Incredibly this actually happened and isn’t a slip

> Whoever, having devised or intending to devise any scheme or artifice to defraud, or for obtaining money or property by means of false or fraudulent pretenses, representations, or promises, transmits or causes to be transmitted by means of wire, radio, or television communication in interstate or foreign commerce, any writings, signs, signals, pictures, or sounds for the purpose of executing such scheme or artifice

It’s wire fraud

What were the false or fradulent pretenses, representations, or promises?

A false representation of user interest

Are you a lawyer?

> I think it's the only way to protect yourself from their hyper-nervousness.

“the only way” puts me in mind of The Onion headline “‘No Way To Prevent This,’ Says Only Nation Where This Regularly Happens”

I mean the key point there I think is the one where they point out that Brits simply wouldn’t accept police regularly shooting people. Policing for the people by the people.*

* and pretend Northern Ireland doesn’t exist, or course

It's rare even in NI.

PSNI had one single firearm discharge in the two year period covering October 2023 - September 2025.

Plus 948 uses of irritant spray, 496 uses of their baton, and 38 taser discharges in the same period. And 23,489 uses of "unarmed physical tactics".

That's for a population of around 2 million. By comparison, SFPD had 10 "officer involved shootings" in the past year for a population of 800k, a rate fifty times higher than that in NI.

True. The PSNI have had an excellent record – particularly given the difficult context they work in.

I guess the above poster is thinking of the shoot-to-kill era of the 80s (still well within living memory): https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Shoot-to-kill_policy_in_Northe...

Yeah, it was very different back then. And not just the police - we had the army on the streets with weapons drawn, routinely aiming at passersby.

The political situation in the late 1960s provided plenty of kindling, but it seems clear that most of the sparks that actually caused the conflagration came from the barrel of guns held by soldiers and the police. They were directly responsible both for the death of the civil rights movement and the collapse of the government, and without the heavy-handed response it's likely that the settlement of the late 90s would've happened 25 years earlier.

It's actually a great example of why the militarisation of policing should be resisted at all cost.

The one thing I'll say in defense of American cops is that they are police a population that's vastly more likely to have their own guns, too.

Of course it's not like American cops have recognized the danger that poses and politically aligned themselves with reducing or restricting access to guns, so they lose a lot of credit there, but they are genuinely facing a better armed and therefore more dangerous population.

To be fair, guns aren't exactly unknown in NI, either!

There are 153k people who have legal firearms (so about 10% of the adult population, vs about three times that in the US). That's largely farmers with shotgun licenses (NI is pretty rural by European standards) plus licensed "weapons for personal protection" for people exposed to threats for whatever reason as a legacy of the Troubles.

And then there are some unknown number with illegally-held guns - the main armed groups put their weapons "beyond use" as part of the decommissioning process in the 2000s, but inevitably some will have been missed, and then there are the dissident groups who still hold significant amounts of weaponry.

Hard to put an exact figure on it, but if you guesstimate it at a weapons ownership rate at about half that of the US you probably wouldn't be too far from the truth.

So even after accounting for the differential in gun ownership, SFPD are still shooting people at ~25x the rate of the PSNI.

Is it legal to carry firearms concealed in Northern Ireland? It's not the presence of guns in a guns safe that makes policing more dangerous, it's the fact the a sizeable chunk of the American public is actively carrying firearms.

Yes, at least for personal protection weapons. And, obviously, the unlicensed users (ie. members of dissident gangs) won't care whether it's legal or not.

PPW holders will be people who have had specific, verifiable threats made against their lives - so will often be people with links to violence, terrorism, or criminality. And, obviously, the unlicensed users are criminals by definition.

So, on balance, the average weapons owner in NI is probably more dangerous than the equivalent in the US. I do agree that it's hard to make anything more than a very general comparison between the two very different situations, however.

Google tells me 2,700 in Northern Ireland have authorization to carry firearms privately.

By comparison in my county in Washington state, there are 114,000 active concealed firearm permit holders out of a population of 2.3 million. And this is a liberal, fairly urbanized region.

We're talking ~50x the rate of people carrying firearms legally. Of course data on criminals carrying weapons is not so transparent, but it's suffice to say that American police are much more regularly encountering people with firearms.

Couches aren’t known to have guns and the cops in Afromans house search the couch as if it’s about to bite them.

It’s a very American mixture of fear and bravado in a feedback loop which means every piece of evidence of cowardice has to be compensated for with even more overt aggression.

Hence cops in full body armor with guns drawn behaving like black and tans in Palestine.

Canada has the same rates of gun ownership as America and you don't see cops come up with guns blazing like they do here

If Canada is like New Zealand, which also has a similarly high rate of gun ownership - it's largely different types of guns - that is, guns for hunting, not for killing people - very hard to conceal a rifle or shotgun compared to a pistol.

That is bad use of statistics. San Francisco forms the core of an urban conurbation of over eight million people.

Sure, but SFPD covers only the County of San Francisco which had a population of 827,526 in 2024.

It's certainly not a perfect comparison by any means - but that's more to do with the very different urban/rural splits, forms and structures of inequality, histories of segregation and political violence etc.

If you can suggest another American police department which would make for a better comparison, I'd be interested in seeing the stats... but I strongly suspect that they'd show a very similar contrast.

In Britain, there is independent civilian investigation when cops kill a person. It creates pressure to not kill, because you wont be judged by buddies.

Well, the IOPC (Independent Office for Police Conduct) has mandatory referrals, not only when police apparently shot somebody, or they die in police custody, or in a traffic accident with a police vehicle, but also cases where the police were recently involved. e.g. Sharon calls police because she says her husband punched her, when officers attend Sharon now says he didn't mean to and seems reluctant to leave or for her husband to be arrested, attending officers decide to leave it as it is, an hour later Sharon is dead and her husband is her presumed killer - that's a police involved death and so that gets referred to the IOPC even though nobody thinks a cop killed anybody.

However, the IOPC is not mandated to conduct investigations. So it is possible (though less likely for a shooting) that the IOPC will just kick it back to local police. It is also possible (and more likely) that they will oversee but use local police to do the actual work, just because that's much cheaper and their budget is limited.

Have you ever been to inner city America? Honestly curious. I couldn't imagine policing it without using a gun sometime.

I have my own mini framework that marries Claude and Codex. When I see the clangers that Claude by itself produces that Codex catches, I can’t see how I’d ever just let a single agent do its thing.

It’s not a conundrum, it’s a stealth regressive tax. The people who could fix it don’t want it fixed, and there’s are massive commercial incentives to keep perpetuating it, wrapped up in arguments against socialism.

I am building https://agentblocks.ai for just this; you set fine-grained rules on what your agents are allowed to access and when they have to ask you out-of-channel (eg via WhatsApp or Slack) for permissions, with no direct agent access. It works today, well, supports more tools than are on the website, and if you have any need for this at all, I’d love to give you an account: pete@agentblocks.ai

Works great with OpenClaw, Claude Cowork, or anything, really

> it depends on what you enjoy: the journey or the destination

I thought I enjoyed the journey more, but it turns out the destination is wild! There are still quite a few projects I keep for myself, pieces I want done in a specific way, that I now have time to do properly, while the dull stuff can get done elsewhere.

I find Gemini to be real bad. Are you just using it for price reasons, or?