Human trafficking/slavery

That's my point. How many people would vote someone out because they voted for increased gun control, compared with how many would vote them out because they didn't? Even though the majority were for it, the majority are also not single issue voters and will not let it affect their vote.

EDIT: but yes, saying 'gun control' rather than 'preventing gun control' was possibly misleading.

And also +1 on the moving this topic.

I don't think it needs to be that drastic. If people make noise and have a solid message, politicians will realise this will affect their career. It happened with SOPA. It happens with gun control.

If I remember at last election Congress had about a 25% approval rating. All but a few seats remained the same after the election.

If everyone had voted for their individual member how they felt about Congress, every seat would have changed. They'd pick up pretty quickly that they need to pull their head in. But people didn't: they thought everyone else should make a change, it's not their (representative's) fault. When anyone grumbles as to how useless Congress is, I ask them if they voted for the incumbent in the last election.

People if they can assemble have the power to fire every politician and give someone else a chance. If they don't perform, fire them as well. Keep going until they're working for the people. Idealistic maybe, but this is where things should be, and I believe can be.

If it were legal, then we're no longer talking about money laundering.

If we're talking about should anyone be able to move their proceeds of crime without any observation, I explained why I disagreed with that. Do I agree with all the laws which they pursue it for? No.

If people are worried about the government cracking down on them, IMHO it's not through anti-money laundering (AML) legislation. They don't get enough information. The $10k reporting limit only applies to cash: wires are not reported. The other information they receive is if a set of transactions go through the bank's entire compliance department and the bank has considerable evidence to believe the transactions to actually be proceeds of a crime (drug dealing, bribery, tax evasion, whatever). Then they are sent to the regulator. This is a tiny fraction of transactions that go through: in the ballpark of 0.001%. The government sees these transactions and no others, unless they're conducting an investigation into a crime. This transaction monitoring process alone costs some banks up to $500 million a year, and they do not want to send through any more than they have to, because each one adds to that number.

FATCA is the government turning every foreign bank into a proxy for the IRS. IMHO that's the concerning legislation.

Because art dealers are required to register with regulators and this transaction would (should) be reported to the authorities.

I consult to financial institutions in anti-money laundering, so I feel I can speak to this with some knowledge:

Money laundering is a huge deal, but not for terrorism. Terrorist financing is actually different - it's moving legitimate funds for an illegitimate purpose, rather than the other way around - and there is still not an effective scenario to monitor for it. 9/11 they think cost around $20k to execute. The numbers are too small.

The "lazy policing" argument I disagree with: I don't know the numbers, but I'd suspect a large proportion of murder convictions are from people not actually witnessing the murder, but someone found to be disposing of the body, hiding the murder weapon, basically everything that is a result of killing someone. ie the results of the crime, rather than the crime itself.

How money laundering does cause a problem though is it disrupts the economy. For example:

I want to move $20 million to my partner in crime overseas. I can't wire him $1 million without someone seeing that: what I can do, is send him 2000 laptops and charge him a dollar per laptop. He now has an invoice showing he's paid for these laptops, and he can sell the laptops at a reduced price to move them quickly and now has his $1 million. He has also now undercut every other laptop seller in his marketplace. This may put legitimate businesses out of business.
Same goes for any other business propped up by illegitimate funds. They compete with legitimate businesses without valid business models. Depending on the amount of laundering or the size of the community, it can do huge damage.

Legislation in the US however (USA PATRIOT act) was pushed through with an emphasis on terrorism as it was the hot topic (2001). It's generally believed in the industry that this was to cut down on tax evasion (which itself is a crime and you can debate how bad that is for years), but saying that money laundering doesn't cause problems in itself is incorrect.

Fister

Yes, eg LTCM... Looks like an interesting film. My question, while partly joking, was also semi-serious: has the market for ASICs changed at all, or are you still throwing money at companies hoping they give you something in many months time?

Is it easier to get your hands on an ASIC or a time machine these days?

Mister

My only suggestion would be to really highlight the fact you need to be logged in to show active browsing to meet the time requirement.

Maybe it is highlighted when you sign up and I'm just an idiot, however I've been lurking since I joined (about 1.5 months) but never logged in: I believe I misread it as membership time. This will resolve itself fairly quickly for me, but still, I think unless people come in as experts (the minority) they should understand how the forums work with that sort of lurking time.

Post count is useless, as can be observed by reading any thread in the newbie forum.

beans