> Cathie Wood’s Ark ETF seems to find the payments margin opportunity, and the gang to get it there. In its Big Ideas 2023 paper, Ark points out that there are 9 steps between Buyer and Seller in a consumer payment transaction, sucking intermediary fees of roughly 2.8% of the value of the purchase. Ark believes enormous money is to be made if the steps between Buyer and Seller would be reduced from 9 to 3 (removing card networks, issuers, and acquirers, for the most part), thereby reducing the expense from 1.64% to 0.21% of the value of the transaction (leaving a massive 2.60% ‘take rate’ for its horse). If you’re looking for crazy, Cathie Wood’s group is a hot mess full of them.
Most of that "take rate" goes to the issuing bank, which returns it to the customer in the form of rewards, which can often be redeemed for cash, and a number of issuers now offer generic 2% cashback cards. There's also the added benefit of fraud protection (and the ability to charge-back, as a last resort). Anyone using Cash App or similar in lieu of a credit card, I just assume is financially illiterate.
I don't think it'd give them access at any time but related data/code for gets sent to OpenAI when you use it, all LLM models who work with code work that way, otherwise it'd be unfeasible.
However, OpenAI pinky promises they don't use API data for anything, like training. Maybe that makes you feel a bit safer, although probably it shouldn't.
> However, OpenAI pinky promises they don't use API data for anything, like training. Maybe that makes you feel a bit safer, although probably it shouldn't.
It doesn't. I don't trust OpenAI or Sama. Frankly, I'm even hesitant to use VSCode now, even with its customizable privacy/telemetry settings (though I can at least limit its network access).
The pearl-clutching over "book banning" is ridiculous. It's parents not wanting schools exposing their children (i.e., minors) to certain materials the parents think is inappropriate. And these supposedly "banned" books are still readily available to adults from Amazon, B&N, and (usually) regular libraries. Why is this such a big deal?
Meanwhile, you now have censorship at the internet backbone level, with ISPs arbitrarily, unilaterally deciding to stop routing traffic to legal websites, and there's been little outcry: https://twitter.com/IncogNetLLC/status/1685359845505957888
The big deal is the cowardice and ignorance of these parents.
A smart child raised by parents who fear and censor media contrary to their ideology or morality is a child whose future has been stolen. It is a theft from society as well.
Why is the dumbest parent allowed to circumscribe the smartest child?
I wouldn't be surprised if the author, and a large segment of HNers agreeing with her, did a swift about-face when they realized that Tor also provides an end-run around the internet backbone black-holing of IPs that some Tier 1 ISPs did to KiwiFarms last year, during the height of the campaign to deplatform it. More people using Tor in general means more people having the means and know-how to evade censorship, and we can't have that, can we?
I don't think anyone would be surprised - what you're describing is pretty obvious to anyone who has ever looked into Tor for more than .1 seconds. It's also pretty well understood that when restrictions can be evaded it will be used for both good & bad purposes, that's just the nature of it.
That accusation has been repeatedly debunked. Also, on a more positive note, amongst all the gossiping and somewhat rude behaviour, they've documented a significant amount of illegal activity by others. In particular, how certain individuals of gender have been grooming children and committing sex crimes - which is why these creeps tried so hard to take Kiwifarms offline. And ultimately failed, as it's still up and running, even on the clearnet.
Not even wikipedia own founder believes on it anymore. It's essentially useless for anything political related because you already know that they will be heavily biased in favor of a given side...
Actually wouldn't a move to Tor completely destroy the ability to effectively moderate any sort of community since you have no way of banning spammers/bots? Even a "lawless" place like 8chan or Kiwifarms will have trouble holding discussions if all their forums are filled with copy-pasted CP from some random botnet
I wonder how many HNers angry about this are also some combination of 1) working for bigtech 2) using iOS/OSX/Android instead of Linux (yeah, I know Android is technically a Linux) 3) using Chrome/Safari instead of Firefox and 4) have endorsed, at least in the past, bigtech firms like Google and Cloudflare acting as arbiters of what is/is not acceptable content for the internet, and even whether it should be viewable by anyone at all.
It's not just hypocrisy. Many of the HNers railing against this are actually responsible, even if just indirectly, for it. Take Chrome (including Chromium) use, for example. Chrome has never been that much better (e.g. 2-3x) than FF. Maybe at its best, when it first debuted and V8 wowed everyone, it was 20-30% better--not enough to justify the investment a poweruser (who heavily customizes their browser) would have to make to jump ship, and not enough for anyone concerned about the open web. Yet I would guess most people here jumped ship at some point (probably when it was new and shinny and Google still paid lip service to "don't be evil"), and they've never looked back, despite FF having caught up and remaining competitive.
Asking people to not use Chrome isn't asking much, and yet people here can't even manage that.
Like one of the commenters in that thread said, this sounds like they were using the noidex feature to use the IA as a personal private backup, and thus abusing it, and ruined it for everyone else. The IA is great as a personal public backup. (For example, I've deliberately submitted copies of certain OSS projects I've worked on to the Wayback Machine.)
The IA can always defer to putting a census of noindexed items as a json item though if they want to stay true to their motto of "universal access to all knowledge". For every invalid reasons there are always a valid reason for retaining such features. Some people might not want to see their works easily scraped by AI companies and so on which then profit off their backs, among all other sensitive use cases. If they do away with the self noindex option, the search results will one day become very clogged if you want to look for a refined result.
Permanent.org which is more geared toward the personal private backup use cases were only formally released in 2020. Before it there was only IA which could really provide digital preservation for all swathes of people. Even then I occasionally saw that Permanent.org cross-pollinates their datasets into the IA.
Contrary to the claims that I'm not looping in with them about noindex, in fact they had already been keenly aware of my (and probably others) use cases for a while. Before then I'd sometimes even contacted their staff members for help if I for some reason cannot no-index the items alone. Their tone changed slightly to say that "IA is a library" around the time of the bookseller's lawsuit but coincidentally because all the items I wanted to be archived, had been so, I was able to promise them to not upload any private items, at least I could discuss with Mr. Kahle about the issue. I did sent an email to the latter afterwards, but perhaps because he's heavily distracted by things like the lawsuits, it was eventually let slide and forgotten, until now.
I actually conversed with the founder somewhere before this year where I floated the possibility of the IA becoming an all-out archive and digital vault, more than just a library, in which he seemed to be welcoming with.
Edit: At one point IA even endorsed/recommended the use of noindex as an option to hide bulk-uploaded files from search results to avoid clogging it.
It will be interesting to see how this affects "toxic," deplatformed, and to some degree debanked (at least from PayPal and CC processors) entities, like the KiwiFarms. While this page is somewhat vague about the private/public status of the Fed: https://www.federalreserve.gov/faqs/about_14986.htm
I think KiwiFarms is a cesspool and I think Null in particular is an extremely crappy human, but despite that I disagreed with the credit card processors pulling them, because they really did have a near-monopoly for online payments, meaning that this could be considered stifling of free speech.
However, I think I'll have less of an issue for it if there's the government-backed means in which to send them money; at that point I think the "it's a private company!" defense would actually apply to the credit card companies.
This is a dramatic whitewashing of KiwiFarms. KiwiFarms was not deplatformed for wrongthink or because people disagreed with their ideas. They were deplatformed for coordinating harassment campaigns that resulted in at least three confirmed suicides. That is not protected speech.
Any speech could be attributed to the N-number of suicides we unfortunately see happening. This is not a good argument for censorship or punitive actions against individuals or entities whose speech was followed by a suicide with dubious / unproven connections to that speech.
If any speech is to be considered targeted harassment, then let the courts decide that in a defamation (or otherwise) case to determine damages and reconciliation of those damages.
Private entities should not be allowed to limit their business services to customers they suspect are behaving in a way they disapprove of, especially since these customers are not asking for tailored services such as cakes and custom websites. Payment providers are the backbone of a functioning economy, and problematic speech should never be the reason why they deny service.
One of those "confirmed" suicides occurred in Japan and the individual was also a US citizen. The US State Department doesn't list any suicides when it was said to have happened (June 2021 - there was one prior to that in May and another in February 2022). Reporting the death of a foreign national to their respective embassy is mandatory in Japan.
Do you have an original source for this and is there a breakdown by cause? US State Department data only accounts for non-natural causes - namely suicides and accidents.
I assume you're talking about near (fka byuu)? Heartbreaking...such an unbelievably intelligent and insightful person.
I had the pleasure of getting a couple direct replies from them once on an obscure subreddit under my own realname account. That turned into a few DMs, and despite the fact that I was publicly working on tech completely antithetical to their technical views, they were so gracious and thoughtful and engaged...it was truly humbling.
I have my own thoughts on KF too...I wish the individuals responsible for their targeted and direct harassment had been held accountable. But I'll try to preserve some tact in their memory and leave it at that.
The nexus between KF harassment and the suicides in two of the three cases is extremely tenuous ("KF had a thread X disliked" -> "X committed suicide" -> "KF induced X's suicide") and in the third the evidence that a suicide occurred to begin with is lacking.
I'm sure many, many more suicides could be linked more strongly to any of the major social media platforms.
In any case, the reasons for deplatforming have always been more diverse. CloudFlare dropped KF for representing some sort of imminent and ongoing threat to human life which you'd think a good-faith review of would indicate was misguided (and thus their service should be restored.) KF has not been able to establish relationships with other hosts not because literally everyone finds them repugnant, but because entering into a public relationship with any company immediately makes that company a target for a hate campaign, and even "free speech" hosts and such have found the cost-benefit math unfavorable.
If KiwiFarms hosted/was responsible for illegal activities, then it is up to law enforcement to deal with it, not payment processors.
It is not desirable that private infrastructure companies such as Visa or MasterCard are effectively playing as judge, jury and executioner in modern society, even if (sometimes) they are happening to do the right thing.
A counterpoint — every day tons of financial disputes are handled by banks and insurance companies. Unlike with government, no violence is involved, and things go well. Why involve governments and violence when we can avoid the bad things without violence?
The parent is claiming a serious harassment campaign which seems functionally equivalent to violence. Both are harmful, illegal activities. Also, no one is advocating violent government intervention.
>A counterpoint — every day tons of financial disputes are handled by banks and insurance companies. Unlike with government, no violence is involved, and things go well. Why involve governments and violence when we can avoid the bad things without violence?
Good point, maybe the private financial institutions (or more!) of the country should lean into this and offer a shadow legal system whereby anyone can bring suit for any allowable reason with the ultimate threat being a sort of (nonviolent!) exile from digital society. That could surely not go wrong.
> They were deplatformed for coordinating harassment campaigns that resulted in at least three confirmed suicides. That is not protected speech.
and how many has reddit lead to?
Just admit that they were deplatformed because a very powerful person pulled their strings at our frigging backbones of the internet for personal favors, and got the site banned there.
Thankfully, the site is no longer available via clearweb, so we can just take its characterization by its harshest critics at face value, rather than having to actually read it ourselves and make up our own minds.
However, I do find it strange that the site now only being available through Tor--and thus not showing up in Google search results or being easily browsable by "normies"--seems to have been enough to assuage the people spearheading its deplatforming, since Tor should pose little of an impediment to those capable and willing enough to IRL harass and SWAT people (the purported real reason KF exists). It's almost as if their real concern is people being able to google them and find a site that comprehensively documents their bad, and perhaps illegal, behavior.
Well wait, maybe they gave up the deplatforming effort largely because it’s not as easy to deplatform an onion site as it is to harass web hosts on Twitter.
Also, wasn’t a big complaint with KF their doxxing? Even if I didn’t do any bad or illegal things, I don’t really want a bunch of trolls knowing my address.
But if you HAD done bad things and they WERE documented on KF, you might try even harder to get it shut down. And if you had plenty money and influential contacts, and no moral qualms, you might succeed. Only temporarily though.
Last I heard, at least one of those "confirmed suicides" failed to appear in government databases, which casts doubt on its legitimacy (I assume it is one of those counted as "confirmed"), and another was associated with outside harassment and falsely attributed to KF. I don't know what the third one is.
I dislike that site and the general behavior of its users too, obviously, but during that time when it was in the spotlight I saw plenty of evidence of egregious behavior and blatant lies from people campaigning to censor them, and much of it seemed to work. It's not hard to see how debanking could affect less "problematic" organizations or individuals through censorship campaigns (or government interference) regardless of your feelings about KF itself.
This is a bullshit take.
Kiwifarms always remind users to stay away from gossip subjects.
The fact that some people disregard that is the equivalent of someone reading a tabloid or "Elon Musk jet tracker" and harasses celebrities mentioned there.
Also if you do what's likely to cause a KF article documenting your antics, you can be sure 4chan/8chan/countless discord channels will have a go at you as well, and those are typically not so restrained.
KiwiFarms was not deplatformed for harassment campaigns* or suicides**; they were deplatformed due to coordinated harassment campaigns against the companies on which the site relied.
*There were no such things. Users were aggressively reprimanded and banned for suggesting and engaging in "poop-touching," respectively.
Because they commit a crime of... what exactly again?
They never crossed even a civil liability threshold, it's strictly a gossip site with multiple reminders never to contact gossip targets.
Isn't it the case that you still have to have a relationship with a bank to have an account to transfer into or out of via FedNow in the first place? In that case I don't think this would change the picture at all. It's not the intention to help the unbanked pariahs, that's for sure.
I presume the system uses bank account and routing numbers? So besides concerns with sharing that information with the public, concerned citizens will figure out who they bank with, and will most likely be able to easily pressure the bank to drop them.
Certain things should be difficult to accomplish in a functional society anyways, and administering a profitable hate group is one of those things. If not bankrupted by their lack of credit card access, they'll eventually run into legal troubles from the damage they cause to innocent people.
> they'll eventually run into legal troubles from the damage they cause to innocent people
Which is how this sort of thing ought to be handled, in stark contrast to "Chrystia Freeland sends an email to the heads of major banks to get troublemakers debanked with zero transparency or due process."
Like the person I was responding to said, there are thousands of banks. If not a single one wants to do business with this organization, that's not a first amendment issue and you don't need to lose sleep over it. Being so unpopular that nobody with a shred of decency will do business with them is not a rights issue.
maybe. maybe not. it's definitely not this simple. those thousands of banks likely share back office software, many fraud prevention vendors, background check provider.
and yes, sure kiwi farms can simply accept checks or whatever. it doesn't change the simple truth, that there are many things the current economic system doesn't provide despite extant demand and profit opportunity. transactions cost are too damn high.
> maybe. maybe not. it's definitely not this simple. those thousands of banks likely share back office software, many fraud prevention vendors, background check provider.
My attorney also advises a local credit union, and has shared some insight in the past with me on the complexity of agreements they have with vendors. I don't think it's a realistic concern that X vendor denouncing Y hate group would cascade down into a bank being forced to drop them. Agreements are just so complex and the financial incentive wouldn't be there to justify such a high risk demand. It's all too hypothetical to worry about.
> and yes, sure kiwi farms can simply accept checks or whatever. it doesn't change the simple truth, that there are many things the current economic system doesn't provide despite extant demand and profit opportunity. transactions cost are too damn high.
Absolutely. Cash still exists. Marijuana shops near me are able to operate profitably without credit card processing. It's also great that online payments in the US banking system are finally being improved.
Every one of those thousands of banks is dependent on remaining in the government's good graces. Canada doesn't have thousands of banks (a setup we'll almost certainly move closer to as the regional banks face ongoing problems), but in the case where an official at Freeland's level said, "jump," they all said "how high?" It's very similar to how censorship, including of many true propositions, was enforced on social media during the COVID/vaccines hysteria. In that case people are also arguing it's "not a first amendment issue" and not having unqualified success in the courts. But your notion that any of this comes as a result of grassroots popular demands is largely a fantasy.
they're not a "hate group," they're a "collecting embarrassing info on creeps" group. of course the creeps aren't happy about that, and frame it as "hate."
Nonsense comparison. We're talking about business partnerships. If everyone with a shred of decency turns your organization away, that's a great litmus test for its existence. Worry about the next revolution being banked when that becomes a real concern, not over an online troll farm that tries to convince vulnerable people to end their lives.
Yes, one doesn't have an account with a participating bank in order to receive and send payments via FedNow. It is same with Zelle; with Zelle, one sends money to an email or a phone number of an intended recipient. Both senders and receivers of Zelle need to registered with Zelle from their banking apps. USBank and Chase are notorious to close accounts who use Zelle heavily, because they see such activities as nefarious. Maybe, other banks use Zelle transaction history as another point to in order to debank people.
I don't want my banks to know who I send money to via Zelle; but they do. If banks are happy with customers writing checks to 'problematic' people, why they think that frequent Zelle activity as source of risk, as long as customers are not depositing or withdrawing cash/money orders.
The Federal Reserve is a private company with a chair that is chosen by the President of the US with advice and consent from the Senate, and serves a four-year term. There is no term limitation for this office.
The reason the US government has a national debt is because that debt is owed to the Federal Reserve, which is a private bank that loans the US government money and that sets the US monetary policy.
>>Federal Reserve is a private company with a chair that is chosen by the President of the US with advice and consent from the Senate, and serves a four-year term
Sorry but no... You can not be a "Private Company" and have your leadership appointed by the President like any other Government Agency
The Fed is a Government Agency,
>>The reason the US government has a national debt is because that debt is owed to the Federal Reserve,
Incorrect
Some of the Debt is owned by a Federal Reserve, more recently as no one want to buy US Debt any more but....
>>which is a private bank that loans the US government money
Again FALSE....
The Federal Reserve can not Loan the US Government anything
The US Dept of Treasury issues Bonds which are sold on the Open Market, 3rd parties then Buy these Bonds, then the Fed Buys them
The Fed can not legally buy Bonds directly from the US Government. How do you think Black Rock got to be do big...
The Fed is a contractor with pomp and circumstance to make it appear different. Any private group charter can require their club leader to be approved by the Pres. and the Pres. may or may not play along.
Parent and GP are using different definitions of "dollar."
GP is using a strict definition (only dollar-denominated liability of the Fed is a "true" dollar), parent is using a looser definition (a dollar-denominated liability of any bank is a dollar).
If you have a fractional reserve (e.g., a bank has $100M cash backing $100M deposits one day, then loans out $30M the next day), with the strict definition you still have $100M dollars ($70M controlled by the bank, $30M that was loaned out and used to purchase stuff). But with the loose definition you have $130M ($30M is still loaned out, depositors are $70M).
Essentially the depositors have made $100M of (debt) investments in the bank, and those investments are now 70% backed by cash and 30% backed by paper (mortgages or other kinds of IOU's from whoever they loaned the $30M to).
That's incorrect. A bank can't give out more dollars than they receive from depositors. It can give out all kinds of paper that is _valued_ in dollars, but not the digital representation of banknotes with the pictures of dead presidents on the front.
In contrast, the Fed can create actual dollars. It can just buy an asset and pay for it with money that it has just created.
you may have an analogy if your "Any private group charter" was established by an act of Congress, where by the Appointment of the leader was required by law to be done by the president, with the advice and consent of congress
Show me "Any private group charter" that was established by such an act of congress and i will agree with you.
>The reason the US government has a national debt is because that debt is owed to the Federal Reserve, which is a private bank that loans the US government money and that sets the US monetary policy.
I'm pretty sure every holder of US Treasuries (including me) is owed money by the US government.
trusts, foundations, and a host of other entities are ‘orphaned’ entities and is essentially a third category which is more accurate for the Federal Reserve as well
The Board of Governors is a public entity with an appointment, and the rest of the entity has a rotation of members and pretty full autonomy on how it runs on the inside at the employee level
It's a club funded by interest rate skimming with opaque structure and reporting requirements which don't conform to typical reporting requirements. CEO of Silicon Valley Bank was on BoD of SFO branch, which failed to adequately regulate SVB.
why do you think it was a regulatory failure? it's not the Fed's job to make sure every bank has a sane business plan and rock solid conservative riskless strategy.
its job is to make sure the entire system can take the stress of failing banks.
The private club Federal Reserve branch in SFO was supposed to regulate SVB which had C-level executive on BoD of the regulator. The regulator failed to take prompt corrective action when SVB had capital inadequacy. SVB subsequently, months later, had inadequate capital to continue operating.
A discussion forum similar to, say, Something Awful (or indeed HN), with a focus on mocking online misbehaviour and a reputation for unpopular political views.
Pretty accurate. You make yourself a name suing a waxing salon for not waxing your balls, you get a KF thread. You harass a github project for accepting contributions from a hardcore Christian, you get a KF thread. You declare "everything is racist, everything is sexist, everything is homophobic and you need to point it all out", you get a KF thread.
The "immediate threat to human life" was not identified specifically; the only post meeting that description was taken down by moderators in less than an hour (which compares favourably with many social media sites' response times to similar incidents) and was from a new account that hadn't posted anything else, so hardly representative of the site's culture.
While I don't know the specifics behind your other link, like most articles about it it's using second- and third-hand claims; given there was an orchestrated smear campaign against the site, I'm sceptical. It was certainly convenient that Kiwi Farms was removed from the Internet Archive just as articles like this were being published, making it impossible to verify or disprove any of their allegations. If you're worrying about sources (which you are absolutely right to!), I'd start there; do the posts that article is talking about actually exist?
It's about as impossible as proving what "caused" someone to die after they got run over by a train. They could have had a fatal aneurysm in the moments before getting run over. Or perhaps it was the train that killed them. A perplexing game of probability indeed!
One of the three suicides seems to have not happened at all (would have been reported to the US consul in Japan), two others were attributed to posts that did not comply to KF moderation standards, were created by freshly registered users and were removed much faster than similar stuff typically remains visible on Twitter of Facebook.
Thought experiment: if KF founder committed suicide, would you demand deplatforming MotherJones?
