Porn-related transactions have a higher than average rate of chargebacks. Maybe post-nut clarity motivates people to say “wait hold on I shouldn’t have spent that money, I must’ve been hacked.” Or maybe it’s people saving face when confronted with a transaction log from their spouse or other family members. Or maybe it’s just the type of transaction that actual card fraudsters gravitate towards, so that there really is a higher percentage of unauthorized transactions.

Gambling-related merchants also have a similar problem with payment processors. For many of them, it’s just straightforward business concerns, not any kind of ethical issue in itself.

From a business perspective it makes sense, to throw all the rendering to the devices to save cost.

Not just to save cost. It’s basically OS-agnostic from the user’s point of view. The web app works fine in desktop Linux, MacOS, or Windows. In other words, when I’m on Linux I can have a solid user experience on apps that were designed by people who have never thought about Linux in their life.

Meanwhile, porting native programs between OSes often means someone’s gotta maintain the libraries that call the right desktop/windowing APIs and behavior between each version of Windows, MacOS, and the windowing systems of Linux, not all of which always work in expected or consistent ways.

As I understand it, MacOS’s desktop relies on GPU instructions that haven’t been implemented in any non-MacOS hosted virtualization environment. So you can have a MacOS VM running on a MacOS host just fine, but you can’t run a MacOS VM in a Linux host, even on official Mac hardware, at least if you want the actual desktop environment. The Asahi Linux people have mentioned it before.

If this passes for the military, then that will mandate the creation of a parts supply chain, as well as documentation and manuals for maintenance and repair, for whatever the military buys. Once that stuff is created, it’ll be a lot easier to mandate that the existing stuff be made available to the public, too.

That might not make much of a difference for a guided bomb, but it’ll make a huge difference for the huge amount of commercial off the shelf stuff that the military buys: laptops, routers, tablets, phones, civilian vehicles, tools, other basic equipment.

And while information itself can be a “product” or be provided as a service, in most cases, it’s not.

Sure, but my point is that the same is true of physical machines. People don’t want working machines for the sake of working machines. They want working machines to actually do something else, to output a “product” of that machine’s operation.

And viewed in that way, information services are as much a standalone “product” as maintenance/repair services. Information services account for trillions of dollars of economic activity for a reason.

The mechanic is usually the actual worker - you run a repair shop

But what is being repaired? A machine of some kind? And the machine is operated in pursuit of another actual productive activity, right?

Machines are just about the application of mechanical force in some way, and that in itself isn’t an end goal. Instead, we want that machine to move stuff from one place to another, to separate things that are apart or smush/mix separate things together, to apply heat or cooling to stuff, to transmit radiation or light in particular patterns.

Everything in the economy is just enabling other parts of the economy (including the informal parts of the economy). Physical movement of objects isn’t special, compared to anything else: kicking a ball on TV, singing into a microphone, authorizing a wire transfer, entering a purchase order, answering a phone, etc.

I’m not seeing a real distinction between an IT consulting business and a heavy equipment maintenance/repair business. The business itself is there to provide services to other businesses.