Ok, but me and my buddies think you use tenuous judgement to characterize words as violence, and enable people to use physical violence in “retaliation”.

That’s a bright line violence against innocents, so we’re closing all your checking accounts and preventing you from paying for anything without cash. And if people try to help you, we’ll say loudly in polite society that they traffic in blood money.

I hope you understand.

> In short, despite the article's somewhat negative tone overall, I don't think anything described is actually a negative thing

I think the main thing to criticize, is that

1. Banks are deputized as ersatz law enforcement, and will cooperate in ways you would otherwise expect to warrant a warrant, or do damage to people you would otherwise expect a court to gate.

2. Government has set up laws that on their face sound reasonable, but are extremely easy to run afoul of, and extremely easy to prosecute.

3. Banks have delegated decision making to private entities, which confounds oversight and is probably extremely under regulated vs anyone’s expectations

4. A lot of this power is wielded at the discretion of political actors at both ends

5. The main lesson of American politics since Nov 2016 is that we need more guardrails than “discretion”

I guess this case is especially interesting and novel because of how the government has deputized banks as ersatz law enforcement, and banks have delegated decision making to SPLC as ersatz compliance officers.

I’m not sure what the law could and should be in this case, but I suspect it’s woefully underspeced to the chagrin of most parties.

Hence, bank/wire fraud.

People in this thread keep saying reasonable things and then stepping on a rake in their last sentence. No, not "hence bank fraud". The bank fraud charges have nothing to do with what's happening here in this thread. SPLC is alleged to have created pass-through bank accounts under fictitious business identities. Everybody agrees that the thing SPLC was trying to do with those accounts was reasonable (or at least, well publicized and understood). They crossed over the line in trying to (a) improve the optics of what they were doing and (b) retaining a single major banking relationship instead of shopping for whatever bank would let them transfer money to the Grand Kloobah of the Kloo Klux Klan or whatever.

If they had created entities and called them "investigative agencies" or "detective agency" to the banks it would have all been above board. But they didn't.

I was personally feeling like the law is too broad and being weaponized against them until the bits about SPLC and allies trying to cut banking access to a Political Action Committee were dropped (it shouldn't matter whose). That's quite beyond the pale for any pro-democratic institution.

there were talks for the US government to take a large equity stake as part of a bailout, but those fell through

I’m really surprised I didn’t get auto-duped. Usually submission of the same url gets forwarded to the old post if it’s recent enough…

is it? it's insanely ugly and interactions seem bizarre

Previous iterations have been a bit dated in terms of UI, but modern versions are pretty good. What interactions are bizzare? Leaving comments, approving a change and running presubmit tests are all pretty straightforward.

In a way it's really sad how many swings and misses Canonical has taken in its history.

I'm fine with a company getting things wrong from time to time. What I don't like is the attitude where they walk into the room and start moving the furniture around while smugly dismissing or ignoring talented and established people. Then after a bit of milling around they just give up and leave the room and everyone has to clean up the mess.

We have rights and representative republics to restrain the will of the people for a reason.

The representatives proposed the legislation, and the people want this. This is democracy working as intended regardless of your preferred flavor.

There was a recent leadership change at the EFF