I would disagree with this logic. 

If someone needs $100 today, and is expecting to receive $120 in two weeks, but no lender is willing to lend more than $20 based on their word, this person will either be unable to meet their $100 need, or will need to give the lender a valuable asset to hold (aka collateral) while the loan is outstanding. This person can either post/browse from an alternate account while the loan is outstanding, or take a two week break from posting until the loan is repaid.

From what I can tell, most of who likely were conspiring against Trump are no longer in the DOJ, with the exception of Rod Rosenstein, and possibly a small number of FBI agents.

There are obviously those helping the Mueller investigation that essentially took over where James Comey left off when he was fired. Unfortunately, it would be very difficult politically to get rid of this group at this point. Indictments have been handed down at politically inconvenient times by Mueller, and I would not be especially surprised to see more not long before the midterms, although this may backfire, as Trump and some congressional Republicans have somewhat delegitimized his investigation, and any indictments would likely be seen as being political.

Based on their behavior in Peter Strzok's public congressional testimony, I suspect some congressional Democrats are a part of the Clinton, Obama, DoJ conspiracy, and they may have played a part in getting Sessions to recuse himself, which ultimately lead to Mueller's appointment.

I think the window to nip the Trump Collusion with Russia investigation in the bud has closed, and this probably needed to happen well before Comey was fired. Part of Trump's problem is that Russia has a long history of meddling in elections (as does the US), so an investigation into Russian election meddling is not exactly frivolous, although based on 18 months of evidence, an investigation into the Trump campaign conspiring with Russia to meddle appears to be frivolous. Based on available evidence, it does not seem that Russia was particularly effective in their meddling, as their disinformation campaign did not appear to have reached many people, and other activities likely got people to attend rallies no more frequently than they otherwise would have.   

Having read the entire dump, it seems that the information is mostly repetitive, and you will have read nearly all information in the original FISA application. The second renewal does have an additional footnote about how Steele was fired as a source from the FBI, and that Page wrote a letter to the FBI alleging voter suppression by Hilary Clinton, asking them to investigate.

A couple of interesting things:
- It appears the fact that Christopher Steele was hired by Fusion GPS, who was hired by the Clinton campaign was originally classified as "top secret/no foreign nationals" -- I wonder why this would be. What could it be about this information that would cause "exceptionally grave damage to National Security" if disclosed?

- The basis for the FISA application appears to have been (1)that Page lived in Russia, (2) that Page gave a speech in Russia, (3) Steele's dossier, (4) partisan news articles that we now know Steele was the basis for, and (5) speculation within the US new media. This means that Page was spied on, and likely has his phone calls listed to based on this information.

- The exact statute citation for the FISA application was redacted.

Well theymos has said multiple times the forum is not in need of money. If this is the case, I don't see why theymos would not subscribe to some kind of plagiarism service.

Further, there are hundreds of thousands active users, and over time, it will become more and more difficult to detect this on any kind of manual basis.....I am not entirely sure how the OP was able to find these examples, but I suspect it would be difficult for someone to read a post and make a determination if said post was "spun" from another post.

I think Anunymint has agreed to not break the 'multi-posting' rule, along with other rules. He also says he believes the specific reason for his ban was that he was posting the same post in multiple threads, which he also has agreed to do, and in practice has actually stopped this practice, as in my interactions with him, he would "url reference" previous points he has made instead of actually copying the point again. For example:

I still don't understand why the forum doesn't use a service like turnitin that complies writings and gives each writing a plagiarism score, and those that score too high can be automatically flagged for review by a moderator.

My initial reaction of the two reports in the OP was that the spammer read and agreed with and/or had a similar opinion of the person whose post he was copying. However after reading actuallytwolamas' post, I would no longer believe this.

If these posts are in fact being plagiarized, I would have no doubt that a bot is creating these posts.

The anti-plagiarism rules are good in theory, however they fail to address the root cause of the plagiarism. Having anti-plagiarism rules has resulted in moderators simply playing 'wack-a-mole' with spammers who have far greater resources available than the mod team. What needs to happen is we need to remove the underlying incentives to create plagiarized posts.

This is in no small part because those who believe in global warming refuse to debate those who want more information. Anyone who does not blindly support the global warming theory is shouted down, and in the case of Exxon recently, called a criminal.

The fact is that temperature measurements from more than 50 or so years ago is horribly imprecise, and the change over the last two generations is little more than a statistical anomaly.

Further, the global warming theory fails to account for the ice age, and the subsequent thawing. The world is subject to a cycle of temperature changes. Modern technology may or may not be accelerating this cycle, however history has shown us that both humans and the world will survive.

The FISA warrant application for Carter Page has been declassified and released by the FBI.

This is the FISA application (via subsequent wiretaps) that were allegedly used to spy on the Trump Campaign in the 2016 US Presidential election. Many have alleged the actual underlying purpose of the FISA application was to spy on the Trump Campaign, and/or was otherwise politically motivated.

One of the early interesting tidbits in the application is a comment that Russia has interfered with US elections (and the elections of other countries) for decades that span multiple generations. To my knowledge, the media and political elates have made very close to zero hubbub about this interference until the 2016 election, and they are now acting as if Russia is about to take over our country with their interference.     

The declassified documents are over 400 pages, and are heavily redacted. I have not yet had the opportunity to review anything close to a substantial portion of what was released yet.

Post in this thread anything interesting you find.

What do you think?

Link to released documents - https://int.nyt.com/data/documenthelper/95-carter-page-fisa-documents-foia-release/full/optimized.pdf

I understand that the sample might be generally accurate for that general period of time, but I am interested in seeing how this changes over time.

You can access and post from multiple Twitter accounts via tweetdeck, and can login to multiple Twitter accounts fairly quickly via the Twitter website but can only be logged into one at a time.

I suspect most of the bounty spammers use some kind of bot to tweet and create other social media posts.

That is probably because the forum kept getting hacked and was the subject of ddos attacks.

Cloudflare along with theymos’ Other countermeasures seems to have mostly stopped this. As bad as CF is for privacy, I suspect it does quite well against hacking attempts for a number of reasons.

Edit: a letter

She looks ugly. And fake.

I think this is more of a problem for bitcoin than a “FedCoin”.

If people lose money because their bitcoin is stolen, they will be less likely to use it in the future and if many people lose money for these reasons some will not be interested in starting to use bitcoin out of fear of loss.

The government can implement regulations that make it more difficult to screw things up that result in losses, such as requiring hardware wallet manufacturers to ship multiple backups when selling said wallets, requiring certain security standards that make losses less likely.

I don’t think the US government will make any coin that allows for anon payments in unlimited value out of money laundering concerns. Further, this would make it more difficult to enforce sanctions, which has the potential to lead to more armed, violent conflicts. There are numerous laws in place and a lot of resources that are used to track and monitor large financial transactions within the banking system and I don’t see the government giving that up.

The market has innovated somewhat in this regard. So called “chip” cards effectively make it so cards must be present at the time of the transaction and the card cannot be charged a second time if it is not present the second time. Many banks offer temporary card numbers that have short expiration’s and limits near the amount of a transaction at a merchant, making them effectively “one time use” card numbers for purchases online. ApplePay and AndroidPay have similar security protections as chip cards, but with addded protections via a users phone, such as a pin or a users fingerprint being needed to make a purchase.

Overall, I find it very unlikely any 1st world government will ever attempt any kind of fedcoin

Why do you think those 500 accounts are representative of all registered accounts?

I am most curious to see how many users make their first 10 posts, by month and compare this to the overall number of accounts registered to look for trends of entities possibly creating many accounts that are not used.

In general, “active” users is a more useful stat than “users” (that includes those who are not/never active).

I am curious to know the number of registrations of accounts that have actually made at least say 10 posts, and the number of people that have made their 10th post by month.

TFs dox is known by a decent number of people, myself included.

Blazr had figured out his dox and decided against publishing it out of fear that doing so would result in him getting harassed which could potentially add significant time and expense to any lawsuits filed against him in relation to losses caused by him.

Blazr has said in the past he would release his dox only to law enforcement or to a lawyer pursuing litigation against TF.

I would find it very unlikely anything that has happened on the forum has caused anything close to what can be reasonably argued to be "torture", although I would be willing to change my mind if I see verified evidence of such.

Also, if someone has harmed you in a way that is not against the rules, there may be a case for an additional rule and/or policy. If you think an additional rule or policy is needed, you can, and should make the argument for as much.


According to theymos' account, you were temp banned several times because of this, however the bans escalated because of ban evasion, that is, you were allegedly using alt accounts to post from when one (or more) of your other accounts were temp banned for the above.   

The US national debt increases every year because the US government continues to spend more than it brings in via taxes every year.

Roads are primarily financed by state governments, however the Federal DOT does give grants to states.

The overwhelming majority of US Federal Tax dollars go to transfer payments (welfare), although some of these tax dollars are specifically designated for transfer programs that the payor will, in theory will eventually get back (such as social security). It probably would be best to eliminate or significantly reduce most transfer programs because they create disincentives for individuals to generate income and wealth.

The primary thing that government provides that individuals absolutely cannot purchase themselves if there were no income taxes is a national defense, and as such, there must be some amount of taxes that collectively pays for national defense and security.

I got a PM from mprep saying that a post of mine was deleted because it was a reply to someone who  was evading their ban, who upon investigation is Anunymint.

I haven't read the bickering between mprep and Anunymint, and I have no financial reason to care about my post count. I found the small number of posts I interacted with/read to be insightful and interesting, which unfortunately is a rarity around here.

Having rules about what you can and cannot do is not unusual in society. This is exactly the role of governments, and without these rules, people would be harming people and extorting people without regard for others.

If you don't agree with a particular rule, or a group of rules, you should make an argument to have the rules changed, not ignore the rules. The exception to this would be if the rules/laws were reprehensibly immoral (such as killing people for arbitrary reasons), which is not the case with forum rules.

I think Anunymint should agree to not excessively create successive posts in threads, and to not otherwise break forum rules. Upon Anunymint agreeing to this, theymos should unban his accounts. I cannot make the argument that someone who is likely to continue breaking and ignoring the rules should be able to participate in the forum.   

Grue and salty were fired from being global mods because they were doing little to no mod work over an extended period of time. In other words, nearly zero productivity has been lost as a result of their removals.

Additional global mods are not needed as a result of Grue and salty being removed as mods.