been outside the USA for a month. No problem, I'm happy to pay $25 a month for a 'dataless' connection that gives me SMS and voice.
I'm sure you're right that the broker is obliged to 1099 me for it.
Are you saying that I should have imported the 1099 and overridden the basis of those shares to be exactly what the sale price was? That seems like an odd thing to expect the end user of tax software to know to do. It's not clear to me that doing that would not also set off a flag when the IRS evaluates the return. There ought to be some solution between employers, brokers and the IRS that doesn't put such a burden on the taxpayer.
I hear all kinds of complaints about the IRS. But my experience with them is that they are reasonable.
I had a tax situation when I did a same-day sale of some nonqualified stock options. What happened is that my employer put the net gain as income on my W2. In addition, the stockbroker sent me a 1099 for the total value of the options sold. This wasn't quite correct, because the income was already reported on my W2 and the broker should have known that and not 1099'd me for it.
I filed my tax return correctly, only including the W2 income and disregarding the 1099.
The IRS added the 1099 back into my income on their end after I filed, and sent me a bill for around $190,000 for the tax on the 1099 income.
I sent them letter with a clear and correct accounting for the difference. They agreed and sent me back a letter admitting that I was correct and that my tax due was now $0.
It was a bit nerve-racking, but I'm glad they did the right thing in the end.
The California Franchise Tax Board, on the other hand, is a whole different beast. Those people are a bunch of idiotic uncouth goons.