In a civil lawsuit filed in the state court of Delaware, PrivatBank accuses Ihor Kolomoisky and Gennady Bogolyubov, the billionaires who owned the bank before it was nationalized three years ago, of large-scale money laundering in the United States. PrivatBank is bringing this action against the defendants “for hundreds of millions of dollars of damages arising in connection with claims for … unjust enrichment, for fraudulent transfer under state laws (including Delaware and Ohio), for violations of Ohio’s [Racketeer Influenced and Corrupt Organizations] statute, and for civil conspiracy.” As noted in this Atlantic Council blog post, one of the most extraordinary allegations contained in the suit is the following: “From 2006 through December 2016, the total movement of funds (credits) into the [ultimate beneficiary owners’] laundering at PrivatBank Cyprus was $470 billion, which amounts to approximately double the Gross Domestic Product of Cyprus during the same period.”

The idea seemed solid: we were making a community for discovering, following, and financially supporting the work of artists, creators, and creative organizations, focused on three core goals:

We were building a platform with an incredibly low barrier to entry for creators and supporters, and we wanted to make a space for creators at any stage of their career, without necessarily having a large established audience. Our platform would prioritize the large population of smaller creators in our community, with a focus on raising up work from new and marginalized artists. Thanks to Kickstarter’s Outreach team for helping creators understand these changes, but especially Travis Brace for leading the charge.

On 2 August 1964, North Vietnamese patrol torpedo boats attacked the USS Maddox (DD-731) while the destroyer was in international waters in the Gulf of Tonkin. In July 1964, Lieutenant General William C. Westmoreland, commander of the U.S. Military Assistance Command, Vietnam, shifted the operation’s tactics from commando attacks on land to shore bombardments using mortars, rockets, and recoilless rifles fired from South Vietnamese patrol boats.1

The U.S. Navy, meanwhile, had been conducting occasional reconnaissance and SIGINT-gathering missions farther offshore in the Tonkin Gulf. At the same time, two other South Vietnamese commando boats carried out a similar attack against Hon Ngu Island, more than 25 miles to the south.4

After observing North Vietnamese patrol torpedo boats pursuing the vessels that had attacked Hon Me, the Maddox withdrew from the area.

I mention Vietnam because, although “Slaughterhouse-Five” is a book about the Second World War, Vietnam is also a presence in its pages, and people’s feelings about Vietnam have a good deal to do with the novel’s huge success. In Vonnegut’s novel “Breakfast of Champions,” we learn about another Kilgore Trout story, “Now It Can Be Told,” written in the form of a letter from the Creator of the Universe addressed to the reader of the story. Throughout the many works by Kurt Vonnegut in which Kilgore Trout appears, he is consistently described as the worst writer in the world, whose books are utter failures, and who is completely and even contemptuously ignored.

To specifically address the uncertainty of distributed systems at scale, Chaos Engineering can be thought of as the facilitation of experiments to uncover systemic weaknesses. By focusing on systemic behavior patterns during experiments, Chaos verifies that the system does work, rather than trying to validate how it works. To guarantee both authenticity of the way in which the system is exercised and relevance to the current deployed system, Chaos strongly prefers to experiment directly on production traffic.

But the location data industry has a much more precise, and unobtrusive, tool: Bluetooth beacons. Let’s say you visit Target; it might be collecting data from you, but it might rent its beacons out to other businesses, allowing them to monitor your location. But there is nothing theoretical about Bluetooth beacon technology that follows you into retail stores (and other venues) and tracks your movement down to the meter.

Online news, however, is also important: The researchers found that people with populist attitudes are more likely to use Facebook for news, and “as a group, those with populist attitudes say they have started spending more time on Facebook in the past 12 months, whereas everyone else says they are spending less.” Because in both the U.S. and the U.K. “the extent of left–right polarization is greater than the level of populist polarization,” in these countries it’s probably more useful to look at people’s political preferences to determine the news they read, rather than whether they identify as populists. Here, for instance, are the news outlets people read in the U.S. — on a populist scale and on a left/right scale:

The researchers also created some interesting maps showing news outlets along two dimensions — populist left and populist right.

He then went on to explain exactly what he and the other strong students did differently as compared to their less accomplished peers. As you read Jeremy’s strategies, ask yourself what it would mean to apply these same ideas to your livelihood, be it as a writer, programmer, consultant, student, or professor. Good food for thought as we roll toward a new year…

This post is part of my series on the deliberate practice hypothesis, which claims that applying the principles of deliberate practice to the world of knowledge work is a key strategy for building a remarkable working life.

Designed for environmental monitoring, Enviro+ lets you measure air quality (pollutant gases and particulates*), temperature, pressure, humidity, light, and noise level. Enviro+ is an affordable alternative to environmental monitoring stations that can cost tens of thousands of pounds and, best of all, it’s small and hackable and lets you contribute your data to citizen science efforts to monitor air quality via projects like Luftdaten. Temperature, air pressure and humidity can all affect particulate levels too, so the BME280 sensor on Enviro+ is really important to understanding the particulate data too.

A few weeks after Lenihan had his big day out at Quillette, I got a message from a friend warning me about a weird video that had just popped up on YouTube. As the Columbia Journalism Review describes, the video showed “imagery of mass shooters intercut with images of the reporters mentioned by Lenihan under the heading ‘Sunset the Media. In a dragnet of journalists who were purported to cover the far-right and who were allegedly doing a terrible job of doing so, Lenihan included two academics, several publicly-identified activists (including Chelsea Manning), a hip-hop artist, and one It’s clear that he and his pals just dredged up whichever high-follower, openly leftist verified Twitter accounts they could find, and then ended up catching a number of reporters who do actually cover the far right in their net.