I used to get "funny" too when sending money through PayPal to friends, never again.
In the description I put "fun times". I had a call from my bank asking me to explain the payment the next day. I've never been called before nor since that.
It certainly feels like they're a bit touchy about certain references.
I recently started using Venmo to pay a few people and the things I have wrote are awful. Recent examples include: "Human organ trafficking" "Lunch and murder for hire", "sack of shrunken heads" and so on. Let them call me.
Maybe they've gotten more permissive but don't do this with money you can't afford to lose.
I want to be as under the radar as I can be when it comes to stuff like this. My attitude is that the bank already knows too much about me, why give them more rope?
> You must meet certain day-to-day responsibilities if your business is covered by the Money Laundering Regulations. These include carrying out ‘customer due diligence’ measures to check that your customers are who they say they are, and risk assessing your business.
https://www.gov.uk/guidance/money-laundering-regulations-you...
(That entire page, like the rest of gov.uk, is comprehensive and very accessible to read for a layman. If you have any passing interest in the area I recommend giving it a skim.)
They've otherwise been quite reliable since so jumping ship now would almost be asking for trouble.
Edit: It wasnt 15 years ago this happened, it was perhaps a decade. I'd already been a customer for some time.
I'd say they quite overstepped the boundaries. What are fun times to you and the recipient is certainly not their business. Why would they even waste time reading the RE line if they aren't doing your accounting for you at the same time?
There is even a party rental company named Fun Times. Would they interrogate every cheque written to/from them?
[0] Conditions apply: A bank isn't forced to do business with somebody who defrauded them in the last 3 years, for example. But the decision must be made timely (10 days), it must be explained and there's a well-defined path to legal review. Details at https://www.bafin.de/DE/Verbraucher/Bank/Produkte/Basiskonto...
If your friend sends you money "for sexual favors", that might be considered taxable income and you'll find yourself having some explaining to do.
The laws around things like sex work or drug consumptions, in most countries, are full of grey areas and willfully-contradictory positions (e.g. one can buy but the other can't sell, etc). So as soon as a transaction is categorised as part of a "problematic" economy, then police can get involved. If your bank lets through "hooker money" unchallenged, the police can eventually accuse the bank of facilitating activities which might be, at some level, criminal.
This seems weird, but is actually a perfectly reasonable legal regime that's all about power dynamics and enabling the authorities to approach people. Drug users and prostitutes are in much more vulnerable positions than drug dealers and johns respectively.
If you make selling drugs a crime, but not buying/owning those same drugs, now the police can approach addicts much more easily, and get them help (this is the much-lauded Portuguese model).
The same logic applies in reverse to prostitution: if selling sexual favours is legal, but buying is illegal, prostitutes are enabled to report abusive johns to the police, and authorities can approach them much more easily to try and get them off that life too.
The facts on the ground are that, dissuasion or not, these economies will never go away ("oldest profession", after all). Full legalisation would allow for complete oversight of such murky sectors, which would ensure everyone's safety better than the current arrangements, at all levels. For example, in many countries there is no way for prostitutes to legally ensure their own security, because any sort of professional relationship with a sex-worker is illegal (even if the business itself is not); at that point, whether they have recourse post-abuse or not, is basically irrelevant.
The legal situation around cannabis and prostitution is just a shitshow in most places, driven as it is by outdated sensibilities which have ossified through short-term political calculation. There is no point trying to find in it a logic that is simply not there.
Full-on legalisation is not universally desirable, though — there's always heroine, cocaine, crack, meth... — and the asymmetric legality thing is still a very useful tool in those circumstances.
There are some truly horrible substances, but with current approach heroin and weed are sold by the same guy.
Also famously you do have to pay taxes on illegal income, otherwise the income is both illegal and tax fraud.
Last year there was a news article about someone getting a phone call from the bank because the description in a money transfer contained the substring "ISIL".
Machine learning is actually a misnomer. A more accurate term is function interpolation.
Let's say I have a training set of 5000 samples.
When I kick off the training process, I'm basically telling the NN run until it simulates a function that yields the desired response in those 5000 cases.
The rub of course, is that programs aren't only defined by what they do (yielding the appropriate response for the the training cases) but also by what they don't do (excessive false positive/negative generation outside the training dataset). Performing correctly on the training, but messing up on more general tasks (the human equivalent being becoming an excellent test taker, but a lousy practitioner) is called overfishing. A more broad subclass of overfishing that van occur would be undesired/discriminatory/illegal optimizations, such as using combinations of protected classes as a significant data point in coming to a determination.
There is no guarantee for any particular training session that you'll arrive at the same weights, or that that set of weights will cover the same set of things that the previous network did. I.e. Your network can make mistakes (just like a person).
The irony in all of this, is you're basically training a machine to simulate a human doing a task in reliability/consistency (admittedly without the constraints of interacting with the world through a human body) with all the volatility between training that just being a human from day to day introduces.
I'm honestly beginning to wonder if the push for machine learning adoption isn't anything more than the market trying to replace people with models that they don't have to pay benefits for, and onto which they can pass blame trivially because, "Of course we didn't make it to discriminate! There's no way we could have known it would do that ahead of time!"
Too bad it's being exported everywhere
More things are denationalized so private companies now have the responsibility but also the revenue (like "Autobahn" or some time ago the post).
When I understand it correctly those where initially financed by public money so it seems like this investment is now being absorbed by the companies overtaking the business.
Accordingly there are strong voices who demand less control of the economy by the government.
I think they had a good system running (look at the numbers) and now they destroy that by adopting the ideas of the US-system.
That ends up including things like utilities, but also most of the US automotive industry, banks, etc. (It also requires the listener to have an understanding of expected value, and other basic statistics.)
“socialized losses, private profits” seems to include any government spending that benefits society, such as public ownership and funding of roads, but private shipping companies (and all the industries that rely on them) profiting from their existence.
This isn’t about anti government sentiment, it’s about pro abuse of government sentiment to use the force of law to push your morality on others.
At least unless you weirdly classify Obama as anti government.
It is a shortening of “corporate fascism”, and is the idea that the government exists to protect the economy, which is best done by strengthening existing power structures that power the current economic system.
Therefore the government should defer to corporations whenever possible.
Jim Crow, Watergate, Catholic priest abuse scandals, regulatory failure in 2008, too big to fail, gerrymandering, police involved shootings, Hurricane Katrina flooding, Keystone Pipeline leaks, ...
And, yes, it happens in local markets too: taxi medallion systems, overzealous zoning, local corruption, running Amazon out of Queens, and so on.
We could call skepticism fanatical, but that dismisses some pretty substantive history and current events regarding government corruption and incompetence.
Never attribute to incompetence that which can be adequately explained by corruption.-Upton Sinclair
Let the government flex its muscles without artificial constraint, and watch how fast the market has to rein itself in to remain competitive.
The reason Medicare is loathed, is because Medicare has a mandate to not excessively spend, and it's pricing is actually determined by people with the public interest in mind first and foremost, as well as having its pricing accessible as a matter of public record instead of being hidden away in a locked filing cabinet somewhere.
The combination of those two factors are a powerful tool for shaping an industry away from "make as much money as possible while providing a service" to "provide as much service as possible while the money holds out".
It is a subtle, yet important difference.
Unlike with insurers where price gouging becomes viable.
I mean, if an engineer is assigned to a project, what else is he/she meant to do?
You can build gigantic multinational corporations, disrupt all kinds of industries, change significant parts of people's lives with tech all written with code and rules and regulations but somehow making a well-functioning country is too hard, even when there's well-working smaller prototypes available to learn from.
https://ec.europa.eu/info/business-economy-euro/banking-and-...
My bank has recently started to ask customers to clarify transfers, and even shoot and send some video of themselves, smiling, and explaining things. I haven't got that myself yet but several colleagues have. I'm thinking I should change banks, but am unsure if any other bank is any better, because this is the result of government regulation.
The EU laws to fight money laundering are in conflict with national laws for privacy. And because laws for money laundering impact tax revenue, they will triumph over privacy.
These things are usually treated as box ticking exercises, not as fervent investigative due diligence.
I would guess money laundering happens elsewhere.
For as little as $1m you can set up or buy a bank of your own. For $10m or more you can buy a regulated operating bank with employees and deposits.
The process is more complicated than plain old incorporation, but I would guess it won't be unduly troubling to people with a lot of spare cash at hand.
As usual some countries implemented it reasonably while others didn’t.
Series of transfers are a basic step in money laundering processes, so from that point of view the need for clarification of each step is understandable.
they will also close your account if you can't prove where the money is from.
i had this issue myself in europe. a friend paid me back a hefty sum. my friend had issues proving where he got the money from. my account was swiftly closed.
Stuff like gambling (which is legal in germany),or being iranian (which I suppose is legal too)
https://www.finanssivalvonta.fi/en/Consumer-protection/quest...