>”those religious groups that forced card payment processors to ban pornhub et al”
I question how much influence such groups actually have, given that payment processors already dislike dealing with adult oriented businesses.
The percentage of chargebacks and disputes made for those transactions is significantly higher than any other category. Companies hate having to investigate such claims and issue new cards, even when it appears fairly obvious the purchase was made by the cardholder. It’s also tricky from a customer service standpoint, because the cardholder may likely be lying in order to hide an embarrassing purchase from a spouse or other family member.
It seems like payment processors just want to get rid of a hassle for themselves.
There’s no way to test UBI without implementing it fully. Any experiment that gives people a no-strings-attached stipend isn’t accounting for the fact that the money has a negligible impact on the economy and produces no meaningful change in the workforce. Plus, all of these experiments are time-bound. Participants know the payments will stop.
I also get the feeling that such experiments just prove that giving people money makes them happier. But there’s nothing to account for the fact that prices in the market haven’t changed, the tax structure hasn’t changed, and no goods or services experienced any shortages.
There’d be a revolt. You might be able to get away with doing this in some small area, maybe a city block or two. But anything more than that is just begging for a backlash from the local population.
To be honest, I always figured we'd make it in the long run. We're a thrifty bunch, we aim to set up sustainable organizations, we're more enshittification-resistant by nature. As long as we're reliable and stick around for long enough.
I used to do that too, but now I go to my spam folder and grab the latest phishing email and use the reply-to address. I like the idea of some sales guy following up a lead with a Nigerian scammer, but sadly I’ll never see the email exchange.
Put such a sales person into the shoes of the Nigerian scammer, uh, I mean "prince" and they might just as well become the Nigerian scammer. It takes a specific kind of person to engage in the dark patterns stuff and be convinced of themselves doing nothing wrong.
In the days when running one’s own mailserver was the common case for small business websites, root@localhost was a fun one. “Why does this freaking thing keep filling its hard drive with our own newsletters?”
I used to go to the trouble of looking up the company's own sales contact or cxo or whatever and subscribing them to themselves, but now I just close the tab.
I remember in the early 2000s I started getting junk fax calls on my phone at least 4X a day. It got so annoying that I took time out of my day to get revenge. First, they made the mistake of sending it from the same number each time. So after some investigation, I identified the name of the company and even found the CEO's phone number. Unfortunately for them, I was an early VOIP adopter and it was relatively straightforward to set the PBX software to forward all calls from that number to the CEO's phone. The calls stopped happening within 48 hours.
There was some company a while back, I forget what they were called, but their claim to fame was a much higher click through rate on modal popups due to them “guilting” people with dynamic messages like “No, I don’t want to save up to 50%” or “I would rather let children starve than sign up for this newsletter”.
One, I can’t believe this worked. Two, some website owners were convinced that being patronizing towards visitors was worth the extra clicks.
Someone made a funny video about this approach with a guy at Petsmart and you hear the lady say, "Ok, just follow the prompts." and gets worse/funnier from there:
While Ukraine had Soviet nuclear weapons, it did not have the launch codes, infrastructure, technical knowledge, or the economy needed to convert them into an arsenal under their sovereign control. Moscow still “held the keys” for all of those warheads.
Given how insistent the international community was on making sure those nukes were disposed of, and how economically devastated post Soviet countries were, I don’t think Ukraine stood any chance of having a nuclear deterrent.
I question how much influence such groups actually have, given that payment processors already dislike dealing with adult oriented businesses.
The percentage of chargebacks and disputes made for those transactions is significantly higher than any other category. Companies hate having to investigate such claims and issue new cards, even when it appears fairly obvious the purchase was made by the cardholder. It’s also tricky from a customer service standpoint, because the cardholder may likely be lying in order to hide an embarrassing purchase from a spouse or other family member.
It seems like payment processors just want to get rid of a hassle for themselves.
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