> This operation, disclosed in an August 2013 Wall Street Journal story,[2] was officially ended in August 2017,[3] and the FDIC settled multiple lawsuits by promising to Congress additional training for its examiners and to cease issuing "informal" and "unwritten suggestions" to banks.
This program actually seems pretty sketchy. Government officials were having banks to identify customers in certain industries and subsequently "informally suggesting" that banks terminate these customers' accounts. Congress also criticized this program:
> Forceful prosecution of those who defraud American consumers is both responsible and admirable. However, Department of Justice initiatives to combat mass-market consumer fraud must be legitimate exercises of the Department's legal authorities, and must be executed in a manner that does not unfairly harm legitimate merchants and individuals.
> Operation Choke Point fails both these requirements. The Department's radical reinterpretation of what constitutes an actionable violation under § 951 of FIRREA fundamentally distorts Congress' intent in enacting the law, and inappropriately demands that bankers act as the moral arbiters and policemen of the commercial world. In light of the Department's obligation to act within the bounds of the law, and its avowed commitment not to "discourage or inhibit" the lawful conduct of honest merchants, it is necessary to disavow and dismantle Operation Choke Point.
Should the government be able to strip people of their ability to use banking services, even when they have committed no crimes? Sure, we may not like gun stores or fireworks or porn but the kicking people off of banking services without justification is quite authoritarian.
(And before anyone gets triggered about me talking about politics, please notice that the examples below are referring to both parties in the same light)
1. Selling marijuana is still illegal federally but there are hundreds of companies selling it out in the open in states where it is legal. Neither Republican or Democratic Presidents seem to have much interest in prosecuting them. Yes I know The former attorney general under Trump wanted to start prosecutions but the Republican Congress at the time basically said he couldn’t use funds for it and it went against what even Trump wanted.
2. How many companies were paying illegal immigrants for farm labor and factory work while both Republican and Democratic lawmakers looked the other way until Trump? I am not making a value judgement either way here.
3. Uber
Your second example was also not something large public companies were doing consistently and I don't think that has changed with a different administration.
"Uber" is not any sort of statement or reasoning in support of what you are saying.
The Koch Brothers run multiple national companies and had one of their companies recently raided for employing illegal immigrants.
https://www.chicagotribune.com/business/ct-biz-ice-raids-koc...
Nope
> The Koch Brothers run multiple national companies and had one of their companies recently raided for employing illegal immigrants.
Are you implying they did this because the previous administration 'did not care' ? That's a large assumption.
Everyone knows that farmers and companies employing low skill labor have been employing illegal immigrants for decades. Other presidents both Republican and Democrats have looked the other way because both sets of employers would not be able to find enough cheap labor otherwise. No one wants to harm the farm belt because of their outsized electoral college influence.
How is any of this about large companies not caring about laws because of a new president?
My post:
“ It’s not about the regulations, it’s about whether the executive branch chooses to enforce them and how much.”
And the response to:
“ That's really not true, you can't run a giant public company and start breaking laws because you think 'the current executive branch won't care'.”
What does it have to do with “changing” the executive branch?
The “executive branch” is not just at the federal level. It’s also at the state and the local level where the president/governor/mayor has a lot of influence on what gets enforced.
I can definitely understand not wanting to invest in these sorts of start-ups purely from an ROI perspective.
Saab comes to mind.
I wonder if they would also fund email spammers if there was money in it.
Games maybe not so much by nature, but the publishers are trying everything they can to increase your time in game.
The classification of sex and pornography as "addictive" has been controversial, and all I'll say about that is that there is no scientific consensus that they should be considered as such.
Porn, you can call it anecdotal, but over a decade in that industry taught me, its certainly addictive for some, and is are some very manipulative marketing going on by the smarter companies. But i do see the opposing argument, people get addicted to all kinds of strange things and nothing about porn per se is addicting. it's that ending they are addicted to, not the content.
I really wish our society could take all of the energy that goes into criminalizing and stigmatizing vice industries and instead use it to offer help to people who are dangerously addicted. Just think of how much free therapy, rehab, and drug research could be funded by the tens of billions of dollars that the drug war has cost.
[0] Gaming is the industry term for gambling
Many people will also say that a delicious food, an entertaining game, or an enjoyable TV show is "addictive", but these do not actually constitute addictions either.
People with scientific backgrounds hypothesize all the time, and they have machines that can make brain scan images, but we aren’t very close to being able to measure addiction on a numerical scale.
The best we have is listening to people, maybe analogous to how we listen to people when they believe they are a different gender, etc. since there is no quantitative measure for ‘feelings’ (see Olympic male/female athlete controversies, et al.)
We may get there some day...
Hard sciences may be, but there are quite a soft science domains such as psychology. We do not yet know exact nature of addiction, but psychological, environmental impacts have not been ruled out, by most scientists.
DeltaFOSB is a gene transcription factor and is the precursor for the development of all forms of what is clinically called "addiction". However what the other commentators suggested [food is not addictive] is not actually true, it has a measurable affect here. In fact, Delta-FOSB can be and often is used as a biomarker of addiction in patients who are already deceased (and can have their brains broken open).
Now, as to the question of addictiveness, nobody mentioned anything about pornography there, but I did hear an interesting anecdote about the raw power that certain addictions have that clearly isn't present in pornography; Delta FOS-B accumulates in the ventral tagamental area and nucleus accumbens, two central regions of the brain, and many drugs have the action of creating floods of FOS-B precursors there, for example, this effect is so strong in heroin addicts, that they nearly always throw up upon recent re-exposure (sometimes newer Methamphetamine addicts as well) where the mechanism here is the flood of FOSB, which an outer region (she had mentioned but I have already forgotten which) interprets as "poisoning". So while it may be true that pornography is "addicting" - when is the last time you saw someone throw up when they looked at pornography (modulo ordinary "disgust").
What was doubly interesting was that she said the change in dopamine regulation (meaning the introduction of new dopamine-like substances + the change in the rate that your body "reuptakes" dopamine) in the most powerful addictions -- benzodiazapines and opiates, aren't actually that high, and compared with drugs like methamphetamine and cocaine aren't much different from marijuana.
It's this secondary affect that creates these changes in reasoning and reward structure with these drugs (she also mentioned that both have "withdrawal", which while technically unrelated to addiction is extremely painful and sometimes life-threatening).
However, to be fair, it was repeatedly stressed that the "secondary" affect was more than just Delta-FOSB. There were changes in signaling, new kinds of peptides that unaddicted people can't produce (???), something about phosphoration of camp ("new notes on camp") and bunch of change to "Dendritic Spiny Structures".
Among the living, questions like "drug-use reinstatement likelihood", "place conditioning preference" (the more addictive the drug, the more you want to use it in a safe, known place), increase in use over time, etc. are how this stuff is generally measured with reasonable economics.
This is not precise, but it seems like an appropriate metric. It's basically the same as defining mental illness in general vs. harmless eccentricity.
Sex is not similar to alcohol, tobacco, or pharmaceutical addictions.
You can have orgasms alone without purchasing anything. There's also debate about whether you can be addicted to sex. 1) It's a normal part of our lifecycles, 2) there's no withdrawal effect after you get off of it, and 3) it's a convenient way to pathologize bad behavior.
E-sports are game competitions, not video games in and of themselves. You can be no more addicted to them than you can be to the NBA.
At least in the US, a majority of deaths by firearm are suicides. And as for potentially addictive drugs (e.g., alcohol), the user can cause great harm to other people, as in drunk driving.
[1]https://www.pewresearch.org/fact-tank/2019/08/16/what-the-da...
Fivethirtyeight says about 2/3 of gun deaths are suicides. Around 1/3 are homicides. A surprisingly small percentage (to me) are classified as accidents.[0]
The amount of people who know nothing about guns and never shot one under proper supervision and then go out and purchase a firearm without researching anything are extremely low, so accidents remain pretty low.
There are some guns for which the basic dogmatic instruction is probably insufficient. Notably glocks; in some circles "glock" has become a verb, wherein to "glock yourself" means to accidentally shoot yourself in the leg with your glock while holstering or upholstering it. More specialized training can reduce the chances of this happening, but for this specific scenario and some others like it, the standard basic safety instructions fall a bit short in my opinion.
[0] One example: http://www.rcmp-grc.gc.ca/cfp-pcaf/safe_sur/acts-tpto-eng.ht... Other rulesets often have the same ideas worded in slightly different ways.
This is really about boutique/niche product manufacturing. There's usually not a reasonable path to becoming a billion-dollar company, at any degree of risk. That's what "startup capital" wants... to get in on the ground floor of a billion dollar company. They want that 100x return. You're not going to get a 100x return manufacturing a better rifle scope or a boutique handgun.
This is what banks are for. Start business on scraped capital, show real customers and real profit, then go to a traditional bank with a traditional business plan for scaling capital.
Make a consumer product banks can copy and try to prove its viable and I think you'll get that feedback.
That’s also very tangential to the fact that while some areas of banking, finance or weapons dealing may be dominated by large institutions, there’s plenty of other areas that are not. Stripe is a perfect example in how they started out by capturing a retail market that was outside the core business of the large players. Nobody would look at their value prop and say “finance is overfunded”, because that ignores what area they were actually trying to compete in.
If you wanted to make a startup that looked to innovate retail weapons trade, then no investor is going to tell you “you’ll never compete with Raytheon”, because no matter how big they are, they don’t compete in retail weapons trade. What they would more likely tell you is something like “we don’t invest in that vice industry”.
I say “some of”, because things like magazines and accessories are usually included in the “prohibited goods and services” clauses, even though they are typical subject to no specific regulation at either the state or federal level. It’s honestly kind of weird to me.