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I also like clean safe unobstructed sidewalks and parks but along with benches, we've made a decision. We've decided that putting the mentally ill in a facility and arresting people for public drug use is not something we're comfortable with at the expense of those other things. I don't personally ageee with this decision but it is apparently the consensus.

> it is apparently the consensus

And what a strange consensus it is. The prevailing belief seems to be that preventing people from slowly/quickly killing themselves on the street (or, more accurately, dying from addiction) is somehow not "progressive" and the moral thing to do is to pretend like these people have made the choice of their own volition and that we cannot judge them for this choice.

In reality, the people who are just rotting away on our streets would be better served if they were brought somewhere against their will and kept there until they were better. Society would also be better served if we did this. The government choosing to involuntarily constrain people isn't something that should be done lightly, but sometimes it is the lesser evil. We've completely abandoned these people and somehow done so in the name of compassion. It's really depressing.


What a strange false dichotomy. Either we do absolutely nothing to help people, or we involuntarily incarcerate them?

The actually progressive option is to provide meaningful public support programs, and also make housing affordable (by building enough housing). The US mostly doesn't do either of those, but it should.


These programs exist, but they are underutilized to a significant degree.

From a partner who used to work in one, people:

- didn't trust the program and wouldn't sign up

- didn't actually want to quit using so they avoided it

- wanted to get the benefits from the program without changing anything (i.e. showed up to get free food etc)

- tried but didn't like it and went back to using

Very few people actually went all the way through compared to the population in the city that could have used it.

The real question is: how do you help people who do not want your help. Do you let them waste away and die on the sidewalk, or do you institutionalize them?


The answer to that question in a society that allows (mostly) autonomy of choice is that we let them die on the street.

I'm not convinced that involuntary incarceration will actually fix the problem. I believe it will just take it off of the streets and out of the public consciousness.


>I believe it will just take it off of the streets and out of the public consciousness.

If antisocial people do not exist in the public consciousness, then that means the problem is fixed. Even you never have to worry about locking your front door, then the problem of burglars has been fixed even if technically would be burglars may exist in prison.


Not a great solution, honestly. Long term drug abuse is almost never a victimless habit. I'm tempted to say never.

Yes, exactly, there's a reason the term is "continuum of care." There is no one-size-fits-all approach to solving addiction because, to quote Ted Lasso, all people are different people. Maybe some people do need to be involuntarily incarcerated, but many, many others would be able to recover with far less intrusive interventions.

Also we are chasing a lagging indicator by focusing exclusively on the homeless population. The vast majority of people who end up homeless because of addiction would have benefited from some far earlier, far milder form of intervention, or from the absence of something that actively drove them into addiction, e.g. some quack pushing oxycontin on them because Purdue Pharma promoted it as non-addictive. Or job loss because of offshoring pushing them into economic despair that then drives addiction, which they are unable to recover from because of the lack of affordable or accessible retraining or educational opportunities.

In many cases over the last 20-30 years, it was the combination of both job loss and careless opioid prescription that pushed people into an unrecoverable spiral, especially in the rust belt, where the opioid crisis hit the hardest. We may not have fixed the job loss side of the problem, but at least doctors aren't pushing pills the same way they were 10-20 years ago after Purdue's corporate downfall, so the number of people driven into addiction-mediated homelessness by that disaster should at least start tapering off soon. But if we don't help people before their lives fall apart with a continuum of support options that are accessible before they are in deep crisis, and are accessible to people who are beginning to spiral but don't yet appear to be in deep crisis, it will cost far more and be far more challenging to help them recover once they are on the street.


I'm not sure if you've had a drug addict in your life at any point, and if not that is a blessing.

Drug addiction is a dark place and it's very common that the availability of free support programs is entirely rejected by the user, and the only hope at a normal life requires forceful intervention by family and friends.

The only way to solve drugs on the street is to look at the cities that have solved them and copy what works. And, at least with what I'm familiar with, arresting people tends to work and alternatives tend to not.


You seem to be equating "homeless" with "drug addict". The article talks about taking away public benches because of homelessness.

There are different programs needed for drug addiction than for homelessness. Not everyone who's homeless has a drug problem, and not everyone with a drug problem is homeless.


That Venn diagram is pretty close to a circle, at least when talking about homeless people that don’t have a friend/relative they can stay with.

> That Venn diagram is pretty close to a circle

False, and harmful. US HUD says it's ~16% of homeless people, other sources give different numbers, but it's certainly not a majority, let alone anywhere near 100%.

The biggest problem, unsurprisingly, is housing cost. The US GAO states that a $100 increase in median rent correlates to a 9% rise in homelessness. Rents have gone up a lot more than that.


> US HUD says it's ~16% of homeless people, other sources give different numbers, but it's certainly not a majority

"Homeless people" is a broad category that includes people temporarily living in vehicles, bouncing between family members, or sleeping on a friend's couch. It also includes people who are about to lose their home, young people living alone.

But when everyday people use the term, they usually mean, specifically, visible homeless people - i.e. people who are homeless long-term, sleeping rough on the streets or in parks, etc.

The two groups are pretty different to each other. I would be very surprised if the rate of drug addiction in the second group was the same as the rate of drug addiction in the first group


> I would be very surprised if the rate of drug addiction in the second group was the same as the rate of drug addiction in the first group

But that's a far far weaker claim than the one above.

If the rate is 90% or higher in the second group, then we get close to the claim being true. (Though still a subset rather than the circles being the same; lots of people with drug problems have homes.)


The people you think are "temporarily" living in vehicles are not doing so temporarily.

> False, and harmful.

Sorry. But you're either misinformed or actively malicious here.

> US HUD says it's ~16% of homeless people

It absolutely is close to 100% of _unsheltered_ people. Some social workers helping the unsheltered homeless are now saying that they have not seen anybody who's _not_ on drugs or who is not mentally ill.

If you want authoritative source, here's UCLA study from the blessed pre-COVID era: https://capolicylab.org/wp-content/uploads/2025/11/Health-Co...

> The biggest problem, unsurprisingly, is housing cost.

No, it's really really not.

> The US GAO states that a $100 increase in median rent correlates to a 9% rise in homelessness.

And the correlation disappears when you look at the states with cold climate.


> If you want authoritative source, here's UCLA study from the blessed pre-COVID era: https://capolicylab.org/wp-content/uploads/2025/11/Health-Co...

Which specifically leads with a page saying:

> Hundreds of studies - including our own - show economic pressures are the primary drivers of homelessness, that housing people ends homelessness, and that targeted financial assistance helps people at risk of homelessness stay stably housed

Also, the cited study blatantly does not show the numbers ("close to 100%") you claim it has, even leaving that aside. You're also now equivocating between drugs and mental illness, as well as between drugs and alcohol. And you're not taking into account the direction of cause and effect (e.g. which came first, the homelessness or the addiction).

I understand that you're also referencing anecdata from social workers. In those cases, there's an inherent bias: people with a drug problem are going to be harder and more memorable cases, which makes them feel like a larger proportion than they are. People homeless for economic reasons are likely to loom less large in people's minds than the times they dealt with someone who had a drug problem.


> Which specifically leads with a page saying

It's a study by a progressive think tank. Of fucking course it's going to say that.

> Also, the cited study blatantly does not show the numbers ("close to 100%")

Care to read it past the preface? Page 5, Figure 4.

Feel free to read the full study report, if you want. I did.

> In those cases, there's an inherent bias

I can send you a nice mirror.

You failed to do a basic search to verify your claims. Instead, you clutched at the first number that popped out in Google Search.

The problem is that you're conflating sheltered and unsheltered homeless. The HUD studies also rely on self-reporting surveys, which have obvious problems with people lying.

And UCLA study is far from the only study with similar results: https://homelessness.ucsf.edu/sites/default/files/2023-06/CA... - it relied on self-reporting, so the numbers are lower.

> More than one quarter (27%) had been hospitalized for a mental health condition; 56% of these hospitalizations occurred prior to the first instance of homelessness. Nearly two thirds (65%) reported having had a period in their life in which they regularly used illicit drugs. Almost two thirds (62%) reported having had a period in their life with heavy drinking (defined as drinking at least three times a week to get drunk, or heavy intermittent drinking).

In short, unsheltered homelessness is NOT an affordability or income issue. It's a drug abuse problem. "Building more housing" in SF or LA will NOT help with it.

And moreover, providing free housing without mandatory treatment turns into horror stories every time.


> Care to read it past the preface?

I already read the entire thing. You may stop accusing me of bad faith or insufficient research at any time.

> Page 5, Figure 4.

Thank you for confirming that you cited a chart listing 75% of unsheltered people and called it "close to 100%". I gave exact numbers from the studies I referenced; you exaggerated yours.

A more relevant figure from the study is figure 2: 51% of unsheltered people (and 6% of sheltered) say that substance abuse is a cause of their homelessness. Also see figure 3 for other relevant causes.

That's leaving aside, again, that you are still equivocating between drugs and alcohol. I would suggest looking at statistics for how many people in the general population drink to excess, if you're going to cite statistics on how many homeless people do. But, of course, "drug addict" is the more evocative and stigmatizing phrase, which makes it harder to get people help.

And in any case: yes, of course there's a difference between sheltered and unsheltered, not least of which because we do a poor job of helping people who simultaneously experience drug addiction and homelessness. There's an obvious correlation there, but a major part of it is "drug addiction prevents getting help from shelters". (And I would venture a guess that homelessness makes it harder to get help with drug addiction, though I haven't specifically looked up numbers on that one.)

There are many attempted claims in this thread that people "don't want help", and none of that is supported. How many people refuse help, versus how many people can't get the help they need based on the structure of what we provide?

On top of that, see https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=48057738 for a more nuanced point about lagging indicators: the right interventions happen much earlier in that downward spiral.

That is nowhere near the same as a claim that homelessness, in general, is a problem of drug addiction, or that the Venn diagram is a circle. That claim is actively harmful towards efforts to build systems that actually help people.

> You failed to do a basic search to verify your claims. Instead, you clutched at the first number that popped out in Google Search.

False. Stop assuming that people who come to different conclusions than you have have not done thorough research.


> Thank you for confirming that you cited a chart listing 75% of unsheltered people and called it "close to 100%".

I already said that the study is from pre-COVID time, and puts the lower bound due to its conservative methodology.

And yes, I consider it proving my point, even that conservative estimate shows that for the vast majority of unsheltered homeless the problem is not in housing availability. It's mental health and/or drug abuse.

> A more relevant figure from the study is figure 2: 51% of unsheltered people (and 6% of sheltered) say that substance abuse is a cause of their homelessness. Also see figure 3 for other relevant causes.

Self-reporting, again. It's also kinda beside the point. Right _now_ the unsheltered homelessness is a drug problem however it began earlier.

Unless you just want to wait until all the addicts just die of overdoses?

> There are many attempted claims in this thread that people "don't want help", and none of that is supported.

I cited another study. There is also the experience in Seattle or SF. I guess you live somewhere in a town where the worst substance abuse is someone getting a bit too much booze?

Portland tried to decriminalize drugs and add voluntary treatment options. Their drug treatment hotline apparently helped 17 to enter treatment. Not percent, people.

> On top of that, see https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=48057738 for a more nuanced point about lagging indicators: the right interventions happen much earlier in that downward spiral.

Yes. We need absolutely relentless pressure. If you're caught doing drugs, you need to have only two choices: treatment or jail. You can then get into housing, but with random mandatory drug screening. Constant, unyielding pressure with 100% certainty of consequences.

For people who are NOT on drugs, I fully support emergency housing assistance, job training, and/or help with getting disability status.

> That is nowhere near the same as a claim that homelessness, in general, is a problem of drug addiction, or that the Venn diagram is a circle. That claim is actively harmful towards efforts to build systems that actually help people.

No. They are people who are actually not blinded by the ideology and CAN SEE THE FUCKING PROBLEM in the first place.

> False. Stop assuming that people who come to different conclusions than you have have not done thorough research.

Sorry. But not buying it.


Utterly and completely untrue and you should be embarrassed for saying so

We didn't eliminate benches in public spaces because we wanted to reduce the presence of the nice, respectful, and polite homeless. We eliminated benches to reduce the presence of the problematic homeless, which has a much higher rate of drug abuse and mental illness.

> arresting people tends to work and alternatives tend to not

What I've read many times is that (essentially) the oppposite is widely accepted consensus: Arresting never works. The US tried the 'drug war' for decades and it was ineffective. Do you have evidence otherwise? It's also unjust to criminalize illness and medical problems for poor people (rich people get sympathy, rehab, and lots of second chances).

What does work is overdose prevention, including needle exhanges and safe injection sites, treating addition as the disease it is (which is how it's treated for rich people), and housing (people experiencing the great instability and stress of homelessness are much less likely to make other changes). Maybe some others I'm not thinking of, too.


Oh yeah, 60 years of arresting people in the US for drug crimes has gone so well. Couldn't be better! Cities that decriminalized have better outcomes.

I hope people like you lose every election for the rest of time.


I didn't create this "false dichotomy", nor did I say that those were the only two options. I'm just observing the fact that the current system that the major cities in the US seem to be employing is to treat homeless as a valid choice, even if much/most of it is a result of addiction and mental illness. The end result of that treating it that way is the death and suffering of people who actually need lots of help and who would be better served by more aggressive tactics.

I don't believe it's a deliberate decision by (most) policymakers. I think it's a structural failure across several axes, including failure to make enough housing for it to be affordable, and attacks on every front by people who treat all social programs and public assistance as evil. Most places have one or the other problem, if not both.

Nothing?? What are you talking about? Go look up how much tax money the SF government spends trying to help the unhoused in their current budget. But no amount will fix the problem because if you ask a drug addict if they want help (and it’s not help getting drugs) they usually say “no thanks.” Many addicts are never ready to accept that kind of help. Sadly.

No amount of help will solve a housing problem in a city where people can't afford to live. Build more housing.

Super strongly agree with you on that. But unfortunately building tons of housing is quite politically unpopular as well, unless it’s wildly stupid housing, like the “affordable housing” that costs more (paid by the city) to build than market rate costs for some reason.

What about just proving housing to people?

The main reasons those places lost support is they became convenient prisons without due process. Why do you think there are so many horror movies based on the setting of a sane person involuntarily put there?

While not ideal you gotta admit now that those people that need help are in your face rather than conveniently disappeared you are thinking about their plight some.

Maybe try to think of something better than forever prisons and stop becoming a ghoul.


'I think you would be better served by not posting to social media and studying personal liberty and ethics.' Should I be able to enforce it? I think people who make comments like those above are much more dangerous than people on the street - the people on the street can't really do harm.

Thankfully, we do have liberty, and they can do what they want - and I can do what I want - and it's none of your business whether it's healthy or not. People also smoke, are sedentary (lots of people here), eat very poorly, use psilocybin (relatively popular here), drink too much, etc.

The only way to begin to approach it is, rather than making judgments on overused stereotypes (another reason to be banned from online comments), talk to each person and ask what they are doing and what they need. I know, I know - it's outrageous to ask the opinions of people you deem substandard, even about their own lives.


They would be better if they were given support. Locking people away is not a solution to anything. You've been sold a lie about the mentally ill, and the homeless, which isn't true.

Yes, I don't think that arresting people for the crime of not having money is a good idea.

We also cannot seem to fund any actual drug programs, because US citizens hate the idea of anyone getting something for free.


SF spends ~$100k per homeless person.

Yes but critically none of this money is actually given to the homeless person. So we aren't giving them anything for free we are just dealing with the consequences of them not having a proper support system. Spending money to do that is okay, because it doesn't really directly benefit the homeless person.

Also the essence of ‘San Francisco has a lot of homeless’ isn’t really a logical argument against those policies since homeless will often migrate to where the functional support services are. San Francisco may well be doing amazing things with getting people back on their feet at a relatively lower cost than prison.

You need to go many levels deeper on statistics to understand if it’s working or not.


> arresting people for the crime of not having money

Such people are not arrested for not having money, but instead for being a pox upon the public by virtue of their behavior.


Aka "the behavior of having no money in public" i.e. laying on benches or sitting on trains etc

This is objectively false. There are many funded and underutilized programs that people actively choose to avoid, per a partner I had that worked in one. They'd literally get you off the street, free public transportation vouchers, job training and financial education (getting bank accounts, etc).

When you can panhandle and use drugs, or get clean and go to work, it turns out a significant portion choose to panhandle and use drugs.


Them staying in the sidewalk is free. Or the cost is so indirect that nobody is responsible for it.

Facilities like asylums and jails are super costly though. And extra expensive to operate if you don't want to treat the inmates as cattle.


I'll add that treating the inmates like cattle is actually the most expensive option of all in the long term. The USA has one of the highest incarceration rates in the world largely due to high recidivism due to the system not providing proper rehabilitation.

So it's costing the USA 65k/yr per inmate on average right now with the 5th highest incarceration rate in the world. The 4 countries above it are not nice places to live contrary to the thought that locking even more people up would make the USA just like the other western nations of the world.

No other country is as stupid as the USA when it comes to homeless. They don't spend a lifetime $65k/yr repeatedly locking up such people. Instead they spend a fraction (when amortised over a lifetime of jail costs) on rehabilitation and public health programs.


The cost is not measured in dollars, but rather in the pollution of the pubic space. People feel less safe and more bothered. Stores nearby get less business, and suffer more theft. Passerbys get accosted.

> Them staying in the sidewalk is free.

Disagree. When the tax-paying public doesn't feel safe around the people living on the sidewalk, they move and take their tax money with them. That means less money for services, roads, education... everything taxes pay for.

That's the cost.


but it is apparently the consensus.

Not everywhere, fortunately.


What's wrong with both? Why can't we have public benches, and also not arrest drug users if they are sitting on the benches and smoking?

Because sitting on benches quickly turns into living on benches. Then the drug dealers move in, because there's a ready customer base of drug users.

Then the productive members of society move out.


So basically the problem is that productive members of society and drug dealers are incapable of existing near to each other?

Why is that?

I pass by some drug dealers sometimes on the way to work. I don't see the problem. Occasionally I get asked if I want to buy some drugs. I don't want to buy drugs so nothing else happens.


Because of your personal politics?


Ok then short SpaceX stock when it IPOs.


“Markets can remain irrational longer than you can remain solvent.” - John Maynard Keynes


What does stock price have to do with anything?

That someone could put a data center in space for the price of 100 years of eliminating world hunger doesn’t mean shit.


People always make this claim about world hunger elimination with no sources. Keep in mind we make more than enough calories to feed everyone on the planet many times over, it's a problem of distribution, of getting the food to the right areas and continuing cultivation for self sufficiency.


That’s right, it’s an allocation of resources problem, and some people seem to control almost all the resources.


Even the most magnanimous allocators cannot defeat the realities of boots on the ground in terms of distribution. It is a very difficult problem that cannot be solved top down, the only solution we've seen is growth of economic activity via capitalistic means, lifting millions, billions out of poverty as Asia has done in the last century for example.


You can pay for a lot of people when you have a billion dollars. When you have a trillion, you can move countries.

When someone lives in opulence while the rest of the world burns, the rest of the world doesn’t sit idly.


When you have a billion dollars you can't even give each person in China a dollar.


I argue that if you have literal hundreds of billions of hard cash to burn for stupid things like AI datacenters, you could afford to make the lives of millions of starving people not suck instead, pretty easily so. But to do that, you'd have to try, and that would mean actually doing something good for humanity. Can't have that as a billionaire.


Ok but what if I shoot a car into space and buy my own social media company. Surely thats a better use of billions!


Who has hundreds of billions of hard cash for data centers? All of the AI spending has been in IOUs between Nvidia, OpenAI, Coreweave, etc. And even if you did have hard cash, how will you spend those billions? No one actually seems to have a sound plan, like I said. They just claim it can be done.


> SPIEGEL: Mr. Shikwati, the G8 summit at Gleneagles is about to beef up the development aid for Africa…

> [Kenyan Economist] Shikwati: … for God’s sake, please just stop.

> SPIEGEL: Stop? The industrialized nations of the West want to eliminate hunger and poverty.

> Shikwati: Such intentions have been damaging our continent for the past 40 years. If the industrial nations really want to help the Africans, they should finally terminate this awful aid. The countries that have collected the most development aid are also the ones that are in the worst shape. Despite the billions that have poured in to Africa, the continent remains poor.

https://www.aei.org/carpe-diem/kenyan-economics-expert-devel...


It’s somewhat ironic that the way it has been framed here is as lacking in nuanced understanding as the style of aid which Shikwati argued against in the full interview. Unsurprising we should get a snippet cropped by a right wing libertarian think-tank in such a way that it boils down to simply “hurr aid bad”.


As always with Marxism, you’re convinced that your flavour of Marxism is new, and will work despite all flavours of Marxism failing in the past.


Not sure what straw man you’re replying to but you seem to overlook that ensuring people are in a state by why they are able to conduct business reliably is a good thing. To do that providing some assistance is often required. Which if you read the full interview with him you’d realise was the point he was making, not that large swathes of people should be sustained to the bare minimum existence entirely on handouts in perpetuity.


If you're hellbent on arguing with a cult, it will be much cheaper to go down to your local Church of Scientology and try to convince them that their e-meter doesn't work.


As if company performance actually affected stock price when it comes to anything Elon Musk touches.

For fuck's sake, TSLA has a P/E of a whopping *392*. There is zero justification for how overvalued that stock is. In a sane world, I should be able to short it and 10x my money, but people are buying into Musk's hype on FSD, Robotaxi, and whatever the hell robot they're making. Even if you expected them to be successes, they'd need to 20x the company's entire revenue to justify the current market cap.


Why would you short the stock?


This ignores physical geographical reality.


Geographic proximity is mutual. If it came down to it, I doubt the US will ever be prepared for polite Canadian terror cells.


Isn't it somewhat laughable when something like 3/4 of Canadian exports are to the US?


I think that Canada has to de-leverage trade with the US is what the take away should be. Not that this trade deal itself is going to change all the balances -- its that there are other players who can start to trade - reducing dependence on the US. The compounding effects are damaging as are switching costs.


What it looks like to me is that Carney the businessman is trying to work for the best terms in an eventual annexation scenario.


Trolls be trolls.


Bookmark it.


He should negotiate directly with Putin then instead of Trump the middle-man


The laughing party is the person taking the tariffs and living large off them. The American consumer is suffering.

In reality, the vast majority of Canadian exports are energy and potash, neither of which have any kind of tariffs applied.

Because if they did, Trump's supporters would lose their shit completely. Gas prices would go through the roof and farmers would be in big big trouble.


If you type something into the computer you should assume everyone in the world will eventually be able to see it.

If you send your DNA to a company in the mail you should assume everyone in the world will eventually be able to see it.


So, what about healthcare? Back to paper records? Because it's not acceptable to me that everyone in the world will eventually see my private medical records.


It's probably too late for that to be honest.

You should also assume your MegaCorp, if you work for one, has also already seen them (in many cases they can buy them from various data brokers or even off the grey market).

I'm not saying this is the way things should be, just things as I know them to be.


What remedial steps would you support, out of interest?

For example, if someone could have their current life become, essentially "redacted", and receive an entirely new one with fairly low barrier of entry, would that be something you would support?

I do agree that once it's out, it's out and you can't really "go back" or have any expectation that what you put out there will somehow magically be "safe", but I think there ought to be a means to hard reset; a burn everything to the ground, and start from square one option.

To head off the inevitable questions of some variation of, "...but what about abuse?" from the croud, I would generally ask:

Abuse to whom? The person who's entire existence is irrevocably captured, documented, data mined, and optimized for malicous intent? Or the random mouth breath8ng schlub who abuses the opportunity to do something nefarious before getting caught and going to prison?


"Scaling" is going to eventually apply to the ability to run more and higher fidelity simulations such that AI can run experiments and gather data about the world as fast and as accurately as possible. Pre-training is mostly dead. The corresponding compute spend will be orders of magnitude higher.


That's true, I expect more inference time scaling and hybrid inference/training time scaling when there's continual learning rather than scaling model size or pretraining compute.


Simulation scaling will be the most insane though. Simulating "everything" at the quantum level is impossible and the vast majority of new learning won't require anything near that. But answers to the hardest questions will require as close to it as possible so it will be tried. Millions upon millions of times. It's hard to imagine.


>Pre-training is mostly dead.

I don't think so. Serious attempts for producing data specifically for training have not being achieved yet. High quality data I mean, produced by anarcho-capitalists, not corporations like Scale AI using workers, governed by laws of a nation etc etc.

Don't underestimate the determination of 1 million young people to produce within 24 hours perfect data, to train a model to vacuum clean their house, if they don't have to do it themselves ever again, and maybe earn some little money on the side by creating the data.

The other part of the comment I agree.


Planetary scientist academics are angry because he's getting all of the attention and it isn't even in the field he's most known for previously. Even smart humans are still humans.


Try reading the article. You might enjoy it and it will answer your question.


Beyond the date of the first artificial satellite, there is nothing in the article that mentions space debris.


There's an argument the prosecution was political. See: https://x.com/balajis/status/1981423831572238856


Sorry, is this person comparing the rights and immunities of a head of a sovereign nation to those of a CEO of a company? I don't think France, as a sovereign country, is completely bound by US law whereas binance, when it is operating in US jurisdiction is. I'm not totally familiar with US finance law but I'm pretty sure a more fair comparison would be to other banks where KYC requirements and anti money laundering rules can be strict. From what I read about the prosecution, Binance ignored many warning signs from their own executives about the possibility and the lack of controls within their platform to comply with the law.


It's not much of an argument... he wasn't being held responsible for the actions of a few binance users, we was being held responsible for his own failure to implement compliance processes required by law.

The laws exist to restrict funding for countries under sanction, drug operations, terrorist organizations, etc.

We can argue about whether these laws are a good idea (either in general or in specific details), but you need to change the law, not just now follow it.

This is a terrible precedent... unless you're a con man, that is. (Balaji Srinivasan isn't stupid. I would guess he understands how real what he's arguing here is.)


balajis is personally invested in propping up the ecosystem.


How does pardoning CZ "prop up the ecosystem"?


It sends a clear message: Pay off Trump and you can ignore financial rules with impunity.


He had already served his sentance.


That message is still crystal clear, is it not?


The prosecution was not political lol, he went out of his way to support money laundering on the Binance platform. The reason he complied with the prosecution and pled guilty rather than try to fight it out in court was that they were able to produce a ton of evidence that he deliberately ignored regulators and regulations designed to prevent money laundering in order to make money off sanctioned groups and criminal organizations using the exchange as a way to circumvent KYC/AML laws. Please don't take what Balaji says about companies he invested in at face value.


It must really suck and be incredibly disheartening to be one of the folks who pursued this to a conviction.


The justifications for why the pardon is okay are ridiculously flimsy and I assumed that it was because they weren't really trying, but bewilderingly it does actually appear to have convinced some credulous people on Hacker News, so I suppose enough consent was manufactured that people think going out of your way to let money launderers use your platform is not a big deal? Maybe it's because people don't understand that typically the reason people launder money is because they committed major crimes to get that money and have no way to actually use it without getting caught.

For example if your crypto is the proceeds of ransomware, you're going to have a hard time cashing out without using something like Monero (which effectively has no offramps) without going through an exchange that knows perfectly well that you're trying to touch tainted goods. Exchanges like Binance that just don't bother to check who their customers are when they withdraw cash for such assets are just as critical to the ransomware plague as any security bug or social engineering issue. It's one of the reasons that pre-crypto, even though ransomware was technically feasible, it was never able to grow into a large-scale operation--no offramps. But hey maybe the official stance of CZ supporters is now that ransomware is good, actually, and if you don't like it it's because you have partisan bias (???)


Those prosecutors were deeply embarrassed by missing FTX at the time, so they then had the SEC and IRS harass and threaten innocent US citizens in Japan and the US as they fished for charges merely because they happened to once work for or hung out with CZ or employees at Binance.

CZ is the first and only known first-time offender in U.S. history to receive a prison sentence for this single, non-fraud-related charge of improper platform AML KYC implementation. Big banks routinely pay a fine for this, and never face imprisonment. The judge found no evidence that he knew of any illicit transactions and that it was reasonable for him to believe there were no illicit funds on the platform. Credit where it's due, they somehow pulled off a 4 month sentence for this unprecedented charge. And now it's all for naught.


Having a bad compliance system is very very different from actively resisting having a compliance system.

Historically bank CEOs have been smart enough to note this difference.


CZ already served the time in prison. It's not clear to me whether he and Binance have paid the fines yet.


Balaji was the former CTO of a rival company. Wouldn't he be incentivized to not support CZ?


No. He had the same financial incentives to not want to have to worry about the BSA and dealing with AML etc. as CZ.

This is not a company vs. company sort of issue, this is a "I want to avoid regulations that would cost me money as a fundamental aspect of my industry " issue.

If Coinbase thought they could legally not worry about all of this, do you think they would want to deal with it?

The sheer quantity of money used in cryptocurrency for money laundering and activity where traditional payment processors will not accept payments (largely illegal, e.g. drugs, counterfeit goods) also means that the keeping the ecosystem healthy involves having ways for this money to flow.


No. The entire crypto ecosystem requires a steady infusion of capital and an absence of regulations to prosper, since their primary use case outside of speculation is for handling money by people who can't get past normal KYC/AML checks. If those people no longer have anywhere to on/off ramp into the crypto ecosystem, most of its "legitimate" (in the sense of actually getting real value out of it rather than just speculating) use goes away.


I don't think you know what you're talking about. Surely everyone on the Coinbase platform is vetted seeing as they're a publicly traded company. Presumably the vast majority of Binance users are not in fact money launderers.


"People who don't want KYC/AML checks" are not necessarily money launderers, and there are still plenty of people who just want to speculate. But money launderers are the people who need to send vast amounts of money through the crypto ecosystem and represented a very significant fraction of the assets managed by Binance (not that this actually affects whether what they were doing was illegal or not, BTW). Maybe you should read the indictment to find out what was actually going on, instead of making claims based on what seems reasonable to you!

(Frankly, the idea that being convicted for making the conscious decision to go out of your way to circumvent KYC/AML laws is somehow the result of partisan bias is ridiculous in itself, so none of this [or how Balaji claims to feel about the matter] is even really relevant).


Because Trump couldn’t have that!


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