Wedding Startup RegistryLove (YC S12) Lets Couples Register For Anything - <AUTHOR> http://techcrunch.com/2012/08/16/yc-backed-wedding-startup-registrylove-lets-couples-register-for-anything/

<comment><USER2> From their "Tour" page:

 _The fun part! Browse and shop our gorgeous gift catalogue filled with inspiration and ideas and add things to your registry_

While their (more obscure) "How it Works" page says:

 _Find things you love on our gift database, or list gifts and services from your favorite stores._

I think they could do a better job of making it clear that you can go and add registry items from everywhere. And honestly, as someone who just got engaged, I would probably be inclined to use Amazon Universal Registry if it came down to it (as someone else mentioned).

Edit: Part of the confusion is that I skimmed the landing page and went right to the bottom. I looked so quickly for the call to action that I skipped the tag line! (Any Gift. Any Store. One Registry.)

<comment><USER3> "How it Works" for HN people is Ruby on Rails, google hosted webfont, twitter bootstrap css and javascript.

Would like to know a bit more about the business side of it.

</comment></comment><comment><USER4> The most difficult part about getting into the wedding business as a startup is _advertising_. People (hopefully) only get married once, and they're usually too happy to go shopping around for deals. This is why wedding businesses can rake in huge profits by ripping off their customers. You get similar phenomena in the baby business and the funeral business (although with the latter the lack of interest in comparison shopping is due to grief). So RegistryLove's success will hinge largely on their ability to get the word out to the general public.

<comment><USER5> The mortuary industry is also covered by state regulations designed to keep out competition, justified by entirely specious public health reasons. For example, it is illegal to import wooden boxes without a license in most American states, if those boxes are intended to be either buried or burned. Wooden boxes are well-understood commodity items which, if they had an OSHA sheet, would be stamped "generally regarded as safe."

The bridal-industrial complex does not benefit from similar regulations, but _not for want of trying_.

<comment><USER6> Honest question: could the wooden box license be intended to slow the transport of pests via wood? Moving firewood that hasn't been heat treated has been responsible for a lot of pest plagues in forests.

<comment><USER7> If so, it would be about moving wood that hasn't been heat treated. The law is generally worded to specifically be related to the funeral business. There are other laws that are similarly restrictive, such as a law in Louisiana that prohibits anyone from selling "funeral merchandise" if not licensed:

[http://abcnews.go.com/Business/casket-making-monks-fight- sel...](http://abcnews.go.com/Business/casket-making-monks-fight-sell- wares/story?id=11489765)

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER8> They could do some work on the (privacy) protection of those registries, for example by making the URLs of registry a little harder to guess. (Yeah, I know, adding obscurity instead of security, but nevertheless).

I wanted to see an example list, didn't knew a valid first and last name to search for, so guessed <http://registrylove.com/registries/> and some low ID number after that. Pronto!

I don't know if some Daisy & Javier mind that I can see their wishlist for their wedding. Personally I would have wanted to keep that list a little more private to only those people knowing I had registered my list at RegistryLove.

<comment><USER9> I'll admit I haven't dealt with wedding registries much at all (really, I watched somebody use a registry kiosk at a store once and that's about it) but I was always under the impression that registries are generally pretty much public.

<comment><USER10> You're right. If you know the first and last name of either the bride or the groom, and the store at which they registered, you can access their registry. This is by design--stores want it to be easy to find what the B&G want, because they want it to be easy for you to buy something for them.

<comment><USER8> I could access a registry by guessing an ID (an ActiveRecord primary key, so just an integer), not searching for names. Agreed, this isn't very useful, but the list isn't protected/obscured if the URLs are that easy to guess.

For example, at Amazon Universal Wishlist, the ID of a valid wishlist is very hard to guess -- like 6HV8XSTGDT3E7-difficult. On top, you can select whether you want that list to be public (discoverable via name search), visible if one knows the link, or private.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER11> My engaged brother is using Amazon Universal Registry for this purpose - <http://www.amazon.com/gp/registry/universal>

<comment><AUTHOR> We provide a personal concierge and service unparalleled by Amazon. Amazon does have a large collection of item's but they don't partner with local boutiques!

<comment><USER12> (To be clear: the amazon service lets you add anything with a website, not just items sold through the site)

<comment><USER13> We're still in Beta, but <http://www.mixwish.com> allows you to add items from any website as well. Similar concept to Amazon, but much easier to use.

<comment><USER14> This has gotten comically out of control and is probably saying something about the wedding industry.

<comment><USER12> Speaking of Amazon, you may enjoy: [http://www.amazon.com/One-Perfect-Day- Selling-American/dp/15...](http://www.amazon.com/One-Perfect-Day-Selling- American/dp/1594200882)

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER15> Based on the name and the vertical, I thought this was going to be another site from the team behind <http://weddinginvitelove.com/>, <http://weddingplannerlove.com/>, <http://weddingphotolove.com/>, etc... but there appears to be no connection. Interesting to see that this naming convention is becoming a pattern.

<comment><USER16> I'm actually quite surprised that this team would use this name when another, earlier company (WeddingLovely) has clearly established that naming pattern for its own name and that of all its products/business lines as you mentioned (WeddingInviteLove, WeddingPlannerLove, WeddingPhotoLove). If they did any research on startups in this space, they must have come across WeddingLovely, so why continue with this name choice?

</comment></comment><comment><USER17> _None knew how to code, so Sofia taught herself... "At first we tried to hire somebody, but we quickly realized that master coders are just not that interested in the wedding market," says Markia, "and we were like, well, we could just sit here forever or we could just do it."_

I advised a startup with a premium domain in the wedding space a few years back. Both founders were non-tech founders, and they struggled day and night to find a tech... anything. Lots of folks like myself offered little bits of assistance and packages of discount consulting work but nobody was really willing to commit and take the plunge as a tech cofounder. I'm sure this is a common story. If you don't have a huge amount of capital investment its really hard to rally tech folks behind bootstrapping something like this

</comment><comment><USER18> We've been using myregistry.com and have been perfectly happy with it. MyRegistry syncs directly with several popular registries, and lets you add anything not in one of those stores with a bookmarklet that intelligently grabs name/price/etc. from the page you're on.

It doesn't sound like this doesn't anything significantly different, other than having syncing with more stores (which is, admittedly, nice).

</comment><comment><USER19> Huh, interesting that it's YC-backed. It overlaps with my own website <http://GiftyWeddings.com> \-- though mine is more of a gift list, where you really can add any gifts you like (you just type them in, and optionally add a web link).

One thing that really put me off trust-wise with Registry Love is the payment page (for guests) is sent, and I think submitted, over clear-text HTTP, for example <http://registrylove.com/carts/N/payment>

</comment><comment><USER20> Is the only difference between this and all the other gift registries like <http://wantsthis.com> <http://wishpot.com> etc. that they handle payment/customer service? I'd be curious to see how things like returns and really odd items like "cash" are handled.

</comment><comment><USER21> Is this international? I would recommend the service to friends but can't find any list of which retailers are supported from the FAQ or About pages. I suppose I could create an account and trudge deeper but honestly, I can't be arsed to do that much work just to find out if Canada is supported and advertise this to my friends.

<comment><USER22> Hey there! We are currently focused on the SF Bay area, but we are expanding very quickly! Depending on what they are looking for we may be able to accommodate them immediately. I appreciate you considering suggesting us, and would love to hear from you/or them at any time! firstname.lastname@example.com

</comment></comment><comment><USER23> We launched this social feed feature today and play in this space: <https://knackregistry.com/hot>

Instead of browsing through various retailers websites knackregistry.com has set up a What's Hot product feed so brides can easily see what friends and other brides are adding to their Knack registries. When a bride finds something she wants she just clicks the add to my registry button and the item will be added from the feed to her registry.

</comment><comment><USER24> This would've been fantastic for my family member who got married recently.

</comment><comment><USER25> Almost makes me want to get married....NOT. but cool shtuff.

</comment><comment><USER26> Great idea, my sister would have loved this too!

</comment><comment><USER22> Thanks! <3 Marika</comment>


Biggest image in the smallest space - <AUTHOR> https://www.bamsoftware.com/hacks/deflate.html <comment><USER2> Actually, it decompresses to a 5.8MB PNG. However, many graphics programs may choose to use three bytes per pixel when rendering the image and because it has incredibly large dimensions, this representation would take up 141GB of RAM.

<comment><USER3> One of the rules of secure programming is that any program that is used in an even remotely security-sensitive context, and anything displaying a Portable _Network_ Graphic is likely to be used in such a context, must be able to specify resource usage limits. In this case that could be dimensions or a limit on the total RAM allowed to be used. Limits need not be hard, either, but could produce a query, for instance, the way very long-running scripts in the browser ask you if they should continue.

Now, go find an API/library for dealing with PNGs that allow you to pass in such a limit, let alone pass in a callback for dealing with violations. Go ahead. I'll wait.

(The Internet being what it is, if there is one, someone will pop up in a reply in five minutes citing it. If so, my compliments to the authors! But I think we can all agree that in general image APIs do not offer this control. In fact, in general, if you submit a patch to allow it, it would probably be rejected from most projects as unnecessarily complicating the API.)

This is the sort of thing that I mean when I say that we are so utterly buried by insecure coding practices that we can't hardly even perceive it around us. I should add this as another example in [http://www.jerf.org/iri/post/2942](http://www.jerf.org/iri/post/2942) .

<comment><USER4> _Now, go find an API /library for dealing with PNGs that allow you to pass in such a limit_

The article itself links to [http://libpng.sourceforge.net/decompression_bombs.html](http://libpng.sourceforge.net/decompression_bombs.html)

 _These new libpng versions do not impose any arbitrary limits, on the memory consumption and number of ancillary chunks, but they do allow applications to do so via the png_set_chunk_malloc_max() and png_set_chunk_cache_max() functions, respectively._

<comment><USER3> Now, go check your bindings, too. Often binding authors consider these incidental and unimportant and don't expose them.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER5> That's impressive. Here are some other compression curiosities.

[http://www.maximumcompression.com/compression_fun.php](http://www.maximumcompression.com/compression_fun.php)

A 24 byte file that uncompresses to 5 MB; another file with good compression under RAR but almost no compression under ZIP; and a compressed file that decompresses to itself.

<comment><USER6> I'll add mine: [https://brage.info/hello](https://brage.info/hello)

It's a 1MB file that decompresses to 261 tredecillion bytes of "Hello, World".

No terribly clever stream manipulation; it's a perfectly normal gzip file, other than the size. The generation script is here: [http://sprunge.us/VhFc](http://sprunge.us/VhFc), but see if you can figure it out without peeking.

<comment><USER7> Actually, it decompresses into a 1.4MiB file, which decompresses into another 1.4MiB file, recursively.

<comment><USER6> I sized it to fit on a floppy disk. :-3

But, no. There's a finite number of levels, and it blows up pretty quickly.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER8> That's neat, but I still think the self-reproducing r.zip from "zip files all the way down" is the best compression trick I've seen:

[http://research.swtch.com/zip](http://research.swtch.com/zip)

<comment><USER9> There's also dynamic generation of output by specifying a custom filter in a RAR archive that is executed during decompression: [http://blog.cmpxchg8b.com/2012/09/fun-with-constrained- progr...](http://blog.cmpxchg8b.com/2012/09/fun-with-constrained- programming.html)

</comment></comment><comment><USER10> Photoshop was able to show it: [http://i.imgur.com/7EdBySv.png](http://i.imgur.com/7EdBySv.png) (Macbook Pro, 16GB RAM)

<comment><USER4> Photoshop is an example of a graphics program that doesn't attempt to read the entire image into memory.

How much RAM did it actually use?

<comment><USER10> Difficult to say. I don't completely understand the activity monitor RAM column: [http://i.imgur.com/QS3NPQQ.png](http://i.imgur.com/QS3NPQQ.png) Looking at the activity monitor details we see that it uses something in the order of 2.54 GB of real memory. I suspect the rest is mostly compression.

</comment></comment></comment><comment> semi-extrinsic If you follow the "related reading" link on the bottom of TFA, you come to a page by Glenn Randers-Pehrson discussing how libpng deals with decompression bombs. On the bottom of that page you find the following curious note; anyone know what to make of it?

""" [Note for any DHS people who have stumbled upon this site, be aware that this is a cybersecurity issue, not a physical security issue. Feel free to contact me at <glennrp at users.sourceforge.net> to discuss it.] """

<comment><USER11> He's presumably had problems with people confusing "decompression bombs" with the blowy-up kind and sending him panicky e-mails.

<comment><USER12> Another possibly apocryphal case of linguistic collisions resulting in governmental interest: When the MIT Media Lab started doing work on intelligent kitchen counters, they found that a lot of shadowy government agencies wanted to talk to them about their research into "counter intelligence".

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER13> PNGs also have optional compressed text metadata chunks, and it's possible to sneak a decompression bomb into one of those as well. You can get about a factor of 1000 in the compression -- 1MB of 'a' winds up being about 1040 bytes. You can have multiple itxt chunks, and it appears that the chunk size is only limited to 2^31-1.

See [https://github.com/python- pillow/Pillow/blob/master/Tests/ch...](https://github.com/python- pillow/Pillow/blob/master/Tests/check_png_dos.py) for a quick way to generate some of these.

</comment><comment><USER14> Reminds me of how you could crash a fido node by sending them some big empty files, so when they got automatically unzipped the filled of the harddrive :)

<comment><USER15> I think this kind of thing was common even a few years ago in DoS'ing mail gateways that uncompressed and scanned various archive formats. Things like really huge files when uncompressed or ridiculously deep nested directory structures.

I think most software these days is immune to such tricks, or at least has tunables to reduce the chance of such tricks causing harm.

<comment><USER16> Zip bombs, a relative of the fork bomb.

[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Zip_bomb](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Zip_bomb)

The billion laughs XML attack is also lovely in its simplicity.

[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Billion_laughs](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Billion_laughs)

<comment><USER17> I was doing a presentation about various bombs last year and crashed PowerPoint by copy-pasting billion laughs in a slide. Simple but extremely effective.

<comment><USER16> Not sure what is worse: that MS has Powerpoint interpreting randomly pasted XML, or that they do not have handling for excessive memory usage beyond crashing the whole program.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER18> [http://jeremykun.com/2012/04/21/kolmogorov-complexity-a- prim...](http://jeremykun.com/2012/04/21/kolmogorov-complexity-a-primer/)

[http://c2.com/cgi/wiki?KolmogorovComplexity](http://c2.com/cgi/wiki?KolmogorovComplexity)

Here be rabbit-hole.

</comment><comment><USER19> This does wonders when used in favicons :D

<comment><USER20> I just tried it on a locally served page, and my browser handles it quite well (although it won't really display it).

<comment><USER19> Only on firefox and chrome since they fixed it [https://github.com/benjamingr/favicon- bug](https://github.com/benjamingr/favicon-bug)

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER20> Fun fact: When trying to upload this as a profile picture (on a site I host myself), chromium crashes.

</comment><comment><USER21> Having dealt with and printed a lot of _very_ large images, e.g., 60k x 60k pixels, I have been on the lookout for image processing software that never decompresses the entire image into ram, but instead works on blocks or scan lines or blocks of scan lines, but stays in constant memory and streams to and from disk. For example, the ImageMagick fork GraphicsMagick does a much better job of this than ImageMagick. What other software is out there that can handle these kinds of images?

<comment><USER22> The key is not to store it in raster form in RAM. Either tiles (like GIMP) or I prefer Z-ordering. Then a user can zoom in and pan around easily - you let the system swap and it won't be bad at all. If they zoom out though, you probably want to store MIP maps of it.

Swap works well for this as long as your data has good locality. huge raster images don't.

But no, I'm not aware of any software that handles stuff like that well - except the GIMPs tiling, but that's not going to help when zoomed out.

<comment><USER21> What does Z-ordering mean in this context?

I definitely want to avoid swap at all costs and find things that are designed to tile & stream instead. The difference between GraphicsMagick resizing an image by streaming and ImageMagick resizing an image that hits swap is orders of magnitude - seconds versus hours.

<comment><USER22> >> What does Z-ordering mean in this context?

You divide the image into quarters and store each quarter as a continuous block of memory. Do this recursively.

Normally we'd index into the pixel data using pixel[x,y]. You can get Z-ordering by using pixel[interleave(x,y)] where the function interleave(x,y) interleaves the bits of the two parameters.

This works fantastically well when the image is a square power of two, and gets terrible when it's one pixel high and really wide. I think a combination of using square tiles where each one is Z-ordered is probably a useful combination.

For my ray tracer I use a single counter to scan all the pixels in an image. I feed the counter into a "deinterleave" function to split it into an X and Y coordinate before shooting a ray. That way the image is rendered in Z-order. That means better cache behavior from ray to ray and resulted in a 7-9 percent speedup from just this one thing.

Once you have data coherence, swapping is not a big deal either in applications where you're zoomed in.

<comment><USER23> > You can get Z-ordering by using pixel[interleave(x,y)] where the function > interleave(x,y) interleaves the bits of the two parameters.

That is pretty cool (also the raytracing application), but most surprising to me, is I remember the interleave operator from reading the INTERCAL[0] docs ... I never even considered the function could actually be applied to something useful :-)

[0] one of the early esoteric programming languages, designed to be "most unlike any other language". It also features a "COME FROM" statement (because GOTO is considered harmful), which iirc also actually has a parallel in some modern programming paradigm.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER24> I used to work on a scanning SMTP/HTTP proxy and even back then it wasn't unknown for people to send crafted decompression bombs to attempt to crash the services. We handled it by estimating the total uncompressed size upfront (including sub archives) and throwing out anything with a suspiciously large compression ratio.

I imagine that .pdf files are another avenue for mischief. They contain lots of chunks which may be compressed in varying ways.

</comment><comment><USER25> Neat. I needed to make very large PNG bombs recently and toyed with the idea of doing it "manually." In the end I decided to take the lazy route and use libpng[1].

[1]: [https://bitbucket.org/tetrep/pngbomb/src/03dfc95065d78562c15...](https://bitbucket.org/tetrep/pngbomb/src/03dfc95065d78562c156c056abc3d5f1fd7047b8/pngbomb.c?at=master)

<comment><USER26> This works wonderfully! With an image size 123456x123456, I made this happen: [http://i.imgur.com/2Dgrazj.png](http://i.imgur.com/2Dgrazj.png)

I killed it at about 25GB memory usage, who knows how high it would have climbed otherwise.

</comment></comment><comment><USER27> That's cool. Presumably the same "attack" could be applied to any file format that uses DEFLATE.

From a legal stand-point, I'd be wary about following through with the authors suggestion of "Upload as your profile picture to some online service, try to crash their image processing scripts" without permission. Sounds like a good way of getting into trouble.

<comment><USER28> What about responsibly disclosing the bug you found with steps to reproduce, the impact and the solution? As long as you only timed out the backend without entirely crashing it, I can't imagine any sane company would prosecute you for trying to improve their service with this level of detail.

<comment><USER27> How do you know that you're only going to time out the backend without entirely crashing it, without actually attempting it? It's a kinda Schrödinger's cat scenario.

It's all good and well saying that you had good intentions, but if you can't prove it, and they didn't invite you to test it (via a responsible disclosure policy), then I would steer clear.

While I wouldn't personally attempt to prosecute anyone for responsibly disclosing a bug to me, it doesn't meant to say that BigCorp™ wouldn't.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER29> >The image is almost entirely zeroes, with a secret message in the center.

too pressed for time, did anyone look? What is it?

<comment><USER30> It is "SORRY, OUR PRINCESS IS IN ANOTHER PIXMAP"

</comment></comment><comment><USER31> I realize that this is besides the point but going on the title alone we could write a script that could generate an 'infinite' (max out available memory) sized image.

</comment><comment><USER32> Everyone's focusing on this being a PNG problem but actually if my server unzips a 420 byte file into a 5M file of any kind, I'd say that's the first red flag. Assuming some sort of streaming decompression, you could write an output filter that shuts off the decompressor when it's seen a factor of X bytes. A reasonable factor would be 10 - which in this case would have halted bzip decompression at 4kB.

This would probably be a trivial patch to bzip2. But I like the idea in general of passing an "max input/output ratio" to any process or function that might yield far more output than input.

<comment><USER33> The real problem is image handling libraries that blindly render images into too-large objects where unnecessary. While full-res uncompressed images are very convenient under the hood, the image library should inherently handle anything "too big" gracefully. Instead we're often prone to apps crashing when someone feeds in a ridiculously large image.

A 420B > 5MB expansion should not be a "red flag" because there is nothing about it (including the subsequent attempt to process a 141GB uncompressed image) which cannot be handled appropriately in software. Flagging such ratio limits is arbitrary, and setting an arbitrary limit is usually a sign the software is incorrect, not the data.

<comment><USER32> A ratio limit is a hueristic.

There _is_ an upper-limit to how much _information_ you can compress into a given space. (Note that we may want to write a pathological program that is very small and allocates a lot of information-free memory. But that's not decompression.)

If we accept the premise then we can look at another approach to solving this problem, once and for all! I like examining memory allocation because it's so general. But there may be another way. We can examine the input to estimate compression ratio.

The problem here is that image decompression is apparently giving strangers the ability provide an arbitrary N and say "Please loop N times and/or allocate N bits". A modern CPU is overwhelmed by an N 12 bits long or longer. This is a root cause of many problems! You know, I'm going to go out on a limb here and make a bold assertion: I assert there is a very safe upper bound on the decompression ratio, and that for any real algorithm _you can indeed examine the input to determine whether N exceeds your allowable threshold_. 10x might be a bit low (although I doubt it) so let's be generous and say 100x. (Which seems crazy. Nothing that I know of, not even text, compresses that well.) This means that I believe that any image format, for example, has a trivially calculable N (for example, width*height in pixels). I would argue that in the general case (unless you are doing some sort of compsci research) the image file should be related to N. That is if the image is 10 bits wide, 10 bits high, we should expect a roughly 20bit file-size.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER33> Looks handy for large image processing tests, thanks.

</comment><comment><USER28> Trying to run the program and create my own image, however a few questions, what did you use for secret.png? Any old png?

Are you using PIL or pillow?

</comment><comment><USER34> Cool, but most web sites wouldn't allow to upload a 5-MB picture as a profile picture. Or do they, these days?

</comment><comment><USER35> Is there a way to check for decompression bombs? I'd like my software to be able to unzip zip files safely.

<comment><USER36> Monitor zip files as they decompress. Halt decompression process if the size ratio between zip file and decompressed file exceeds a fixed ratio (for example, if ratio between the file sizes is something like 10:1).

<comment><USER37> If you do that, pick something a little more extreme. When using BEM, for example, your CSS becomes pretty repetitive and you easily get better than 10:1 ratio with GZIP, for example.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER38> It's probably using middle-out.

</comment><comment><USER39> I wonder what the ratio would look like if the equivalent was done with a JPEG instead of a PNG.

</comment><comment><USER40> does anybody tried to upload it on facebook as profile picture?

<comment><USER41> "Your photo couldn't be uploaded due to restrictions on image dimensions. Photos should be less than 30,000 pixels in any dimension, and less than 41,000,000 pixels in total size."

</comment></comment><comment><USER42> The title was changed and is now more opaque and less descriptive.

<comment><AUTHOR> Yeah, I agree. The original title was a lot more descriptive.

<comment><USER43> The original title is the one the author gave it. The HN guidelines ask you to not to change that unless it is linkbait or misleading.

<comment><AUTHOR> Ah yes, of course. Thanks, I'll keep that in mind for the future!

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER44> righto pied piper

</comment><comment><USER45> This is a very easy form of attack in security circles.</comment>


The Cost of Dirty Money - <AUTHOR> https://www.bloomberg.com/graphics/2019-dirty-money/ <comment><USER2> It's just a list of previous cases of money laundering and the fines to the entities (mostly banks) involved.

Would be nice if for example they mentioned the overall impact of the illegal transactions on the entire systems, or maybe changes or actions that those banks made (other then paying fines).

Basically, I feel like this misses either (or both) the overall, total impact of 'dirty money', the global scale of it, it's effect, etc. (because only the bigger cases that were caught were mentioned, it's interesting to see how big the phenomenal). And also I would like to understand what is being done to stop or prevent other and future instances.

<comment><USER3> It makes the point that governments "punish" these crimes with the velvet glove on. None of those fines are anywhere close to the point they'd endanger even one yearly profit of these institutions.

Now try being suspected of tax cheating as a smaller company and see how governments punish that (not "convicted" mind you, "suspected", meaning you likely did nothing wrong, and even if you did there's a decent chance it's an accident/lack of knowledge/... rather than outright fraud). Let's see government limit themselves to not endangering even one year's profitability then.

<comment><USER4> I think it's unreasonable to consider fining a bank based on the yearly profits of the bank. If a bank does hundreds of billions of dollars of transactions globally and several hundred million of those are tainted, the sanctions in question should be based on the tainted transactions, not the annual revenue or profits.

If a small bank does $100M of tainted transactions and a large bank does the same, they should be fined the same, IMO.

Your point about the small company is not an analog in my opinion. If you have $500K in profits and a tax cheating penalty of $1MM, it does not follow that the precedent is that tax penalties are 2x annual profits, but rather that tax penalties are proportionate to the tax cheating. If another company has a tax fraud of 50x the scope and 1000x the profits, their tax fraud fine should be 50x yours, not 1000x yours.

<comment><USER5> > If a bank does hundreds of billions of dollars of transactions globally and > several hundred million of those are tainted, the sanctions in question > should be based on the tainted transactions, not the annual revenue or > profits

If the penalty is meant to be a deterrent, then it should hurt. Otherwise it will not be a deterrent. You have to consider the bank's annual profit if you want it to hurt.

<comment><USER6> depends on your philosophy regarding fines/punishment. personally I think punishments, particularly fines, should be proportional to the damage done to society, not jacked up as high as you feel is necessary to discourage the behavior. I don't think a large bank that does $50mm in illegal transactions did any more harm than a small one that did the same volume.

also, as we see in criminal law, setting huge penalties doesn't work very well if you can only get a few convictions. it just turns into a game of hot potato where everyone still does the illegal thing to stay competitive and some unlucky firm occasionally gets stuck holding the bag.

a free society should strive for reasonable penalties that are consistently enforced.

<comment><USER7> >I don't think a large bank that does $50mm in illegal transactions did any more harm than a small one that did the same volume.

The large bank can continue to do damage if they are caught, while the small one cannot. Thus they definitely do more harm, and at the very least will be perceived to have effective immunity from the law.

If you only fine thieves proportional to the value of the stolen goods, then all you're doing is saying it's ok to steal so long as you are sufficiently wealthy. (And if you became wealthy through theft... then you've made a legitimate living through damage to society.)

<comment><USER4> We could also be saying that we (as a society via our laws) try to curtail stealing by setting penalties at a level such that the expected value from thievery is negative.

You don't need the equivalent of capital punishment for stealing and, by extension, don't need to take away _all_ of a caught thief's money, just a sufficient multiple of their stealing to make it unattractive to enter into a career of it.

<comment><USER7> That is essentially what I'm saying. The complication is that you can't reliably measure EV for certain acts. (E.g., What is the dollar-value loss for murder? How much should you fine someone for doing it?) In this case, to calculate the dollar-value loss for creating a subset of society which is above the rule of law which uses wealth as a barrier to entry... the penalty needs to take that into account.

So the point is not simply that you need to defer thieves from entering a career of it, but that you need also to deter thieves from considering it as a one-time option for when their quarterly earnings are due, and that you need to do so sufficiently well that even a highly skilled thief with a multi- million dollar company salary won't consider it. So either it can't just be fines (asset seizure/prison, maybe for repeat offenders) or those fines must be legitimately severe as measured by the one committing the act.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER8> I find the amount of money in these cases so staggeringly high that I can't imagine that a vast portion of 'those in power' are not complicit in some ways. There is simply no way to mix this amount of money back into the system without lots of people of statute being involved.

<comment><USER9> Have you worked at a big company, let alone a big bank?

When you have 100k+ employees, it's immensely difficult to keep tabs on every. single. thing. that's happening.

If a bank sees asset flows into the trillions, even $1bn of tainted transactions is less than 0.1%.

Do you or 'those in power' know 99.9% of what happens at your company?

<comment><USER10> > When you have 100k+ employees, it's immensely difficult to keep tabs on > every. single. thing. that's happening.

Tough. You want the big bucks? You gotta solve hard problems. Big companies shouldn't be able to whine or excuse their way out of problems because those problems are hard. If they're too hard to solve, pull an HP and split your company into lots of smaller companies.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER11> "Dirty" money is such an expansive term that encapsulates huge sums and many distinctly different schemes. The Guardian actually stated that the influx of cash from crime syndicates propped up the banks and significantly contributed to some banks financial health—- thus helping during the economic crisis. This money is part of the economy and it is hard to entirely crack doen on it less risking unforeseen issues.

[https://www.theguardian.com/global/2009/dec/13/drug-money- ba...](https://www.theguardian.com/global/2009/dec/13/drug-money-banks-saved- un-cfief-claims)

</comment><comment><USER12> I'd keep in mind three things.

First, the direct consequence of tightening controls on payments to prevent money laundering is that you are tightening the control of government on anything happening in a society. I don't think any libertarian leaning people at least should be ok with this level of control. Like how would cannabis would have ever been legalised if a parallel, illegal market didn't exist to the point that the consensus moved toward legalisation.

Second, as a private company, how to you go about ensuring that every single one of your customers is legit. Any paper you are given can be forged. Any explanation can be made up. You don't have police investigation powers. A car salesman has no way to check that you are not buying a car with profits from a ponzi scheme. Banks are becoming increasingly invasive in term of questions and documents they require, but this is an impossible task. Even auditors don't spot fraud every time (see Patisserie Valerie in the UK for a recent example).

Third, in a 200,000 employees organisation, how do you ensure that every single one of your employees is honnest. At that scale it is just statistically impossible to not have a fraud somewhere. So how do these calls to bankrupt the company with fines if anything wrong happens (that I read in other comments) makes sense?

<comment><USER13> Agreed. Regulating "dirty money" is equivalent to regulating speech, and is therefore unconstitutional.

<comment><USER14> The parallels are strong:

\- Lazily creates an appearance of addressing a problem by going after a sometimes-associated activity

\- Collateral damage to activities that aren't necessarily wrong, but that upset some group

\- Only affects the little guy (to the major players, it's just a cost of doing business)

\- Creates a purportedly-neutral cover on what is essentially political persecution

\- Based on the God delusion that assumes some ambient authority is capable of passing correct judgment on every situation

<comment><USER13> Don't forget:

\- Rationalizes the creation of a massive bureaucracy to control (and centralize) what beforehand was considered normal and local in scope.

\- Rationalizes universal surveillance by unaccountable individuals in federal bureaucracies against the entire population. This can and has been abused in the case of bank disclosures required by anti-money laundering laws: [https://www.msn.com/en-us/news/politics/us-arrests- treasury-...](https://www.msn.com/en-us/news/politics/us-arrests-treasury- employee-accused-of-leaking-bank-records-on-manafort-gates/)

(Note that the so-called "suspicious activity reports" she leaked were merely transactions that met some criteria like being above a threshold amount).

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER15> Having worked at a payments company and helped evaluate anti-money laundering (AML) software with ex-commercial bank compliance people, I should not have been surprised but still was of how manual and subjective the entire AML investigative process is.

At a high level, it's just a bunch of business rules that trigger a massive number of alerts that you then have analyst review one by one (and clear 99%+) without any more action. When you do come across something, you file a Suspicious Activities Report (SAR) to the gov't among other things.

Very clear to me there's a market for a SaaS with some AI/ML/automation capability to reduce false positives and more easily investigate cases. The bar is very low.

</comment><comment><USER16> It's insane how small those fines are as a percentage of the amount laundered. There really doesn't seem to be any reason a bank should even bother, or at the very least, look the other way. And rarely do people ever go to jail over this sort of thing.

And these are only the ones we know about.

</comment><comment><USER17> Planet Money had a great podcast on this topic. [https://www.npr.org/templates/transcript/transcript.php?stor...](https://www.npr.org/templates/transcript/transcript.php?storyId=654792142)

</comment><comment><USER18> One thing to keep in mind is that this story is from Bloomberg, who came up with "The Big Hack" story that proved to be completely unsubstantiated, and yet has never been retracted.

</comment><comment><USER19> The graphics would have been a lot more fun if there was some sort of gauge or running totals of the cumulative amount of fraud versus the cumulative fines and prison time.

</comment><comment><USER20> From a political standpoint, I don't understand how the world is still tolerating such thing, and why it's not part of the public debate. I can understand why it exists, but I'm a little worried to see how widespread and out of control this has become.

I just fear this has the potential to influence and topple governments (even the "solid" ones). People complain about money in politics, but when I see this, I see unchecked capitalism slowly obsoleting governments, because financial power is not under the control of institutions anymore. Money flies, there and there, and governments seem to be completely clueless and unable to work on fighting it.

Worse, citizens don't even seem to pay attention. Money is truly invisible.

<comment> ur-whale To try and give you a partial answer, you may want to consider the fact that money is essentially equivalent to freedom.

Giving governments absolute oversight of the flow of money and of a detailed accounting of who owns what is therefore equivalent to implementing a planet- scale fine-grained surveillance state. Yay.

Is that a world you'd want to live in?

Or more interestingly, if you're a government official that also happens to be a half decent human being (I'm told they do exist), wouldn't you carefully consider how much control you'd like a government to have over so-called "dirty money" vs having every single penny a citizen spends/owns recorded in a database?

Or if you even want to be milder about it, where do you draw the line between total government control of money flows and privacy?

This whole conversation around "dirty money" is the exact same old "won't you think of the children" bogeyman that's being bandied about every time the government wants to restrict freedoms and uses basic citizen's cowardice to entice them to make the trade of less freedom for more security.

[edit]: by the way, you are very correct when you say that citizens aren't paying attention. With increased fine-grained control of money, one of their absolute basic freedoms is being not just eroded, but plain old erased.

And no one is talking about it or debating it. Find me _one_ mainstream politician in the anglo sphere that even has this problem on his radar.

<comment><USER20> You're just serving the libertarian agenda, and I'm having none of it.

Money is not freedom. Money is a tool to trade goods. I was talking about how a minority of fraudsters are hiding their money to not be taxed, and to escape scrutiny, and you're arguing for less government.

<comment> ur-whale >You're just serving the libertarian agenda, and I'm having none of it

You appear to be operating on faith (smells libertarian therefore it's bad) rather than arguments, I guess having a conversation is pointless.

Another thing: there is a vast difference between hiding money to avoid the taxman (something that falls under the "civil disobedience" category, especially when said taxman is exerting unchecked power) and hiding money that was earned committing crimes that _actually_ hurt people (slave trafficking, dictators, etc...).

But the standard discourse served to the unwashed masses is more than happily co-mingling the two issues because it once again is very useful in scaring the flock straight.

<comment><USER20> > there is a vast difference between

Both are illegal.

You're trying to equate a major crime with civil disobedience. Big financial interests are far from the public interest, so I can't follow your argument of civil disobedience.

> taxman is exerting unchecked power

There are so many who argue about money corrupting politics, inequality rising, but I'm not trying to have this argument with you. I just want to tell you that you're exposing yourself as defending big financial interests, against the public interests.

I've already had some back and forth with people like you who try to defend the act of evading taxes, and I can warn you: you will never convince me. Let's agree to disagree.

<comment> ur-whale >I've already had some back and forth with people like you who try to defend the act of evading taxes, and I can warn you: you will never convince me. Let's agree to disagree.

If your debating strategy is to self-proclaim as close-minded and incapable of intelligent conversation, far be it from me to try and stop you :)

And anyways, at some point, if you dig deep enough in people's politics, you always hit the same bedrock: either you're a collectivist and essentially an enemy of individual freedom, or you always give priority to individual freedom before that of the group.

I suspect it's a genetic thing, and you are correct: trying to change one's genetic makeup is pointless via argumentation is basically pointless. Born a sheep, always a sheep.

<comment><USER20> If you really think that things are so black and white, then so be it, don't need to tell people they're sheeps.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER21> from somekind of "Free Market" standpoint, how can there even be "dirty" money? isn't money just money?

I sense some kind of double standard

<comment><USER22> A totally free market would be one without any regulations or laws, that can't have "dirty" money.

But nearly all actual markets have some kind of regulation, and thus the potential for dirty money.

<comment><USER23> > But nearly all actual markets have some kind of regulation, and thus the > potential for dirty money.

It is possible to have a wide variety of regulations without having monetary ones. Money is fungible. If you dump mercury in the river, you get fined or put in jail. It doesn't matter if the money you have to pay the fine with is the profit from the dumping or not, it only matters that it would bite enough to prevent anyone from doing it to begin with.

In particular, you don't need banks to investigate customers or know anything about them, and asking them to causes all kinds of otherwise avoidable problems. The people who should be investigating criminals are law enforcement, not corporations. And if the criminals use banks, well, _then_ you can go to the banks and seize their money etc., after you've proven their crimes to the satisfaction of a judge. Instead of having Paypal do it preemptively because it's easier to screw over many innocent small businesses than deal with regulators when 2% of them cause problems.

<comment><USER24> If banks don't need to be concerned with criminal activity by their patrons, does the same apply to pawn shops? Casinos? Scrap metal dealers?

<comment><USER23> None of those things are law enforcement agencies. And a casino is just a type of bank here.

Though the others may have their own reasons to want to know who their customers are, since a lot of property isn't as fungible as money and possession of stolen property is a crime in most places.

Notice how nobody even suggests for things to work that way in other cases where the business is accepting money rather than goods, e.g. businesses that sell sandwiches or jeans or flatware should hardly be under these types of KYC requirements.

If you can buy $1000 worth of apparel without identifying yourself, why can't you have a bank account with $1000 in it?

<comment><USER24> You don't seem to be engaging with my point; perhaps I didn't make it clear.

There are other businesses besides banks, of which I gave some examples, that attract criminal activity. We don't say "they may have their own reasons" to scrutinize their customers and leave it at that, because self-interest doesn't cure the problem. If you don't regulate scrap metal dealers, then the profit motive will lead them to cheerfully take material stripped by thieves, which encourages destruction and theft. Similarly with pawn shops.

<comment><USER23> The profit motive is exactly why such regulations are useless. The dealer will harass every honest customer in case one of them are the type to report them for not checking, and then pay pennies on the dollar for the copper pipes ripped out of a building which they _know_ were stolen because both parties to the transaction are aware they're profiting from participating in criminal activity.

And the dealer may not even need to be in on it. If the thief lies and says the material was found in a dumpster at a construction site, or that it has been collecting dust in their basement for twenty years, and there isn't any way to trace a generic pile of metal back to where it actually came from, what does it matter that you take their name?

Which is why cities like Detroit are full of buildings that have had their pipes stripped out. The deterrent isn't the scrap metal dealers, it's that the thief goes to jail if caught in the act, so it only happens in places where people reach a level of desperation that isn't present in most other places.

And regulating pawn shops is even sillier, because the thief could just sell the stolen goods on Craigslist or at a swap meet or a hundred other alternatives.

These types of criminals are most commonly caught directly by the victims -- because they're the ones with the best incentive to actually do the catching. The people with the second best incentive are law enforcement. Deputizing disinterested third parties, much less ones with an active conflict of interest, is largely useless and generally does more harm than good.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER25> Fines are minuscule relative to the transaction amounts, and no jail time for execs. I'm shocked, SHOCKED, that this has had no effect.

</comment><comment><USER26> I'll stand and take my downvotes like an adult, because everyone loves to hate on misapplied tech, but this is exactly the use case blockchain currency would be most useful for. Anyone can audit the complete trail of funds from source to holding to destination.

The challenge would be to get banks on board, because they're making so much off this ill gotten flow. Once there, their profit (interest and fees) would also be transparent to everyone, another reason they'd hate this scheme. But it would be good for taxpayers, governments, and honest bank consumers.

<comment><USER27> The cases you see at Bloomberg are well evidence, lack of tech is not a problem here.

It's a bit like CCTV - the crimes were recorded Blockchain or not.

But they were not prevented, and Blockchain isn't going to help with that.

<comment><USER28> > The cases you see at Bloomberg are well evidence, lack of tech is not a > problem here.

From TFA "From about 2007 until 2012, Banamex USA, a Citi subsidiary, processed more than $8.8 billion in transactions with almost no oversight.".

> The cases you see at Bloomberg are well evidence > the crimes were recorded > Blockchain or not

imglorp suggested "Anyone can audit the complete trail of funds from source to holding to destination.". Was this evidence you mention publically auditable (i.e. what imglorp's suggesting would help)?

> Blockchain isn't going to help with that

It's at least plausible that a publically auditable log would have helped spot these issues.</comment></comment></comment>


Our planet just had the third warmest May in recorded history - <AUTHOR> http://boingboing.net/2013/06/20/our-planet-just-had-third-warm.html <comment><USER2> This May was as warm as it was 15 years ago.

FTFY</comment>


Ask HN: Will SnapChat and Tinder survive in the long run? - <AUTHOR>

Are they just popular for the moment until something new comes along? Or is there a valuable business that can be built in the long-run? Both? <comment><USER2> I think Snapchat should have sold when they had the offer. Of course it can't last much longer. They'll have to spawn something separate or acquire someone (think FB -> Instagram).</comment>


Xi's Dilemma: Send Forces into Hong Kong, or Wait Out Protesters - <AUTHOR> https://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2019-08-13/xi-s-dilemma-send-forces-into-hong-kong-or-wait-out-protesters <comment><USER2> How is this a dilemma at all? There are two options, send in the troops and forcefully pacify HK or wait and let all kind of mayhem happen. The second choice is a no brainer. Xi's powerbase is in mainland China, and the people there currently have negative sympathy towards protest in HK, not least because they labeled mainland people as 'locust' and waved British flags calling for foreign intervention. HK's economy is also not directly controlled by China, nor benefit China directly, having the protester turn the whole place into shit does not harm China at all, and serve as an 'I told you so' to all of China as to its point on the protester. Rolling in the troop might galvanize support for HK both outside of China and within China, and taking all the blame for past protest and whatever pacifying action the troop did. It's clear as day which choice is superior to the Chinese government.

The troops in Shenzhen are most likely just a threat - if they do roll into HK it will be the worst miscalculation by Chinese government since 89.

<comment><USER3> Is there evidence to suggest China sees '89 as a miscalculation? Seems like their ultimate goal was successful.

<comment><USER4> Yeah, I'm not sure Tiananmen Square was a miscalculation. When's the last time you heard about a serious mass democratic movement in China?

<comment><USER2> The point is China, not HK. Whatever HK does at the moment have 0 or negative effect in China itself.

<comment><USER5> The goal is to make HK part of China.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER6> As a Chinese mainlander emmigrated because BOTH of the Chinese gov and the people, I'm fine with an independent Taiwan or Hong Kong or whatever. With that being said, I find the stupidity in those reportings and conversations around Hong Kong's protest astonishing. It is sad to see illogical media- induced anger has taken the better part of many commenters here at HN as well.

There's no incentive for the Chinese gov to use military force, period. What the protestors are doing is actually pretty beneficial to the Chinese gov. The protest is destroying HK's economy, yes. But HK's economy is actually not vital to China's economy anymore[1]. Instead, a less economic significant HK would be much easier to govern in the long run. China would rather further develop its Shanghai or Shenzhen, than investing into HK.

What's more, the recent trade dispute with US, and the Hong Kong protest, have made significant negative impact on mainland Chinese attitude toward the western countries and idealogies. If there's any internal conflicts and fights for certain types of freedom before, they certainly become muted now. The rise of nationalism is surely making the higher-ups happy.

1\. [https://www.vox.com/2014/9/28/6857567/hong-kong-used-to- be-1...](https://www.vox.com/2014/9/28/6857567/hong-kong-used-to- be-18-percent-of-chinas-gdp-now-its-3-percent)

<comment><USER7> I very much agree that most reportings and conversations lack proper context, especially non-Chinese ones (although I refrain from describing them as _stupid_), but can't help but wondering whether your concluion is also missing some other context.

Reports conflict on how China is faring on the trade disputes, but Hong Kong, being the only place not affected in these trade conflicts, may be too valuable to give up as a worst-case plan, even if it might not be vital in numbers. Even given the same information, a spectator's mindset can be drastically different than a player's, since a spectator has nothing to loose, but a player does.

The current Hong Kong incident is really, really complicated not only because of China itself, but also it happens at a very perculiar time. The fact that China chose this particluar time to assert control on Hong Kong (proposing the Fugitive Offenders Bill and providing the sparking point) is also under- discussed, and no-one AFAIK has a good explaination–it can't be simply stupity, for sure? I certainly would not jump into the conclusion that China has "no incentive, period" to use military force without first understanding all those nuances and much more.

<comment><USER6> Genuine question, with all the context and nuances you have provided, what positivity would bring to Beijing if they use military force? For me I dont see a militarized HK will help with the trade dispute in any way.

<comment><USER7> A militarized HK certainly won't, but China may be convinced they could use military to bring Hong Kong back to approximately its pre-protest state. Hong Kong in its current state would be increasingly less likely to fill the economic role Beijing might need it to. It'd be reasonable to risk military action if they think they can repeat Tiananmen, with (western) countries repeating the appeasement policy on that occassion.

And honestly I kind of feel they actually might have a chance to pull it off. Prominent countries don't have a good track record reacting to China's bullying tactics (except Trump, as much as I dislike him).

<comment><USER6> You think Beijing would think pulling a Tiananmen 2.0 would bring HK into the right track fulfilling its economic role after? I dont think almost anyone, include almost every mainland Chinese would think that way.

If military is involved, economies will crash, hard. Not only HK's economy, a lot of economies will crash. It will be an economic suicide for mainland China. Is there any doubt about that? And that's irrelevant if any western countries intervene or not.

You probably haven't talked to any educated mainland Chinese recently? For the ones who would like to get HK in line and even get Taiwan back, the only feasible way they see is economic dominance over those territories. As a strategy by itself, I kinda agree.

Edit: I dont think PRC depends on HK more economically than emotionally. HK is one of the symbols of western countries invasion 100 years ago. Getting it back has a great deal of emotional value for mainland Chinese. What I see PRC can extract more value out of HK right now is to emphasize the western influence over the protest, making regular Chinese more in line with PRC's world view and values. Anger directed towards other countries rather than introspective is a good thing for the gov if and when there's any hardship inflicted during the trade dispute period.

<comment><USER7> I agree as much as the next commenter here that HK can't survive Tiananmen 2.0, but am not so sure about the CCP leadership. And I do have actual interactions with mainland Chinese (although I don't know whether you'd consider them "educated.")

> It will be an economic suicide for mainland China. Is there any doubt about > that?

Why not? I would most definitely doubt it. Again, I do assume it would crash, but there is absolutely no actual proof that is the case. This wouldn't be the first time CCP uses armed forces against civillian protest, and on every previous occassion they ended up just fine.

<comment><USER6> >This wouldn't be the first time CCP uses armed forces against civillian protest

Europeans have killed how many American Indians and ended up just fine. But can they do that today? Coerced sterilization of Indigenous women in Canada had been legal for as late as 1970s and do they dare to do that today [1,2]?

What I'm saying is the world has changed quite a bit and so do CCP.

>and on every previous occasion they ended up just fine.

Really? For starters during previous conflicts CCP rarely had an economy to crash.

Again, the legitimacy of CCP within mainland is almost purely lay on its power of economy growth. There are many Chinese people who are not content with it but bear CCP because of the economy growth [3].

You probably knew the 2014 Hong Kong protest, which had a similar scale? If CCP can wait that one out, why can't it do it again this time? [4]

1\. [https://www.cbc.ca/news/canada/north/forced-sterilization- la...](https://www.cbc.ca/news/canada/north/forced-sterilization-lawsuit- could-expand-1.5102981)

2\. [https://www.thecanadianencyclopedia.ca/en/article/sterilizat...](https://www.thecanadianencyclopedia.ca/en/article/sterilization- of-indigenous-women-in-canada)

3\. [https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=20148705](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=20148705)

4\. [https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Occupy_Central_with_Love_and_P...](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Occupy_Central_with_Love_and_Peace)

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER8> "dilemma"? - give me a break! As if this is some kind of crisis nobody saw coming. This is a homemade problem, a dictator facing the results of dictatorship. It's sad the world isn't much louder in its support for Hong Kong.

<comment><USER9> This is a complicated situation and I don't claim to have all the answers so I'm just offering a perspective here, but it's not at all clear that the world should loudly support Hong Kong. If the world loudly supports Hong Kong, and China sends in the military, will the rest of the world defend Hong Kong? Would that be a good outcome? If the rest of the world stays relatively quiet, it plausibly allows China to let the protesters win without creating the appearance of being cowed by the threat of violence from the rest of the world.

I agree completely that it's a homemade problem and I have no sympathy for the Chinese government, but that doesn't mean it isn't still very complicated from an international perspective. Of course, the right answer is that China just give the protesters what they want, but what's right and what's going to happen don't always overlap and it's not particularly helpful to end the analysis so quickly.

<comment><USER7> I'm sorry to see you downvoted. Maybe the problem is you use "rest of the world" when you really mean other national governments? It is easy for people to loudly voice support, but the perspective you raised is quite valid for governments to consider. Which is why most government leaders (except e.g. the UK) do stay silent on this very topic.

<comment><USER9> That's an excellent point, thank you. I hadn't considered that, obviously.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER10> I kinda hope someone advocates option 3: Start negotiations to change some of the rules.

Idealistic, I know. But I can still hope.

<comment><USER11> That's the 'give in' option.

<comment><USER10> I don't live in Hong Kong. I don't work for a company that has influence in Hong Kong or China. I voted for a different party to handle the US foreign relations. Hoping is about all I, practically speaking, can do.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER12> The world is watching.

<comment><USER13> Was it watching Tibet as well?

<comment><USER14> Watching, and sending thoughts and prayers. /s That said, HK is different in that it's China's primary interface with the Western financial system.

<comment><USER15> > HK is different in that it's China's primary interface with the Western > financial system.

 _Was_.

Part of the reason for protests in HK is that it's not as important as it once was, and young people growing up in HK who don't remember the British (remember, HK never had democracy under the British) are at once lamenting the lack of lucrative jobs like their parents had/have and idealising a past that never existed in order to maintain a self-identity that isn't simply 'Chinese'.

Unfortunately this also won't unfold the way the protesters want. China can turn HK back into a fishing village by simply opening up Shanghai and Shenzhen even further, and HK has no real path towards independence. There's literally no sympathy for them on the mainland, no foreign power will intervene, they have no real power.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER16> Wait to see what back to school is like come sept. Then they will reassess

</comment><comment><USER17> Or give the protesters what they want: Liberty and self-determination, and welcome those changes into China's mainland.

<comment><USER18> This. I have no idea why people thought it's a dilemma of choosing either send forces or wait out protests, but not consider the ethical, correct, and right option of giving what the protesters want.

<comment><USER19> So you protest to get everything you want? Not all protests are guaranteed to be just. What if the Mainlanders then decide to protest to stop the protests in HK?

<comment><USER18> I am not saying ALL protest objectives are right. I have no idea why you would generalize that. In this particular event, don't you think what the HK protesters ask for are just?

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER20> I think Xi is not well prepared for urban guerrilla. He'll probably wait this out, get prepared for it, and shut up the protestors once and for all the next time they decide to make noise (maybe in 2-3 years?).

</comment><comment><USER21> Unfortunately in the event of (armed) intervention, I expect the US and Europe's reactions to be similar to the Kashoggi murder. A bit of faux outrage and then everything goes back to normal. Heck, I could even see Trump praise Xi Jinping for being such a strong leader.

<comment><USER15> And what would the US and Europe do? Invade China? Nuclear deterrence is still a thing.

<comment><AUTHOR> > _what would the US and Europe do?_

Recognise and arm Taiwan.

<comment><USER22> Taiwan as Taiwan, or Taiwan as the Republic of China?

There is only one UN Security Council seat for China.

<comment><AUTHOR> > _Taiwan as Taiwan, or Taiwan as the Republic of China?_

Taiwan can call itself whatever it wants.

Recognising the island's right to govern itself would be reasonable. Nobody would recognise Taiwan's claim on the mainland.

> _There is only one UN Security Council seat for China_

Out of all the challenges around recognising Taiwan, this is like the nine hundredth most pressing.

<comment><USER5> The issue is that PRC, ROC, and every other country in the world agrees in principle to the "One China Policy". The One China Policy is the fundamental basis of things. Nobody, even the Taiwanese, is willing to officially accept the notion that Taiwan is not part of China. I suspect that neither China or Taiwan would allow any country to simultaneously recognize both of them as separate de jure nation states.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER23> They are screwed without an armed populace.

<comment><USER24> > They are screwed without an armed populace.

Say Hong Kong did have something like the 2nd amendment, and more private firearms than citizens just like the USA.

What are the strategies and tactics that these people could use to win a military campaign against the might and weaponry of Chinese People's Liberation Army?

[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/People's_Liberation_Army](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/People's_Liberation_Army)

<comment><AUTHOR> > _What are the strategies and tactics that these people could use to win a > military campaign against the might and weaponry of Chinese People's > Liberation Army?_

Modern warfare hasn't figured out urban insurgencies. Pot shots and IEDs, sabotage, _et cetera_ would have made China's occupation of Hong Kong a PITA. It would raise the stakes of invasion from worldwide outrage to having to destroy Hong Kong in a Pyrrhic victory.

<comment><USER25> > Modern warfare hasn't figured out urban insurgencies.

Only in a sense of US rules of engagement.

However, look at other less scrupulous countries dealing with urban combat and you will see that while bloody they can pacify quickly.

If you know that resisting means death of your family, you're less likely to resist.

If your neighbour's best way to safeguard his family is to expose every guerilla fighter he knows he will do it.

The thing is, it won't be pyhrric victory, it will be a full and near lossless victory for PLA. Most HKers will lay down their arms because people generally dont want to die in a hopeless struggle and collective punishment will flush out the remaining guerrillas.

<comment><USER26> > less scrupulous countries dealing with urban combat

Do you have any examples? I'm not challenging you, I just don't know much about this topic.

<comment><USER25> ISIS conquering land in Iraq and Syria

Taliban taking over cities in Afghanistan

More "police" actions:

China pacifying Uighur and Tibet regions.

El-Sisi pacifying Muslim brotherhood in Egypt.

Basically, intense indiscriminate violence "solves" some problems.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER27> And now think whether there'd be a "dilemma" if they had the Second Amendment like we do. I think not.

<comment><USER28> The good thing with a second amendment, from the point of view of an authoritarian regime, is that if you arm loyalist militia to gun down protestors, you have plausible deniability. Look at Ukraine. A lot of weapons in the population, makes it easier for Russia to support a side without direct involvement.

<comment><USER27> Ukraine doesn't have 2A though. Most of the "weapons in the population" in the hot phase of the conflict there came directly from the military bases where the separatists used to serve. People simply switched allegiances. Some willingly, some not so willingly.

<comment><USER29> Wrong. Soldiers and weapons came from Russia.

<comment><USER27> What can be asserted without evidence can also be dismissed without evidence.

<comment><USER29> Yep, I dismiss your incorrect comment.</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment>


Like Today, the 1920s Roared With Technology - <AUTHOR> http://www.forbes.com/2009/07/28/great-depression-roosevelt-hoover-opinions-columnists-thomas-f-cooley.html <comment><USER2> Here we go again: another poor deluded soul who believes that today's social networking toys are comparable with the truly revolutionary technological advances of the past, such as the early electric appliances and the automobile.

<comment><USER3> Social networking toys? What, you mean smartphones, integrated GPS, augmented reality, robotics, pervasive communications networks. None of these advances strike you as important and potentially disruptive?

<comment><USER4> Relative though.

There's cell phone to iphone levels of disruption to the norm, and then there is kitchen sink to washing machine levels of disruption.

If you look at tech, a comparable time period to the 20's would be the late 80's early 90's, where we went from basically the industrial age to the information age in a matter of years.

What's happening now is nowhere close to the same scale.

<comment><USER5> What's happening now is the commoditization of the tech that started gaining traction in the early 90's. Speaking from a macroeconomic standpoint this is where all the fun is.

<comment><USER4> Depends on how you define fun, and where you sit. All the "fun" stuff from the 80's and 90's has turned into companies like Apple, Microsoft, Nokia and Motorola. Their founders have been living what I'm sure they would consider "fun" lives for quite a while. :-)

<comment><USER5> What I meant by fun was higher productivity, better utilisation of resources, rise in GDP based on innovation and that sort of stuff.

What is fun to one is, well something else, to another. :-)

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER6> So, the productivity increases of the 20's in essential areas like food production and household maintenance led to a rapid devaluation in the worth of the products of that labor. Hmm, so the globalization and commoditization of manufacturing labor and white collar labor is leading to the devaluation of the products of current 'service economy workers', 'knowledge workers', etc. So what is an unemployed 64 year old logic designer, programmer, and test engineer supposed to turn to for work in the future?</comment>


Announcing Google Research, Europe - <AUTHOR> https://research.googleblog.com/2016/06/announcing-google-research-europe.html <comment><USER2> This really makes me consider moving my family to Zurich.

Looking back at growing up in Germany/Europe made me really feel disadvantaged compared to people growing up in more tech friendly environments. I would want my child to grow up somewhere where technology is not overwhelmingly debated about in a negative light.

So much good stuff is coming out of ETH that it really seems to be a place where people talk more enthusiastically about tech in general.

<comment><USER3> I have actually applied to Google Zurich (but after 10 interviews they didn't hire me) and studied a bit how the life is there. There are many advantages or living there, but the cost of life and the fact that most people in Zurich are immigrants makes it a pretty cold city where it is hard to make friends or stay for a very long period of time. I think that now your point about "tech friendly environments" is not relevant anymore, because many countries support tech companies and offer a lot of grants for programmers and tech-related activities.

<comment><USER4> 10 interviews? is that normal for a research job? that feels like a lot

<comment><USER5> Apparently Apple, Google & co have so many applicants that they can do whatever they want. How incompetent can one be at interviewing to need 10 or 20 interviews?!

Soon they'll make candidates crawl through broken glass.

<comment><USER6> > _How incompetent can one be at interviewing to need 10 or 20 interviews_

Yes, after a full day of interviewing and five interviews, presumably preceded by phone interviews, the people responsible for hiring should be capable of reaching a decision.

I've found that hiring managers who don't value your time lead to managers who don't value your time. They say they want to screen for the best and brightest, but maybe they really want people who are subservient and willing to jump through hoops.

<comment><USER7> It's more likely both. They want good subservient people.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER8> A good sign of commitment by Google to their Zurich office - recently the Swiss papers had stories of Google looking towards building their London office, due to limitations in acquiring work permits for staff in Switzerand. This news somewhat contradicts it; Zurich really is an attractive location for talent to flock toward.

<comment><USER9> Zurich attractive? - I though it might be Google hedging its bets in the event of Brexit.

Though Cranfield CIT and half way between Oxford and Cambridge woudl have been another good choice. - they could even have taken RAF Twinwoods over as a site for a DC as it has a direct link to the Grid.

<comment><USER10> If they thought that Brexit would have a big impact on their business, they could just wait a couple weeks to announce anything.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER11> I guess ETH Zurich and EPFL are the reason why Google chose Switzerland "Europe is home to some of the world's premier technical universities, making it an ideal place to build a top-notch research team"

<comment><USER12> I'd guess the main reason is low tax on salaries, and less competition from finance than e.g. London.

<comment><USER13> Well, finance takes also a large chunk of Switzerland's GDP and thus is scooping up many engineers as well. Maybe it's not as pronounced as in London, but it certainly isn't very easy to hire good engineers here because of all the banks and hedge funds.

I think google came to Zurich because of EPFL/ETH, the very high living standard and most of all the rather liberal labor law. It's very easy to fire someone in Switzerland, compared to the surrounding countries.

<comment><USER14> I think that Google went to Zurich because an early engineer was from there.

<comment><USER15> Urs Hölzle (also an ETH alumni), who was googler n°8, but I'm not sure that was the reason; ;)

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER16> I would rather see Europe monetize their own tech instead of some US company.

<comment><USER17> Would be great if the next Google/Facebook/Microsoft was European and HQ'd in Europe, but it's hard to see that.

ML anecdotes - Schmidhuber makes a point of how LSTM was developed on European taxpayer's dime. Backpropagation was invented by Esko Linnainmaa (a Finnish researcher) in the 70s.

Universities or startups can't compete with finance/Google/FB level compensation, so that's where a lot of the bright minds go.

<comment><USER18> I also used to think that, and in the long-term I agree, and I have (i) done a startup in Europe (failed for lacking of funding) (ii) worked for a European startup (Prezi). But right now I work for Facebook (in London), and this is a good thing. You can go to these places and learn a lot, a lot more than what you can figure out on your own with your friends sitting in a garage or at one of the moderately successful European startups (moderately successful=0.1% of Facebook, that's already like $300-500M), which any sane entrepreneur here would be super happy over, fully so.

By "a lot" I mean cultural things, vision, strategy, how to set your own expectations, how decisions are made, what tools are available, etc.

<comment><USER17> I agree it's a good learning opportunity for individuals, but I still hope Europe will be able to produce new large, successful tech companies in the future. Right now a lot of the value is captured by US companies

<comment><USER19> For that the European home market needs to become easier to compete on, though, and it currently looks like it's moving towards getting a lot worse instead.

The Brexit might throw us back ten years.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER20> I love how they throw in a link to picasa instead of google photos. Anyway, this is really good news with the EPFL and ETH next to it, it's perfectly placed next to the core research centers of Europe.

<comment><USER21> Also close enough to Germany(hours with a train/bus from TUM)to hoover up the bright minds from there.

And then there is France (polytechnique) and the rest of Europe...

</comment></comment><comment><USER22> Anyone know why so many tech/pharma companies have research/development departments in Switzerland? It sounds expensive and not very centrally located.

A young company where I live have HQ in Switzerland, but that's just a post box and some servers for tax reasons. The are so few people working there it's negligible.

</comment><comment><USER23> This is great, I'm glad that they are tapping into the many very smart Europeans who aren't willing to leave Europe to work in the states.

That being said, I'm pretty sure this is almost an entirely tax based move. By doing this, they now have a way to spend a bunch of the money they have "stranded" in Europe.

</comment><comment><USER24> I definitely see the reasons behind this move. The computer vision department at ETH is particularly strong and that spills over to industry as well. There is Fashwell, a startup that is doing pretty well and they do ML / computer vision quite extensively.

Also, the ML meetup in Zurich has 2000 members, which is a lot for a small town like Zurich ([http://www.meetup.com/Zurich-Machine- Learning/](http://www.meetup.com/Zurich-Machine-Learning/)).

Salaries are huge (7000 CHF - 12.000 CHF after taxes) and the living standard is very high. I am well-connected in the tech-scene in Zurich and if you're thinking of moving here and need support, send me a message (e-mail is in my HN-handle). Disclosure: I am a tech-recruiter.

</comment><comment><USER25> Is that a dog?

</comment><comment><USER26> >This really makes me consider moving my family to Zurich.

If you immigrate to America you can become an American. You can shop till you drop, eat mc donlads, celebrate 4th of july and call yourself an american.

This can not be said for _any_ other country. In Germany you will always be an "immigrant", maybe if your kids are white and young enough to pick up the language maybe they can become invisible. But for anyone else it impossible to become german, dutch ect. I don't mean any of it in a negative way, btw.

<comment><USER27> Completely disagree on that.

Lived ten years in California. Studies, Green Card etc. Could have gone for citizenship, but didn't. I was never seen as an American. Ever. Not even a little bit. I was always 'the German'.

Almost every coffee shop, restaurant, super market, you name it I got asked where I am from or where my accent is from.

No. It is not cute. It reminds you you are NOT one of them.

<comment><USER28> > you name it I got asked where I am from or where my accent is from.

Your interpretation of these sorts of questions may have been influenced by your German upbringing.

There's a wide variety of accents even by Americans who were born and raised here. Add in the fact that we're all pretty much only a generation or two removed from at least one immigrant, and discussion about where people are from, etc. is typically just a way for people to make conversation and attempt to connect with one another.

There are probably nationalities which would make certain people uncomfortable and treat you differently, but I don't think Germany is one of those.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER29> Yeah, surely this isn't a move to get some EU funding... And to provide a base for the massive lobbyist team in Brussels.

<comment><USER30> 1) Why do you think Google needs EU funding for their research ? Last I checked they had one of the largest cash reserves outside the US - which means a lot of it is in the EU, if anything this is a way to smartly spend that cash rather than get taxed repatriating it.

2) The lobbyists can be based in Brussels, Zurich isn't that close to Brussels anyways!

<comment><USER29> 1) Needs? Of course they don't need it. A -lot- of organisations asking for EU funding don't need it.

2) Yeah, but Zurich is a much nicer place than Brussels :) . And most likely not as watched by investigative journalists.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER31> I wonder if this is because Google is having trouble recruiting people to the US, due to the crazy political system there, or because of visas or because of people with concerns about surveillance, gun control, the death penalty, lack of whistleblower protections, etc.

<comment><USER32> Or it could be just because they want distributed teams with multicultural talent in different timezones.

<comment><USER33> From what I've seen there's a ton of research or computer science-y talent in Europe. Makes sense for Google to try to get some of that.</comment></comment></comment>


Airbnb works with California, builds on efforts to fight discrimination - <AUTHOR> https://www.airbnbcitizen.com/airbnb-works-with-california-builds-on-efforts-to-fight-discrimination/ <comment><USER2> So... What's the purpose of this agreement? The only new stuff from the agreement is in the third bullet point, which I think is the tl;dr:

> Airbnb will continue to expand its efforts to make it easy for users to file > discrimination complaints, and offer additional information for users who > seek to file complaints with the Department of Fair Employment and Housing.

Disclaimer: I work at Airbnb

<comment><USER3> I agree. It all seems very hand wavy. I still remember their advertising campaign in SF thanking themselves for paying taxes. It makes it hard to take anything they say seriously.

</comment></comment><comment><USER4> still waititng for the media to turn on them ala uber. they do shitty stuff</comment>


Aldi 3D printer - <AUTHOR> https://www.engadget.com/2017/11/08/aldi-3d-balco-printer/ <comment><AUTHOR> When I was a kid Aldi was for Gummibaerchen and Mirinda. Now you can buy a 3D printer - maybe I should get one and compare to the ones we make...

<comment><USER2> I think Aldi is being (somewhat) consistent here by bringing relatively new high tech products to the masses. When I was a kid in the 90's, Aldi in Germany was famous for their affordable Windows PCs they were offering from time to time. On those days people were lining up in front of the supermarkets early in the morning.</comment></comment>


POPDEEM -Have you heard of us? - <AUTHOR> http://www.popdeem.com/

<comment><USER2> Nope!

By the way-- the white text overlaps your background at very high resolutions and makes the product description line unreadable, especially above 1830px wide in FF. The "Buy 1 get 1 free" overlaps "reward" which might be the single most important word for context.</comment>


Jemalloc - <AUTHOR> https://github.com/jemalloc/jemalloc

<comment><USER2> I've been keeping an eye on malloc's for quite a while, and they are getting ridiculously big nowadays. The malloc complexity seems to be greater than the programs themselves. With that kind of complexity it's hard to do objective comparisons, and the frameworks to do objective tests are nowhere to be found. So it is no surprise everyone claims to be best. Hint: Complex malloc for complex things.

If you like mallocs: [https://github.com/emeryberger/Malloc- Implementations](https://github.com/emeryberger/Malloc-Implementations). Don't think they have the disruptor based one yet: [https://github.com/bytemaster/disruptor/tree/master/fc2](https://github.com/bytemaster/disruptor/tree/master/fc2)</comment>


After Budget Cuts, the IRS' Work Against Tax Cheats Is Facing "Collapse" - <AUTHOR> https://www.propublica.org/article/after-budget-cuts-the-irs-work-against-tax-cheats-is-facing-collapse <comment><USER2> Tax cheats like the current President of the United States[1], the leader of the Executive Branch, whose job it is to ensure that tax law is enforced?

1\. [https://www.yahoo.com/news/trump-helped-parents-shield- milli...](https://www.yahoo.com/news/trump-helped-parents-shield-millions- taxes-york-times-002042585.html)

<comment><USER3> Isn't fraud if the IRS okayed it.</comment></comment>


Accidentally in Code - <AUTHOR> https://cate.blog/2018/05/08/creating-success-together/ <comment><USER2> "Accidentally in Code" is the name of the blog. The title of the article is "Creating Success, Together".

Anyway, this does provide some food for thought on how to create an effective working environment.</comment>


A Parable - <AUTHOR> http://www.cs.virginia.edu/~evans/cs655/readings/ewd594.html

<comment><USER2> The children's bedtime story [from a former(?) Russian satellite] version of this parable is a projector film slide series titled "The coloured pencil", from the same era. It cheekily teaches the parents on how a "cost driven market based" pencil factory had a brilliant innovator, arguing, that there is no need for graphite in the end of a pencil, since nobody can use pencils when they are shorter than a cm or so. The savings made on using less graphite was stellar, the innovator got promoted.

Seeing the success, soon the second innovation followed: what use is the wood at the end of the pencil, when there isn't any graphite inside? Less wood, more profit.

And this handling of "externalised" costs continued until the pencil became dysfunctional, unusable (Dijkstra as a programmer would notice the powerful idea of recursion).

The story ends with the reinvention of the pencil, and a huge prime for the genius.

Back to Dijkstra's version: an MBA market analyst would come up with a "research" study which concludes, that in order to improve the "user experience" of the customers on the train, at least (two) WC-s would be needed in each wagon, pocketing a hefty consulting fee for the ground breaking innovation.

</comment><comment><USER3> I get the story. I even kind of like it, but I still can't help thinking it would have been cheaper just to outfit everything with toilets and get on with life.

I kind of feel the same way about laptop "stand by" for energy saving (good motive, wasteful execution). My time = money and the cost of having my laptop turned on needlessly per hour is less than 2 cents while my wasted time every time it happens when I'm just about to use it/reading what it says is worth more than 2 cents. If it is about the environment I would rather them just double the price of electricity and use that towards green initiatives.

<comment><USER4> The idea is that, initially, all cars had toilets (see the invisible emphasis of "only" in "if only fifty percent of the cars would be equipped with a toilet"). Of course, there must have been plenty of cost associated with handling toilet complaints and training (and re-training) at the shunting yard, but we can guess that the long term savings made up for that.

</comment></comment><comment><USER5> just for the record: there are _lots_ of brilliant articles in dijkstra's EWDs. i am particularly fond of trip reports (almost always funny), programming language comments (e.g. EWD498, or EWD898: " _Stop BASIC before it stops you_ ") and insights to the commercial field of computer science (EWD 898: "I have fond memories of a project of the early 70's that postulated that we did not need programs at all! All we needed was _intelligence amplification_. If they have been able to design something that could _amplify_ at all, they have probably discovered it would amplify stupidity as well; in any case I have not heard from it since.")

<comment><USER6> Might he have been talking about Douglas Englebart's "Augmenting Human Intellect" project? (which invented the mouse as well as provided the foundation of GUIs, hypertext, and the Internet -- although any amplification of intelligence is debatable.)</comment></comment>


IPad Personality Clash: Elites vs. Geeks - <AUTHOR> http://mytype.com/blog/?p=109

<comment><USER2> Beware - major generalizations of "geeks" lay within that article.

I consider myself an "independent geek" in the basic sense that the article portrays it, up until it says such geeks find the iPad uninteresting because it's a) not the first tablet computer and b) is basically a "giant iPhone."

Perhaps I'm weird for appreciating aesthetics and user interfaces, but I'm willing to overlook openness, open source, and "hackability" for certain devices if I get significant value from them. I don't want to hack my washing machine, car, TV, or iPad. They have specific uses and I want them to be attractive, easy to use, and suited to purpose.

The iPad, to me, is an appliance, not a computer. Let Apple dictate the UI and app experience however much they want, as long as I can come back to my regular computer and still have access to any software and OS of my choice. The iPad is a mere magazine to my workstation's printing press.</comment>


Ask HN: How can we help our communities and the world during this pandemic? - <AUTHOR> In big or small ways, how can we help our neighbors, communities, or the world during this challenging time?
Giving blood? Signing up as election judge? Coding something?
I don't know what might be useful, but I get the sense that the HN community would have a unique perspective on this. Looking forward to any and all responses. <comment><USER2> Someone we know is in a local nursing home. He is tech savvy and communicates with video chat, but many residents don't have that option.

Many states, including ours, have locked down these facilities, not allowing any visitation. These people are lonely.

You can send cards and other items to the facilities addressed to "any resident", or with a cover letter explaining you are wishing your gift to go to a resident who needs it.

</comment><comment><USER3> Where do you live? Building awareness is #1 for sure. Pick a truck and help seniors get food and other products without leaving home.

The rest depends on where you are located.</comment>