Why does it have to be a bank card?

Part of me kind of wants these companies to stick to their guns. Once people start to find alternative payment methods for their adult content, maybe they’ll start using those methods for everything else as well and cut Visa, Mastercard et al out of their lives completely.

Yeah, the govt spun the story of Abu Ghraib as being a few bad apples that didn’t represent American values. And of course it’s bullshit, because it’s so incredibly predictable what outcomes you will get from doing things like this. Torture and abuse are American values, because that is what America consistently and repeatedly engages in.

One of the great mysteries of the 21st century is how a tiny number of US companies control most of the world’s payment processing, when it’s not a technically difficult problem.

You could implement an entire end-to-end payment processing system in a year with a team of a few dozen competent engineers. The only difficulty is getting banks and retailers to sign up to it, but when the big players charge so much and create so much trouble this doesn’t seem like it should be a tough sell. In most cases literally all you’d need to do is charge 2.4% instead of their 3%.

You can’t think of an N-word?

I don’t think that was what they were saying. They were bemoaning the fact that “3rd world” has become a synonym for “developing” or “poor” when technically it means countries that weren’t part of the cold war, although I think they might be tilting at windmills given it’s a distinction that’s been lost for at least three decades already.

Apart from anything else, even if you keep its original meaning, it still works as a metaphor in the sense of a country losing superpower status.

You don’t want to stifle innovation by adding a bunch of regulations, do you?

/s

Remember, when tech bros complain that Regulations Stifle Innovation, this is the kind of “innovation” they’re talking about.

And now Google are actively assisting a genocide, and firing employees who object.

oh wow. I knew IBM were involved, but it always seemed to be handwaved as “yeah we sold them some computers before we knew they were evil and had no control over what they did with them”. But uhh nope. They were complicit as fuck.

“Also, I don’t draw pictures,” Trump said on social media in response to the story.

Of course he doesn’t draw pictures. Artistic creation would require one to have a soul or some sense of joy.

No, you’re thinking of rai’iain.

Hypothetically if you wanted your country to become impoverished within the next five decades, what sort of things would you do that are different to what the current administration is doing?