8 of history’s most corrupt leaders:
1. Suharto: President of Indonesia from 1967-1998, Suharto ended his rule with a personal net worth of $38 billion. He oversaw a military dictatorship, which evolved into an authoritarian regime built on his own cult of personality.
Following an economic downturn in 1997 that Indonesia was slow to recover from, prominent politicians began blaming Suharto and protests began in earnest that year. After mounting pressure and desertion by his political allies in May 1998, Suharto resigned.
He has been investigated for corruption numerous times since his resignation and was accused of embezzling $571 million of government funds through various personal charity foundations. Other lawsuits in Indonesia have sought to order Suharto to repay up to $1.5 billion in scholarship funds that supposedly disappeared during his tenure.
Suharto was never prosecuted, partly because he was said to be too ill to stand trial but also because he was still well-regarded by a large proportion of the population. He died in 2008
India will be the biggest loser in AI & crypto. There is no reason to build a crypto company from India for India. Same with AI.
India was already lagging in frontier tech. US & Chinese AI apps will dominate in India how big tech did in the last decade.
We will be relegated to adding AI as a feature to SaaS products.
Excited to share @GoogleDeepMind’s newest AI model GraphCast: the most accurate 10-day global weather forecasting system in the world. GraphCast can also offer earlier warnings of extreme weather events, including the path of hurricanes. In @Science today https://t.co/iHhQeSH3js
Rebuilding trust in governments through cryptocurrencies: the USA, Iran, and Israel
In early August, the US and Iran conducted a prisoner swap in which five imprisoned Americans were returned for several jailed Iranians and $6 billion of frozen Iranian assets.
Given the association between Iran and Hamas, many have reasonably asked: did that $6 billion fund today's horrific terrorist attacks on Israel?
According to the New York Times, these assets were placed "into an account in the central bank of Qatar... controlled by the government of Qatar and regulated so Iran can gain access to the money only to pay vendors for humanitarian purchases such as medicine and food." [1]
This claim has been echoed multiple times by US officials, including White House National Security Council Spokesperson Adrienne Watson (@NSC_Spox) and Under Secretary for Terrorism and Financial Intelligence Brian Nelson (@USTreasury).
In the current partisan political climate, Republicans have accused the Biden administration of indirectly funding terrorism. However, it is not just the political right doubting the official narrative. Many on Twitter, responding to official statements, have expressed skepticism since there is no way to independently verify these claims.
How can we confirm with our own eyes:
1) That the $6 billion in the Qatari central bank remains unspent?
2) That any spending is exclusively for humanitarian needs?
The answer is that we cannot. This information is opaque and inaccessible. We are left only with our trust in the words of public officials, invariably influenced by our own political biases and proclivities.
Of course, the technology exists to solve this problem: cryptocurrencies and the public blockchain.
Public blockchains allow for the transparent monitoring of fund movements, so that anybody can verify the balance of any account. Furthermore, through cryptographic signature attestations, transfers can be verified between specific parties. This can be set in a smart contract, audited, made open-source, and publicly viewable.
This is a perfect use case for cryptocurrencies. Unsubstantiated arguments always have the potential to devolve into tribal conflicts. In contrast, the mathematical inviolability of cryptocurrencies provide objective verification. They obviate the need for third parties to make unilateral and unverifiable claims.
Survey after survey shows that public trust in institutions is declining. Someone's word simply isn't enough; labelling something as disinformation is insufficient. Those in government who wish to regain the faith of their citizens should strongly consider employing the public blockchain as a tool for demonstrating their honesty and integrity, particularly in times of crisis.
[1] https://t.co/8zJGV2OnKE
@siddharth17 Saying interest rate moved by 0.25 percent (from 6% to 6.25%) can be confusing due to "percent of what". Hence comes "percent points" which leads to "basis points" (like m -> cm)