Completely agree.

We are very rapidly heading toward full on cyberpunk dystopia.

Get your EM grenades ready, rofl.

Hey thanks for an actual link!

I am on mobile, have both bad vision and a fucked up wrist, scrolling through a huge thread is physically difficult for me.

Ok then, that is an actual source, or, at least a mention of one, thank you!

And what is your source on that?

I am again, genuienly asking for a source.

This is a recent event, I am not up to speed on the reporting on this, can you please provide a source that his target was the NFL?

This is what spammers, scammers, identity thieves, ‘pig-butcherers’, credit collections do.

It absolutely works.

Corporations lie blatantly all the fucking time.

Its just that they lie in ways that usually are not able to be legally defined as some kind of a legally actionable version of a lie.

They are usually more worried with ever having outwardly admitting something that they could be sued over, than they are with any kind of human to human sense of accountability or believability.

Every, single, thing they are mass releasing or designing as an official stance has gone through some kind of legal team, or a team under a legal team that follow’s guidelines from a legal team.

This is just how megacorps work.

They are not people, they are a sociopathic machine, operated by people who very much tend to be sociopaths.

Here’s the summarized version:

Be Polite.

Act as if you only understand ‘the effects’, have a nebulous notion of ‘the cause’.

Act like you know little other than this, and insist they explain it to you like you are a five year old.

Waste as much of their time as possible, without becoming hotheaded, instead become sad-confused.

“I’m not so much angry, as I am disappointed” type of vibe / energy.

And if possible, be genuinely kind to the low level, actual people you talk to, they literally do not make the rules.

Yeah, so far this basically sounds to me like if the guy from Falling Down walked into the building Patrick Bateman works at.

At worst, from a tactical effectiveness standpoint.

If it actually was a more or less specifically targeted attack, it would absolutely make sense that this would be massively underplayed and misconstrued by the broad media…

Because the last thing the broad media wants, is a lot of pissed off, suicidal, heavily armed Americans realizing that this can actually be a shockingly effective tactic, for those with nothing left to lose, ready to meet God or w/e.

The broader media being basically a totally corporate owned affair, that really, really would prefer it not become normalized that … (semi?) random corpos just start getting gun downed in roughly the American version of insurgent suicide tactics, who are to a great extent capable of acting totally solo and are thus impossible to completely prevent at scale.

Call it the ‘final form’ of ‘I’d like to speak with your manager’.

Genuinely, what is your source that he had ‘the wrong floor’?

To have ‘the wrong floor’ implies there was a ‘correct floor’, which implies either a premeditated set person or set of persons as a target, or a known location associated with some kind of organization or something.

If it was a random ‘just hurt people’ type of mass shooting, there cannot really be a ‘wrong floor’, beyond maybe a comparison between overall target rich snd target sparse environments…

Or perhaps it was ‘the wrong floor’ in the sense of ‘the correct floor’ being one that worked with some kind of egress, escape plan?

Seriously, what do you mean by ‘the wrong floor?’

No, that is not how that would work.

It is, actually, allow me to explain:

Visa and MasterCard have policies for who they do business with, ie, merchants and vendors.

The business they do with Valve is the business of processing online payments, Valve is one of their merchant partners.

They can absolutely shut everything down in the name of upholding their own moral / business standards, via deciding to no longer be a business partner with Valve.

If Valve uses an alt payment system for adult games, Visa and MC are still business partners with Valve, Valve is now in violation of their partnership guidelines, ergo, Visa and MC drop Valve.

Visa and MC are concerned with the reputations of the partners they have, in general, not so much with the exact transactions they actually process.

Being mad at Valve is reasonable, because they did not have to ban all games that their payment processors disagree with.

No, its not, and Valve did have to act in this way, see above.

Itch.io and Nutaku just did the same thing after Valve did, you can no longer buy any games that cost money, that have explicit sexual content, so by your logic, its Valve and Itch.io and Nutaku all being unnecessarily censorious, of their own accord, rather than the reality, which is that MC and Visa are strong arming all these digital market places.

EDIT: In itch.io’s case, they even delisted their totally free adult games.

So yeah, being mad at Valve is stupid, people need to be mad st MC and Visa and probably also PayPal.

Being mad at Valve is shooting the messenger.

Fortunately the petition is at least correctly aimed at the payment processors.

But also…

If MC and Visa won’t budge on their positions, well, if Valve then makes an alt payment system for adult only games…

MC and Visa go, oh, hey, you’re violating our guidelines, we no longer support Valve/Steam, now no one can buy any game.

This is a MAD situation, Valve would have to come up with a comprehensive payment processing system for everything, in secret, and then deploy it all at once.

They would have to roughly make their own form of PayPal, alongside their own bank.

If you didn’t know, PayPal technically isn’t a bank, it and Venmo use Synchrony Bank… which is an actual bank.

If they did something like that, it could work, but it would have to be at a similar scale as PayPal, that is to say, massive…

Because doing this would/could basically be the nuclear option:

MC and Visa and PayPal would/could drop them.

So, they’d have to basically develop a massive project, in total secrecy.

… Which is something Valve has arguably done a number of times, they are notoriously opaque as a company.

…

Sort of as you mention, they already have a barebones backend framework to scale up from the steam gift card / user gift card balance system.

I am… uncertain if their backend for that already does or does not include an actual legally defined bank though.

…

Problem is that this would necessitate a massively costly undertaking, as well as ongoing maintenance costs, and Valve is also notorious for basically running on what most other firms would consider a skeleton crew for the size and scope of what they do.

Worth also noting is that Monero also, not too long ago…

They specifically rewrote/updated the uh, block solver problem that miners solve for a reward…

They updated it to make ASIC mining basically not work.

Because they do not want it to be feasible for some rich assholes to build an ASIC mining farm.

They want mining to be distributed, done by individuals, in remotely collectivized mining pools.

Yes, it is individually, not as energy efficient as PoS system… but if you have a PoW system, that is specifically difficult to scale a large scale mining operation for…

Well, then basically no one does that.

Go lookup how much power gets thrown into Bitcoin or Eth., vs Monero.

Yep, they have much larger transaction volumes, but they are also way, way, way more energy intensive due to at least in significant part, it being profitable to run a large scale mining op.

And, not having people able to run huge mining ops, also just keeps things more stable on the value/price/txn speed front.

Monero is the least worst of all cryptocurrencies in terms of being an actual, private, secure currency.

Everything else is to a different degree, some kind of a speculative investment asset, the major ones also all happen to be orders of magnitude worse at overall energy consumption, which is largely used to just do crypto forex trading… people still do not really buy anything tangible with BTC or ETH, outside of either basically, or just actually, some kind of scam.

Hooray two tiered legal system, huzzah!

/s/s/s

I mean…

Looking at mic_check’s figures…

Lets say we are just talking straight, hetero people.

We got all straight men at 43:55 Dem to Rep, thats a 22% higher chance of a woman randomly picking a Rep instead of a Dem.

Meanwhile you can just, as a woman who is looking into dating a man…

Just pick a random, single, never married dude.

Bam!, now its 61:37 Dem to Rep, a 65% higher chance a random, never married dude will be a Dem than a Rep.

…

We are talking about these stats in the context of dating, right?

Where people like, talk, get to know each other?

Not just being randomly assigned partners from a slot machine?

Do dating apps not like, allow you to filter by something like this, or… talk/chat to a person, and ask them questions before you meet them…?

Its kind of silly to paint individual people with a broadly accurate brush… when the ostensible whole point is to get to know a person individually.

Sure, use broad stats to form a broadly accurate general worldview, but realize its limitations.

Disclaimer: Please consider this a sort of fork of your discussion so far, I only mean to say anything about the parts of your comment I actually reference.

…

Why would women seek out a women-only app? And inversely, why would men seek out a men-only app? The answer to each will be fundamentally different, which means the user bases will be fundamentally different as well.

To a significant degree, yes, but I think you are overstating that degree.

Tea is imo more like a gossip app, ala Nextdoor, just specific to dating.

Tea isn’t a dating app, it is… I guess you could call it … dating-app-meta-review app, from a technically minded standpoint?

A supplement to a (or many) dating app(s).

But it doesn’t actually directly link to

[(EDIT: whoops I accidentally a sentence there.)]

It is named ‘tea’, as in gossiping, the deets, the low down, the real story, etc.

Literally this is their own marketing:

https://www.teaforwomen.com/about

It is literally just a replacement for Facebook ‘Are we dating the same guy’ groups, but better, if you pay, because the Premium account allows you to run background / criminal / sex offender records.

…

So, a rough equivalent for guys would probably be named something like MPH, officially Miles Per Hour, unofficially, Miles Per Hoe, I dunno, something edgy for the manosphere crowd, where guys would gossip about cheating girls/women, and also be able to run background checks on them for a premium.

I can guarantee you that men would be broadly interested in such an app if it existed.

…

Now imagine the inverse. Most guys probably wouldn’t even think of using a men-only app for safety reasons. Like it’s not even on their radar, because safety while dating isn’t something they’re concerned with.

Maybe not as much in the safety sense of immediate physical danger, but absolutely in the sense of… is this person financially abusive, emotionally manipulative, do they have kids, or a massive amount of debt/bad spending habits, an STI, etc, that they don’t mention untill they’ve been dating you for some time, do they have a history of acting like they’re committed when they’ve in the past cheated whilst acting like they were monogamous?

These kinds of things apply to both men and women, and are far more common to occur in a dating/relationship than physical abuse.

Yes, women are more likely to be the victim of physical or sexual violence or stalking…

But its not like this doesn’t happen to men.

I can personally tell you that I, a guy, have been so lucky as to have had all three of those happen to me, done by women.

But lets not just use myself as an anecdote, here are the stats on that from the CDC, last updated before the Trump Admin got into power, doesn’t look like they’ve fucked with this page.

https://www.cdc.gov/intimate-partner-violence/about/index.html

IPV is common. It affects millions of people in the United States each year. Data from CDC’s National Intimate Partner and Sexual Violence Survey (NISVS) indicate:1

About 41% of women and 26% of men experienced contact sexual violence, physical violence, or stalking by an intimate partner during their lifetime and reported a related impact.

Over 61 million women and 53 million men have experienced psychological aggression by an intimate partner in their lifetime.

We could quibble about the exact stats of what sex/gender the partner was, and they do cite some studies directly, but uh, oversimplifying to pretend only heterosexuality exists…

About half as many men have been seriously, violently victimized or stalked as women, and I’d be willing to bet the psychological abuse numbers are at least a bit closer to equal if you account for men being unwilling to admit to being victimized in that way due to internalized machismo, ‘shut up and deal with it’, whatever you want to call it.

…

Point of me saying all this is to throw numbers toward countering your claim here:

Most men probably wouldn’t think of seeking out a men-only app at all. So the pool of men who would be willing to go out of their way to engage with a men-only app is going to look vastly different. The average user likely won’t reflect the average man, because the average man wouldn’t even think to seek out a men-only app.

I agree that it wouldn’t represent the average man, but we’ve got a potential user pool of 50+ million men in the US who’ve been through a bad relationship and would probably also not want to go through that again.

Again, yes it is absolutely true that women more often experience a more severe form of relationship than men, no argument there.

But I don’t think you can just say that a man version of tea would only appeal to blackpilled manosphere men.

Yes, that would likely be a large proportion of the user base, but there are tons of men who are not misogynists and also would like to avoid being played or abused.

…

Also, uh:

You say that,

The active engagement is seen as a positive thing, and she’s willing to jump through a few hoops (like uploading a photo ID) to get there.

But what I am seeing is:

To access Tea, women have to verify their gender by submitting a selfie, which is then verified by the app’s team.

https://www.fastcompany.com/91374409/everything-to-know-about-tea-the-viral-and-controversial-app-that-lets-women-mark-men-as-red-flags

The rest of that quote is that the picture is ‘verified by the Tea team’, but I think we both know that almost certainly means they just use an AI face scanning tool.

Anyway, point is: taking a selfie is a way, way lower bar to entry than taking a picture of your driver’s liscense… basically every dating app already does the former, this is totally normal now, whereas the latter is… so uncommon I cannot think of an example.

So…taking a selfie is not that much of a trifle, not a strong potential blocker, for a guy who’s already used a dating app in the last 5 ish years.

…

EDIT 2:

Occured to me on reviewing this:

… Yeah, an AI face recognition to verify gender?

How… does that work for trans folks, or even probably just non white women, and are women who are maybe bald or have more typically masculine coded shorter hair cuts, with less stereotypically/heuristically feminine facial features?

AI has fucked up this kinda shit in the past quite badly.

Wow that was fast.

I did not even know this app existed untill about 8 hours ago.

Already comprimised.

EDIT: Also, lol, this arguably is not even largely a hack.

These idiots just had everything stored in a fucking publically accesible firebase bucket… amazing.

They didn’t delete anything they claimed to.

Either way you look at it, anywhere on the spectrum from:

A ] A bunch of women reasonably concerned for their safety

B ] A bunch of gossip mongers

… well, they’ve now all been doxxed, ironic from each angle.

What a fucking disaster.

Peter Thiel was also a major, early investor in the project.

That’s another ‘this one thing should let you know this is radioactive.’

They probably are not broadly lying about AI replacement being the main factor.

Turns out… Amazon runs AWS for businesses… and also Amazon.com the online retail megastore and logistics service.

Every other business is laying people off?

Less B2B AWS demand.

Everyone is now unemployed?

Less consumer demand, downsize all aspects of Amazon.com storefront and logistics.

…

I’d actually argue that any serious modern economist should be paying attention to AWS and other enterprise level, scalable server solutions…

… That’s a leading indicator of at this point, of broad economic conditions.

If AWS and similar departments at similar companies… stop expanding so much, when the rest of the economy seems to be doing ok?

Yeah, that means growth in demand for basically core business software infrastructure is stalling, and it’ll take 6 to 18 months to filter through to the rest of the economy and become apparent in other metrics.

Or it can just defederate from UK based instances.

.zip has already been trying to figure out how to handle this law, its also UK based.