It’s so weird that people have framed his approach as “going after bad landlords”.
Yes, he is going after bad landlords because the city should go after bad landlords who aren’t following the laws or have their tenants living in mold infested hell holes.
But that’s not how he has said he will lower housing costs. His stated approach has always been twofold.
Pausing the rent increase on rent stabilized apartments for at least 1 year (something that was done multiple times in the 2010s and those apartments are rent stabilized because the builders got tax breaks in return for rent stabilization) as a temporary quick relief. But ultimately his goal is to build a lot more housing. And he wants to do that both by having the government build housing but also by making it easier for private builders to build housing through zoning changes, reducing regulations, and allowing for fast track approvals if certain conditions are met.
His stated approach is basically all of the above. Picking only 1 of those and saying it won’t fix the problem is true but silly because no one is saying any one action will fix the problem.
They don't have a mechanism for doing that. A military base near me has had continuous flight restrictions for decades. Each notice lasts a few months (e.g. https://tfr.faa.gov/tfr3/?page=detail_5_8746) and before it expires they issue a new one.
Visa/MC have built walled gardens which provide many services.
Some of the services include:
- Consumer Credit
- Fraud protection
- Payment network
- Discount service (rewards, etc)
- Concierge services
- Rental/Ticketing services
- etc
No one is denying the utility of what they have created. The problem is they’ve built monopolistic walled gardens where these are all bundled together which raises overall costs while also prevents competition.
These services can easily be unbundled (for example in India the payment network is open and cost free, so anyone can provide those other services on top of the payment network).
What has made this far more urgent, however, is that these companies are located in the U.S. which has recently leveraged the power these networks have to attack EU citizens for frivolous reasons.
So even if the MC/Visa business model was perfect, it would be foolish for even American allies to rely on them given the actions of the current administration.
An easier solution would be to simply require companies to pay a bond for the cost of closing down operations before they’re allowed to start extracting resources.
This is likely the closest thing to viable, some sort of mineral extraction permanent life insurance policy to protect the surrounding area and workers would go a long way toward safeguarding the wealth created from being swallowed in shareholder greed.
It was a key primary source for many forms of data.
There are very few other sources, barring Wikipedia which isn’t a primary source, that maintain a regularly updated “fact sheet” about various countries.
It was also an authoritative source for many discussions especially if you were having the conversation within the U.S. or a friendly allied country.
It was well maintained and I never came across any errors despite having used it heavily.
Finally it is about as consistent as possible. So, for example, if I go to Wikipedia for a certain piece of information, such as population, etc. how Wikipedia defines the population or even the boundaries of certain nations (and therefore the population) wouldn’t necessarily be consistent across countries.
With this it would usually be consistent. You may disagree with the definitions but it would largely be consistent or at the very least it would be useful because this is how the CIA largely defined it, so you still have a consistent authority if not methodology.
Umm, it’s incredibly easy to blame the shooter because in those 999,999 cases the shooter was not effectively kidnapping the person they were supposedly afraid of.
This guy didn’t just shoot the delivery person whom they were afraid of.
He didn’t let her drive away even after she was clearly scared, explained she was simply an Uber driver, showed no evidence of weaponry and just wanted to drive away.
There’s a reason he wasn’t just convicted of killing the Uber driver but also of kidnapping.
Outside of the obvious, the tragedy of the young woman losing her life, the fact that the scammers likely will not be impacted at all, etc. a couple of other thoughts.
- It’s strange that we still haven’t setup any sort of authenticated form of communication with official parties. Email/phone call scams have been around for a long time. They’re very easy to fall prey to. There’s no reason our phones shouldn’t be able to inform us that a certain number is officially from the IRS, Cops, Verizon, etc.
- This is a form of Swatting. Delivery companies, and also the police, etc need to do better in ensuring the people demanding services are where they’re demanding the service and/or the person who lives there is aware and genuinely needs to be visited.
- We need a bit of a broken windows policing for online/digital scams. The reason they are blowing up is there is hardly a risk of being caught. And the cost/benefit analysis probably suggests that th police really shouldn’t be involved in most of the individual cases or expend too many resources. However, this blows up the number of cases so the aggregate cost does indeed grow too high. So there needs to be an effort to prosecute and expend resources even on low level cases so the criminals get the message that they’re not gonna get away with it.
Phone scams shouldn’t even be a thing. Every phone number has to be registered to a company. Simply hold those companies to account for all crimes committed using them.
If you sell numbers to Indian scammers, then you take the hit for all the scams, because why are you selling phone numbers to scammers?
> It’s strange that we still haven’t setup any sort of authenticated form of communication with official parties.
My alarm company had me come up with challenge and response words. Yet when they call they want me to say my word first. Like how do I know they are who they say they are? Caller ID can easily be spoofed.
The security model here is different than usual. The goal of the challenge is to authenticate you to them - in case they are calling a landline, or a left-at-home mobile phone that the burglar is now answering. So this actually makes sense.
If they call, you say you word, then they can't authenticate themselves to you, it seems like you must then change your word.
For active man-in-the-middle, I don't think this protocol is designed to protect against that.
A high trust society reduces the incidence of scams/becoming victims to scams by reducing the number of scammers and increasing the number of honest people and honest behavior. That's what a high trust society is and does by definition.
If you want "mechanics", that would be an increased focus on community, with positive community best-behavior incentives (reputation, pride in work, solidarity, rewarding good behavior) and negative ones (shame, ostracism, punishing bad actors), social cohesion, and an emphasis on duty and morality, while reducing cynicism, and selfish individualism. This includes the appropriate role models and media/entertainment landscape.
> A high trust society reduces the incidence of scams/becoming victims to scams by reducing the number of scammers and increasing the number of honest people and honest behavior.
Considering that the scammers in this instance haven't been identified, there's a good possibility that the phone scammers belong to an out-group (e.g. infamous Indian/Nigerian scammers) of the victim's society. In fact, it seems to me that trusting more (because the in-group are honest) without appropriate safeguards preventing out-group members from impersonating in-group members exacerbates the problem. So I do not really see the connection between your solution and the problem.
Agreed. We (meaning the United States) used to have this for the most part. It doesn't scale to mediate all human interactions with authentication/authorization.
In re your first point, it's tricky because the advice is to call them back on the publicly available number. Problem is, I know somebody who fell for a SEO hijack and called a fake number. Not everybody knows how to spot a scam. The guy here did though, and he used my techniques (ask questions they'd know the answer to). He knew he was getting scammed. I think it was just an emotional override with weighing the risks. This one is very different than a call saying the IRS wants Google Play gift cards or whatever. Especially with the scammers having the woman actually show up. That's next level in all the wrong ways
You didn't say, and I wouldn't want to assume the situation, but calling the number on the back of a bank or credit card would work better here (in case it was a bank). This is also an argument in favour of paper bills, or logging in to a customer portal as a best-of-the-worst option
Correct. We all told the person after that they should've called the number from previous communications. But there's so much diligence that's needed in these stressful times and it only takes one mistake to get fooled. Wasn't nearly as bad as this though...
> It’s strange that we still haven’t setup any sort of authenticated form of communication with official parties
Because this would add compliance and regulatory overhead which the Telco industry has lobbied against, and activist organizations like the EFF will screetch muh liberties while taking donations from those very companies, and HNers will dutifully complain about the descent into authoritarianism.
Additionally, a large portion of smaller essentially fly-by-night VoIP vendors and MSPs have an incentive to not ask questions about who is purchasing their services despite attempts at regulation by the FCC [0].
Yes, he is going after bad landlords because the city should go after bad landlords who aren’t following the laws or have their tenants living in mold infested hell holes.
But that’s not how he has said he will lower housing costs. His stated approach has always been twofold.
Pausing the rent increase on rent stabilized apartments for at least 1 year (something that was done multiple times in the 2010s and those apartments are rent stabilized because the builders got tax breaks in return for rent stabilization) as a temporary quick relief. But ultimately his goal is to build a lot more housing. And he wants to do that both by having the government build housing but also by making it easier for private builders to build housing through zoning changes, reducing regulations, and allowing for fast track approvals if certain conditions are met.
His stated approach is basically all of the above. Picking only 1 of those and saying it won’t fix the problem is true but silly because no one is saying any one action will fix the problem.
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