Does their comfort bubble include comfort prices on things? If so how do I get in on that?

It was one thing when all the bad stuff was happening to people they wouldn’t associate with, but tanking the economy and firing scores of government employees has gotta be breaking into that bubble, right?

I’d have gone with the idiot

Yes, but actually managing to use crypto for commerce is pretty tricky.

Not sure of the state of things currently, but back in the day it was so volatile that you had to buy more than you need because it might lose value before you could pay with it. And the company also couldn’t cash out with the same value either. That’s why Valve stopped accepting crypto if I remember correctly.

It would be nice if it actually worked well for that, but I expect if it ever did approach broad adoption the powers that be would come down hard on it to prevent losing their control.

You were saying they were motivated by advertisers. That these websites can exist if only they chose not to use ads.

But hosting a website of any decent size takes money. So to pay for it you need ads OR payments from your users. Either a subscription or donation.

So if the websites, like you suggest, avoid advertisers to get away from advertiser sensibilities, they’re still subject to payment processors. Which have many of the same kind of hang ups.

Patreon has had several crackdowns on content solely because of payment processors getting upset. Patreon doesn’t care. The patreon creators are happy and their fans are happy. Everyone involved in the commerce was happy with the business. But PayPal was unhappy and the fans couldn’t send money to the people they were supporting without that middle man. So a company almost entirely unrelated gets to dictate what can and can’t be hosted on Patreon. And this has happened multiple times on multiple sites.

Primarily right now it happens to NSFW content, but there’s zero protections from PayPal and visa doing the same for LGBT content, content critical of China, etc. They’re a private company so all our rights and protections don’t apply.

Theoretically there’s an alternative. You could always make your own banking system and your own Internet (good old ‘free market’ at work) just so you can pay for your website hosting costs. Since that’s technically an option, then they aren’t legally interfering. It’s just business and they can choose not to do business with you if they want. Just as easy as building your own power grid and water system. (Though even if you did try to make your own, they’d heavily interfere to stop you).

So yes, avoiding ads will free you from their control, but it will also limit you to only the size of website that can be hosted for free. Anything of a size that would need funding is subject to these company’s morality rules. Which also makes these communities small, isolated and easily dismantled if they prove to be a problem.

As soon as any one instance gets big enough and needs to get funding, the payment processors will crack down on allowed content. Don’t like it? Tough luck in receiving the money people are trying to send you.

No it’s really payment processors.

There have been multiple successful ad-free websites in the past. But they still need revenue to function. Revenue their users happily pay.

But then Visa or PayPal or whoever is handling the transactions starts to pay attention and then all the sudden there’s new rules in place or else they hike fees or just stop processing payments altogether.

And on the Internet, there is no true alternative methods of payment (hint: any viable methods are quickly suppressed by those same payment processors).

So the only way any website gets big is left to the whims of advertisers or payment processors (usually both).

I have no idea why we as a people are somehow fine with private companies having a complete stranglehold on all significant online business. Why we’ve allowed the government to privatize digital transactions, subject to very little rights or protections. It’s allowing private corporations to massively suppress free speech, commerce, and social gatherings in the digital sphere.

Honestly our supposed freedoms are more and more limited these days because they only apply to public spaces, but there’s been a continual erosion of ‘public’. Where is the modern town square? If the only place you can practice your ‘rights’ is almost nowhere, do you really have those rights at all?

The government should be mandating that ‘digital infrastructure’ (ISPs, data centers, payment processors, etc) are neutral and can’t be utilized to bully others out of business. That their privileged position also comes with extra responsibilities and restrictions so you don’t have the digital equivalent of cutting off water to an abortion clinic because the water utility is pro-life.

Yeah. But it makes several pitstops before hitting my bank account. The government pulling back a grant or funding is different than the government taking $500 from John Q Citizen’s account

Also the money came from the government in the first place. That’s a critical aspect to this.

Quiet yes. They’ve gone quiet several times before. But it never results in different actions. They don’t change, they only ever become more circumspect.

It’s how Democrats deluded ourselves that things were turning around and then were so surprised to lose everything. All of the words in the world aren’t going to affect any real change.

I honestly don’t think there’s anything anyone can do to reach these people. I think something is deeply broken in a huge majority of Americans. Either they’re voting for this or they’re too checked out, self absorbed or hopeless to bother to do anything to try to fix it. 2024 revealed just how broken we are.

I also think that, after getting up to speed, they’d fight pretty hard against measures that are meant to backslide us to that point again.

I’m struggling to believe these articles are anything but pandering to the left. I struggle to believe there’s any significant number of conservatives actually having real second thoughts.

I mean during COVID you had conservatives literally claiming COVID was no big deal as they died. I think that was when I understood just how far gone these people could be. They will happily drink the Kool aid no matter the personal cost to themselves.

So losing their jobs is questionable as to whether or not it’s going to actually result in a different mindset, rather than some fleeting complaints that are forgotten by the next election cycle.

‘How to treat a sprained neck’

So not sure if I’m the one with the neck injury or if I managed to get killed treating someone else