One difference: the horse vehicle may run off to the fjords, the truck vehicle may run off to the Ford’s.

May the streets run red with maple leaves

That was back at the moment when Trump threw around enough tariffs to make countries with longstanding enmity sign direct trade deals with each other, cutting us out as the middleman. Those will never, ever come back (they were mostly forged in the wake of WWII, when the US had the only functional economy)

As for when we’ll see it? I think we have a “oh shit” world stage moment if the US tries to attack Greenland, as Denmark will then have to defend - and then by chain of treaties WWIII kicks off.

If we avoid that fate somehow, then there probably won’t be a specific moment - the US will over twenty or so years just slowly collapse in on itself and other countries will quietly start ignoring US while publicly paying lip service. … - There will probably be an event when we publicly can’t afford the giant military we have which will be an existential crisis for a news cycle.

That’s my attempt to read the tea leaves in the crystal ball.

From what I can tell, the ‘age’ part is misdirection. They want to restrict computer use to the “good” people, to make it “safer”.

Using age restrictions first allows legislation to be passed “for the children” using the idea of potential harm to theoretical children. However, in practice, legislators expect the implementation of the age check to be capable of checking anything else they want to about your identity, as a prerequisite for access. Probably using a combination of face scans and ID scans.

Crime by statistical association

Yeah; I just chalk it up to the fact that humans for thousands of years have been obsessed with sex and poop on a level more basic than language - it’s not as surprising then to think our language is riddled with allusions to it.

You can use cash to buy gift cards, then fuel your account with 3rd party gift cards. https://www.privateinternetaccess.com/pages/gift-card-payment (Not the most economical, but a good way to bootstrap into a VPN if more traditional payments are not available)

I am convinced that about one-half the money I spend for advertising is wasted, but I have never been able to decide which half. https://quoteinvestigator.com/2022/04/11/advertising/

Personally, it has always struck me that half is wildly optimistic. Still, (frustratingly) it seems the case that some marketing is correlated with some success in business.

Honestly I’ve been recommending setting up a personal git store and cloning any project you like, I imagine the next phase of this is Microsoft making a claim that if Copilot ‘assisted’ all these projects, Microsoft is a part owner of all these projects - in a gambit to swallow and own open source.

git is a very complex undo/redo tool designed to simultaneously track the changes made to multiple documents by multiple users while being efficient with managing disk space and other resources. (It also has other clever tricks it can do). It was created by Linus Torvalds, current development is led by Junio Hamano.

Chris Wanstrath, P. J. Hyett, Tom Preston-Werner and Scott Chacon made GitHub.com, which was eventually sold to Microsoft. GitHub does two things well: -You can easily clone any project hosted with them to your own git repository using the command ‘git clone https://github.com/[Username]/[ProjectName]’ -The rest of the public website is basically a looking glass for everything git does under the hood natively (but with a nice webUI instead of a cold command prompt).

Personally I lost faith in GitHub when it started offering Copilot assistant. We’re only a two heartbeats away from Microsoft saying that using Copilot for any of your projects code constitutes Microsoft contributed to that project as a precursor to Microsoft saying it basically ‘owns’ all this open-source stuff. Embrace, extend, extinguish (I recommend everyone run docker and GitTea to create a personal clone store (give your favorite projects insurance) and that all developers move away from GitHub)

Just a quick reminder, if you give yourself some time and a small budget (or upcycle older tech), there are more good (sometimes great) alternatives to everything listed here that you can build yourself (often pretty quickly, thanks to docker)

https://lemmy.world/c/selfhosted

This made me laugh. Not wrong though!

People are complicated and FOSS isn’t as simple as all or nothing.

Sometimes people have things setup before they discovered FOSS - it’s hard for me to give up my gmail account from age 14, even though I run my own domain now.

Sometimes FOSS gets captured - Microsoft owns githib now, which makes tough decisions for all the projects hosted there.

I should have remembered that. I had to lend my card out to my friend who was in a credit lock at the time they needed a rental. Still, I don’t think my advice is invalid, just irrelevant here.

Yes. I agree - on paper all three have a chargeback process that appear similar enough. However, assuming you aren’t a financial expert who never needs help, I’m discussing the behind the front politics at play and each group’s motivations to go above and beyond.

It’s about who’s lawyers you can rally to your defense in a dispute.

With a credit card you’re spending the bank’s money. If you can convince the bank you’re in the right, it’s you and the bank’s lawyers recovering the bank’s money.

As a debit card user, the banks will support your legal rights, because it’s good business for your clients to prosper. While the bank’s lawyers won’t go to bat for you, many will be willing to give you quasi-legal and quasi-financial tidbits or point you in the right direction.

As the bank’s client’s employee, you’re basically on your own. Good luck.

Too many people these days don’t use or have access to credit cards for services like this. Many people I know only use bank debit cards, or worse, use the debit preloaded cash cards issued by their employers’ payroll service provider.

Credit cards motivate banks to help you, because if you won’t pay, and the business doesn’t pay, the bank has to take the hit.

Debit cards will work as well if your bank values it’s reputation - but not all banks do.

And I would not trust a preloaded card provider to assist. You are neither their business partner nor their customer and that puts your interests at the bottom of a very long list. You have to hope some law is on your side or that your issue is so trivial that resolving it is more cost effective then dealing with you.

Oh. Well, I was worried for a bit but you’ve put my heart at ease.

Now that we’ve made our problems go away by redefining them, I’m ready to tackle cancer, a natural body resource management issue.

[and assuming parent comment is also in spite of Poe’s Law Nathan’s astute online parody observations]

That’s the problem.

Valve already had a process to flag titles as illegal in specific jurisdictions, and as far as anyone can tell, was doing an okay job at that (not perfect, obviously), but they were forced to add an extra clause of, ‘oh, plus anything visa et al. don’t like’ the extra layer is adding minimal protection and is rife for abuse.

Additionally, let’s talk about what makes porn. Does “https://yakuza.fandom.com/wiki/Be_My_Baby” of Yakuza 2 count? Or does it get a free pass because it’s a large publisher?

What if players take the elements of the game to create something the developers didn’t prevent? Like if a map contains a baby on one side of a map and an orgy (in another office) on the other side of the map, is it CP if a player picks up the baby and brings it into the orgy room? Is this something you want the banks deciding? Couldn’t we - have therapists or other behavioral health development experts make this call?

Most importantly is the recorded history of how these systems are routinely shown to be used against smaller publishers, and assorted minorities (including LGBT people) have a woman show a boob, it’s polite adult fun, but if their twin brother shows a pre-op trans boob, now it’s magically porn.

Just a reminder. Self-hosting is a hobby that is both useful and satisfying, and the skills you pick up will change how you see computers that are increasingly part of everything.

You probably won’t be going off-grid overnight, but the tech industry has spent 30 years promoting propaganda that ‘only skilled engineers should worry about what goes on under the hood’ and have conditioned us to expect tech to just be magic.

Fighting back means educating yourself, and that means grabbing an old laptop, learning how to install Linux on it, fire up a few Docker projects, and exploring all the options that opens up.

It will take a few weekends to get started, and it will require some upkeep. But for that price you will gain some sovereignty back over your digital life.

For extra credit and when ready you can pay $15 /year for a vanity domain (you’d only need one, as you can freely create an unrestricted number of subdomains), once done you move from being a serf to a digital landlord.