good luck starting an eccommerce business where everyone has to write you a money order. oh and you can't use amazon, ebay, or shopify either
you don't really believe what you're saying do you? that's like telling blacklisted hollywood writers and actors that they can make their own plays in their backyards
yes but practically big businesses can get away with these types of things without much fuss. even in the case where Apple and Google were caught wage-fixing, and there were emails from the CEOs blatantly colluding to prove it, all they got was a slap on the wrist. So it's effectively legal in my view
you are being intentionally obtuse. there is obviously a difference between a t shirt vendor and 1/2 of a duopoly on online payments. the other of which also (coincidentally in your view) took the same measures to restrict people from using their services at the exact same time with no realistic alternative
again I'm not making a legal argument but a moral one.
>If the government can take away your rights, then they can take away mine too. I don't support that and will defend your rights as vigorously as my own, whether I agree with you or not.
This applies to Stipe and Paypal too. They can arbitrarily prevent anyone from operating an online business. The libertarian view that you should care more about their right to do that than individuals who will lose their livelihoods with no recourse, is something I'll never understand and we'll never come to agreement on.
when did I say Stripe didn't have the legal right to do this? I used the Hollywood blacklist as a parallel precisely because it too was a legal enforcement of political speech by a big consolidated industry that had the power to end peoples' careers
the civil rights act effectively does protect speech with regards to religion and sexual orientation, since the idea that we won't discriminate against those things as long as nobody finds out is not what it means
What you are saying is word for word the libertarian argument against the civil rights act ("if we have to bake a cake for gay weddings, what if wants a cake for their child bride!"). I happen to disagree with it as it applies in the real world
Hollywood is a private business as well. They were within their rights to make a blacklist. And people cheered on big business for protecting them and snitched on their friends to their employers, just like they're doing now
the poster you are replying to seems to be arguing that Qanon people should be a protected class under the civil rights act because it's a hokey pseudo religion with prophecies, shamans, and everything. That absolutely does apply to private companies. I don't really know what to make of that as I am not a lawyer, but I'm not making a legal argument but a moral one.
Internet businesses are natural monopolies and being banned from one can ruin your life without trial in a way that was unprecedented for private companies to be able to do in the past. In the near future somebody who is banned from both Paypal and Stripe will be close to being perpetually unbanked in some lines of work. The way progressives have cheered on giving tech companies this much power over our lives has been dispiriting
I think our history books do a disservice when they teach McCarthyism by focusing only on the falsely accused-- many Americans really did support the USSR and some even swore an oath to Stallin. The lesson should be that it was still a mistake to take civil liberties away from these people who passionately supported a horrible cause, not that McCarthyists were just bad prosecutors who arrested the wrong people.
I believe Trump supporters, especially the QAnon weirdos, are wrong to believe the things that they do, but they are less wrong than the people who supported the Soviet Union during its genocidal reign. Unless people are charged and convicted of a crime, their livelihoods should not be taken away by the whims of these powerful companies selectively enforcing their rules. McCarthyism was wrong then and it's wrong now, even though its targets are wrong too.
If you make 75K that's more than double the US median personal income and you still qualify for the checks. It's a good living in the US outside of a handful of cities. Also I think a lot of buyers are young people living with parents
another round of stimulus checks is going to set bitcoin off on another bull run imo. you could see a drastic effect as soon as the $600 started hitting people's checking accounts
I think people who have a healthy relationship with games agree with you, but for me, the obsessive grinding only made the games less challenging/fun, with no reward except larger numbers on the menus-- like if the reward for the Marshmallow test was just that you got to look at a bitmap of a pixelated marshmallow on tv.
Videogames are not all bad, and of course there are many healthy and successful people who enjoy them and appreciate them as works of art. But for me personally, I regret that I spent so much time doing busywork for an unpaid job that I didn't even enjoy.
Of the thousands of hours I spent playing single player videogames in my youth, a surprisingly small amount was spent having fun or doing anything interesting or challenging. It was mostly just tedious grinding on my overpowered Pokemon (and other rpg equivalents) against helpless enemies so that I could be even more overpowered against them.
I luckily grew out of it, but being absorbed by the pursuit of easy, digital approximations of real accomplishments, to the point where it impedes more difficult pursuits of the real thing in the real world, is a serious issue for many millennial men I know.
this is what I don't get though. Why mortgage your future earnings to take a MOOC from a random startup employee when you can get the same from a world class professor for free?
If you're self motivated enough to follow a curriculum on your own, you're probably much better off using online resources from MIT/Stanford/Harvard which are not only free but much better quality.
The learning environment described in the linked thread (200 students per teacher, plus blind leading the blind with volunteer mentors) sounds terrible at any price including $0.00. Many MOOCs have community boards, TA's, interactive assignments and cost little or nothing. If their plan is to just bundle that same experience with a job placement sales team and a private slack, then they'll just be yet another for-profit credential mill