as alive as you need me to be
Who gave Harvey Weinstein a cattleman hat and a Senate seat?
Fucking Oklahoma, goddamnit.
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.
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.'
Shouldn't be hard for him, I'm sure he has a lot of prior experience with boot-licking, how hard of s lateral skill transfer can bootstrap based levitation be?
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I completely agree with 99% of bigger tomatoes, but... I evidently just cannot forget those few, exceptionally good heirloom tomatoes somebody had grown back in the PNW a decade ago, hah!
Could be worse, don't take a bite out a ... tomacco.
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Beautiful. fɹud͡ʒ.tə.bəl, I think, incidentally.
That seems right to me, the... what is that a lower case sigma?
iirc, thats the sort of... rolling 'zh' sound I was going for...
... though I think maybe we just have a natural dialect difference for how how to pronounce vegetable, as you've got the same vowel sound for the last two syllables?
But anyway, yeah, I think I came up with 'fruigtable' almost 20 years ago, upon first learning how much overlap there is due to all this linguistic silliness... so i choose chaos, and decided to add to it, and now I finally have a relevant time to use the nonsense/compound word, woo!
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I am 100% with your well written explanation here!
Just one 'nitpick', that isn't really even a nitpick because you did qualify the relevant part with 'tend to be':
A properly grown tomato absolutely can be so flavorful, sweet, tangy, varied, complex... that you could just eat it like an apple.
Not as sweet as most apples, but way, way more sweet than the typical mass produced tomato you're likely to get in the US.
I've been to a few farmers markets where... a couple of smaller farms were growing just absolutely stellar quality tomatoes.
...
On the other hand, squash and zucchini, even the fancy ones from farmers markets?
Main difference I noticed was basically perfect ripeness, they still just taste like nothing.
(I guess I should also point out this was from 10ish years back, sadly, a lot of farmers markets now have a lot of people basically just reselling some particular, slightly higher quality but still mass produced fruits and veggies, than aren't even local)
...
Finally, to throw more insanity on this terminology dumpster fire...
Corn.
Corn is arguably, from different domains of technical or colloquial meaning... a fruit, vegetable, and grain.
After millennia of us artifically selecting (and then just outright genetically engineering) what was originally, basically a kind of grass, we now have something that is now so sweet, that the US uses it to make HFCS, a cane sugar substitute... and then we jam that HFCS ... into bread, soda, everything.
So... ketchup... is then roughly a tomato/corn smoothie, made primarily from two... frui-getables.
Yep.
Fruigetable.
(froojzh-tah-bull)
((im too lazy to look up IPA symbols))
You're welcome, bwahahah!
True, they are related, but Redhat has a bunch if stuff that Fedora, and thus Bazzite, does not.
This can matter a lot if/when UE5 is dependant on something that doesn't exist in Bazzite, or that is configured in a completely different way, such that to make UE5 work with Bazzite, you basically have to break have of Bazzite with that reconfiguration.
Bazzite is a great general use/gaming linux OS / distro...
But in particular, getting UE5 set up and working on it, as a game development engine, is actually very, very not fun.
It is much easier to set up Godot or even O3DE, or Bevy. Those are all fully open source, and also totally free to use, no liscensing payments for making a game with them.
Uningine is a seemingly little known, closed source, but much more generally linux compatible game engine, that imo rivals UE5 in terms of features and capabilities, and also Flax Engine exists, is uh, 'source available'.
Both of those have something like a 'pay x% of your game revenue per time period after it exceeds $y per time period' model, similarish to Unity... and they also have better, more broad native linux support than UE5.
...
But uh, why aren't UE5 snd Bazzite a good fit?
Well, for starters, UE5 officially supports Rocky and Redhat linux.
You may note that Bazzite is not, nor is based on either of those.
Bazzite is basically a customized version of Fedora.
Further, Bazzite's whole paradigm is that of a sealed off base OS, and then everything else is run or installed in atomized containers, use flatpaks as much as possible.
Generally, this is great for stability, gaming, and being able to rapidly update and improve the OS...
But when you are running a game engine for development, especially on linux, you will often need to download and install all of its specifically required dependencies, and Bazzite, by design, is geared toward you not doing that.
It wants you to use distrobox, podman, distroshelf, etc, to set up essentially a containerized, near approximate of a more standard linux setup within Bazzite, and then do any real development work within that... and this can lead to various weird, esoteric problems, that there isn't really anybody with guides or documentation on how to handle, because setting up a game dev engine in this way is extremely uncommon.
(Especially so if you want to actually do some kind of customized build of the engine from source, because you need or want some existing, additional, but non standard capabilities)
(Though of course that doesn't apply to UE5, they are not open source)
This makes it more complicated to set up a properly working game engine, especially when native linux compatibility is uh, advertised, but not well documented, updated, or fully working in practice.
...
UE5 is also very, very much just offering 'linux support' as an after thought.
UE5 + linux + containerized, atomized linux = you're gonna have a bad time.
If you wanna go with Bazzite, and a totally free and open source game engine, I'd suggest Godot, Bevy and/or O3DE, roughly in that order of increasing difficulty of getting them to actually work properly.
You could also maybe consider Raylib/RayEngine, though I don't have much experience with it.
What does nth grade reading level even mean?
Very broadly, a lower grade of reading level means:
Less broad vocabularly,
Less ability to use and comprehend more complex grammar and sentence structure,
Less critical analysis capability,
Less ability to understand context and domain specific, different meanings of words,
More reliance on nebulouy defined, vague slang vocabulary.
In the context of adults I can understand, but I think I've heard things like Xrh graders having an average reading level as Yth graders.
This means that say, a typical 8th grader now has reading/writing abilities on par with a 6th grader.
In other words, kids keep failing classes and getting passed onto the next grade anyway, instead of being held back, or sent into some kind of 'catch-up' or 'remedial' classes to get them up to standard.
...
Teachers and the education system broadly have, you know, rubrics, standards, lists of concepts that a kid is supposed to be taught in each class and grade.
This is how 'grading' works, the idea is that your test is supposed to evaluate how successful the student was at learning, how succesful the course was at actually teaching the student new concepts.
The main problem is that we underfund teachers and schools, and also punish teachers and schools when they actually do the right thing and refuse to pretend a kid has learned things they haven't.
So, the result is, kids don't learn.
...
Another recent contributor to this is just pandemic levels of kids on their phones in class, all the time, not paying attention.
What you should do is something like ok, if I see your phone in class once, it gets taken away for the rest of the class, two times, the rest of the day, 3 times, you have to surrender your phone to the office when you get to school and get it back when school is over.
But students and parents literally respond like feral zombies when you propose this, despite this being the norm throughout the proliferation of cellphones, and early days of smartphones.
There's nothing stopping you from using a phone responsibly. Set it on vibrate, if you get an actual important txt or call, ask to step outside the class and take the call/message.
Schools also have landline phones for emergencies.
Another thing is that short form video content addiction does actually cause brainrot, it is real, its been shown in numerous academic studies.
Lower attention spans, lower impulse control, less control over emotions, and shortform video content platforms in particular also spread misinfo and disinfo like wildfire.
I didn't think you were arguing that, no worries m8.
I was just trying to throw in some relevant numbers to attempt a more realistic estimate of the situation.
I agree with you that the 60% figure for BNPL is not actually evidenced, and is likely an exageration, so I tried to do the author's work better than they did and come up with a more defensible figure.
I used to be a copy editor for a while, and oh man, yeah, it absolutely annoys me to no end when a person tries to argue in a direction I generally agree with, but they do so sloppily, with bad citations, logical leaps, lack of approoriate levels of knowledge leading to them making inferences and deductions that do not actually follow.
In American schools?
Normal public schools?
Economics is an elective, only available at fairly good schools, usually only taken by overachievers.
Most US Public schools don't even teach the basics of taxes or finances as it applies to an average person who is going to like, work a job that is taxed, buy a car with a loan.
Our education system has been intentionally destroyed by Republican s for decades, the result is that roughly within +/- 2 years of when I graduated college... US average adult literacy rate has been plummeting.
The average US adult now reads at a 6th grade level, average math skills are also terrible.
Uneducated people are easier to lie to and trick.
"Mmm, munch, mmm, I love this popcorn!"