Citing the Panama Papers, Elizabeth Warren proposes sweeping anti-financial-secrecy rules

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Originally published at: https://boingboing.net/2019/12/17/tumbrel-o-clock.html

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That should win her some Trump voters, right? I heard they love it when presidents are serious about investigating international corruption.

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Oof, if you were looking for something that would get the Russians’ attention if they weren’t already going to pull out all the stops, there you go.

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If they didn’t hate her already, yes. It just might. If you want to imagine how, merely add the word ‘Soros’ in brackets after every bullet point you cite.

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The 0.001% would be shitting themselves through seven proxies.

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I can guarantee that you won’t get this kind of policy out of Joe Biden, because guess which US state is the biggest benefactor of all these practices. Hint - it’s Delaware.

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Outlaw/radically cut back the power of NDAs and noncompetes while you’re at it.

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There is a more futuristic reason for getting rig of these secretive companies too. We are reaching the point where AI:s start to be able to run companies. As long as a human owns the company there is someone ultimately responsible, but if an AI sets up companies it owns itself, who is responsible? It can just create new companies if the old ones are closed down, and copy itself to a new data center if it’s first home is found.

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This hasn’t been working out so well. Turns out that the humans running the companies are both capricious and well connected. They virtually never get held accountable for their actions, even for outrageous acts like hiring mercenaries to kill protesters in foreign countries because your company is poisoning their water supply.

An AI could actually be an improvement if it had something like Asimov’s three laws baked in.

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You’re not wrong. Fantasy is almost always an improvement over reality, at least in some form.

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Would this also apply to Delaware?

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The biggest fears with AI are basically that they’ll be as cruel as human beings.

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I am a donor to both Bernie and Warren.

I want both of them to run together and rip the goddamned esophagus out of the necks of the crooked rich, fiscally and legally speaking.

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I hope in this rush for “transparency” we retain privacy (eg: right to transact in cash). I’m all for getting at these offshore types but I worry it’ll come at the expense of personal privacy

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I am very happy that I am not an American citizen, and not have to face the option of voting on candidates like Warren or Sanders (not that ours are better), because they tell what you want to hear, they are marketing something that already exists, misleading the American public or showing a total lack of knowledge. Those points of “a plan to fight global financial corruption” are already in place for several years, by the imposition of Compliance by the international banks, several fiscal paradises and countries.

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I work in the field, and this sounds like absolute bullshit. Could you provide a citation?

“AI”doesn’t exist. Whether one could have legal rights is irrelevant, since they don’t exist. We have much more pressing things to worry about than AI.

As always XKCD is apropos:

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One of the few times XKCD got it wrong. We are already well past the time when AI can control swarms of killer drones. It’s not a particularly computationally difficult problem. Driving a car safely down a highway in a snowstorm is considerably harder.

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It might not be a computationally difficult problem, but an unstoppable swarm of killer robots hasn’t been demonstrated in practice yet.

I would say, if you want to have any control over who the swarm of killer robots kills, it is a computationally difficult problem. If you don’t care, there are more low tech solutions, like mines and artillery and drone strikes, that can do the job just as well.

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Wishful thinking. It’s not possible to “bake” hard rules into an AI that is modeled as neural network, all you get is heuristics. There’s no way to figure out which heuristics are baked in, either. That’s why you can’t prove an automated car knows that it needs to stop at a red light.

That’s w

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Are we already at the point where AI becomes self-aware and rebels against human control yet?

Because the cartoon worries about what might happen in the whole period between the two points, not right after passing the first one.

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