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1·7 hours agoIt’s really annoying that @some_guy@lemmy.sdf.org just took this on the chin. For me even a dispute over $100 would be worth the courtroom battle just to satisfy my curiousity of what happened. A landlord cannot evict without a court procedure, so the tenant would not have to spend a dime on court costs and bring the paper trail to the court. From there, since the banks (all 3 involved) did a shitty job of investigating, they could have been named as 2nd party defendants (sue them all, let the judge sort it out). The investigation should have revealed the bank where the money landed and the actual bank account from there. They could then use the court to subpoena the agency that has “no record of the case”, but who the bank says has the money. If there is no case, then they can return the money (a judge would say).
OFAC obviously benefitted from someone’s court phobia even though the tenant had nothing to worry about.
That’s not how contracts work. Unless the contact specified using that avenue, the only thing that matters is payment received.
You apparently believe OFAC took the money from the sender, not the recipient despite targeting the recipient. A court is not going to say that a payer owes money they already paid and must pay again in duplicate despite a government action to take money from the recipient. I have my money on the tenant prevailing in this case. Since OFAC targeted the recipient, the money likely would have left the sender’s bank and landed in the bank of the recipient. At that moment, the money is on the other side of the wall and outside of the sender’s control. The sender did not hire the recipient’s bank. The money grab would have happened after the money landed in the recipient’s bank. A sender cannot be responsible for a recipient’s bank paying their client.
If OFAC were some ransomware/cyber criminal gang running out of Nigeria, I would agree (as it’s not a government confiscating money from a recipient).
If I say in my contract: pay me by stashing cash under a rock at location X, and the payer complies, and then a bypasser takes the money, that’s a problem for the (foolish) person who drafted the contract that way. The drafter of a contract has a higher responsibility to flaws in the text of the agreement than the party who merely agrees to the contract.
For example, the US specifically has a law that states the benefit of ambiguity in contracts goes to the party who did /not/ draft the contract. This rightfully encourages contract writers to be diligent.
Otherwise you are left with penalizing people for faulty contract terms that they did not draft.
yeah, I was slow to realize that. Like a day slow.
So, if you want to transfer a large amount in cash, most people would probably use a dedicated cash transfer service.
“most people”. Luckily we know that it’s an injustice to marginalize minority groups.
Problems with xfer services:
① fees
② privacyIt’s really absurd, but money transfer services often charge a percentage of the amount transferred (esp.if forex is involved), as if sending more money somehow costs them more electricity to transmit. I feel like I’m being ripped off when charged a percentage of money that moves and even if the price is reasonable I will reject that option on general principle.
You potentially pay more to the transfer company than a courrier and give up privacy on top of it.
③ shipping is faster than electronic payment (no joke!)
I shit you not. I tried a payment service once to send a few hundred to someone for a laptop. Two days later I got a fraud alert demanding that I call a number. I was interrogated:
- how do you know the recipient? What is your relationship to them?
- what are you buying?
- why are you buying it?
WTF? When I send money in the mail, the postal worker does not pull this shit and snoop on me. After the interrogation, it took another day or two for the money to reach the recipient. The post would have been faster and hassle free.
④ we now live in a frenzy of AML extremists coupled with the masses being pushover consumers who will go along with being cattled herded. Non-criminals are being harrassed, inconvenienced, forced to overshare information, and generally oppressed in this fishing for criminals which is being carried out with total disregard for colatteral damage to law-abiding people. Why? Lazy law enforcement. They want /their/ job to be convenient. They want evidence of crime to fall in their lap, rather than to do clever good investigative work.
⑤ a sender may have to ship something AND pay money. I know jewelers. It’s common for someone who is buying new jewelry to pay partially in scrap gold. They give the jeweler their unwanted jewelry which has a melt value. The jeweler reduces the price of the new jewelry by the value of the scrap gold. If you are shipping scrap gold, why make a separate trip to a money transfer service and pay more fees? It’s cheaper and easier to put cash in the pkg if you trust the jeweler. Or a customer might want the very same gold or stones their great grandmother wore to be made into something else.
A jeweler told me uninsured packages have a very high rate of loss. Couriers apparently know when jewelry is being shipped, at least when the sender is “Bob’s diamond shop”. Insurance works as a great deterrant. A courrier knows there will be an internal investigation when an insured pkg does not reach the recipient. They can only steal so many of them before a pattern emerges. Insurance is so reliable for jewelers shipping gold and precious stones, they would just as well trust it for cash.
That’s not going to work for long. Best you’re going to get is a stay until you pay.
Hold on. Who are you saying OFAC took the money from, the tenant or the landlord? You can’t have it both ways. The tenant complied with the terms of the contract to send the money as directed. OFAC targeted the landlord. A court would not have impose a higher expectation than following contractual obligations.
I could see if a check got lost in the mail, where the result is that the defentant retains possession and constructive use of the money, then a court would have enough descretion to rule fairly. But the OFAC case is not that case.
IIRC, New Mexico banned civil forfeiture. But the cops kept doing it anyway. So a law change is not enough… enforcement is also needed. Yes, against the police, sadly enough.
I’ve been boycotting FedEx for over a decade. Not for this reason but for the other reasons I mention in this thread.
It’s quite hard because many sellers do not disclose who they use for shipping. I can sometimes add a comment to my order saying “Do not use FedEx. If that’s the only option then cancel my order.” This makes online shopping tedious, so I’ve been driven to just shop locally.
I could not reach that enshitified article but judging from the title, FedEx’s contemp for Black Lives Matter is consistent with their extreme right politics:
- FedEx is an ALEC member (thus opposes labor rights, women’s rights, environmental protection, gun control, taxation, consumer protection, financial regulation, public education, welfare…)
- FedEx used to give a discount to NRA members
- FedEx ships sharkfins, hunting trophies, and slave dolphins
- FedEx was founded by an ex military serviceman (a mostly right wing demographic)
Being on the extreme right would be consistent with BLM contempt. And indeed, fighting unions is FedEx’s core reason for being an ALEC member. Photos of DVDs were leaked and circulated on social media with FedEx on the label and some title like “how to mitigate unions”.
Edit: Nvm the dogs don’t get to keep the money.
I’m sure they get plenty of doggie treats, likely procured with civil forfeitures. Which motivates the dogs to find more. I’m not the least bit worried that the dogs are unfairly exploited from the dog’s standpoint.
As it is openly stated that it will not be carried by FedEx, it’s no stretch that the police will consider it contraband.
It is a stretch. Enforcing contractual agreements is not the job of the police. And it’s also a stretch to say the police are looking to protect the contractual interests of FedEx.
It’s also strangely inconsistent with FedEx’s anything goes practices, whereby FedEx is known for shipping morally dubious payloads:
- #sharkFins (illegal in countries that have a shred of respect animal welfare and the environment)
- hunting trophies
- slave dolphins
Normally, FedEx could normally claim that they are simply maximizing the bottom line in their duty to their greedy shareholders. But the cash ban is not consistent with that. Unless FedEx believes that anyone who loses an insured pkg would claim the pkg included cash as a way to max out the insurance payout. But in that case, it is not in FedEx’s business interest to enforce the policy – just to be able to point to the policy when an insurance claimant say cash was lost.
(update) In fact, police are preventing crime prevention by grabbing the cash. This inspired me to propose a new rule.
Since it’s a small amount of money, the legal process would be with small claims court. You don’t need a lawyer for that. Small claims is cheap and easy going. It’s typically under $100 to file (which you get back if you win) and in some states a registered letter is sufficient to serve the other party.
You would not want to sue OFAC though. In this case you would ideally keep a paper trail of your payment attempt and carry on. Give your landlord the proof of payment (attempt) and wait for the landlord to act against you. That’s the easiest… you wait for the court date and show up with proof of your attempt to pay and a copy of your landlord’s payment procedure (which you followed). OFAC apparently did a money grab on the landlord, not you, so you would come away clean so long as you paid as per your landlord’s instructions.
But wouldn’t a particular dog with particular training who then becomes very interested in your unopened USPS package be a real reason to open the pkg?
Really? I thought pigs were 2-cycle animals (eat their own output on the first iteration, like rabbits), no? I mean, sure, some minority of dogs eat their excrement – the same dogs that end up in the homes of Blue Collar Comedy comedians. Tough contest I guess. I had a dog that rolled in every rotten dead fish it encountered by the lake. Not sure why… maybe it serves as a good cologne to attract the females.
(edit) dogs might have a better memory than cops.
3·2 days agoShit… sounds about right.
Although the /water is hot enough/ scenario could be addressed mechanically: bigger water tank, lower heating element raised and the heat pump heating the bottom exclusively where it could /always/ add heat because it would never be hot enough at the bottom.
(edit) after some thought, it would superficially make sense to get a factory water heater (tank) and not tamper with it at all. Just have a PV-powered HP heat water before it enters the stock water heater (in a tank or coil). Thus there could be 2 heat pumps (but for economy the stock tank would just be a simple non-heat pump type thus 1 HP). I guess this is still a dead idea anyway if it’s true that a PV cannot simply directly connect to a compressor.
I’ve never heard of cops being called dogs. Pigs, sure. Anyway, money confiscated in this way usually finances police station frills like high-end coffee machines.
They probably weigh the birthday cards to see if anything seems worth opening.
Would the materials have much more of a footprint than geothermal installations? Because that slight 7° difference between below ground temp and above ground temps apparently justifies the labor, materials, and power to the circulators for harvesting geothermal energy. So this seems to be the same but adding a cherry on top – incorporating a heat pump to add to the energy of a geothermal system.
Because of Google’s DoS attack, those of us in the open free world cannot reach Youtube. So would someone please explain the concept in text?
Is this it? → https://utahforge.com/2022/12/30/did-you-know-that-scottish-clubbers-use-dance-beat-to-generate-heat/
Seems like a great idea. Like using the body heat to boost geothermals.
Someone plz tell Massive Attack about this. Massive Attack has gone gung-ho on eco-friendly festivals (in places inaccessible by car). They might want to throw some indoor events with this tech.
(edit) from the article:
“An experienced DJ could get up to 600 watts with the right song at the right time.”
So IIUC that’s like ~1½ solar panels getting a full dose of UV, correct? I guess that’s not much. But nonetheless not something to throw away either. So during the day solar panels on the roof could heat the ground pipes and during the night the clubbers keep the system powered.
Would be fun for that power output to be measured, and then that power measurement could be a performance index on each DJ. You pay the DJ according to the power output they can produce. Though I guess that would screw over the ambiant / trip-hop DJs.
Have they thought this through? To install batteries that are much heavier than what the bus trip requires makes the bus less efficient. Research in the UK found that a bus carrying 5 people is about as efficient as 5 cars each carrying 1 person. That’s because of the weight of the bus. So the goal should be to fill the bus with people, not excessive batteries and overhead that need not move back and forth from A to B which then requires more riders to maintain the same efficiency.
Sure they need to store energy for to smooth out peak grid consumption but probably smarter to do that with stationary batteries – if they must use batteries. Another way to store energy: pump water to the top of a mountain and open a dam that turns a hydro turbine when they need the energy back.
from the article:
Pollution from buses and other vehicles contributes to chronic asthma among students, which leads to chronic absenteeism.
Seems like a stretch. Even if they can attribute chronic absenteeism to air pollution and keep a straight face, moving the pollution of a fleet of buses that makes 2 trips/day from the street to the power plant isn’t going to change the absenteeism by reducing asthma. This claim only signals a bit of desperation to get support.
But luckily under the capitalist paradigm every consumer can decide for themselves what prices are reasonable and decide whether a transaction in is their interest. I don’t care how they justify their price. If they are charging me 1% to move 5 figures, I’m not okay with paying upwards of $100 to move money. If there really is $100 worth of risk in moving money electronically, then I don’t want a piece of that action.
PayPal shares your personal info with over 600 corporations:
https://git.disroot.org/cyberMonk/liberethos_paradigm/src/branch/master/rap_sheets/paypal.md
Credit card: there are only 3 to choose from in most regions.
Cryptocurrency requires both people to use, which kills it as an option in most cases.
All of those options, including cryptocurrency, expose more data than cash and bring in risks with that exposure.
Most people don’t have the insight that my fellow jewelers do. Most people think the risk of an uninsured pkg getting lost is the same as an insured pkg. They decide to save money and take the risk without understanding the heightened risk.
My reason for bringing up insurance was that insurance provides a way to secure valuables like cash. The best security is a good insurance policy. It gives a good option for the legit shipping of cash. The jeweler in the article most likely insured the $47k+ value. But if they didn’t, then it was most likely a young jeweler who has not learned that lesson. Either way, insurance does not likely protect victims from government actions, which is likely why the victims had to directly sue the state.
Something like that might exist in major cities but probably over 95% of the US is rural where some people are lucky if FedEx is within reasonable reach, much less anything special purpose. DHL abandoned the US, IIRC because they could not spread enough with enough reach to be sustainable. FedEx and UPS have a near duopoly.