CEO of a (different) Canadian crypto company here.
Two things are simultaneously true in Canada right now: 1) the government has become unwilling/unable to actually keep repeat violent offenders in jail (and has totally failed to prevent them from acquiring illegal firearms), and 2) the law essentially outlaws the use of any tools (firearms, pepper spray, knives) for the express purpose of self-defense.
It's functionally impossible to get a concealed carry permit in Canada. They just don't issue them, even if you have a restricted firearms license, even if you're a high-profile individual, and even if there's an immediate threat to your life. You have to rely on police and, if you can afford them, expensive private security who probably can't carry a firearm either. I should note that the kidnappers in this case (plural) were all armed.
The politicians, of course, are protected by the armed Parliamentary Protective Service. They just don't believe you deserve similar protection.
The article claims violent crime is up 30% over the last decade. An important note the article only mentions in the subtitle is that this is recorded crime.
So recording might have gotten better/loose or the methodology is super stable and violent crime exactly as it was defined 10 years ago is up.
This seems unlikely, but plausible.
From the article though:
“The top violent crimes in 2023 were assault not using weapons or resulting harm, uttering threats, and assault employing weapons or resulting in harm.”
To me the recording of “uttering threats” pops out as something that would easily change depending on society’s sensitivities.
I am not saying violent crime isn’t up. These are just some thoughts that I wish were addressed in the article. The article doesn’t go into any of the recording methods and possible changes in what is categorised as a certain type of crime that could also impact the stats.
Sounds like Seattle, the police cannot chase criminals who steal cars, use them to brake into businesses and then drive off with the ATM in the back. The last is so left there that they are not allowed to chase them.
the event you're likely referring to is a cop that pursued without authorization and was reprimanded. this is a good thing, cops should get permission before going on a wild car chase
Like another commenter has replied, not only are you factually incorrect, you are incorrect on a moral level, because your argument is that if the statistics show that more bad things happen with guns acquired legally, then that somehow trumps an individual's right to self-defense.
It does not and I hope you never get into a situation where you have to experience that choice for yourself.
> then that somehow trumps an individual's right to self-defense.
As a note, you don't have individual rights. That is a man made concept. You only have the rights that other humans grant you. There is no universal tablet of morals or rights, inscribed into the fabric of reality.
That's a very cynical viewpoint and one that's not very easy to convince people of. I don't think it's a very moral stance to take either because it can be used to justify immoral stances. There have always been actions in human society that are held as reprehensible regardless of time or culture that would seem to imply the opposite (or at least that the majority of people who live or have lived at the very least believe in the opposite being true)
It might not be to people's liking, but unfortunately it's just the truth. Human's have had what we would now consider absolutely awful "moral codes" throughout history. The only real truth is "might makes right".
It's a realistic view point. I'm gay and I don't delude myself on the fact it can be dangerous to express that in public. No matter "how far we've come" "we don't need pride parades anymore" etc.
Sorry, didn't see your response until today. But I'd argue that those two truths aren't incompatible with one another. Something can be an innate human right and also perceived poorly within a given culture at that moment in time. Someone not respecting a human right doesn't mean that the right doesn't exist. It's just being infringed. "Individual human rights don't exist" seems like a defeatist statement to me and also (looking at religion) doesn't seem to be one believed in by the majority of humans throughout history (though the nature of what is and isn't a right is probably what is usually argued about). There are some things that seem to be universally frowned upon in just about every culture (like unjustified, by their definition of unjustified, murder, rape, etc.) The idea of human rights should be sacred and inarguable because the alternative leaves room for pushback against them.
It is 1. A deterrent and 2. Accidents are just a result of poor training and 3. The amount of defensive gun use is exceptional, it does not get reported on purpose due to state propaganda in Canada, America, and so on.
Also all concealed carry holders regularly train, much of it is for fun, and their skills rival or surpass law enforcement.
>Also all concealed carry holders regularly train, much of it is for fun, and their skills rival or surpass law enforcement.
I generally disagree with your other bullets points, but this statement is so absurdly inaccurate I feel the need to call it out explicitly. It is absolutely not true that all concealed carry holder fit this description. Not even a majority of the concealed carry holders that I know do. It is, quite honestly, a fantasy.
(I am generally pro-gun rights combined with smart gun restrictions laws)
You are likely right, not all concealed carry permit holders practice, but cops practice even less, and generally are worse-trained to carry a firearm.
Instead of training in the legality of use of force, and to hit a target with a bullet, like most CCP holders get, cops get training that everyone is a potential enemy, and to spray and pray first, ask questions later. Considering they're essentially immune to going to prison when this goes poorly, the result is often bad.
guns don't really seem to be much of a deterrent in the US, instead gun crime is way up.
and what's worse is it becomes an "arms race" at the individual level. many people end up buying guns because everyone else already have guns (especially criminals), so they feel obligated to acquire guns to defend themselves from other people with guns. it's a vicious cycle.
the ideal solution is to keep the gun supply low all together, meaning your average criminal are much less likely to have guns, which is what most countries do.
not only that, having a massive amount of guns around & having a culture of guns probably directly leads to school shootings.
The ideal solution is that the government demonstrates overwhelming effectiveness at stopping violent crime so people won’t feel the need to have a self defense gun
I’m not your bro. The thing that’s absolutely wrong (and quite frankly inscrutable) about people who think like you is that you all believe everyone is money hungry like yourselves and you are utterly incapable of imagining anyone whose life doesn’t revolve around wealth.
Most people aren’t envious of “crypto bros” nor are they mad they didn’t “get rich” in a zero-sum scam most lost money on. That’s how you would feel. Fortunately the world is more diverse than that and there are people with healthier priorities.
Hey you make great points, but you assumed some things incorrectly.
1) I never said people were envious of "crypto bros".
2) I never said I was rich or cared for money. My main priority is family.
I think you might have some issues about late stage capitalism, but for that I do salute you.
Ill repeat what I was trying to say so its clearer.
I think there is potential in AI , and Bitcoin was a fantastic piece of software. I am confused why people on HN had so much trouble adopting these technologies.
yeah AI and Bitcoin have shortfalls in their design, but Bitcoin is used by alot of people now, and so is AI.
Those are my points.
I don’t know you, so I won’t make assumptions. Free yourself from early judgments; often, those you clash with share more in common with you than you might realize bro.
and fake it before you make it ...im still waiting for GPT's version of H.E.R.... many months later nowhere to be found yet no doubt that juiced their revenue.
The startup playbook lie ur ass off and make sh!t up. Musk still does it to this day with the recent demo of his Optimus robots implying they were all AI driven.
why that's what many start-uppers do to win the startup game ..fake it .. lie. Would you trust your life to Elon's self driving tech which you sign away your rights to sue lol
Some with deadly consequences like Uber's attempt at self driving and what was that other recent self driving company that ran over / mangled a pedestrian?
Yes but in this case it was clearly apparent to most and to those who spoke with the robot and believed it must have felt like morons for being filmed thinking they were real. I just felt the benefits weren’t there as it was an obvious fakery.
Tbh when they had the real person on the suit I wouldn’t have approved that it would give the impression I’m ok with pretending to an extent.
I understand having a half working prototype iPhone on stage but literally pretending the robots are real just felt dishonest and a bad idea.
> Yes but in this case it was clearly apparent to most and to those who spoke with the robot and believed it must have felt like morons for being filmed thinking they were real.
If you spoke with the robot and believed it was AI controlled you should feel like a moron, considering the robot explicitly stated that it was remote controlled in that demo. https://x.com/zhen9436/status/1844773471240294651/
I'm not sure why you don't seem to understand my point or what seems pretty clear to me what happened that night. Here are 2 points.
1) "that" demo? I never mentioned "a" demo. That one clip, which you found, the robot answers a specific question to one user.
There were hundreds of interactions that night, and in many that I saw atleast one person clearly didn't realise they were.
2) Regardless of whether it was their fault for being morons, my point is they FELT like morons, which TO ME is not good publicity.
I like Elon and I think the demos were incredibly, I am saying it weirded me out they were trying to pretend the robots were sentient, which I am sure they are not far away from. I just think it was short sighted. But maybe I give people too much credit.
I would 100% have not told anyone to pretend shit. It wasnt even required. It just made me feel uneasy about the products.
Not really. The plans to build a foundry have been dropped. It's more a cautionary tale that at some point you will end up in an environment that's closer to reality where your bullshit is a liability. It was reported that the TSMC people called him a 'podcasting bro'. In other words, they lost all respect for anything he was saying.
Robotaxi will use the same stack as other Tesla vehicles, which is deployed on millions of vehicles. The <$30k price point and lack of controls/supervision are the only things that truly differentiate it from a Model 3.
Yup, this. I use FSD almost every day now that it's available for Cybertruck, and it's already quite excellent. It pulls off human-like maneuvers that are kind of gobsmacking.
Then jump in the backseat if it’s gobsmacking and just as good as a waymo. Tell it to drive you to the other side of the city while you sleep in the backseat. Put your money where your mouth is.
I can understand the average person not realizing what Teslas can do today, but I'm highly disappointed that so-called "tech" people on this message forum have no idea.
See the thing is they do and you don’t. If you don’t know and understand why waymo is far ahead of elons lies and will never catch up with its current tech direction and strategy for supervised fsd (which is an oxymoron) then you should only be disappointed in yourself.
If you’re so confident of the tech go jump in the back of a Tesla and let it drive you 100kms. Let’s see if you live to tell the tale. I’m happy to also do the same but in a waymo.
> In reality Tesla FSD is still in very primitive shape.
From the article. Have the people saying this actually tried the most recent FSD build?
I used it yesterday, and it reacted flawlessly to road construction that blocked a lane, then had cones demarcating a lane that didn't follow existing road markings. Then it saw that a driver wanted to turn left from parking lot while approaching a stop light and made space for the driver to turn out. It also flawlessly executed a merge involving turning into a suicide lane and waiting for traffic to pass.
It's very good at adapting to changes and can work on roads its never seen before. There is no other production car that can do what FSD can do currently.
Does this mean it's ready for full autonomy tomorrow? No, but I could use supervised FSD today if I wanted to drive 1600 miles from Austin to Toronto with hands mostly off the wheel.
The pace at which FSD is now improving is quite remarkable. In the long run it's clear that this approach is going to be WAY more flexible than Waymo's, because Tesla has so many more vehicles on the road collecting so much more data, and throwing vast amounts of compute at vast amounts of data is basically the best way to see rapid improvement for the foreseeable future.
If you're a large enough entity operating in multiple jurisdictions around the world, you're exposed to such a byzantine labyrinth of laws and regulations that it's impossible not to be in violation of some rule or law, somewhere, at all times.
Regulators know this. They use discretion to decide when and how to enforce these rules. Some are seldom enforced, others enforced with reckless abandon depending on the administrator, market conditions, political winds, etc.
Every regulated financial institution, for example, and I mean every single one, will be fined for something if it is big enough and has been around long enough.
Basing fines on worldwide revenue is a ridiculous way to ensure absolutely no risk-taking happens, because innovation happens at the margin. Tomorrow's massive industry is today's grey area.
The industry has spent decades moving revenue worldwide via complex financial engineering to avoid taxation. This is the end result of that innovation.
I can't believe that baising fines on the wealth of the criminal could possibly lead to zero innovation.
There's a difference between risk taking in doing something new and innovation and risk taking of riding the line of legal/illegal. I for one, would much prefer an environment where businesses were a little more afraid of breaking the law to exploit people/environments/other businesses/etc.
> Another important conclusion of this is that if a politician is pro-crypto today, but they are the type of person that is either very power-seeking themselves, or willing to suck up to someone who is, then this is the direction that their crypto advocacy may look like ten years from now.
Vitalik strikes me as being very naive about the process of policy-making. All politicians are, by definition, power-seeking individuals. They're seeking the power afforded to them by a seat on city council, as governor, a member of congress, etc. This is simply the nature of the political process. They may even be seeking power in pursuit of a noble objective, but they are seeking power nonetheless.
Realpolitik as a non-politician means aligning yourself with whoever best represents your interests at that particular point in time. One election cycle that may be Party A, but in the future it could be Party B. It could differ at the federal, state, or local level. Frequent elections and term limits ensure that turnover will happen, so change will be the only constant. Flexibility is required.
Waiting for the perfectly ideologically-aligned candidate sounds nice, but in reality it means you'll be waiting forever. All politicians are flawed, and many will simply tell you what they think you want to hear. Their behaviour is amenable to incentives, however, which is why donations are such an important - if maligned - mechanism for accountability.
Marc & Ben are being practical. They've observed that the behaviour of one party has run directly counter to their interests over the last several years and they're aligning themselves with the party that is at least proposing a better set of policies.
That's just... how this stuff works and has always worked.
I agree that you sometimes have to pick you battles and have allegiances of convenience.
However, my opinion is that an excessive amount of “selling your soul to the devil” for short term gains is the root cause of much of what is wrong in business and politics.
I don't get what you're hinting at here. The org Vitalik actually links to here that rates politicians on being friendly to crypto, rates individual politicians, not parties, and it claims to have over 1,000 politicians in its database. When I filter for only the ones unfriendly, it lists 49 people. If this rating system is correct, it seems crypto is very likely to be safe based on simply keeping the current people in office in office. It certainly stands out that there are far more democrats than republicans in the against category, but it's a tiny minority of the overall party in both cases.
They've observed that the behaviour of one party has run directly counter to their interests
For an extremely narrow definition of "interests". And their perception of their interests. There are reasonable doubts whether they are correct, even on that domain.
If it were just a matter of their two votes, that wouldn't matter. They are entitled to their interests, and to their opinions about the best way to pursue those interests.
But we're not talking about two votes. We're talking about tens of millions of dollars, which they can use to influence other people's choices, perhaps to the detriment of their own interests.
I happen to disagree with them on crypto. That's debatable. But what's not debatable is that if they were gay, trans, female, black, Hispanic, poor, Ukrainian, or living without air conditioning, their opinions of their own self-interest might be very different.
If they really think that the absolute top priority is the promulgation of cryptocurrency... well, I hope they're happy with what they get, because they are going to risk a ton of suffering.
You made up your own definition of politician to prove your point. Thats fallacious reasoning. I was in politics for four years not for power but to help people organize and prevent corporate takeover of family farms. Get bent, dude.
You were endowed with power in order to pursue a noble goal. But it was the power you sought that allowed you to do that. I think he’s definition is correct.
Thank you for your service. I think it’s popular to be dismissive and say that all politicians are sociopaths, which sounds very similar to saying they’re all power seeking individuals. The reason they sound similar is because there’s this idea that seeking power is always bad, but your example proves otherwise. So again, thank you!
The key to keeping debit card fees down isn't to legislate a fee cap, it's to make payment rails more open and competitive.
Why are regulators still attacking stablecoins, for example, when they represent one type of innovation that could actually lower transaction costs? Creating a legislative framework that encourages innovation rather than stifles it would make a lot more sense than trying to micromanage fees.
Yep, FedNow is a good step in the right direction, but the list of banks that participate needs to grow substantially. Many small and mid-sized banks/FIs aren't having a great 2023/2024, so I wouldn't expect to hear much about them integrating with new payment rails until their fundamental economics improve a bit allowing the decision makers to loosen up the purse strings again.
source: have worked in the industry consulting and doing technical design and implementation
I work in a firm very closely associated with CC and ACH processors, and I feel like the only time FedNow ever came up was when I mentioned it.
The low cost of acceptance and fast response times would seem to appeal to any merchant who's already begrudgingly accepting ACH, even if it's not a direct replacement for card payments.
This technically exists but can you actually use it? It seems like there are no articles about it in the 2024 calendar year.
I remember reading a really nice screed from walmart last year pushing the fed to turn the screws on rent seekers, but without RFP and ubiquitous participation that isnt going to come about.
bit of a conspiracy here but IMO banks have been observing the fraud rates with zelle, venmo, etc and only tolerating it because an external party gets to be the bogeyman.
In cases of unauthorized Zelle payments, consumers have legal rights and protections under the Electronic Funds Transfer Act (also known as "Reg E”). This also applies to FedNow instant payments, which has fraud management services available and includes a closed loop reporting requirement.
You should expect to see instant payment functionality that runs on FedNow rails within banking apps in the next 6-12 months. I cannot share more detail publicly unfortunately, my apologies.
(contribute at a fintech, thoughts and opinions always my own)
One of the bigger product goals for Zelle, I thought (though perhaps not the most publicized), was "moving liability away from banks more to consumers" (not exclusively, but moreso), I thought? I believe there had even been leaked internal presentations on that liability reduction.
> Insights about the egregious behavior of Elon Musk, & about the chaotic craziness at Tesla, Inc., all with a legal slant informed by my career as a commercial trial lawyer.
This is a nakedly partisan substack account. Does this really meet HN's quality standards?
Yeah, a "commercial trial lawyer" who vehemently supports court interference with companies and lawsuits to seize control from shareholders and founders. This parasitic class will be the end of the United States.
I can think of lots of things that could end the United States, and Elon Musk having a slightly smaller ownership stake of Tesla doesn't seem like one of them.
What Musk is trying to do seems borderline criminal. It seems to me that he is using his control of Tesla to extort the company for compensation.
It's one thing to say that he deserves to be compensated for the benefit he brings to the company. It's quite another to threaten to undermine the company if he doesn't get his way.
Two things are simultaneously true in Canada right now: 1) the government has become unwilling/unable to actually keep repeat violent offenders in jail (and has totally failed to prevent them from acquiring illegal firearms), and 2) the law essentially outlaws the use of any tools (firearms, pepper spray, knives) for the express purpose of self-defense.
It's functionally impossible to get a concealed carry permit in Canada. They just don't issue them, even if you have a restricted firearms license, even if you're a high-profile individual, and even if there's an immediate threat to your life. You have to rely on police and, if you can afford them, expensive private security who probably can't carry a firearm either. I should note that the kidnappers in this case (plural) were all armed.
The politicians, of course, are protected by the armed Parliamentary Protective Service. They just don't believe you deserve similar protection.