I was hoping to find some recordings/archive of the Wildberries SMO section from before they removed it, but no luck. The best I could find was a reddit thread with some examples from a month ago: https://www.reddit.com/r/UkraineWarVideoReport/comments/1uzsxn9/a_huge_amount_of_military_goods_are_sold_on/. Camo bulletproof vests and equipment for fiber optic drones.

You might be on to something. There’s so many languages where the short word for mother is some variation of “ma”. Likewise with da/ba/pa for the father.

Crypto farming, feeding the ai bubble, large scale wars of aggression, commuters replacing cars with trucks, buying throwaway junk has never been easier. That’s the relatively new completely unnecessary hubris that I can think off atm. These should be the low hanging fruits to just not do, but apparently we’re going to continue doing them anyways. If we can’t address the low hanging fruits, then tackling the harder challenges will remain a pipe dream until it’s too late. Climate stability is fucked, and we’re in for a rough ride.

So your idea of justice is to heavily sentence people for actions that are not related to the crime that they are being sentenced for. That’s not justice, that’s called vengeance.

And yes, someone defrauding the government should be sentenced less severely than someone who does a violent robbery. Violent robberies can get people killed and even if noone dies or gets wounded, the victims will still be traumatized. None of that can happen with white collar crime against a big organisation. That this difference isn’t obvious to you, should imo be a wake up call for yourself that you need to calm down and take some time to rethink some of the things that you belief.

And Trump does the following: “President Donald Trump signed off on several eyebrow-raising pardons this week, including a man whose daughter donated millions to his PAC and a convicted fraudster he had already freed from prison for a different fraud scheme during his first term”

Trump hands out pardons after blatant corruption & at the start of people’s sentences. Biden did not do that. That you want to portray Biden to be as bad as Trump, shows that apparently your fairness compass is very broken.

And that person who got pardoned after already serving 10 years of his prison sentence … 10 years is already a freaking long time for non violent crime, which also didn’t ruin anyone else’s lives. Sentences have to follow a gradiant along the severity of the crime, if not you end up with a broken system (like the USA one). Prison should be temporary, a chance for correction and rehabilitation, where the person one day gets released with another chance at living a quiet honest life. That you want that man to die in prison … Says a lot about you again.

I looked it up and there was a good rationale based on fairness behind Biden’s pardons. Most of Biden’s pardons also weren’t really pardons, but commutations of sentences: “Context: The thousands pardoned on Friday were “serving disproportionately long sentences compared to the sentences they would receive today,” Biden’s statement said.” https://www.axios.com/2025/01/17/biden-presidential-pardons-clemency-record Which seems fair and also needed to me. Imagine having 10 years left to serve of your 20 years sentence, while new convicts only receive max 5 years for the same crime.

What Biden did with pardons was completely different from what Trump is doing with them.

Meet the parents:
The filing states that Rodis (the father) “is a former attorney who was convicted of federal conspiracy and wire fraud and was later disbarred following that prosecution for a multi-million-dollar scheme in which he used his law license to deceive vulnerable victims for profit.”

Rodis previously pleaded guilty to conspiracy to commit wire fraud after the scheme, which “defrauded more than 1,500 homeowners of approximately $6 million,” was brought to light, according to the filing.

The filing also included testimony from a director of photography on The Cleaning Lady set, who described Rodis as “pushy and manipulative” and said that he would “frequently encourage and tell the children to hug people on set, including Mr. Busfield.”

The accusers’ mother, LaSalle, has an “equally disturbing history,” the filing states, citing that she “has had multiple civil judgments entered against her for fraudulent and dishonest behavior.” She was sued for “various claims including fraud, conversion, and fraudulent transfer,” including allegedly unlawfully repossessing a Bentley car after selling it and writing bad checks to Las Vegas casinos, according to the filing.

https://people.com/timothy-busfield-lawyers-claim-parents-of-alleged-sex-abuse-victims-have-history-of-fraud-11887859

When sitting on the toilet with my pants on my ankles, my cat would crawl into my pants and start his pre sleep wash.

A non exhaustive list of what makes them awful: https://expertbeacon.com/why-is-paypal-so-bad/

Afaik, the issue that was making the most victims, was that they were facilitating scammers that targeted sellers:
5. Good Luck Recouping Losses as a Seller in Disputes.
89% of sellers experienced dispute resolution problems with PayPal in 2021 surveys. Despite providing evidence the item shipped or service rendered, they lost cases and sums averaging $622.
This is driven by PayPal‘s buyer-favored review round taking 1-2 weeks. This favors scamming buyers at the expense of legitimate businesses.

Iirc, there was a time when Paypal always sided with the buyer, irregardless of evidence or past track record, the review process was useless. Once scammers picked up on this and began scamming sellers en masse, Paypal still kept their policy unchanged for years and sellers started to raise their prices on platforms that forced them to accept Paypal (ebay used to do this). Ebay has since tossed Paypal off their platform. I don’t know if Paypal ever improved.

And the dystopia has become a little more dystopian.

The story reminds me of dystopian/scifi stories where someone is imprisoned and presented with problems that they have to solve to earn their freedom/food/… . The first problem is understanding the instructions, because they’re presented in a way that the prisoner doesn’t understand + there’s no outside help to help the prisoner understand.

Not crazy at all imo. I’ve only read the first book and I don’t plan on reading the rest. I found it interesting for the mainland Chinese societal influences that were sometimes explicit, but often just peeking through. It’s obvious that the writer is from a different background as scifi authors that grew up in a western country. But the character writing and scifi aspects, were only kinda meh imo.

I had also read someone recommending the books as hard scifi and I can’t agree with that either. The three body star system is a very interesting premise, but the godlike single proton that can envelop a planet is pure fantasy. Too much deus ex machina for good world building.

When calling that number, the caller will need somekind of proof that they are in control of the car that they are trying to opt out of ads. Afaik, the easiest way to accomplish that when requiring a phonecall, would be pairing phone and car. But obviously Stellantis is not going for easy with this setup, so this is purely speculation on my part.

Apart from how insane it is to put obtrusive ads on a car dashboard, having to link your phone to your car and then call a phone number to opt out of touchscreen display ads is 🤯

There is going to be a reason that they’ve set it up like that.

It appears that in the future, Itch will allow creators to opt out of payment providers, meaning that it’s probably on a per game basis, not per platform. That Itch and Steam are not making a per game solution now, is most likely because their current software doesn’t allow it and they need time to rework it. Itch has promised various changes already, Steam has been mum afaik.

Source for Itch: “For NSFW pages, this will include a new step where creators must confirm that their content is allowable under the policies of the respective payment processors linked to their account.”. https://itch.io/updates/update-on-nsfw-content

I only use Steam myself, so I hadn’t checked Itch Io’s communication yet. I don’t know the platform myself so it’s quite possible that I’m misinterpreting this, but to me it appears that Itch Io will allow creators to delist payment options that they are not compliant with: “For NSFW pages, this will include a new step where creators must confirm that their content is allowable under the policies of the respective payment processors linked to their account.”.

Source: https://itch.io/updates/update-on-nsfw-content

Do you have a source of where they are saying that?

I have seen an article about the Australian political action group that was claiming credit for getting the games banned. The story behind the start of the controversy.

And I have seen an article about the communication from Steam that they were banning games which were in conflict with the rules of their payment providers. The result basically.

But I’ve only seen conjecture and speculation about what went on to get from the start to the result. I haven’t seen any article that spelled out exactly what the different payment providers demanded from the gaming platforms, nor anything about what they discussed in between them.

Edit: after 12 hours there’s 4 downvoters and 0 sources. Another victory for vibes over facts.

I don’t get why the gaming platforms are removing games instead of removing the objecting payment providers as a payment option for purchasing those particular games.

If visa doesn’t want people to purchase game X with Visa, then remove Visa as payment option for buying game X.

I’ve done some reading and it turns out that Reform is now sometimes polling at a percentage equal to what Labour last won the elections with (~34%). Labour is polling as low as ~20%, the greens at ~10%. So yes, Reform and Tories are splitting the rightwing vote, but no, the left cannot afford to further split the left vote.

Because of fptp, that 34% result was enough to bring Labour to a 63% majority. Which apart from being ridiculously unrepresentative, also means that Reform could achieve the same result.

As an external observer who would rather not have Reform get in control of the UK, I see 2 possible solutions:

1. Get rid of fptp asap.
2. If that’s not possible for reasons, then coordinate in between moderate parties to let the top moderate candidate run unopposed against Reform, the French way.

The UK still has a fptp election system. Splitting the leftist vote, seems like a good way to move the UK further to the right again.

I thought that internal opposition within the Labour party, would have been the way forward. I had the impression that Starmer was very unpopular with Labour members, so why can’t they get rid of him and his clique from within the party?

This was new to me so I tried looking it up as well. I found a lot of results right away with startpage, which makes me wonder what search engine you were using?

They (the evangelicals) are apparently calling it “toxic empathy” and they jump through a lot of loops to claim that it’s bad to have empathy with the victims of USA republican policies.

My first result was a long opinion piece criticizing evangelicals for their newfound crusade against empathy: https://churchleaders.com/news/511911-the-scandal-of-evangelical-empathy.html/4

2nd result is an evangelical that does a bit of mind bending to explain why empathy with outgroups is “toxic”: https://unityinchristianity.com/2025/02/03/the-truth-about-toxic-empathy-and-why-its-becoming-a-controversial-topic/.

The 3rd article has a claim that Jesus Himself was not empathic: “Clearly the Lord Jesus Christ can be sympathetic, but He cannot be empathetic in the sense of identifying with our sinful emotions and desires.” https://www.e-n.org.uk/features/2025-03-the-problem-with-empathy/ That article also references a book by an evangelical called “the sin of empathy”.

Modern USA could be summed up by the old Russian adage: “And then, somehow, it got worse.”