chimeracoder

See, that’s just flat-out lying. What’s this mythical circumstance where playing audio A at the same volume as audio B on one device will magically make A louder than Bon another?

Regarding your second point: as any audio engineer or electronic musician knows, the same exact audio absolutely will sound very different on different speakers, depending on how well they replicate various sounds, what level of gain is being applied, and the volume (which is different from gain, although people confuse the two).

That's even before you get into the fact that many modern devices, like smartphones, will apply their own compression or sound processing before playing the sound, sometimes to compensate for those deficiencies and make them less noticeable, and sometimes to "enhance" the sound.

Loudness/volume (technically different things but let's conflate them here) are also unintuitive because human ears don't have a flat frequency response curve, and some things will be perceived as louder despite being the same volume, or vice versa.

Advertisers actually can (and do) take advantage of this, by using sound engineering to make things feel louder while staying within the desired volume, by targeting the way humans perceive the sound.

This isn't a defense of the advertising/streaming companies here, because it is a solvable problem. But it is true that this is a problem that they need to solve.

The HB vaccine unfortunately doesn't work that well, many people are still not fully immune even after several doses

This is incorrect. The HBV vaccine is one of the most effective vaccines available for any pathogen, providing full immunity to over 95% of healthy infants, children, and young adults, and with that immunity typical lasting for at least 30 years (and likely for life).

If someone is one of the rare exception, tthat's easy to detect with blood titers, and the response is either to give them additional doses or to deliver an adjuvanted version (which is the same thing regularly done for other vaccines which are either less effective or primarily targeted at the elderly, who have weaker immune responses).

Yes, there is an effective vaccine but not everyone has access to it for tons of reasons.

Also, about 3.5% of the world's population already has it. That's about 300 million people for whom a vaccine is pointless, and who are at dramatically higher risk of liver cancer (somewhere between 15-50% lifetime risk of an extremely deadly type of cancer), and for whom a cure would literally be life-changing, if available.

It's estimated that 300 million people have HBV. HBV is currently incurable once acquired, at which point the vaccine is irrelevant.

The HBV virus is also carcinogenic, which makes it unique[0] among the three big hepatitis viruses. Liver cancer is extremely aggressive and fast-killing, often reaching terminal stages before it is even detectable at all. It is one of the top three causes of cancer deaths worldwide.

Aside from the sheer number of people affected by this, it is also a horrible thing to experience. I have watched someone die from liver cancer, and I would not wish it on anyone.

Contrast to HSV, which is widespread (approximately half the population has at least one HSV latent infection) and causes very few problems beyond occasional irritation in virtually all cases that do not involve other comorbidities or immunocompromised status. HSV is also suppressible through antiviral treatment, making it generally untransmittable (if treated and suppressed) and unlikely to cause symptoms. Most people with HSV do not even bother to do this, which is if anything a testament to how little HSV affects their lives (most don't even know they have it, and there is no clinical justification for routine testing in otherwise healthy patients).

Of all infections pathogens for which I could wish a cure into existence, HSV would be extremely low on my list.

[0] While HCV can cause cancer if left untreated for a long time and if it causes cirrhosis, approximately one third of people clear HCV infection in the acute stages without any lasting ill effect. Of the remainder, it takes a long time for cirrhosis to develop, leaving plenty of time for treatment. First-line treatments are approximately 95-99% effective. So there is no clinical reason HCV needs to increase a person's risk for cancer, as long as they have access to medical care. The same is not true for HBV.

“Free Palestine” isn’t exactly fringe. In fact, outside America and Israel, I’d bet it’s the default stance

That's certainly not true in many European countries

wait, how many workers fall outside the 16-65 range??

A little less than 10% of the workforce.

GP is correct - basically there was a report making that claim about the decline in employment rates of US-born workers over a certain time period. It was almost immediately debunked because it excluded workers older than 65, who are almost exclusively US-born, and excluding them heavily skews the average. Many of these workers also aged out of that bucket during that time period, which makes the comparison misleading, since the actual size of the studied workforce varied, and the workers who were excluded from the studied cohort were strongly correlated with the effect they were trying to demonstrate.

Furthermore, that effect is also exacerbated because of the uneven distribution of baby boomers.

This is wrong. There is no minimum time in the country for a green card. You are thinking of citizenship. That is different.

You are incorrect. What you said is technically true in that there is no statute that requires it, but in practice, OP is correct.

It varies depending on the country of origin, but in the case of immigrants who hold citizenship from India, which is the country OP mentioned, you can likely expect to have to wait that period or even much longer before becoming eligible, unless you have a way to otherwise jump the queue.

This is not true, India has something called “Overseas Citizenship of India” which is technically not a citizenship even though the name says, but its a life time visa available for US citizens of Indian origin. And you don’t have to give up US citizenship

The OCI card is better thought of as a green card that you have to reapply for once at the age of 65.

It provides the ability to live and work, with some minor restrictions, but none of the typical benefits of citizenship that wouldn't come with permanent residency in the US.

How many people become permanent residents of the US through these visas, as opposed to the others?

The majority of permanent residents gain their green card through a status adjustment (ie, from a nonimmigrant visa).

Status adjustments are the norm, not some fringe edge case.

That excludes all fans who don't live in big cities. A lot of people travel just to go to shows.

Not really. The place that sells the tickets doesn't have to be the performance venue itself.

This sort of distribution was quite common pre-Internet. In theory it's even easier now, because so many of the venues have (unfortunately) consolidated under vertically integrated ownership (e.g. directly owned by Live Nation). Which incidentally, after scalping, is the biggest reason that ticket prices are so high in the first place.

Google owns Android. Google does not care about you or other users. Their customers are ads publishers. 0days does not matter for them

"Google does not care about zero-day vulnerabilities" is an absolutely ludicrous claim.

They ended up citing a state law indicating that no locality domains were to be used for _government_ purposes in MA as their reason to say no, when of course that has no bearing on private use… If anyone would like to band together to push city of Boston or Cambridge to start approving these, please let me know! I can revive some email chains.

I'm confused by this. Some have migrated away from the locality domains but some are still in use even by official/state purposes.

Here's the website for the Newton, MA public schools: https://www.newton.k12.ma.us/

Belmont: https://www.belmont.k12.ma.us/

I believe Cambridge used to use one as well but I can't confirm that.

Chargebacks. "Oh, honey, I don't know how that got there. A hacker must've stolen my card! I'll call the bank immediately!" Worked in the adult industry and traditional e-commerce. It's a perennial problem.

As explained elsewhere, this is a problem for the merchants, not for the platforms. The platforms don't lose money on this, and may in fact profit off of it.

pornhub doesn't even accept payment via credit card. A while back they were kicked off due to there being too much CSAM.

There are orders of magnitude more CSAM on other platforms, such as Facebook. As explained elsewhere in the comments, Pornhub was targeted by evangelical, anti-pornography groups which weaponized claims of CSAM against Pornhub for their own political purposes, despite the fact that Pornhub had vanishingly few instances even compared to other pornography platforms, let alone non-pornography platforms (like Facebook).

This law is why they've been so aggressive over the last few years. There's nothing else that has changed

There is so much that has changed! If you think FOSTA/SESTA are the only thing that have changed, you're clearly not up to date on this topic!

Banks didn't do this before 2018 as aggressively

Because after FOSTA/SESTA passed in 2018, the groups that lobbied for it started targeting financial infrastructure as the front in their war. This is not some secret; they've been very open about it and their lobbying efforts have been extremely well-documented.

Those bills are the reasons banks/credit card companies are pushing this since it holds them liable.

You are either misreading those bills or confusing them with other similar bills which did target banking infrastructure (and which thankfully did not pass).

FOSTA/SESTA did increase liability for platforms, but the applicability of those laws to this specific case is minimal to nonexistent.

The problem is that activists who are laser focused on eliminating adult content watch intently for the first thing they can use against the company, and even if it violates their ToS something problematic is eventually bound to get through review.

This is why Pornhub is always targeted under the pretense of "fighting CSAM" when in reality Facebook is orders of magnitude worse in terms of the prevalence of CSAM and the distribution.

Exodus Cry, et. al. don't target Facebook, because they don't actually care about fighting CSAM - they are simply weaponizing that rhetoric in order to attack the the thing they really want to end (pornography, and more broadly, anything "immoral" according to a right-wing, evangelical definition of that word).

Thank you - appreciate you being willing to correct that.

FOSTA-SESTA is the source of this. A well intentioned bill, that, once again, has unintended consequences beyond it's original intention.

You're right that these are connected to FOSTA/SESTA, but you're missing the actual connection.

FOSTA/SESTA were not "well-intentioned". They were the product of lobbying from explicitly religious, anti-sex, anti-pornography groups. Those same groups are behind recent campaigns to require providing government ID to access pornography, to allow attorneys general to prosecute LGBTQ content, and to ban pornography from platforms like Steam and Itch.io.

FOSTA/SESTA have worked exactly as they were intended to! The intention was to make it harder to conduct sex work legally and safely, and they accomplished that goal!

These policies have little to do with FOSTA/SESTA themselves, in that the text of those laws has no bearing here. But those bills were the first big, national victory of these campaigns, and they used that momentum to raise absurd amounts of money to lobby for the other laws mentioned above, and to target financial infrastructure as an easy point of leverage to accomplish their goal of banning pornography across the Internet.

Collective Shout is Australian, but there are plenty of similar groups in the US , UK, and Europe.

There hasn't been sufficient reporting on all the lobbying and back-room dealing.

There has been tons of reporting on this in the industry. It is not hidden. The war on sex work is extremely well-documented, as is the explicit shift in tactics to targeting financial infrastructure as a tactic.

It's not people using stolen cards, it's people feeling shame or regret after making an intentional purchase and using chargebacks to "undo" the purchase

If this problem were as pervasive as people keep saying it is, it would put the merchants out of business long before it would have any noticeable impact on the card brands (Visa, Mastercard) who are typically the ones actually pushing bans like these[0]. Even if the merchant is successful in winning the chargeback, they are the ones who have to pay the fees for it, which means that any business with a predictable and consistently high enough chargeback rate will just stop collecting payments long before the upstream providers care.

A lot of people here don't actually understand how payment processing, risk underwriting, and chargebacks work - which is fair, because it's an arcane area of knowledge that most people don't interact with! But it means that a lot of things which sound like simple and easy explanations are actually completely off base and nonsensical.

[0] I do not have knowledge of the Kickstarter situation specifically, and the article is light on primary-source details, so I am explicitly not commenting on this specific case.

Adult content, pharmaceuticals and travel are all industries that experience significantly higher occurrence of fraud and chargebacks than others. For example, your spouse sees a weird item on your credit card for a porn site. "Wasn't me! Must be stolen I'll report it." Sometimes it's the other direction.

No, it has nothing to do with chargebacks. It's not even presented that way in their policies when they ban it. They consider it a "brand risk", which is completely different.

Why payment processors do it? Why people in America do not want to earn more money from commissions? Strong church lobby? Legal risks? I think its mostly religious groups who who are against adult content and sex, or there are other groups?

The driving force is mostly a group of nonprofits and lobbying groups that are backed by right-wing, mostly-but-not-exclusively evangelicals.

Over the last decade, they have successfully laundered their views into the mainstream to the point where many people don't realize how influential they have been in writing all of these laws and policies and driving them across the finish line.

None of this is hidden knowledge - they've been acting out in the open for years, but people have an aversion to acknowledging it, because it's an uncomfortable truth which triggers a great deal of cognitive dissonance.

It's not a sudden new thing. The financial theory seems to explain all the facts.

Literally all three of the examples you list were the direct result of lobbying from groups like Exodus Cry and Morality in Media. These campaigns had been in the works for years, and were well-known to people in the industry, who had been sounding the alarm for years.

It's maddening that people not only refuse to listen before the actions come down, but also still refuse to connect the dots even after they happen.

The religious right knows many of their views are unpopular so they don't act in the open. They find underhanded ways to force their views onto us. Abortion bans wouldn't survive a simple up and down vote in almost any state, yet abortion bans are happening across the country.

They do act out in the open! That's why it's so maddening to see how pervasive the belief that this isn't a push from right-wing groups is. They are extremely open about their goals and about their ideological alignment, and they have been at literally every step in the process.

They're telegraphing every single move in real-time. But for some reason, people just don't really want to believe it.

It turns out, the best way to get away with a heinous agenda is not to hide it, but to be completely open and direct about it. If you tell people exactly what they want and it's horrific enough, they will refuse to believe it's true, because nobody would be that cartoonishly villainous, right?

The sex industry isn't the only area where that principle works, although (like with many "technologies") it was one of the first where it was successfully applied.

Question: what prevents an organisation like Kickstarter from using more than one payment processor, including the ones used by actual porn companies?

The way the policies work, they would either have to use the latter processor for all transactions (which would be prohibitively expensive) or relegate all "adult" content to a completely separate company and domain, which would be a huge pain and expense to operate for something that constitutes a relatively small fraction of their business.

I’ve heard this is apparently less about morality and more about payments getting contested by men getting caught by their spouses

This is a common myth. The concerted effort that we've seen over the last 5-10 years in particular is the direct consequence of intense lobbying from a handful of groups that are openly backed by or aligned with right-wing religious groups, especially (but not exclusively) evangelicals.

In case you have any doubts about whether "morality" is their motivation, one of the groups was literally called "Morality in Media", before renaming to the more official-sounding National Center on Sexual Exploitation. Despite the new name, they actually don't care very much about "sexual exploitation" as most reasonable people would define the term (such as child abuse) but instead consider all sex work to be "exploitation" and aim to ban legal sex work.

Right-wing, openly evangelical groups like Exodus Cry and Morality in Media, who have an explicit agenda to ban pornography and see this as an easy "next step" towards that end goal.

They are also the groups behind the closure of big porn sites like XTube, the short-lived purge of adult content on OnlyFans (one of the few battles they lost), and the scourge of age verification bills that are sweeping the US, UK, and Europe.

The goal with age verification laws is not to protect minors or fight CSAM (as much as they pretend it is) - it's to make it expensive and difficult to legally serve content that they disapprove of, producing a chilling effect. Note that the content they disapprove of is not limited to pornography, which is why many of these bills have such vague language that can apply to other things like information on abortion, or LGBTQ+ themed material. This is not an accident; the supporters of these policies are quite open about their intention.

Windows laptops are out of the question, and pure linux laptops (until only very recently) were of marginal support and low battery capabilities (especially "close it and stuff it in a backpack for 3 days").

Dell has sold laptops with first-party Linux support for nearly fifteen years, to say nothing of other smaller OEMS.

As for the battery issues during sleep: that actually has to do with a combination of the BIOS settings + downstream ramifications of secure boot (and how the old-fashioned "hibernate" used to work). Unfortunately, that isn't specific to Linux. My MBP has the same problem, and so do the same laptops running Windows.