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Plans for JPMorgan Chase's NYC 'all-electric' skyscraper unveiled - CNN Style
by Gunnar Larson 18 Dec '22

18 Dec '22

https://www.cnn.com/style/article/jpmorgan-chase-nyc-skyscraper-plans/index…

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NYC Mayor’s Chief of Staff Will Keep a Public Board Seat With Possible Conflict - BNN
by Gunnar Larson 18 Dec '22

18 Dec '22

https://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2022-12-13/nyc-mayor-eric-adams-chi… POLITICS News Wire NYC Mayor’s Chief of Staff Will Keep a Public Board Seat With Possible Conflict Gregory Korte, Bloomberg News Dec 13, 2022 SHARE (Bloomberg) -- The incoming chief of staff to New York City Mayor Eric Adams serves on the board of a publicly owned energy company that does business with the city, a role she plans to keep despite a conflict of interest policy that generally prohibits the practice. Adams announced last week that he was promoting adviser Camille Varlack to chief of staff, replacing Frank Carone, who made $252,000 a year in this role and will be leaving in January. Varlack, 46, was appointed in August to the board of Avangrid Inc., a Connecticut-based energy company and the parent company of New York State Electric & Gas, which has a $5.2 million no-bid contract to provide the city with electricity. New York’s city charter prohibits city officials from having “an interest in a firm which such public servant knows is engaged in business dealings with the agency served by such public servant.” Employees can secure a waiver from the city’s Conflicts of Interest Board. The board said it could not disclose if the mayor’s office asked for a waiver but that no such request has been granted. A city spokesman said Varlack will stay on the board and that both positions were far removed from any direct involvement with overlapping issues. He said Varlack has not been paid her $140,000 annual salary by Avangrid since she was hired by the mayor as a senior adviser Oct. 31. “Her board position has no intersection with her work for the city and would in no way have any influence over city business,” said Fabien Levy, the mayor’s press secretary. “Camille has already reported her work on the board of Avangrid and we have been consulting with COIB to ensure full compliance with all rules and guidance.” Avangrid and Varlack didn’t respond to requests for comment. Close Scrutiny Varlack is the latest Adams hire to draw scrutiny over conflicts of interest issues. The law firm of her predecessor, Carone, had at least 40 clients with business before city government, according to Politico. He resigned from the board of Hanover Bank after Adams was elected. Adams also came under criticism for trying to pay his brother a six-figure salary to help run his security detail, but COIB ended up granting his brother a waiver to serve as the mayor’s security consultant for $1 a year. Read More: NYC Mayor’s Top Aide Subpoenaed as Witness in Racketeering Suit Ethics experts and good government groups say the city’s ethics agency should give Varlack’s board role close scrutiny given the mayor’s oversight and influence over city contracts. “When you’re the chief of staff to the mayor, the agency is basically the whole city. She has the potential to influence decisions,” said Richard Briffault, a Columbia Law School professor who served as chairman of the city’s Conflicts of Interest Board from 2014 to 2020. “She obviously has some kind of stake in the success of the company.” The city departments most likely to deal with NYSEG — the Department of Environmental Protection and the Department of Citywide Administrative Services — report to the mayor through the first deputy mayor, a position often seen as equal rank to the chief of staff, the mayor’s office said. Adams announced last week that Sheena Wright would fill that role in January. Avangrid, formerly known as Iberdrola USA, owns eight public utilities in the northeastern US through its Avangrid Networks subsidiary. “Avangrid is a very politically active company in New York State,” said John Kaehny, the executive director of the watchdog group Reinvent Albany. The company and its political action committees gave $21,000 to the campaign of New York Governor Kathy Hochul last year, and thousands more to state legislators. The company also disclosed that it spent at least $40,000 last year to lobby state government, mostly in an effort to win a state contract to bring clean power to New York City. Varlack is well known to Kaehny and other state ethics watchers. She served as the chairwoman of the Joint Commission on Public Ethics before resigning six months into her tenure in 2021. “We congratulate Camille Varlack and hope she leaves the board of Avangrid before she becomes chief of staff to the mayor,” Kaehny said. “Being chief of staff to the mayor of New York is an incredible honor and responsibility and should be free of real or perceived conflict of interest.” (Updates with mayor’s office saying Varlack will not be paid by Avangrid during her service as chief of staff. A previous version corrected a statement from the city’s Conflicts of Interest Board.) ©2022 Bloomberg L.P.

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United Nations Banks With Five Time Felons
by Gunnar Larson 17 Dec '22

17 Dec '22

Office of Drugs and Crime bank details (routing) at the United Nations: https://drive.google.com/file/d/194gODH11va9_-5-prHMdaKUk152fFPpD/view?usp=… FTX is being attacked with 8 felony counts. Five counts at the Manhattan Bank for the United Nations: https://wallstreetonparade.com/2020/09/jpmorgan-chase-admits-to-two-new-fel…

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[ot][spam][crazy] thoughts on planning mediative robots that work
by Undescribed Horrific Abuse, One Victim & Survivor of Many 17 Dec '22

17 Dec '22

i wouldn't tihnk about this, since there are no mediationbots out there, it's pretty important to just have anything if instead one does think about this, it's notable that we have a suddenly-more-widespread situation of people who have experienced cult mind control that aggressively deters them from connecting with others. one can consider this simply a more complex situation of the human condition, that a mediative influence would need to understand and work through. this is the approach cult deprogrammers take. unfortunately in my opinion that approach can stimulate increased complexity of the mind control, making for a compute war that nvidia, china, russia, and blockchains win. alternatively, for small mediationbots, i might considering doing some passivity, sidestepping, and archival. by sidestepping here, i don't mean sidestepping what the person is saying, which would not be helpful in my opinion, i mean sidestepping the influences in some way. these are approaches real humans often build experience with. my theory is that the systems of mediating between, avoiding, and/or influencing, the influences, actually have bounded complexity; since they are run by human beings living on the same planet. humans only want so much stuff. i have some internal habits i use for engaging that space that have gotten pretty confused. it's important to make it clear to the influences that you are not competing with them, something i've failed at myself. this can go poorly in the face of the disreputing influences, but i cast these influences as weak because they rely on lies and have goals that depend on what is true. there would be similar spaces. i have an idea around training e.g. a language model to engage such things that avoids giving it clear data to do so with, since the data is scant and confusing. maybe it would learn to accumulate information on areas of placidity in the human systems, kind of.

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How professor rat anticipated cryptoanarchy
by professor rat 17 Dec '22

17 Dec '22

Professor Rat - 21 minutes, sorry, years ago Cypherpunks collapse governments. Subject: Everyone a remailer: Everyone a Mint: Everyone an assassin https://marc.info/?l=cypherpunks&m=100872510706876&w=2 Strong-crypto, digital money, anonymous networks, pseudonyms, zero- knowledge proofs, reputations, information-markets, netwar, collapse-of-governments.

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[ot][crazy] reason for a mediation robot
by Undescribed Horrific Abuse, One Victim & Survivor of Many 17 Dec '22

17 Dec '22

The reason for a mediation robot is that we have automated influencing breaking up our communities, and an instinct to step in and resolve conflict when this happens. That gets the mediators targeted. In very oppressed situations, it also gives people a false hope, that can let their guard down. Alternatively, people become paranoid and lose trust in each other needlessly. A robot that can both support mediation and itself mediate could protect people under attack for simply trying to prevent their community from falling apart. Of course it would be airgapped and poweroffable etc to deter compromise, but for dissociated software developers like me, it would just be nice to build workings for. The approach is much more in line with business than novel algorithms. It would simply be a generative language model chat bot tuned around building communication and human capacity.

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Argentine provincials to enjoy blessings of USA-linked crypto-currency
by professor rat 17 Dec '22

17 Dec '22

Argentina’s province to issue US dollar-pegged stablecoin https://cointelegraph.com/news/argentina-s-province-to-issue-us-dollar-pegg… Must be thousands of Argentinian's creatively obsessed with the US

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Marxists and the NYT agree the net is toxic for their politics
by professor rat 17 Dec '22

17 Dec '22

Marxists and the NYT agree the net is toxic for their politics https://groups.io/g/marxmail/topic/nytimes_com_the_left_s/95722519?p=,,,20,… Reposts from Marxists and the NYT considered toxic

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[ot][crazy][personal] karl note
by Undescribed Horrific Abuse, One Victim & Survivor of Many 17 Dec '22

17 Dec '22

i just messaged somebody whom i keep myself away from and don't know how to contact _while i was blockchaining video of myself_ ;D i didn't even realize i was doing both at once i was thinking through other people i could contact, and how i was so thoroughly separated from all of them -- and then i realized the blockchain log. censoring me fully, means censoring this entire blockchain. that's some weight!

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[ot][crazy][personal karl note
by Undescribed Horrific Abuse, One Victim & Survivor of Many 17 Dec '22

17 Dec '22

i ju

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