chimeracoder

> The problem is that activists who are laser focused on eliminating adult content watch intently for the first thing they can use against the company, and even if it violates their ToS something problematic is eventually bound to get through review.

This is why Pornhub is always targeted under the pretense of "fighting CSAM" when in reality Facebook is orders of magnitude worse in terms of the prevalence of CSAM and the distribution.

Exodus Cry, et. al. don't target Facebook, because they don't actually care about fighting CSAM - they are simply weaponizing that rhetoric in order to attack the the thing they really want to end (pornography, and more broadly, anything "immoral" according to a right-wing, evangelical definition of that word).

Thank you - appreciate you being willing to correct that.

> FOSTA-SESTA is the source of this. A well intentioned bill, that, once again, has unintended consequences beyond it's original intention.

You're right that these are connected to FOSTA/SESTA, but you're missing the actual connection.

FOSTA/SESTA were not "well-intentioned". They were the product of lobbying from explicitly religious, anti-sex, anti-pornography groups. Those same groups are behind recent campaigns to require providing government ID to access pornography, to allow attorneys general to prosecute LGBTQ content, and to ban pornography from platforms like Steam and Itch.io.

FOSTA/SESTA have worked exactly as they were intended to! The intention was to make it harder to conduct sex work legally and safely, and they accomplished that goal!

These policies have little to do with FOSTA/SESTA themselves, in that the text of those laws has no bearing here. But those bills were the first big, national victory of these campaigns, and they used that momentum to raise absurd amounts of money to lobby for the other laws mentioned above, and to target financial infrastructure as an easy point of leverage to accomplish their goal of banning pornography across the Internet.

Collective Shout is Australian, but there are plenty of similar groups in the US , UK, and Europe.

> There hasn't been sufficient reporting on all the lobbying and back-room dealing.

There has been tons of reporting on this in the industry. It is not hidden. The war on sex work is extremely well-documented, as is the explicit shift in tactics to targeting financial infrastructure as a tactic.

> It's not people using stolen cards, it's people feeling shame or regret after making an intentional purchase and using chargebacks to "undo" the purchase

If this problem were as pervasive as people keep saying it is, it would put the merchants out of business long before it would have any noticeable impact on the card brands (Visa, Mastercard) who are typically the ones actually pushing bans like these[0]. Even if the merchant is successful in winning the chargeback, they are the ones who have to pay the fees for it, which means that any business with a predictable and consistently high enough chargeback rate will just stop collecting payments long before the upstream providers care.

A lot of people here don't actually understand how payment processing, risk underwriting, and chargebacks work - which is fair, because it's an arcane area of knowledge that most people don't interact with! But it means that a lot of things which sound like simple and easy explanations are actually completely off base and nonsensical.

[0] I do not have knowledge of the Kickstarter situation specifically, and the article is light on primary-source details, so I am explicitly not commenting on this specific case.

> Adult content, pharmaceuticals and travel are all industries that experience significantly higher occurrence of fraud and chargebacks than others. For example, your spouse sees a weird item on your credit card for a porn site. "Wasn't me! Must be stolen I'll report it." Sometimes it's the other direction.

No, it has nothing to do with chargebacks. It's not even presented that way in their policies when they ban it. They consider it a "brand risk", which is completely different.

> Why payment processors do it? Why people in America do not want to earn more money from commissions? Strong church lobby? Legal risks? I think its mostly religious groups who who are against adult content and sex, or there are other groups?

The driving force is mostly a group of nonprofits and lobbying groups that are backed by right-wing, mostly-but-not-exclusively evangelicals.

Over the last decade, they have successfully laundered their views into the mainstream to the point where many people don't realize how influential they have been in writing all of these laws and policies and driving them across the finish line.

None of this is hidden knowledge - they've been acting out in the open for years, but people have an aversion to acknowledging it, because it's an uncomfortable truth which triggers a great deal of cognitive dissonance.

> It's not a sudden new thing. The financial theory seems to explain all the facts.

Literally all three of the examples you list were the direct result of lobbying from groups like Exodus Cry and Morality in Media. These campaigns had been in the works for years, and were well-known to people in the industry, who had been sounding the alarm for years.

It's maddening that people not only refuse to listen before the actions come down, but also still refuse to connect the dots even after they happen.

> The religious right knows many of their views are unpopular so they don't act in the open. They find underhanded ways to force their views onto us. Abortion bans wouldn't survive a simple up and down vote in almost any state, yet abortion bans are happening across the country.

They do act out in the open! That's why it's so maddening to see how pervasive the belief that this isn't a push from right-wing groups is. They are extremely open about their goals and about their ideological alignment, and they have been at literally every step in the process.

They're telegraphing every single move in real-time. But for some reason, people just don't really want to believe it.

It turns out, the best way to get away with a heinous agenda is not to hide it, but to be completely open and direct about it. If you tell people exactly what they want and it's horrific enough, they will refuse to believe it's true, because nobody would be that cartoonishly villainous, right?

The sex industry isn't the only area where that principle works, although (like with many "technologies") it was one of the first where it was successfully applied.

> Question: what prevents an organisation like Kickstarter from using more than one payment processor, including the ones used by actual porn companies?

The way the policies work, they would either have to use the latter processor for all transactions (which would be prohibitively expensive) or relegate all "adult" content to a completely separate company and domain, which would be a huge pain and expense to operate for something that constitutes a relatively small fraction of their business.

> I’ve heard this is apparently less about morality and more about payments getting contested by men getting caught by their spouses

This is a common myth. The concerted effort that we've seen over the last 5-10 years in particular is the direct consequence of intense lobbying from a handful of groups that are openly backed by or aligned with right-wing religious groups, especially (but not exclusively) evangelicals.

In case you have any doubts about whether "morality" is their motivation, one of the groups was literally called "Morality in Media", before renaming to the more official-sounding National Center on Sexual Exploitation. Despite the new name, they actually don't care very much about "sexual exploitation" as most reasonable people would define the term (such as child abuse) but instead consider all sex work to be "exploitation" and aim to ban legal sex work.

Right-wing, openly evangelical groups like Exodus Cry and Morality in Media, who have an explicit agenda to ban pornography and see this as an easy "next step" towards that end goal.

They are also the groups behind the closure of big porn sites like XTube, the short-lived purge of adult content on OnlyFans (one of the few battles they lost), and the scourge of age verification bills that are sweeping the US, UK, and Europe.

The goal with age verification laws is not to protect minors or fight CSAM (as much as they pretend it is) - it's to make it expensive and difficult to legally serve content that they disapprove of, producing a chilling effect. Note that the content they disapprove of is not limited to pornography, which is why many of these bills have such vague language that can apply to other things like information on abortion, or LGBTQ+ themed material. This is not an accident; the supporters of these policies are quite open about their intention.

> Windows laptops are out of the question, and pure linux laptops (until only very recently) were of marginal support and low battery capabilities (especially "close it and stuff it in a backpack for 3 days").

Dell has sold laptops with first-party Linux support for nearly fifteen years, to say nothing of other smaller OEMS.

As for the battery issues during sleep: that actually has to do with a combination of the BIOS settings + downstream ramifications of secure boot (and how the old-fashioned "hibernate" used to work). Unfortunately, that isn't specific to Linux. My MBP has the same problem, and so do the same laptops running Windows.

> Despite paying rent for an apartment, it’s not rent-seeking. You get a place to live out of it that wouldn’t exist without the owner renting it to you.

> Rent-seeking is a very specific economic term where a party inserts themselves into a transaction and takes a cut without providing anything: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Rent-seeking

> Being a landlord comes with significant responsibilities and even principal investment risk.

Economist here. Yes, this was a correct use of the term "rent-seeking behavior". It's actually quite funny to see someone try to argue otherwise, when the name was chosen because this is, literally, the textbook example.

> The only information sent to the card processor is the swipe (number expiration date) and sometimes the zip code and verification code on the back (if entered by hand).

For credit cards? No, that's not necessarily true.

> Gosh, I hope colleges don't find out about this pricing strategy.

They've been doing it for years; it's called "financial aid". It is literally the textbook example of how to get people to pay different amounts for the same thing based on what they are willing or able to pay.

It's also why the recent shift in immigration policy has affected top-tier universities so much: domestic education is, by and large, subsidized by international students who are almost exclusively admitted on a need-aware basis, allowing the schools to ensure the financials work out on paper.

Now that there's been a huge drop in international applications, they need to make up the loss in revenue, so they're shifting those costs back to domestic applicants.

> In the US, the plan is to require adults to take a picture of their state ID and upload it to a third party that provides age verification.

That's not just the plan - that's what's already legally required in many US states.

These laws were introduced by the explicitly religious right-wing groups like Exodus Cry and Morality in Media, as ways to de facto outlaw pornography (in their own words). They've since been laundered into the mainstream so the general public is unaware of the root cause.

> Not so sure about that. Handing an ID to a bouncer at a bar or similar is not logging anything.

> Sophisticated places might have a scanner that does what ever validation it does, but again, it's just another cursory check of the photo.

Many/most bars do scan IDs now. Ostensibly it's to verify that it's real, but they do use those systems to keep a log of everyone who enters.

> It's interesting that internally you had a very different experience with Salesforce buying Heroku and Microsoft buying Github. From the outside it appears to be analagous (except github is degrading quicker than Heroku did?)

This pops up on here frequently. People misremember the Heroku timeline with Salesforce. Most of Heroku's growth and glory days happened after the acquisition. Salesforce actively invested in it and turned it into the powerhouse that people remember today.

At some point, they stopped, and it's not clear why.

People flip the order of the first two and remember it as "Salesforce acquired Heroku and then they went on a downward spiral" but that's not really what happened. There were many years of growth in between, including the period that almost everyone who remembers Heroku fondly remember it for.

> Evangelion is Japans star wars

Which is funny to say because Star Wars is actually the Western version of samurai movies (especially but not exclusively Akira Kurosawa's Hidden Fortress).

That's the movie that Lucas is pretty open about heavily drawing "inspiration" from (all the way down to specific characters and plot beats) but Hidden Fortress is itself part of a larger genre of similar stories.

> To be honest, I feel like this is where iOS and Android are failing us. Why is every app allowed to embed a bunch of trackers? Only blocking cross-app tracking on user request as iOS does is not enough (and data of different apps/websites can be correlated externally).

Even if Google and Apple both want to commit to fighting this, it becomes a game of whack-a-mole, because there are all sorts of different ways to track users that the platforms can't control.

As an easy example: every time you share an Instagram post/video/reel, they generate a unique link that is tracked back to you so they can track your social graph by seeing which users end up viewing that link. (TikTok does the same thing, although they at least make it more obvious by showing that in the UI with "____ shared this video with you").

> Random ≠ arbitrary

Sure, though if you're looking to be pedantic, the keys they're asking you to press are neither random nor arbitrary

> There's a big difference between doing a day trip to those altitudes which is normally ok, and sleeping that high which causes problems if not acclimatised.

I'm not sure what point you're trying to make. People regularly experience AMS at the heights far below what OP mentioned, whether on the day they arrive or on days 2-4, and that's not even accounting for strenuous physical activity.

> 12-15K feet just isn’t that high in the scheme of things. Many peaks in the western US are in that range or more.

It's "not that high", but people frequently do get AMS at those attitudes or even lower.

> Who makes browsers? Ad companies.

> Of course Google is going to back door their browser.

Aside from the fact that other browsers exist, this makes no sense because Google would stand to gain more by being the only entity that can surveil the user this way, vs. allowing others to collect data on the user without having to go through Google's services (and pay them).

> If the biggest flaw of a OS is the border radius of its windows, you've got yourself a pretty decent OS!

There are loads of other flaws with the OS. It just so happens that people care a lot about the design of Apple's products, so people talk about these details.

> It's a $3 million verdict in compensatory damages. Even if reduced on appeal, that's a lot of money.

Where are you seeing that?

The article says:

> Jurors found there were thousands of violations, each counting separately toward a penalty of $375 million. That’s less than one-fifth of what prosecutors were seeking.

> Meta is valued at about $1.5 trillion and the company’s stock was up 5% in early after-hours trading following the verdict, a signal that shareholders were shrugging off the news.

> Juror Linda Payton, 38, said the jury reached a compromise on the estimated number of teenagers affected by Meta’s platforms, while opting for the maximum penalty per violation. With a maximum $5,000 penalty for each violation, she said she thought each child was worth the maximum amount.

> What structural change would permit a worker to take initiative and say "Hey, these working conditions are wrong/inadequate and I will not safely do my job today unless proper changes are made", without risk of getting fired by higher-ups?

Well, what you are describing is a strike, and it is currently illegal for ATC to strike, so in theory one possible structural change would be to make it legal for the workers to do what you're describing.

> Academic research concludes that ranked-choice and vote-for-one both result in a center-squeeze spoiler effect.

No, it's more complicated than that.

All voting systems have the potential for spoiler effects (in the broadest sense of the term). That's a core and long-proven theorem in social choice theory. What's more relevant is how those actually play out under the conditions in which they're used. And it turns out that, while pathological cases are still mathematically possible, in practice, under the conditions that typically apply to our elections, RCV is actually less likely to produce these effects than other systems.

The idea that approval voting, STAR voting, or Condorcet voting is superior to RCV for this reason is a misconception based on decades-old research that is no longer current.

(Also, the website linked above is not a correct demonstration of the effect you linked, although I can see how the confusion happened).