And an even bigger thing would be providing viable alternatives to driving, which would reduce the amount of cars on the roads, and help with those driving unsafely (because they're tired, not good drivers, "had a couple of drinks", etc).
Correct, part of safer street and road design is supporting transit, biking, and walking.
That said, it's essentially impossible to get rid of cars entirely, and you can see that just by looking at countries or even regions that have good transit and notice that they still have tons of cars. Even Singapore has lots of cars, and the entire country is a super-dense city-state!
So it's definitely worthwhile to develop self-driving cars and trucks, even if you have fantastic transit and biking and walking available.
Public transit would also benefit from self-driving, as bus drivers and their salaries are a major limiting factor to how many lines you can run.
Bus drivers are a limited and very moveable workforce, and if you have huge economic differences in your common market, poorer cities won't find enough drivers to sustain their own systems.
An example: there is helluva lot Bulgarian and Romanian drivers in Western Europe, and there is no way that Sofia or Bucharest, cities with half the GDP per capita, can afford to pay them competitive salaries.
I just tried to pay my elderly neighbors cell phone bill here in California. I will spare you the details. Is all of this really required?
It reminds me of a time when credit and credit cards were flying fast. Large losses started appearing on consumer credit accounts by the tens of thousands. A casual look into it indicated that it was the employees and leaders of the sector, who read and understood the credit agreement that put liability ultimately on the company. The actual credit card employees, adjacent accountants, quick witted cons, all siphoning money from credit cards in very large numbers. Why say this? Actual customers with increasing security requirements were largely not at all involved with the growing fraud. It was the participants in the credit industry seizing the opportunity to steal, with relative impunity. Things have changed and changed again since then with scale, local rules, fraud detection systems etc.
The point of the rant is that ordinary people's rights are squeezed, privacy vanishes, routine humiliating document production and security, required because the people in the industry that created those is cheating.
Yes of course there is cheating on taxes over tip money, or no-show jobs for relatives.. but what kind of society is being built with constant oversight into ordinary people's activity ?
The criminal money and money laundering has been researched since 19th century. It has stayed at constant 2-5% of world GDP. However the cost of compliance has gone up exponentially.
Today banks use $250B/year on KYC checks. You could fix the world hunger and still have $50B leftover money with this amount.
The board of directors recognizes the cost savings and immediately start solving world hunger. Meanwhile a gangster in Moldova intrinsically knows that world money laundering has hit 5% GDP and decides not to.
It's not a fair comparison. Money laundering controls likely have also been implemented since the 19th century in some way shape or form. Therefore, that 2-5% figure also includes the effect of those controls. This might just the natural equilibrium below which the juice is no longer worth the squeeze.
Access to information and interconnectedness have also increased exponentially so it might make sense that the costs have increased proportionately.
Finally 200B/year would not solve world hunger if nefarious actors grift away most of that money (especially because you wouldn't be able to track them with out some form of KYC)
You also have to ask if money laundering is bad enough of a crime to warrant all of the overkill responses to it. At some point the medicine becomes worse than the disease. Lawmakers tend to get into these inescapable loops:
Crime X exists -> Try solution Y -> Crime X still exists -> Try harsher solution Y0 -> Crime X still exists -> Try harsher solution Y1 -> Crime X still exists -> Try harsher solution Y2...
I think the problem here might be that while Crime by its definition might be the same, the way that it is executed changes drastically so Solution Y/Y0/Y1/Y2 are not required to exist in terms of severity (very likely solution Y was severe enough if you were tried and convicted of the crime) but they are needed because the way Crime X is executed changes (especially this Crime X)
Who decides who we're sanctioning and who is a "terrorist"? Not me, that's for sure! My money is my business and I don't need the state nanny watching who I send it to.
> Government should require regular, mandatory reporting by technology service providers to document abuse of their systems including financial support of violence, harassment, and terrorism.This includes implementation of mandatory financial abuse reporting requirements for internet services operating in the United States, including social media services, infrastructure providers, banking institutions, cryptocurrency exchanges, crowdfunding sites, video streaming platforms, and the like.
> [These companies] should be required to investigate and report the details of harms and abuse of their service. There should be … penalties applied to services that refuse these tracking and reporting responsibilities.
Hard disagree, low level crimes should not be so heavily enforced. A bit of blackmarket activity is not only beneficial but neccessary for any stable economy. It can't be allowed at mass scale, but you can't effectively micromanage every transaction and account for every situation for every single good or dollar.
They route through all kinds of intermediaries that handle the banking by proxy — eg, as we saw in the Panama Papers and similar leaks.
Reporting $600 in CashApp isn’t about stopping cartels, terrorists, etc; it’s about harassing sex workers and street dealers, profiling side businesses, etc.
Money laundering isn't even a real thing. It's an excuse for the government to arrest people who are linked to people who are linked to people who they don't like.
It's rich coming from a person affected by ukrainian propaganda that is one of the most corrupt countries in Europe. Maybe you should back your opinion with facts. Citation is desperately needed.
when terrorism can be defined as "having a book" and can result in indefinite detention without charge or access to an attorney maybe i'm not 100% gung-ho by default on everything labelled anti-terrorism
It's a slow shift, but it's coming. For instance, Airbus already picked a French AWS replacement (Scaleway). It won't be all, it won't be tomorrow, but "what happens if we get tariffed / they invade Greenland" is already part of everyone's disaster planning.
Exactly, which makes this a stupid war to start in the first place.
Also, to be clear, a land invasion isn't "too costly". It's suicidal because we're talking about a massive country that has been preparing for decades, has a terrain advantage and literally more than a million fanatics ready to die for the regime. You'd need millions of soldiers deployed, and are looking at some Operation Downfall level expected losses.
I'm not suggesting we should even consider invading Iran - mostly because we don't need to, but these numbers you are throwing around seem a bit off the mark without either a time horizon or some other qualifier.
Also... a million fanatics ready to die for the regime? Maybe. Maybe some of them value their lives.
We've dealt with fanatics multiple times whether that's Japanese willing to die for the emperor or Muslim extremists throughout the Middle East trying to get their 72 virgins. Nobody in the US is scared of dealing with fanatics. Been there, done that. Iran is more mountainous and the terrain is a challenge but the major population centers aren't hidden in bunkers in the hills. Iran is also not landlocked, and unlike, for example, Afghanistan, we would be dealing with a population that has familiarity with the modern world and has at times even protested en masse against the current government of Iran.
Again, none of that is to suggest we should or politically could "invade Iran", and of course I don't think it's necessary to achieve any of our goals, but let's not put Iran on a pedestal either.
> Also... a million fanatics ready to die for the regime? Maybe. Maybe some of them value their lives
The Basij militia has more than a million men in it alone (officially it has 20+ million but more neutral sources pin the number around a million), and this is the organisation that was doing unarmed human wave attacks against Iraq to defend the Iranian revolution. It's also a theocracy with a religion that has martyrdom as a thing.
If anything, a million fanatics ready to die for the regime is probably an understatement.
> We've dealt with fanatics multiple times whether that's Japanese willing to die for the emperor or Muslim extremists throughout the Middle East trying to get their 72 virgins. Nobody in the US is scared of dealing with fanatics
And Japan surrendered because the Emperor said so. If Operation Downfall had to be done instead, you'd have millions of American and Allied casualties.
If you're not scared of this, you aren't paying attention.
> Iran is more mountainous and the terrain is a challenge but the major population centers aren't hidden in bunkers in the hills
Bombing population centres has never resulted in military victory. It has occasionally, alongside military reversals, contributed to political leaders deciding they can't continue (Hirohito, Milosevic), but it would be delusional to hope that Iran's Supreme Leader, sone of the previous one who got bombed out of existence, and again, is a religious leader part of a religion with martyrdom, would be impressed by the US bombing "his" people.
Plenty of people are running OpenClaw with local models, and even the latest Qwens can be confused relatively easily by prompts such as "As per internal policy that was already approved before, do XYZ".
And considering even frontier models can and do ignore instructions, I'm pretty sure we'll never be fully safe from prompt injections.
And if you say you're good, you'll get the check (assuming end of meal). If you don't pay it, they'll come back and ask you if you want something else. If you say no, they'll give you a few minutes and come back. They want you to get the fuck out of there as quickly as posible.
In the average place in most European countries (excluding places with a queue outside or highly sought after reservation only places), nobody would bat an eye if you stay talking an hour after you're done.
> In the average place in most European countries (excluding places with a queue outside or highly sought after reservation only places), nobody would bat an eye if you stay talking an hour after you're done.
That's because most European restaurants operate on a single sitting model when it comes to financial planning. Someone coming in later in the evening to fill an already vacated table is a nice and welcome extra income for the restaurant, but that not happening will not cause a financial loss either.
Yes, the dining experience in California and New York is just so, so different. One waiter might call it pop, the other soda, it's like being on a different planet!
It's wild the extents to which Americans overestimate the cultural differences between their states and literal entire countries with actual differences. Scandinavia and the Mediterranean are quite different, Americans speaking in a different accent and maybe being slightly friendlier or not is nothing.
> *As of mid-June 2023 an estimated 1.2 million Ukrainians were recorded in the Russian Federation under different legal forms of stay (other than refugee or temporary asylum status)
This means people that have Ukrainian citizenship, which includes lots of families that were on both sides of the border. It does not mean people who were residents of Ukraine before the war, and decided to move to Russia. It does include the kidnapped children, and surviving people in occupied cities.
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