This was a neat piece, wow, especially considering it was published more than 20 years ago. Quite prescient when the author writes:

“If Jeff Bezos's vision comes true, here's how you'll shop in 2020:

The vast bulk of store-bought goods - food staples, paper products, cleaning supplies, and the like - you will order electronically. Some physical storefronts will survive, but they'll have to offer at least one of two things: entertainment value or immediate convenience.”

Prior to COVID-19, 86% of retail in 2020 was still brick and mortar.

Don't underestimate the power of immediate convenience.

And for that matter, there are a number of people who effectively live paycheck to paycheck - "If I buy it online, it wont show up until next week, so I'll wait until I need it and buy it locally" (I understand how credit works, but many people dont, or dont have credit for some other reason). Additionally, there are a sizeable number of people who cant, or wont buy anything online.

mission accomplished!

Anyone know your typical steps for this process? I guess your first step is to contact your embassy, then look for a local lawyer, then what comes next?

Well, in this case, it involved hiring mercenaries, arranging an elaborate heist involving traditional Lebanese musicians and bribing airport workers in at least three different countries. I think the ability to improvise is crucial.

Presumably this means "hiring one specialist in this area".

I think the more charitable view might be:

Willing and able to apply pressure on both private and public sector officials in different countries, and if that fails, willing to take extra-legal steps as long as that's what's required.

Even if that boils down to hiring one specialist to coordinate and do that, you'll have to sign off on various steps of the process, and make the decision if/when to pursue certain avenues, even if it's with recommendations from others.

For all we know, she might be a "specialist in this area".

That's the point of the test... There is no one guaranteed path. Each situation will be different in a thousand different ways. It requires someone very "resourceful" to be able to navigate and handle all of the unknowns.

Yeah of course, I'm just interested hearing potential paths.

At that level you are going to start with agencies that have an existing K&R team, potentially from your insurance underwriter (because if you are the sort of person who needs to consider or plan for this threat then you also have insurance for it.) The steps past that point are beyond me but probably involve both political contacts as well as consultants/contractors with specialized skills -- I would expect that one of your various law firms is probably going to be your primary interface.

Knowing people who know people and bribing all the way down the chain I guess.

If it's a developing country, then bribery.

It's still bribery in a developed country, there just might be some effort made for plausible deniability. It's partly why kids are told "networking" is so important in developed countries. Because when they grow up, it's a "you scratch my back, I'll scratch yours" world.

I'm pretty sure there's a bunch of corruption—skimming money, creating unnecessary "jobs" for friends, family, or co-conspirators, kickbacks, that kind of thing—in the US, it's just that most of it doesn't reach the "retail" level, if you will, and mostly occurs within and between bureaucracies both public and private, without directly affecting ordinary people outside those organizations. So it might be quite difficult and rare to bribe a person to do something for you, or to have a bribe solicited, but fairly common to interact with organizations that have tons of internal corruption going on that's hard to see from the outside.

In short I think we have a lot of corruption, we just don't let the poor or low-status participate.

I think you just don't see it.

I'm thinking of the guy working at the garbage dump who lets you drop off commercial trash if you slip him $20; the small business owner firing his office manager to he can hire his wife instead; the guys on 3rd shift at the industrial paint shop getting their friend's cars painted for $50, etc.

Corruption like this is all around. It just doesn't rise to the level of anyone not directly affected being concerned about it.

That sort of stuff is the borderline corruption that's the grease that keeps things working. Then there is stuff like promoting the do nothing nephew of one of the board members over someone competent.

Pretty sure all you need are high-level State Department contacts, not necessarily "a very particular set of skills", so to speak.

> all you need are high-level State Department contacts

That's a terrible strategy for getting out of the clutch's of a foreign country's law enforcement. Let alone an ally's.

Why? Who do you think negotiates things like prisoner exchanges?

You don't negotiate. That leaves fate to someone else whose interests most likely don't align with your own. You make your own luck.

State Departments are powerful, but politically complicated and slow. Cash in the right hands goes a long way in many places, and is much quicker - valuable when time isn't your ally.

It's not as simple as you suggest. Hearing someone is imprisoned, or kidnapped, is probably one of the last things that a local consulate or embassy wants to deal with. Unless there is broader geopolitical concern, there is little reason to think that these folks will do much beyond the minimum to keep you alive. There is a good chance that the local diplomatics aren't too sympathetic either because know what you should have known about the country before you got yourself into trouble.

If they think there is some injustice, then it depends on how much it'll play out in the media. The government posture at home will also play a part. You could see the Trump administration playing hardball in a lot of scenarios to demonstrate how tough they are, but then they undermine the general ability of the State Department to operate, so lower visibility problems struggle for attention and resources. The Obama administration provided more resources, but probably wasn't as hawkish.

What is this "honk honk"? I've seen it lots of places. Might just be baader meinhoff, but I first encountered it in Chicago where aggressive drivers are constantly honking but its commonplace practice to give two loud honks on your car horn coming out of alleyways letting pedestrians know you don't intend to stop and slowly approach but instead are barrel assing out of the alley and don't give a shit if you kill someone.

I asked and it appears to be a Chicago tradition like dibs. Since then I see it online usually accompanying controversial opinions, but I noticed a trend. Its usually also in connection with politically controversial opinions and insider information regarding politically motivated actions taken by government, military, black ops, or other groups where operation security is a concern.

Does it have some kind of special meaning or is it just random and I'm seeing connections where none exist?

"honk honk" is an alt-right meme. It refers to clown world or the fact that current politics, the zeitgeist or how the world works is clownish.

I have only ever seen "honk honk" used when referring to issues involving Islam, racial minorities or the treatment of women.

Your first paragraph is correct, but your second doesn't match the usage in the OP.

> This meme, like many others, has been effectively used to show that small communities online can trick mainstream media into reporting the idea that benign things (milk, the OK hand sign) are actually a secret racial symbol.

https://www.reddit.com/r/OutOfTheLoop/comments/bbyhxz/what_i...

Google search suggests it has "4chan racist troll" origins, but I'm hoping the origin for this poster was more innocuous.

[1] https://knowyourmeme.com/memes/clown-pepe-honk-honk-clown-wo...

It's weird how you ignored the first sentence of your link:

>Even after a failed U.S. Special Forces hostage rescue mission in Syria

So the state department literally sent in special forces to try to rescue her...

While there's hardly a shortage of things to criticize the State Department for, it's hard to argue that making exceptions to the "don't give money to ISIS" policy for ransoms is a good idea. That just encourages more kidnappings.

On the one hand, sure. On the other, if you're kidnapped for ransom by foreign terrorists or guerrillas (or even just hardened criminals without a political agenda) and no money or consideration at all is allowed to change hands, your odds of survival just went from "not ideal, but OK" to "terrible". Telling people they can't do that is basically telling them their loved one's already dead unless the murderous kidnappers respond well to "pretty please" and agree to take on the risk of a process to return the prisoner without even a token reward.

that contradiction was my point. the US govt already covertly gave ISIS over a billion dollars--the splashiest way to provide Material Support of ISIS. meanwhile, giving ISIS $100,000 in ransom for a hostage is just too much.

https://www.google.com/amp/s/www.nytimes.com/2017/08/02/worl...

if you doubt my claim that CIA gave ISIS over a billion dollars, that link proves it--they admit it themselves.

honk honk is a meme that means "irony." as in the noise of a clown's nose being squeezed while someone tells you something that is clearly self-contradictory and requires you to ignore the evidence you see in front of you.

i don't know what these quick-to-politicize-speech downvoters mean when they unpack a rather innocuous meme. memes are the Lingua Franca of the Internet. it doesnt matter where they originated, or who may have used them because after they are recycled a billion times all over forums, they lose whatever original meaning they had and become common slang.

i don't care about being down voted and i don't care about pleasing tattletale censor Karen's.

I'm not sure who you're replying to with the clown/meme thing? Might have the wrong comment.

Regardless, I'm sorry if people calling you a clown (?) offended you- that's not too productive and doesn't help anything. They shouldn't do that.

I wonder if MacKenzie Tuttle passed the test.

No. Saudi Prince MBS played her like a fiddle. She walked right into his plan of humiliating her husband. After all he has achieved, she should have overlooked his affair. Just like Hillary. If Jeff got arrested in a third world country on made up rape charges, she would have just accepted the charges and let him rot.

Dang. Uh, citations or something? This sounds interesting.

MBS got his phone hacked by sending him a video on WhatsApp. Bezos owns the newspaper for which Khashoggi worked. Remember him? He's the guy who MBS got murdered in Saudi embassy in Turkey. They tried to blackmail Bezos that his affair would be revealed. Instead of getting blackmailed he revealed it himself. McKenzie should not have let MBS win.

Interesting stuff, thanks for linking!