Having worked at FinTechs and in finance in general that doesn't ring true at all. The FCA definitely takes anti-money laundering checks quite seriously.
e.g. (off the top of my head) NatWest were fined £264 million for AML breaches.
I'm no expert by any means but if I wanted to flout the rules I'd definitely consider a few other juristictions before the City.
AML tech is so primitive, it almost looks like it's designed that anyone 'in the know' will know how to not be detected.
Eg. Most AML checks are done because someone wrote some triggering keyword in the payment reference field. Do we honestly think a criminal mastermind won't manage to come up with something else to write there?
The AML you are thinking of is designed to catch small time crooks and drug mules (and maybe also dumb terrorist supporters). They are not really designed (or more specifically deliberately obtuse towards) Slavic oligarch money. Not all "corruption" and money laundering are treated equally. Places like London (not to mention Jersey), Switzerland, and Singapore are more for good old fashioned siphoning-of-national-assets type of corruption where there's almost always a "clean" paper trail to back things up. Also, don't get tax dodging mixed with money laundering. There are plenty of processes required by OECD and similar orgs, e.g. the concepts of a LEI number, that are not really useful against real oligarch/state level money launderers.
Here's a simple example: You lived in a former USSR/iron curtain state. During the chaos of '89 you managed to "acquire" lots of assets or finagle yourself into owning former public companies/real estate/factories. The paper trail is clean as far as your typical London banks are concerned because you are merely liquidating assets you own in your own country where there's a full paper trail (regardless of whether it was attained through illegitimate means). Alternatively, in a different narrative, you a rich international student from similar types of countries and you just happened to have "rich parents" who have plenty of money to throw around. It's a very different threat model than for example trying to prevent grassroots terrorism financing.
Money laundering vs tax evasion have a lot of overlap but don't get them confused. They are very different threat models from the perspective of the service provider (and it's also why many smaller foreign banks refuse to accept Americans as customers, partially because of the paperwork required to stay compliant with Uncle Sam).
If you want an actual no-questions-asked romp of organized crime type of money I believe the current main contenders are the middle eastern states like Dubai (pre Iranian conflict at least).
Rumor through the financial grapevine is that ironically there are many GCC middle eastern royalty/pseudo-royalty currently under house arrest who are trying to do the opposite i.e. get their assets out of the country because their main bank accounts are frozen domestically. So basically real life Nigerian princes.
(As for why they are under house arrest, it's kinda out of scope for HN but mostly because of domestic political purges, especially in Saudi Arabia from what I heard)
The rich international student pipeline has always stood out to me – we've seen dozens of 30, 40 or even 50 storey skyscrapers built for students, enjoying lifestyles usually reserved for those in high finance.
Well, I assure you most London bankers won't lose any sleep given that the money is often from Gulf states/places like China/ex Soviet oligarchies/various forms of corruption in the global south. The countries where the money flow out from often lack the means to actually pursue and prosecute overseas, especially for what boils down to "white collar" offences/corruption. It's only when anything like terrorism/organized crime/anything involving Uncle Sam's tax revenue occurs then the banks AML processes might become useful for more than just check-the-box compliance.
You will often find that entrepreneurs and digital nomads get caught in this sort of of AML debanking web because the paltry 6-7 figs of business/personal transactions across countries often resemble mules/illegitimate businesses and the banks are not allowed to talk about it. (Just go to the subreddit for wise or PayPal and search for the keyword "frozen")
Meanwhile international students can easily bring in 8 figs to buy houses and that's perfectly fine because it's "clean" as far as the compliance department is concerned. It's also a cultural issue, fintech platforms and neobanks try very hard to use heuristics to automate compliance. This is why I recommend digital nomads to use a proper cross border bank like HSBC Premier. You pay a lot more but you get a lot less of the "account frozen" bullshit.
Countries that are caught in between corruption and terrorist threats and Uncle Sam are the worst generally. E.g. transfering money both into and from Turkey are a pain in the ass.
I’m not sure why web-midi can’t be available behind a permission to control finger printing.
I can think of several light weight patch editors I’d like be able to use. There’s probably not enough demand for someone to make a stand alone app for them.
I can’t see any reason why this needs to be controlled by apple’s app store.
You say “needs to be learned” but that’s no more so than any other accent.
We just grow up with it because it’s how our parents and the parents of our friends speak.
If you want to change your accent you can, of course, get elocution lessons but most Brits do not. We just have a large variety of accents of which RP is one.
As if it’s only one or another. Or you truly believe horde of low quality devs without any specs can come up with better product than Claude with quality specification?
I mean, yes they do wear out but the rate is pretty slow if you look after them. I have some of my father’s old early LPs and they still sound pretty good.
You can get rid of a surprising amount of surface noise with a static gun and a line contact stylus (where shape is close to that of a cutting head so you get the biggest contact patch).
I think most people only copied to cassette if they want to use a Walkman, play it in the car or give a copy to a friend. It generally wasn’t for sound quality.
He said tape not cassette. Tape would mean real to real tape in this context - cassette doesn't make sense. Tape can be wider than cassette, only two tracks, and run faster - all give you a lot better sound quality. Not as good as a good digital system and it costs more but still very good.
They we never common from what I know. However again the context is people who care about sound quality and in that group I believe they were much more common.
Reminds me of the Autechre album Tri Repetae which was labelled as “Complete with surface noise” on vinyl and “Incomplete without surface noise” on CD.
If they really wanted to do so, they could take the vinyl, play it with all the surface noise they wanted, and record that to CD so they could have the surface noise there, too.
It would be the same surface noise each time, not getting worse.
I refurbished a pair of old Sennheiser HD-25s I’ve had since 1998ish recently.
They work just like new and there is something really satisfying about bringing old tech back to a useful life.
I’m using them for monitoring things that don’t have Bluetooth.
I still use AirPods day to day though because it’s so useful to always have something in your pocket that can block unpleasant noise. Bluetooth works fine for me.
reply