You can also be right for the wrong reasons. You see that a lot in the anti-AI echo chambers, people who never gave a shit about IP law suddenly pretending that they care about copyright, the whole water use thing which is closer to myth than fact, or discussions on energy usage in general.

Everyone can pick up on the vibes being off with the mainstream discourse around AI, but many can’t properly articulate why and they solve that cognitive dissonance with made-up or comforting bullshit.

This makes me quite uncomfortable because that’s the exact same pattern of behavior we see from reactionaries, except that what weirds them out for reasons they can’t or won’t say explicitly isn’t tech bros but immigrants and queer people.

Weird, either there’s some backroom drama with Interac or now might be the time for you to ask their support about it.

They already support local payment processing schemes such as Bancontact, iDEAL, JCB, Pix, etc. A good chunk of their international customer base already isn’t dependent on the big American payment processors.

The way towards undermining Visa/MC’s power is for more governments/Central Banks to push for indigenous alternatives which abide by local regulations rather than foreign puritanism. This is already a desirable goal for most both from a geopolitical POV (reduce American control over world finance) and a financial one (VISA/MasterCard charge outrageous transaction fees).

American consumers are fucked whichever way things go though, it’s not like the regime is going to make a move to break up the monopoly nor to push for less censorship in media. If Valve somehow goes through with this and makes deal with all major American banks, they’ll be done just in time for the Save The Children From Pedostanic Video Games Act or whatever the fuck that will force them to purge all thought crime from their platform.

Did you even read the article? Even under the VERY GENEROUS interpretation of contract law that contracts can’t be predatory (which is not a particularly popular philosophical stance outside of cyberpunk fiction), AWS MENA fell short of even their typical termination procedures because they accidentally nuked it while doing a dry-run.

I don’t know where you work but if we did that to a paying customer, even IF there was a technicality through which we could deny responsibility, we would be trying to make it right.

The author put it well:

What if you have petabytes of data? How do you backup a backup? What happens when that backup contains HIPAA-protected information or client data? The whole promise of cloud computing collapses into complexity.

Multi-region cloud computing is already difficult and expensive enough, multi-cloud is not only technically complex but financially and legally fraught with uncertainties. At that point you’re giving up so much of the promise of cloud computing that you might as well rent rack space somewhere, install bare-metal infra, and pay someone to drive there to manually backup to tape every 3 months.

This level of technical purity is economically unfeasible for virtually everyone, that’s the whole point of paying a vendor to deal with it for us. And you know who doesn’t need to put up with the insane overhead of multi-cloud setups? That’s right, Amazon, Microsoft, and Google, who will be getting paid for hosting everyone else’s multi-cloud setups while they get to run their huge infra on their own cloud without fear. The last thing GAFAM competitors - especially OSS projects - need is even fewer economies of scale.

Stop with the victim-blaming, this blunder is squarely on AWS.

Eeeeeh. I mean sure, we do have stricter requirements, but not nearly as much as fantasized by Americans. My grandpa still has a license that he got where the whole test was saying “I solemnly swear that I can drive”. Here in Belgium the country is extremely car-dependent so license suspensions are actually vanishingly rare, requiring you to get caught red-handed more than 40 km/h above the speed limit (50 in practice due to radar correction), and even then the suspension is only temporary; I have never heard of anyone who lost theirs permanently. Most people here do consider driving to be a right. Until a few short years ago temporary license suspensions could even be scheduled only on weekends and holidays!

Another angle to see this problem: I see Dutch people driving in Belgium daily. And they’re absolute menaces. But they’re so chill when they drive in Holland! What gives? Well most roads around here have more in common with American roads than Dutch ones… Give a dutchie in a BMW a wide straight line and he will do 75 km/h in a school zone without a second thought before changing lanes without signalling, then barrel through a roundabout while ignoring right-of-way. They aren’t better drivers, they just have such good road infrastructure that forces them to drive one very specific way: slowly and carefully.

It’s multifactorial. Cities like Helsinki and Amsterdam are poster children, but Europe also has plenty of areas (especially suburbs) that are as car-dependent as equivalent US cities.

However traffic deaths remain much lower than in the US thanks to less idiotically-designed streets.

Step 0, by far the biggest impact-to-cost ratio, is narrow the damn streets. Take the biggest road-legal vehicle allowed on that street, mark down the path of travel, and put some plastic bollards a few inches on either side. Watch as everybody instinctively slows down even though the flow of traffic is not even impeded or redirected in any way. This policy - by itself - doesn’t even reduce car dependence! If you do it as part of the regular road repair schedule, it’s literally free.

America’s wide-ass roads constantly astound me with their profound stupidity. There’s literally no tangible gain, and so many downsides to public safety. I understand (though I strongly disagree with) the usual refrains for why the US is car-centric, but making streets too wide is simply inexcusable and unconscionable.

That is… not the threat that you think it is.

I highly recommend watching Fantasies of Nuremberg. Be warned, it is extremely heavy to watch. But it is absolutely essential framing to keep in mind when talking about Genocide.

Furthermore, appliances compatible with Type F are almost always compatible with Type E as well, it’s just a matter of including both grounding mechanisms which they all do to avoid designing multiple cords.

I haven’t yet visited the UK so the only time I’ve had trouble plugging in something in Europe is in shudders Italy.

I hear that a lot but would that actually work? Sure, you will get a redhat level 1 support employee within the hour for a severity 1 ticket. But does the actual contract (which I don’t have access to) make any legally binding guarantees regarding the time-to-resolution? I seriously doubt it. Which is to say – your legal team will be SOL.

They also won’t take responsibility for any fuckup on your part if you install a bad driver or deviate from the admin guides in anyway (which is why Legal says for a minor issue you can’t apply a patch from StackExchange, you must raise a ticket and wait 3 business days for RedHat to tell you to apply the patch from StackExchange).
Getting phished definitely falls in this category BTW. Vendors may or may not help you but they certainly won’t accept any liability.

It’s still a good enough safety net to have for corporations with no trustworthy in-house expertise as vendors do have an incentive to keep their customers happy and most will help to the best of their abilities (which often isn’t as much as one might think…), but it’s hardly a legal panacea. If you need guarantees against catastrophic financial losses, that is what insurance is for.

Does not work around the necessity to get all major retail banks or the central bank on board, as they outline in their FAQ.

There’s no magic bullet, if you want to act as a payment processor you only have a handful of options:

• Do a bank wire (but it’s not pre-authorized so you’re just providing a deposit account for your customers, like PayPal)
• Use Visa/MC (which PayPal falls back to if you have no money in your deposit account)
• Use regional payment processors where they exist (e.g. Bancontact/iDEAL in the Benelux, which Stripe conveniently abstracts for the retailers; however most countries don’t have such a widespread alternative to American payment processors)
• Use physical cash
• Agree on a protocol to pre-authorize transfers on behalf of your customer with all banks your customers are likely to be using (in the EU you can do that with SEPA mandates, which PayPal does support as well)

In practice the EU is doing that last thing with Wero (which already has partnered with all major retail banks in Benelux+France+Germany) and Brazil successfully did the same with Pix. It’s not that the technical part is particularly hard, it’s that convincing the banking sector to adhere to and commercially promote a new standard is a long, expensive, arduous process that requires strong political connections.

And I want a unicorn for Christmas.

Look, right now I don’t even have a good reason to hope that Israel will be stopped before they finish their genocide. But step 1 is to get a permanent ceasefire in place. Whatever fantasies we might have beyond that is a moot point. But recognizing both parties as sovereign would go some way towards facilitating the terms and enforcement of that ceasefire.

If you’ve got a plan to achieve that and doesn’t involve genociding israel, shoot for it. But I don’t think “unrecognizing” Israel is a particularly productive step towards that.

In this context? Someone who is currently on the good side of the current apartheid system in Israel/Palestine.

Don’t play dumb with me, you know full well what I meant. If you have a point, make it.

So no Israel, just Palestine? That would leave Israelis a majority population in Palestine. Do you expect Israelis to magically not outvote the Palestinians, or are you proposing an autocracy or an apartheid system stripping Israelis of their voting rights?

I would also strongly suggest you do some reading on the factors leading up to the Rwandan genocide. A “just” peace isn’t enough; after generations of life under apartheid, there are no easy or quick paths to lasting peace. I won’t commit the hubris of pretending I have a definitive solution, and I think it’s important to underline that as outsiders to the conflict, the best we can do is offer to safeguard peace. That’s what the Two-State Solution was meant to do, that’s what arms sanctions are meant to do, that’s what the threat of economic retaliation would be meant to do (granted each with their own significant shortcomings). Denying the practical existence of either Israel or Palestine is antithetical to building a path towards lasting peace and a meaningful international effort towards safeguarding said peace.

For a practical example, assuming a peace treaty ever gets signed, sending UN Blue Helmets would be diplomatically easier if all parties involved recognized Palestine and Israel as sovereign states. Even if that all seems like a moot point right now what when neither Israel nor most Western nations are actually looking forward to peace.

I mean, it’s a matter of opinion, but leather sucks in hot and in cold weather. It doesn’t breathe so I get super sweaty, and it gets super cold in winter. So luxury cars compensate with heated seats and in-seat ventilation…

I’ve never considered the friction of my car seat to even be a factor, I don’t tend to move much once I’m sat down.

So there are two interpretations I could make of your comment, one of which is more charitable than the other.

1. You are using the Chinese and Israeli playbook of weaponizing statehood recognition as a value judgement. That is profoundly problematic, both on a practical and a philosophical level. De-humanization should not be a tool we have to use on our enemies. Our moral high ground should speak for itself.
2. Your are dog-whistling for the genocide and/or deportation of all Israelis. In which case our conversation is done here.

To be clear, Israel is committing genocide and every single member of its government and of the IDF should be tried at The Hague. But laws and international order exist for a reason, and trying to circumvent them like this is a very bad look that Israel has been rightfully criticized for for decades.

The first part applies to… Most of the world outside of Europe?

The second part applies, to lesser degrees, to a large part of the world. Such as the USA.

What even is this argument. Israel’s not a state? Well fucking great, so following that logic which state should we hold responsible for Israel’s crimes then?

Europe’s colonial past is a whole-ass subject but amongst all the potential ways to try to make up for it, “stop formally recognizing former colonies because we fucked it up too badly” is one of the worst takes I’ve heard.

I’m sure google is already working on GenAI to “fix” that for you.

I hate the future.

So do regular fiat payment processors that are beholden to citizens and not faceless shareholders. Wero and Pix for instance.

Democratic governments are supposed to safeguard your ability to exchange legal tender for legal goods and services. The fact that Visa/MC have a duopoly and a stranglehold on the entire online economy is a major governance failure that needs to be rectified ASAP.

Crypto goes a lot further and says no-one, not even the government, should be able to prevent a transaction from taking place. Not necessarily an invalid idea but it does come with some huge unanswered challenges, such as “what happens when someone makes 1B€ through fraud and refuses to hand over the coins” and “how do we even prevent large-scale fraud in the first place”.