ORF ORF ORF

Yeah this is basically just a dad joke.

And this is being told to us by a drug addled, serial conman, with an insemination, but not actually breeding kink, who lies about his prowess in video games for attention and validation, and just released an interactive AI girlfriend/boyfriend simulator…

Who is also the richest man in the world.

Who paid for the person he is now mud slinging at, to become President.

…

We live in a fever dream, or fan fiction level attempt at a cyberpunk novel from the 80s.

Fuck it, maybe simulation theory is correct, and us running a whole bunch of AI bullshit inside of it is just actually collapsing the narrative generation capacity of the simulation.

Damnit.

I’ve now made the fever dream even more ludicrous.

Learn the ways of OSINT, follow only the rules you want to.

On that note, may I interest you in a free, interactive instruction plan that teaches ethical hacking?

I was gonna ask, was this… that ball pit?

Ughhhh…

I hear you that you don’t want a full point by point debate, so I’ll just respond as succinctly as I can.

A credit score is not, and should be construed as, a measure of responsibility (I see this line of thought a lot!) It’s simply a measure of how risky it is to loan you money based on your established history of being loaned money. (You and I would probably fully agree about it being inappropriate for credit scores to be used for anything outside that scope, however!)

I… guess we agree on that last sentence, but you have to know that credit scores are routinely used for all sorts of things other than lending people money, that an entire data economy exists around this.

Most notably, in country where fewer and fewer people have no option but to rent a living space… If your credit score sucks, you don’t get to live anywhere.

Companies soft pull your credit score before they decide to interviee or hire you.

Credit scores just are the social credit score all the rightwingers in the US are terrified of China for having, but they’re controlled by corporations instead.

…

Calling credit card use “going into debt” feels similar to saying that wearing a seatbelt is “tethering yourself down”.

Two different, domain specific meanings.

I am focusing on the most literal and technically accurate one.

You are focusing on the colloquial one, which implies an onerous quantity of debt.

…

As to credit unions being imperfect… yep.

They’re not as competetive in many ways, because they do not have an exceptionally wide array of accounts to spread risk over… they are in my view, more representative of realistic local credit conditions.

…

In general, you ignored my broader, main point of a totally financialized economy leading to a less equitable society… so… yeah.

Credit isn’t a tool you can voluntarily use or not use or use in a different way.

You have direct control over a hammer. You do not have direct control over your credit report and score, it is abstracted, obfuscated behind layers of bureacracy.

You also have no choice but to use it, if you want to be an independent adult.

Its easier to live in the US without a car than without a credit score/history.

It is not optional if you want to participate in normal society.

…

Welp, I did try to be succinct. I did not do a very good job, apologies for that, lol.

Republicans are extremely talented in the art of cucking themselves.

They learned it from their version of God.

Its a Stop Killing Games kind of issue.

Governments generally don’t care, don’t really understand it or take it seriously.

So, no one ever … attempts to regulate some new paradigm for payment processors.

You’d need a mass social movement to petiton governments.

Or maybe use I2P?

…

Also lol at your last line.

No, no living in a capitalist society means the richest capitalists are in charge, the free market isn’t real, capitalists hate competiton, and love being as close to a monopoly as possible.

They just say ‘free market good’ because it easily convinces those that have not studied economic history.

If capitalism just, was a purely efficient societal structure, it would assign prohibitive costs to corruption, racism, sexism, sexual preference discrimination, etc, etc.

( the naive, pro free market interpretation, taken to its logical conclusion )

Or, you could argue, it is pricing those things correctly, and that the general will of the people is infact racist and sexist.

( the ancap interpretation )

Outcome is still the same, either way.

The free market naturally corrupts itself, concentrates wealth, and money talks louder than poverty does… in a market based society.

You have to have an effective societal counter balance to that at all times, otherwise, you just end up with oligarchy with extra steps.

And the capitalists are of course motivated by their own capitalism logic to undermine and destroy that counter balance… so they uh, do that, all the time.

It is worth noting that the .xxx domain does still exist.

Its… a lot more like the late 90s / early 00s web.

https://icannwiki.org/.xxx

www.Search.xxx

I… am uncertain as to whether or not payment processors …care at all, or a lot about anything going on here…

But uh yeah, people could just… start using this domain more and try to force a re-evaluation of internet/society norms.

The internet is a lot less of a ‘US sets all the rules’ thing these days.

Transaction times have improved a lot, there are networks designed for fast transaction times, and usually the payment can complete in seconds.

Hrm, well, if that is true, then that is a considerable improvement.

The volatility problem is solved by stable coins, which have their values fixed relative a currency. (Of course stable coins can, and have failed in the past. But that only concerns you if you keep your money as stable coin. For one-off payments this shouldn’t matter).

But it absolutely does matter if you are a retailer that builds or uses a payment processor system around a ‘stable’ coin that suddenly flatlines one day.

There goes your ability to sell things!

Or, even worse, if the retailer does hold a standing balance in the ‘stable’ balance, or pays the sellers directly in a crypto… welp, theres, what, half of a months operating revenue, poof, gone, all the sellers? Now totally broke, unless they’re also active crypto traders at the same time as being people who make things to sell.

Crypto markets have pretty good liquidity nowadays, it’s not hard to get rid of the coins immediately after you get them (well to be fair if you are getting Valve volumes it could be a problem, should be fine for smaller stores).

I mean, you kind of showed a major flaw right there.

Yep, volume is much better.

But… not sufficient for actual large scale retail, or many, many small to mid size retailers.

Also, to the best of my knowledge… no ‘stable’ coin has anywhere near the volume of say BTC or ETH.

Crypto is a fast evolving field, so problems are being solved by the day.

No, hard disagree.

Most coins haven’t even figured out how to actually be significantly, meaningfully untraceable, other than XMR.

Even a tornado blender thing can be unwound… or it can just steal some of your money.

What else has crypto figured out in almost 20 years now?

Well, aside from being an optimal vector for scamming people…

A new verification paradigm that still leaves it orders of magnitude more energy intensive than traditional payment processors?

NFTs? Who cares, its the least efficient FTP protocol ever devised, quite easy to poison or social hack.

I guess if payment processing speeds are now comparable to existing payment processors… wow, crypto is slightly less useless than what proceeded it?

I’ve beem following this shit since before Mt Gox opened the first online trading market.

Crypto has managed to become the most speculative, fundamental-less investment ‘asset class’ of all known human history.

It still isn’t really private, and you still can’t generally buy things with it, barring a few niche exceptions.

…

You can send a check, a digital eCheck, as payment for many, many things, thats been around longer than crypto.

If you are running an adult video game store, just accept that, can paypal.

Might be slow, but its very, very simple, and cheap for a store to implement.

Hard disagree with your first sentence.

If you are using a credit card for everything, you are going into debt.

If you pay it all off every month, you are very skilled at going into debt.

Thats kind of the whole point of on time payments and carried balance as % of max balance as components of credit scores.

…

You could just be doing the same thing with less steps by using a Debit Card.

But, the former activity boosts your credit score, and the latter activity does not…

Despite both people being equally responsible.

…

However, if you lose that discipline, or an emergency happens, and you are on paradigm one…

Now you get charged interest, late fees, cash advance fees.

But, in the old school, just use and have a normal, more local bank account model, pre mass proliferation of credit scores…

Your bank is going to know you, probably trust you, and can offer you a loan themselves, a personal line of credit, and they’ll probably give you lower rates, less arcane fee structure.

…

Also… banking locally (with an actual local bank) or using a local credit union…actually keeps money within your local community.

The local bank is only gonna be giving business and home loans… to local people.

The local credit union is not going to be massively tied up in things like collaterialized debt obligations trading on Wall Street.

Smear that all around nationally, globally, you end up with a system that is much, much more prone to highly financialzed, massive scale boom and bust cycles.

During the booms, the rich get hyper rich.

During the busts, the poor get decimated, the ‘middle’ become poor.

IE, Neoliberal globalism, austerity, etc.

…

The full picture is much more complex than this, but hopefully this is simplified enough that you can see how … just using credit for literally everything, all the time… primarily benefits wealthy capital owners, and actually makes the economy more fragile, and spreads this fragility, and thus precarity, around like a cancer.

The all credit all the time model is why during financial crises, the banks get bailed out, and the people get austerity.

To do otherwise would collapse the finance sector, and well, we can’t have that, because then the hyper rich would actually suffer.

Making having a credit score functionally mandatory to particpate in society, means you are functionally mandated to be reliant on this system that routinely, reliably, predictably booms and busts, transfers real wealth upward to the capital class over time.

Really not that different than being born as an outright and literal debt slave, its just less obvious, less direct, works more slowly, more gradually.

The system does not need to be this total, this unavoidable, this unregulated, this inequitable.

Hell, most of the rest of the world still calls itself capitalist, but doesn’t operate in this extremely permissive to the capital class manner that the US does… hypercapitalist, profligate.

A malignant narcissist never lives in reality anyway, this just becomes more apparent with age.

EDIT:

Well, the first half of that isn’t totally true, if they can grow a sufficient cult of personality, turn a good chunk of the world into a sycophantic hugbox for them.

These usually collapse as they go truly senile or incredibly delusional… or they functionally become the figurehead of a persistent cult or religion.

I believe you are correct, but I was perhaps not clear enough there.

What I meant was, had Kamala won, I doubt she would have sent B2s to bomb Natanz, Fordow and Ishfahar.

She maybe, might have agreed to some kind of support role in a much, much more limited version of that kind of a strike, but it likely would have been at least given the Blinken treatment of a veneer of plausible deniability.

Which is fucking awful, but is at least more competent in terms of staying on messsge and presenting an official ‘stance’… in neoliberal ghoul logic, which does unfortunately convince many people.

EDIT: Or, maybe, now being President, she could have actually broken from the seemingly very Biden driven deference to Israel, and actually drawn a line at at least… maybe no Israel, you shouldn’t bomb Iran that provocatively, we will actually stop giving you some kind of weapon if you do that… maybe even abstain from some UN vote on whether or not you’re doing a genocide, instead of voting no.

Hypotheticals, but…seemingly at least possible, to me.

Well, its… kind of hard to totally disentangle Syria from Israel and Iran… and Palestine, and Iraq, and Lebanon, and the Kurds, and Russia… and Trump recently just directly, very publically, bombed Iranian nuclear facilities…

I am reasonably confident this would not have happened in a Dem regime.

They are genocide enabling and duplicitous assholes, but Trump and his cabinet turned that situation up to 11 by sending in B2s with GBU 57s, and being very, very public, antagonistic about this.

…

Regardless of the strike actually being effective or not, it completely slams the door shut on basically ever doing another nuclear deal with Iran (again, done under Obama/Dems, revoked by Trump)…

… barring something like a complete 180 in some theoretical future Dem regime that totally 180s on basically everything connected to Israel. No clue how likely that is or isn’t at this point, but it is at least theoretically possible.

…

Dropping morality from the equation, massively directly aggroing against Iran, with is a player in Syria, is just incompetent on its face at being any kind of sensible policy.

Like, I guess just even more full throatedly going against Iran does remove a significant amount of their influence in Syria (maybe?)… but the cost is looking like a completely insane mad man at the international level…

…not to mention pissing off a significant domestic chunk of Trump’s own base, the ones stupid enough to somehow believe Trump was the ‘peace candidate’.

…

US foreign policy irt Syria in particular has been a shitshow for about 2 decades now, simply on its own terms of theoretically ‘promoting American security interests.’

Trump has accelerated this from ‘a clusterfuck’ to ‘a paradigm ending disaster that has totally ended the US as the dominant world hegemon’.

It has totally destroyed any remaining remnant of plausibly being a morally justified ‘World Police’.

The US is now just obviously a rogue state, by its own definition of a rogue state from 10 years ago.

This is what I mean by ‘making sense’, or really the complete absence of that.

Foreign policy kinda involves having allies.

Not many people wanna ally with a beligerent mad man.

…

Maybe a shorter version of my viewpoint could be:

Pete Hegseth is the Secretary of Defense.

Trump has the best foreign policy, in terms of making sense.

/s

Not like the Dems were much better, but yeah, the Trump regime is even worse.

Hi, Econometrician here.

We routinely and regularly refer to State run lotteries with such phrases as ‘the idiot tax’.

As in, it is a regressive form of taxation, that objectively hurts people who are objectively idiots.

…

I’ve actually gambled once in my entire life, at a horse race.

My strategy?

Walk in with $40 bucks.

Place a $5 dollar bet on the horse with the silliest name.

I ended up walking out with $60 bucks, after being able to pay for a hot dog / fries / drink, forgot how much they cost (this was about a decade ago).

…

Stonks. Gambling.

…

Its funny, I legitimately love playing Texas Hold’em Poker.

But … you can just play for pennies, or just have a set of plastic chips, little or no actual money involved.

Its a fun game, I am fully in agreement that it does constitute a legitimate competetive sport, it totally involves strategy, bluffing, acting, essentially… but there’s no need at all to risk financial ruin over it.

Nutaku exists but I don’t think they use crypto?

Also you can buy adult games on itch.io, again, don’t think they do crypto though.

The whole problem with … you know, actually using crypto for retail…

1. transaction times are abysmally, orders of magnitude more slow than using PayPal or Visa or MC,

2. crypto is exceptionally volatile, way, way less price stable than actual currencies,

3. transaction fees tend to be way, way worse than using traditional payment processors, because what you are actually doing is closer to a realtime forex currency conversion service,

4. or, if 3 is not the case, that means the retailer themself is directly holding a crypto wallet, which means they have massive financial risk and instability due to the extreme volatility of crypto, when all their other expenses are in USD or w/e

There are reasons why basically every single retailer that has ever tried to directly accept crypto either cancels that after a year or two, or goes bankrupt, or both.

I guess it could work if you convince game devs/publishers to directly accept payment in crypto…?

But that still seems kinda unlikely.

Also kinda like it would immediately be flooded with NFT/cryptobro scamslop, you know, like every single crypto basdd or crypto funded game, literally ever?

I have never heard anything from any Valve interview to the effect of how specific pay rates for specific employees are actually set.

I think (as in, this is my semi-informed speculation) it is closer to:

You get hired to fill a specific role, with a specific pay rate (Valve still like, lists specific job openings with specific role requirements), and then uh, you have tasks within that realm that are fairly clearly your responsibility… but at the same time, everything going on at the company is essentially one big github issues list, a whole bunch of feature requests and bug reports, and everyone can contribute to any of those, assuming they’ve got their core responsibilities covered as well.

(This is appealing to anyone who has ever worked in a tech corp or really any corp ever, because the standard way this works, at least in American corps… is you get hired for a role, that often has an exceptionally all encompassing job desc, or an absurd number of requirements… and then your boss and their boss just continuously, hierarchically, assign you new and more ever growing responsibilities…ie, your job has ‘scope creep’ the way a poorly developed game does. Valve inverts this and makes the ‘scope creep’ much, much more voluntary for the employee.)

(If you’ve never worked a software dev focused or adjacent role, you would be amazed at how often and regularly management and C Suite just demand you learn and do things entirely not in your job description, just treat you as a ‘computer person’, as if a heart surgeon is also a brain surgeon and also a metabolic expert and also a pharmaceutical designer.)

Like, there are probably still yearly reviews / the ability to try to negotiate yourself a raise… but I don’t think there is some kind of… formal, everyone votes in some sense on how much everyone else should be paid.

Valve is still a private company, not an actual worker cooperative that votes up or down an entire business budget for the whole year or w/e.

They are just a lot more flat of an organizational hierarchy, have a lot more unconventional work culture, but still ultimately a private corp.

But since there are only a handful of payment processors, what if they all collude and do this?

This is possible, but I kind of doubt that say, MasterCard and Visa are going to blanket ban all kinds of ‘adult’ charges… at least right now.

Like uh, ever been to a strip club?

Its not like Visa and MC don’t know that the ATMs there are infact at strip clubs, and even those ATMs are still ultimately using Visa or MC as a payment processor.

I imagine that if they weren’t already, this event has likely spawned a payment processor independence project internally.

I’d say probably not full fledged, ‘we are actively developing this’ project, but it may have at least spawned some discussion along the lines I above described.

The way large tech corps tend to work is that a whole bunch of at least high level, general concept plans are drawn up, considered in meetings, sorta like cards pulled out of a deck, into your hand… and then there is deliberation as to whether or not to actually ‘play’ said card.

The way I know that above paragraph is that uh, hah, like GabeN, I used to work for MSFT, and a few other companies/nonprofits with a significant tech aspect.

But at the same time, I’ve not worked for Valve, I have no special, specific insight in that sense, and they are also rather notorious for being quite opaque about things they aren’t ready to full throatedly publically endorse… my guess there is that part of their culture largely stems from the notorious HL2 Beta/Alpha hack, way way back.

I had heard about the first part there… not the second part.

But uh yeah that sounds about right.

So basically, Smedley Butler’s ‘War is a Racket’ was functionally written about Prescott Bush and people like him?

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/War_Is_a_Racket