Imrich: What it takes to feel rich: How much Aussies need to earn to 'feel wealthy'
Can you catch COVID twice? Or does it give you greater immunity?
UniCC, the biggest dark web marketplace of stolen credit and debit cards, has announced that it's shuttering its operations after earning $358 million in purchases since 2013 using cryptocurrencies such as Bitcoin, Litecoin, Ether, and Dash.
"Don't build any conspiracy theories about us leaving," the anonymous operators of UniCC said in a farewell posted on dark web carding forums, according to blockchain analytics firm Elliptic. "It is [a] weighted decision, we are not young and our health do[es] not allow [us] to work like this any longer."
Dark Web's Largest Marketplace for Stolen Credit Cards is Shutting Down
Duels that didn't prove fatal often gave rise to friendship. "Facing death together prompted a mutual respect
“Crime tourists” targeting Asian and Middle Eastern families in the DC suburbs?
Arvind Sabu (Capital), Realization's Vexations: Taxing Cryptocurrency Hard Forks, 61 Jurimetrics J. 379 (2021):
A cryptocurrency hard fork seems to increase a holder’s fortunes—those who held Bitcoin, for example, nominally received an equivalent amount of Bitcoin Cash as a result of a famous hard fork. But this Article argues they should not be taxed based on the time of the fork, nor would they then be taxed under existing authorities.
Cryptocurrency hard forks represent innovative experimentation with changes to a cryptocurrency’s protocol in the rich modality of commons-based peer production—the modality responsible for Wikipedia and Linux. The tax system should not stifle this ex¬perimentation and the growth of the cryptocurrency commons by taxing hard forks based on when they occur. Relatedly, the indeterminate value of newly forked cryptocurrencies weighs against taxing hard forks based on when they occur.
Furthermore, hard forks are unlikely to result in the realization of income under foundational Supreme Court authorities, which in part key to concerns over valuation. The Internal Revenue Service’s ruling on this issue does not alter this conclusion; it il¬lustrates rather than resolves the vexing question of whether a hard fork results in the realization of income.
World Economic Forum: “In the Global Risks Report 2022, we share the results of the latest Global Risks Perception Survey (GRPS) in the context of the current global outlook, followed by an analysis of growing divergences in the areas of climate transition, cybersecurity, mobility, and outer space.
We examine the tensions arising from such divergence, spillover effects, consequences for stakeholders, and shocks that could arise. The report concludes with reflections on resilience, drawing from the lessons of year two of the pandemic. The key findings of the survey and the analysis are below…?
Share of those 65 and older who are tech users has grown in the past decade
Pew Research Center: “Younger adults are often more likely than their elders to be earlier adopters of innovations, and that has been true for many digital technologies since Pew Research Center began documentingtheir use. There are still notable differences in tech use between U.S. adults under 30 and those 65 and older. But on several fronts, adoption of key technologies by those in the oldest age group has grown markedly since about a decade ago, and the gap between the oldest and youngest adults has narrowed, according to new analysis of a Center survey conducted in 2021…”
Pew – “…here are some of Pew Research Center’s most striking research findings from the past year. These 15 findings cover subjects ranging from extreme weather to the COVID-19 pandemic and ongoing demographic shifts in the United States. And they represent just a small slice of the year’s full list of research publications…”
The prisoner’s dilemma for prisoners and Mafia men
We develop experimental evidence on cooperation and response to sanctions by running prisoner’s dilemma and third party punishment games on three different pools of subjects; students, ordinary criminals and Camorristi (Neapolitan ‘Mafiosi’). The latter two groups were recruited from within prisons. Camorra prisoners show a high degree of cooperativeness and a strong tendency to punish defectors, as well as a clear rejection of the imposition of external rules even at significant cost to themselves. The subsequent econometric analysis further enriches our understanding demonstrating inter alia that individuals’ locus of control and reciprocity are associated with quite different and opposing behaviours amongst different participant types; a strong sense of self-determination and reciprocity both imply a higher propensity to punish for Camorra inmates, but quite the opposite for ordinary criminals, further reinforcing the contrast between the behaviour of ordinary criminals and the strong internal mores of Camorra clans.
Here is the paper by Annamarie Nese, et.al., via Ethan Mollick and Ilya Novak.
What we do not want to know / Vice – “Do you want to know what you’ll get for Christmas? A movie spoiler? When you’ll die? The study of deliberate ignorance reveals the topics people want to remain in the dark about….After the reunification of Germany in 1990, the Stasi’s files were opened to the public, and anyone could apply to see if their nearest and dearest had been passing along information. Many decided not to—they just didn’t want to know. Those who left their files untouched practiced “deliberate ignorance,” according to Ralph Hertwig, a psychologist at the Max Planck Institute for Human Development who studied the decisions people made about their Stasi files, and is the co-editor of the 2021 book Deliberate Ignorance: Choosing Not to Know. Knowledge seeking is often regarded as a good thing—we should want to know things, and when given the chance, we seek out information. But many researchers, like Hertwig, are dedicated to the study of what we consistently don’t want to know…”