So far, in the cases which have actually run to completion in the ICC, they have been about crimes committed in countries with weak or non-functional judiciaries. This, I would assume, is the court’s primary purpose.

Your assertion that the ICC Prosecutor is obligated to respect the decision of a state party’s procuratorial authority to not prosecute seems unsupported by the text of the Rome Statute. Article 20, Section 3 of the Statute only precludes the ICC from trying offences which have been fairly and impartially tried in another court. The key here, is that the accused must have actually been tried. A decision not to prosecute by local prosecutors does not prevent the ICC Prosecutor’s Office from pressing charges.

I do, however, agree for the most part that the United States can avoid the issue with respect to its own citizens by simply prosecuting all the possible crimes domestically in American courts, which would remove the jurisdiction of the ICC, averting all the nasty due process violation concerns. The US can accede with a reservation that all crimes involving US citizens will instead first be referred to the US Department of Justice for local prosecution, and then domestic legislation can force the Department of Justice to at least put some effort into a prosecution to satisfy the requirements of Article 20, Section 3 and foreclose ICC jurisdiction.

There are also some arguments about how the US being obligated to arrest visiting foreign heads of state or government with active warrants against them would be detrimental to the general peace-building process, but I don’t agree with this interpretation. Article 98 of the Rome Statute states that state parties are not required to extradite in violation of other obligations of international law, presumably including diplomatic immunity.

So yes, I agree that it is a weak argument for not adopting the Rome Statute. To be clear, I think the real reason the US did not ratify the Rome Statute is because the US military has its fingers in so many pies that it’s inevitable that some criminal conduct has occurred somewhere, but having even a single US service member appear before an international war crimes tribunal would be geopolitically embarrassing, especially since neither of the two other contemporary world powers subject themselves to ICC jurisdiction.

I will be honest, the genuine reservations voiced about the ICC and the due process problems are legitimate. I don’t agree that they outweigh the benefits of joining the ICC, but I do understand that a reasonable person could conclude otherwise.

For one, ICC proceedings take years and there is no right to a fast trial. Article 67 of the Rome Statute gives the defendant a right against “undue delay” but this clause is essentially toilet paper in reality. A defendant can spend years in detention awaiting a resolution to their case, even if they are later acquitted and released (which has happened).

For comparison only, there is a right to a speedy trial in American law. If exercised, this usually results in a trial scheduled in mere weeks, at most a month or two for complex cases.

If the ICC is known for anything, it’s the completely broken pre-trial process.

After the next presidential election, the US should accede to Rome Statue and dump this loser on the steps of the ICC. Might as well nab Bibi as well, Maduro-style.

It’s more a question about why Omani officials haven’t thrown a fit on the international stage about this blatant violation of their sovereignty. I’m not stupid enough to think that Iranian missiles stop at the international border.

Side question: Why, in this whole debacle, can’t ships just sail within the territorial waters of Oman, on the southern side of the strait? Why does Iran get to dictate what happens in Oman’s territorial waters? 've heard surprisingly little said by or towards Omani officials about this.

As someone living in America, I really hope that the next administration puts these clowns on trial and we make the systemic changes necessary to rejoin the democratic world order. Living under this wannabe fascist sucks.

I can’t believe the Board of Peace got the mandate for Gaza. They are absolutely openly corrupt. I expected France or the United Kingdom to issue a veto against it.

This is probably fine as long as they can suffer the shenanigans from the Board of Peace until 2029. The problem is that the UN gave an implementation mandate to the Board of Peace. This is extremely problematic as the Board of Peace lacks credibility and its leadership structure is completely centralised around its chairman for life, Donald Trump.

After the next US president takes office, I think it’s highly likely that the United States will use the threat of withdrawing from the Board of Peace and freezing its bank accounts (the Board has an account at the World Bank which is empty; all funds are currently held in a private account under the control of Trump at JP Morgan, an American bank) to force Donald Trump out of the position of chairman, or try to get the Security Council to withdraw the mandate. If the US withdraws all support from the Board of Peace, it would probably crumble without access to American resources. This would provide a good reason to transfer the mandate away from the Board to the UN’s own Trusteeship Council. At least the Trusteeship Council has a reputation for mediocrity when it comes to overseeing its territories.

Urban Dictionary for people who actually want to know what words mean

In my opinion Wiktionary is probably the best English dictionary on the planet and probably the best English to other language dictionary as well.

It seems like others have already given the definition, but I do want to introduce you to the wonderful thing that is Wiktionary.

https://en.wiktionary.org/wiki/haul_ass

It’s part of the same project as Wikipedia, and it has a very comprehensive compendium of definitions for slang terms.

This doesn’t prevent Americans from going to Cuba. I can book tickets right now online from New York to Havana for $550.

No, you do. You just don’t realise it. If you live in any developed country or even most developing countries, you have all of these. Your comment is really giving off the vibes of someone who doesn’t know what they have because they’ve never lived in a world without it.

When I say “access to cheap credit”, I mean that you can, if you want, go down to your bank and ask for a personal loan. As long as you are not already overburdened by debt and have a decent income, the bank will lend money to you at interest rates that medieval kings could only dream of.

Without the financial and legal infrastructure to facilitate, what are your options? Without the state to enforce debts and contracts through legal channels, people historically have resorted to threats and violence instead. And all that risk means interest rates get jacked through the roof. Triple digit APRs, baby.

When I say you have the ability to “transact business remotely”, I mean that you can pay money, be paid money, and conduct financial business without having to physically attend in person to exchange physical objects (like coins or banknotes). The financial infrastructure in place allows you to transfer money anywhere in the world from your fingertips. You can sell or buy almost anything online, pay, and have it delivered to your doorstep without ever talking to anyone or leaving your house. Without that financial infrastructure, your options are pretty limited. Either unregulated trust-based informal systems, or you have to go and bring physical goods or money to someone.

When I say you “have the ability to plan for your future financially”, I don’t mean you have the ability to plan yourself into a comfortable future. Being poor doesn’t negate this. You have a job (presumably), and every month you can expect some regular amount of money to appear into your bank account. You can plan on that happening. You can also plan on the fact that said money has a predictable value. You also can predict with good certainty what that money can buy. All of that is because the financial system has created an incredible amount of currency stability. Even countries with poor economies by modern standards are incredibly stable by historic ones.

When I say you “have the ability to save”, I don’t mean that you personally are guaranteed to have excess money to save. I mean that the very act of saving is not made impossible. If you have the money, you can put it in the bank, and you can reasonably expect to get that money back later, possibly with interest. In comparison, in a country that’s in a state of economic collapse, you can’t put money in the bank without risking not being able to get it back. You can store cash at home without the risk that the Government will just declare your money invalid or inflate away its value. You might not even be able to buy gold because the Government forbids “hoarding” gold. The act of saving, the accumulation of excess money, is literally impossible for the everyday person in that scenario.

This might not apply to you, but as a person whose family immigrated from a second-world country to a first-world one, I see far too many Westerners complaining about how bad they have it and how they wish everything would collapse. Buddy, if everything collapsed you’d have it even worse. This isn’t even “champagne socialism” or whatever the hell the reactionaries call it, it’s just plain ignorance of how the world works and what one shouldn’t take for granted.

What you think goes away when a financial system collapses: dodgy bankers, predatory financial institutions, money influencing politics, centralisation of wealth, rampant corruption

What actually goes away: access to cheap credit, the ability to transact business remotely, the ability to plan for the future financially, and your ability to save

What remains after the financial system collapses: dodgy bankers, predatory financial institutions, money influencing politics, centralisation of wealth, rampant corruption

I want to do a sanity check here. The six largest payment cards networks (Visa, UnionPay, Mastercard, American Express, JCB, and Discover) processed about 770 billion transactions in 2024 (source). That’s two years ago, and certainly as more of the world transitions to cashless payments that number has probably increased, but let’s just use the 770 billion number for the sake of calculation.

Bitcoin transactions are actually fairly inefficient in terms of transaction size because of their UXTO-based coin system. An account-based system like Ethereum can result in smaller transaction sizes. Let’s take the minimum transaction data that one would need to store for a payments-only network:

• The sending account number, which is usually 128 bits
• The amount, let’s say it’s a unit64_t so 64 bits
• The receiving account number, another 128 bits
• A digital signature generated by the sender. Let’s use Schnorr signatures, which are relatively short. A 512-bit signature will provide 128 bits of security.

We’ll ignore Segwit since witness data still needs to be stored, that’s just Bitcoin’s cheeky way of expanding the block size without explicitly declaring a larger block size.

To allow for indexing, let’s allow some kind of tree structure and say it has overhead of 32 bytes per node (it will probably require more, but let’s just roll with this for now).

Total: 136 bytes per tx

Multiplied by 770 billion gives 104.72 PB. Even if you had a block every 10 seconds like Ethereum does, the block size needed to process that kind of volume would be 33.2 MB.

Storing a blockchain that grows by over a hundred petabytes a year is impossible for all but the most well-funded organisations. That’s two orders of magnitude out of reach for the largest non-crypto open-source projects (the Wikimedia Foundation), four orders of magnitude out of reach for your average open-source project, five orders of magnitude out of reach for ordinary FOSS enthusiasts, and eight orders of magnitude out of reach of everyday users.

Blockchain is a cool technology and I grant that Satoshi Nakamoto was a pretty smart guy and a brilliant computer scientist, but it’s just not suitable for handling the types of volume we deal with in the modern financial system.

I’m sorry, but you’re describing an open-source, decentralised, peer-to-peer, permissionless digital payment network. Which is exactly what cryptocurrency is. But I think you know that if you openly advocate in favour of cryptocurrency here, you instantly get downvotes on Lemmy. So you’re doing it in a fairly roundabout way.

I don’t know where you get the idea that blockchains are no longer proof-of-work. Bitcoin is still the largest cryptocurrency and it’s still using proof-of-work. It’s not really what I’m getting at though, when I say that a decentralised system is 1000x the people each doing 100x the work. Even a proof-of-stake system will still have a lot of work that each node has to do, validation transactions, and that amount of data that has to be passed around serves as a ceiling on transaction capacity. Bitcoin is notoriously low at 1 (“virtual”) MB every 10 minutes. But even larger limits or Ethereum’s sharding strategy would be utterly overwhelmed by the transaction volumes of traditional finance.

J. P. Morgan is absolutely relevant in the modern day.

Sometimes. But even if it is temporary, it’s still good while it lasts.

Nothing too deep about it. That’s the whole thought.

I feel like if you want to blame a company for creating the modern financial system, John Pierpont Morgan and the company which bears his name are probably 10x more responsible.