2023-10-13T05:23:35UTC
This photo of Gustavus Adolphus's sarcophagus at Riddarholm Church: the color contrast achieved through rock types, and the lion's feet-like stands, were interesting.
Google docs support handwritting-to-text conversion[1] for languages not limited to English. Which means along with the spell/grammar check,
it can be used for language learning practices with the price of some privacy.
sshfs is no longer orphaned on Spet 23, 2023, thanks to a new maintainer.
Vesuvius Challenge has a dataset of 5.5TB X-ray CT scans of two (not unrolled) papyrus rolls. Each horizontal slice is a 120MB .tif file, representing 8µm vertical travel. The challenges are roughly in two parts (disregarding the tooling):1) get the surfaces of papyrus, and 2) find inked and not inked regions from the surfaces.
Tried to learn the different between sales tax and VAT. Wikipedia had the following description without a source:
A general economic idea is that if sales taxes are high enough, people start engaging in widespread tax evading activity. On the other hand, total VAT rates can rise above 10% without widespread evasion because of its collection mechanism.
After a few googling i still have no idea how comes the magic 10%. Is it safe to assume that the number is empirical and everyone just tried to raise VAT until it doesn't work? (That sounds depressing.) Unamused by the magic number, i then checked out Carousel Fraud. Gale, 2020 mentioned an interesting case in their footnote #40:
Indeed, at one point, a single person appeared to account for 10 percent of worldwide sales of one type of computer chip. In fact, however, he had only a single box that was rapidly making round trips across the Ireland–UK border (Ainsworth 2006).
Fancinating extreme case. I want to know what the chips was and how the person managed to pull that off. There probably are more reportings and analysis, right? The Ainsworth 2006 paper does not mention the one person with a box of computer chips. I had to find out that Ainsworth has another 2010 paper which actually mentions this case. It cited a piece originally reported by the HM Treasury of UK in 2003 titled "HEALEY HAILS SUCCESS OF VAT CRACKDOWN":
a 21 year old supposedly supplying 10% of the entire world production of one type of computer chip in a three-month period – in reality sending the same chips round and round in circles
Searching HEALEY HAILS "vat fraud" "2003" on google yield nothing useful.
The same query on yandex returned a 2003 piece from 'the register' about a gang that was "found guilty of an £11m VAT carousel fraud involving computer chips".
This appears to be another listing in the HM Treasury's report[2], but
one of the gang's member, Vincent Stapleton Jr, happened to be 22 year old.
The report can be cross-referenced by another 2003 webpage[3].
I wouldn't call 2 news and 1 official press release as a "widely reported case"[4],
but there is no other original sources available.
Might be purely a coincidence, but
the HM Treasury piece also did not explicitly say that the "21 year old" person's case was independent from
the other ones.
More importantly,
so i followed along anyways.
I then landed on the wikipedia page of Nicola Stapleton, an English actress born 1974. Her father was the Vincent John Stapleton of Kingston, in the register's piece, and her brother is the 22 years old Vincent Stapleton Jr. This can be confirmed in several news reports regarding a legal battle wrt a confiscation order of a house of this family, but nothing new about VAT fraud was said.
Based on the date of guilty pleads, the two Stapleton were probably in the same trial along with May and Bravard, possibly also Hope. I found "R v Steven Lawrence Raymond George May JACQUES ADRIEN NORBERT BRAVARD Vincent John SENIOR STAPLETON Vincent JUNIOR STAPLETON Darren HOPE" on Nov 20, 2001, indexed in this paywalled place. The case's neutral citation ID is "[2001] EWCA Crim 3073", which unfortunately does not exist in public databse for unknown but perhaps copyright-related reasons, see also footnote [5]. Using this guide, i landed on [2005] EWCA Crim 97 (alt link of the db's record) and [2008] EWHC 1968 (QB), but somehow both cases did not mention the Stapleton Jr, nor the [2001] EWCA Crim 3073.
In the end, the HM Treasury article's description turned out to be the only original source about that specific person and their acts. I gave up at this point and chose to believe that maybe attributing the fraud all to a single young person was a half truth for reporting purposes, or that 21yo person simply was not this Vincent Stapleton Jr.
I searched the stuff in the next subsection because i once thought liberapay was about implementing secure processing of bank card information, somehow without concerning banks or Paypal/Stripe. This is very wrong. Liberapay is built on top of Stripe and PayPal [6] as an EU non-profit[7] fully on donation-based model, and the product they are trying to match is Patreon or Ko-Fi, not non-bank payment processors. Actually, after searched the stuffs in the next subsection, i grew (needlessly) worried about liberapay:
A while ago i have seen a post (Sept 2022) on Hacker News (not a lone one; there is this reddit post from July 2022, another one on HN from 2021, another one March 2023), venting that Stripe the payment processing service halted their account out of blue, therefore practically destroying their business:
3 weeks ago, I woke up to a pissed off customer telling me her payments were broken. My startup uses Stripe Connect to accept payments on behalf of our clients, and when I looked into it, I found that Stripe had decided to deactivate her account. Reason listed: 'Other'.
I contact Stripe via chat, and I learn nothing. Frontline support says "we'll look into it." Days go by, still nothing. Meanwhile, this customer is losing a massive amount of business and suffering.
[...] This morning I woke up to an email that about 35% of my client accounts had been deactivated and were "Under review"
From the comment section of the Sept 2022 post, i TIL'd that Paypal/Stripe/Square are not "real" payment processors, in the sense that there is not underwritting going on when you onboard and become ready to submit transactions. And when such an account grows, they come back and scrutinize and this is when things might go south. The harder-to-start but more secure way is having a merchant account with a bank which requires a fee and approval upfront. One would still be able to abstract the details of processing credit cards etc to a third party this way.
It sounds like Paypal/Stripe/Sqaure behaves as retailors of underwrittings, rather than some software interface, but one comment pointed out that banks hate it:
One thing that is almost impossible to do on your own is to get a merchant account that you will be using to process payments on behalf of others. So if that is your business model, you are almost certainly in for the fight of your life with banks and merchant providers, along with some stupidly high reserve funds. Stripe makes this super easy, but it is a house of cards based on stories like this one.
Another comment agreed:
this is why my previous company never went the IPSP route (letting customers accept payments with your merchant account). They are incredibly arduous to get approved, you practically need to have a bank CEO as your godfather to get it.
My retailor interpretation is less correct than i thought. Then the question becomes, how did they make it to work, then? Digging a bit more, first of all, the FDIC (Federal Deposit Insurance Corporation) decided in 2002 that Paypal is not a bank, nor a savings association, "because it does not accept deposits as defined by federal law, which requires institutions to have a banking charter. PayPal doesn't have a charter, thus it is not a bank".
And it still holds. In today's Paypal FAQ:
PayPal is [...] not a bank. PayPal Savings is provided by Synchrony Bank, Member FDIC. Money in PayPal Savings is held at Synchrony Bank.
2002 is around the time when Paypal IPO'd. Digging further back, from this article (2019) with a quite detailed timeline, Confinity (initial name of Paypal) started out like this:
The founders' idea was both simple and efficient - convince customers to share their emails, banking and credit card information in return for fast, low-cost payments. Small businesses, online merchants, and consumers quickly signed on, with the company handling more than $3 billion in payments from 10.2 million individual consumers and 2.6 million commercial customers within three years of opening its doors.
which surprisingly appears to still be a valid method to connect a Paypal account to your bank account, and a valid method for third party to manage financial accounts for their customers, until at least 2019 (never tried; what if i have 2FA over there?). But this doesn't solve my question of "how does paypal make it work at scale if bank is averse to the model". Fortunately the said article continues to say:
Why didn't anyone else notice that consumer and business payments on early retail sites like eBay (EBAY) - Get Free Report were being paid by checks and money orders via the U.S. Postal Service, resulting in delays for products to be delivered and for checks to clear?
That answer is unclear, but the two PayPal founders certainly cracked the code and set up the company as the leading light for online payments for years to come.
So, someone had a godfather somewhere, perhaps. Wikipedia has nothing to add. Bloomberg has a piece covering Stripe, but it was a marketing writing. I learnt nothing except for 1) founders have made profits out of sales of downloaded wikipedia, and 2) they had millions before Stripe was created, which probably implies some godfather situation as well. That's it for now.
I haven't tried yet. ↩︎
Quote, "an £11m computer chip fraud resulting in 8 convictions, sentences totalling 27 years, and a record £7m VAT confiscation order, where one of the defendants added parts to a smiley-face doodle each time the boxes came round the carousel". ↩︎
Official release? The piece ended with "Issued by HM Customs and Excise Communications Division" and asks that info about VAT fraud to be reported to Customs officers. ↩︎
As described by Ainsworth and who cited them ↩︎
Transcript can be requested at a cost, see here. There is data access for academic purposes, but looks hard to get as a regular person. I gave up on both. ↩︎
Around 2018 they appear to also accept wire transfer and direct debit, but this information does not exist in the current doc. ↩︎
Identifier was listed as W144000981. However, no useful information. ↩︎
