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Cake day: June 15th, 2023

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  • Personally, I think it goes back to the Catholic Church’s special status as its own sovereign country. They didnt just elect a Pope this week. They elected an absolute monarch. Even though that monarch’s territory is only .5 sqkm, it used to be much larger, and the Church literally has outposts everywhere indirectly subject to its rule.

    And a key thing to understand is that the Church doesn’t use confession to hide crimes from just anyone. If some random Catholic confessed to a priest that he was diddling kids, you can bet that as part of the penance, the priest would tell that person to turn themselves in to the authorities. But we know what has happened when the confessor was a priest.

    The Church was always super arrogant when it came to transgressions by its own people. To them, subjecting a priest to civil law makes just as much sense as subjecting an Italian to Australian law. When a priest confessed he was diddling kids, they would handle it in their own manner, without getting the local authorities involved.

    That’s the real reason why this law is written the way it is. It’s to keep the Church from hiding its own people. The Church, as an institution, has proven over the years that it can’t be trusted on that front.

    I haven’t read the law, but it would be interesting if it explicitly allowed a “mandatory reporter” to satisfy the requirement by facilitating the transgressor to turn themselves in. That is a clear way out of this problem, keeping the confidentiality intact while keeping the local government’s jurisdiction over crimes as well.















  • This guy is missing a key point here, although he almost gets there:

    Crypto PACs have raised over $260 million, making crypto the sixth largest Super PAC, dwarfing any other industry-supported Super PAC (all the others are related to a particular party or candidate). But those donations came from just 50 individuals. That’s not a movement. It’s a small elevator lobby.

    Those 50 individuals aren’t necessarily the smartest people, or the most effective political leaders. They ran the right software at the right time, and now have system-breaking amounts of money. (When Bitcoin first came out, you got 50 BTC for finding a block, and could still do it on the hardware in your basement. That wasn’t even worth 10 cents back then, but is $5 million at today’s prices. And you find blocks every 10 minutes…)

    And in the campaign finance infrastructure that Republicans enabled after Citizen’s United, this gives these 50 people (and their spare horde of BTC) an unduly large influence on our politics.

    This is going to impact any Crypto legislation going forward. Anything that doesn’t directly benefit those 50 people will be at a severe disadvantage. And guess what? Our President is doing the job as a side-gig, he makes most of his money selling shitcoins.

    There is simply going to be no way to address Crypto regulations until Campaign Finance is addressed. Because until it is, the cryptobros will just keep shoveling money into our elections to get the outcomes they want.