Skip Navigation

InitialsDiceBearhttps://github.com/dicebear/dicebearhttps://creativecommons.org/publicdomain/zero/1.0/„Initials” (https://github.com/dicebear/dicebear) by „DiceBear”, licensed under „CC0 1.0” (https://creativecommons.org/publicdomain/zero/1.0/)O

orclev

@ orclev @lemmy.world

Posts
0
Comments
1096
Joined
3 yr. ago

  • Companies aiding Trump’s immigration crackdown see ‘extraordinary’ revenues

    Jump

  • Funneling public money directly into the hands of his cronies was the point all along, everything else is just a bonus to Trump. I guarantee somewhere in there there are also kickbacks going to Trump and his buddies as well. If we ever manage to dislodge this bloated parasite we'll need a whole army of forensic accountants to go over every action he's ever taken to document all the embezzlement and fraud and maybe claw some of that money back.

  • Mozilla under fire for Firefox AI "bloat" that blows up CPU and drains battery

    Jump

  • Try IronFox on android.

  • Mozilla under fire for Firefox AI "bloat" that blows up CPU and drains battery

    Jump

  • Sadly this is nothing new for Mozilla. It's easier to count the decisions they've made that aren't terrible than the ones that are. Their history is a long series of fuckups occasionally punctuated by a decent decision.

  • Trump escalates his racist attacks on Black Americans

    Jump

  • So now that they're approaching their end game with hispanics they're starting to spin up the machine to go after the next minority. Now where have we seen this before? Been a while, something like 80 years.

  • Trump Promised to Eliminate Funding to Schools That Don’t Nix DEI Work—But Half of States Aren’t Complying

    Jump

  • The US was democracy 1.0 up until the civil war when it became democracy 1.1. The rest of the world meanwhile has moved on to democracy 2.0+ that fixed a lot of the fundamental problems that the US inherited from feudalism. We've never really fixed any of the fundamental problems with the US government because everyone is too afraid to make significant changes. We would literally have to throw the constitution away and start with a new one, and nobody trusts anyone to do that these days. So we're left to hobble along while the country slowly tears itself to pieces.

    Any one state leaving is similar to what happened with Brexit but significantly worse. It would leave that state in a significantly worse position in all respects than it was previously. The only way to make it work would be to literally dissolve the federal government and reform it as something new, but first you'd need to find enough states willing to do that and who could agree on the form that new country should take.

  • Trump Promised to Eliminate Funding to Schools That Don’t Nix DEI Work—But Half of States Aren’t Complying

    Jump

  • The problem is ultimately the civil war. The US was originally envisioned as something much closer to the EU. Each State was effectively an autonomous country with the federal government setting some simple common ground rules and facilitating inter-state trade. That worked right up until the states could no longer agree on those ground rules which ultimately led to the civil war. Following that rather than going back to what existed before or reevaluating the fundamental design of things they instead just attempted to paper over things by increasing the federal government's power while slightly reducing each state's power, but without addressing problematic leftovers of the previous system like the senate or the electoral college.

    The US government makes sense as a very loose confederation of countries. It doesn't make sense as a country in its own right. Too much of the federal government is designed to grant power to states governments at the expense of the public's right to democracy.

    The reality is that following the end of the civil war they should have gone back to the drawing board and re-architected the federal government rather than attempting to go back to business as usual.

  • Trump Promised to Eliminate Funding to Schools That Don’t Nix DEI Work—But Half of States Aren’t Complying

    Jump

  • Unfortunately states don't directly pay the federal government, their citizens do via their federal taxes. The state would need to figure out some way to get each person and business within their borders to reduce their federal filing and then somehow shield them from the IRS.

  • Trump Promised to Eliminate Funding to Schools That Don’t Nix DEI Work—But Half of States Aren’t Complying

    Jump

  • It's mostly the Republican lead states that use it. It's funny how the biggest federal welfare queens are all the supposedly fiscally responsible Republicans while the Democrats meanwhile actually run balanced budgets and aren't reliant on federal bailouts.

  • Trump wants a new U.S. census to exclude people here illegally. It'd be unprecedented

    Jump

  • Part of the problem is that Trump says a lot of things but only ends up doing a few of them. Everyone ends up wasting a lot of time and energy reacting to things that never end up happening, and that ends up taking away from time to respond to things he's actually done. Like yes, if this happens it's a huge deal, but right now this is just the latest load of bullshit to come tumbling out of that cesspool Trump calls a mouth. It's very concerning, but nearly everything Trump says is very concerning, and the things he actually does even more so.

  • Trump wants a new U.S. census to exclude people here illegally. It'd be unprecedented

    Jump

  • Going to be hilarious when they do this and it ends up hurting Florida and Texas the most. They'll end up losing a ton of congressional seats, mostly out of Republican controlled areas. They'll have to scramble to redistrict again to keep their gerrymandering going.

  • Mastercard deflects blame for NSFW games being taken down, but Valve says payment processors 'specifically cited' a Mastercard rule about damaging the brand

    Jump

  • Yes, in a perfect world the EU would require banks to support Taler for transactions in euros and presumably also provide the necessary infrastructure for that support. Doing so would allow you to seamlessly (and transparently) convert back and forth between Taler and Euro as needs require just like is done with cheques and credit cards.

    It would honestly be the smartest play by the EU since they would avoid reinventing the wheel. That said I doubt it would happen because even at the best of times government of any type rarely makes the best decision. If you're lucky they still make a good decision, just not the best one.

  • Mastercard deflects blame for NSFW games being taken down, but Valve says payment processors 'specifically cited' a Mastercard rule about damaging the brand

    Jump

  • Yes, that was me. Unfortunately much like GNU Hurd, Taler is less of a project than it is a thought experiment. It lacks a sufficient number of people pushing it to become a viable project. It exists, but as far as I'm aware it's never been used seriously in the real world outside of some proof of concept type deployments at a university. Without a champion, ideally a major business or significant public figure, it's likely to continue being far more conceptual than practical.

  • Mastercard deflects blame for NSFW games being taken down, but Valve says payment processors 'specifically cited' a Mastercard rule about damaging the brand

    Jump

  • Bitcoin is sadly a failed experiment and you're not a luddite for pointing out its various shortcomings. I was an early adopter back when you could get an entire coin for a buck or two, but never invested much in it and lost most of what I had when one of the early exchanges imploded.

    The concept of bitcoin was great, a decentralized currency not under the control of any government or institution, but that was still reliable and pseudo-anonymous. The execution however was beyond disappointing. It was quickly commandeered by "investors" looking to gamble on something even more volatile than forex markets and ceased being able to function as an actual currency due to the wild swings in value. In order to be a useful currency something must have a relatively stable value. Additionally scammers and criminals also gravitated to bitcoin further driving legitimate businesses away from it not wanting the guilt by association. Finally it turned out that the anonymity was even easier to break than initially thought and the tax headaches involved in buying, selling, or trading in bitcoin or any cryptocurrency make it too annoying to actually use (massively compounded by its wildly fluctuating exchange rates).

  • Microsoft CFO calls for 'intensity' in an internal memo, after blowout earnings

    Jump

  • It's because they're concentrating all the wealth. The wealth in the US used to be far more distributed, with the majority existing in the large middle class. Reagan started the policy by Republicans to pass laws and regulations designed to benefit the wealthy at the expense of everyone else, and then Clinton got the Democrats on board with the same strategy. We're approaching the end game now where the middle and lower classes are nearly bled dry and the rich will start cannibalizing each other to be the last fattest rat in the garbage pile while the entire US economy collapses around them. Be on the lookout for the smarter rats to start fleeing the ship by transferring as much wealth as they can into foreign assets that will survive the collapse of America.

  • Mastercard deflects blame for NSFW games being taken down, but Valve says payment processors 'specifically cited' a Mastercard rule about damaging the brand

    Jump

  • So that's kind of missing the point. First as I pointed out you don't actually have to buy anything to see the explicit preview images, so Steam is arguably in violation of those laws. Secondly the issue is that the Visa and Mastercard contracts require companies to be in compliance with local laws. It doesn't matter whether someone is using a Visa or Mastercard to make the actual payment if the purchase would technically be considered illegal (which it arguably could be in some states/countries under the new super strict porn laws).

    At the end of the day this boils down to a) terms of the Visa/Mastercard contracts, and possibly b) new anti-porn laws that are putting an onerous burden on services to collect customers IDs in order to prove age. This isn't a question of common sense, in contract law (and law in general) it's about the letter of it and not so much the spirit. Yes, it stands to reason that if you legally own a credit card, and you must be at least 18 to own a card, then you are obviously 18 or older. However that doesn't matter at all when the laws are written such that services must validate age using a photo ID. It also does not account for stolen credit cards (never mind that that's a far more serious situation than the possibility of under age kids seeing some naughty pixels).

    This whole situation is stupid and Visa and Mastercard clearly need to make some changes to their terms and conditions, but until they do from a legal standpoint businesses like Valve and Itch.io have their hands tied.

  • Mastercard deflects blame for NSFW games being taken down, but Valve says payment processors 'specifically cited' a Mastercard rule about damaging the brand

    Jump

  • You would think, but I believe the law(s) require verification of a photo ID. I haven't looked too closely into the UK one, but the way the laws are written for a couple of the US states a credit card doesn't meet the requirements. There's also the fact that many of the preview images and videos for porn games on Steam show nudity and/or sex and you can access those without needing to purchase the game (just the birthday question to "verify" your age).

    Edit: also steam gift cards are a thing, so you can purchase without using a credit card technically.

  • Mastercard deflects blame for NSFW games being taken down, but Valve says payment processors 'specifically cited' a Mastercard rule about damaging the brand

    Jump

  • I don't know that anyone has put together a complete list of games taken down specifically because of this, but you can look at steam-tracker.com and sort by date to see what has been removed recently. It doesn't show why a game was removed, but you can usually infer a lot from the title and cover art.

    Also I should clarify it wasn't specifically multiple large waves, there was a large initial group, but the remainder have been slowly trickling in. I'd guess there's someone going through Steams catalog slowly flagging games to remove. The first group was likely an easy keyword search, while the rest are being evaluated on a case by case basis most likely.

  • Mastercard deflects blame for NSFW games being taken down, but Valve says payment processors 'specifically cited' a Mastercard rule about damaging the brand

    Jump

  • That's what it started with but it seems to have quickly expanded to include a lot of more mundane things. Initial reporting was only on the first wave of censored games and didn't include the stuff that was removed later on.

  • Mastercard deflects blame for NSFW games being taken down, but Valve says payment processors 'specifically cited' a Mastercard rule about damaging the brand

    Jump

  • It's a catch 22. You need a phenomenal amount of capital to stand up a payment network with all those criteria, but anyone with that amount of capital can't actually be trusted not to abuse their position in exactly the same way the existing banking networks have.