Yeah, but it's walking genital warts like Paul Ryan who lump Social Security into "entitlements". And it's the same bunch of ambulatory STDs who were fiscal conservatives worried about the deficit until Trump was elected, and then they couldn't add 1.5 trillion to the deficit (the tax bill which passed the Senate last night) fast enough.

That assumes that Bitcoin plummeting won't have a chain reaction to other crypto-currencies.

If Bitcoin slowly drops, say, a daily decline of 0.25%-0.50% of it's daily opening value, the markets of other crypto-currencies could adjust. But if Bitcoin drops, say, 30%-40% in a day, how do you think other crypto-currencies are going to fare?

"What can we get away with?" has been a corporate tactic for a very long time. And while it's hardly limited to corporations, they tend to have bigger legal teams.

Yeah, but look at the context. Before he was elected, he was like "Well, you can't trust the stock market highs under Obama, because it's totally a bubble, and therefore doesn't count, because reasons. But now that I'm in charge, it's totally accurate, and not a bubble because other reasons." Yes, the stock market is higher, but Trump is basically asking you to take his word that the stock market highs under Obama don't count, because he doesn't want them to.

Look, it's a sad state of affairs that I expect politicians are going to lie. But it's a given these days. Trump is just a prolific liar while simultaneously being really bad at it. Then through in that he seems to have this massive inferiority complex when it comes to anything Obama did....

Funny, that's what LGBTQ people want too, and yet there are "conservatives" who want to take away their rights.

Except that neither Facebook nor Twitter are owned by the U.S. government. If they were, then absolutely, you couldn't ban a U.S. citizen from using them.

But they're not. They're publicly traded. And they have Terms of Service. If you violate the Terms of Service, then they can ban your account. Now, the question should be, are they applying those Terms of Service equally and in an unbiased manner?

I'll admit, I have a Twitter account. I mostly use it to troll politicians, and I use the word 'fuck' like it's punctuation. I won't be a bit surprised if my account gets banned. I've certainly gotten a few 'timeouts' on Twitter.

That being said, I don't want people banned just because I disagree with them. If someone is posting conservative stuff (I consider myself fairly liberal), I'm not going to report it just because it's conservative. That's silly. But I have reported people on Twitter for posting death threats, attacks on religions, etc. Because that is a violation of Twitter's ToS.

Twitter is not required to give people a platform for such things.

Here's the thing.

We're not talking about some people arguing over which Star Wars movie is the best one, where it's a matter of opinion, and each side may have valid points.

Some of these Twitter accounts regularly call for extermination of peoples, like Jews or black people, or whoever. There's no "middle ground" to be had there. There's no, "well, you have a point, but...."

Fuck that noise. They don't deserve a seat at the table.

Wait... alt-right are populist leftists?

What?

Did.... did anyone tell the alt-right that? Because, you know, they seem to be operating under the idea that they're really conservative. (And a fair number of them are racist asshats as well.)

It's up to 280 characters now, but otherwise, yes.

So, you're wrong. But you probably already knew that.

In the case of the baker/cake/gay-wedding:

When you operate a business of public accommodation, that is, a business that is open to the public, you have to operate under certain rules and laws. One of those laws is that you cannot deny service to a person solely based on that person's inclusion in a protected class.

Now, federally, there are several protected classes. They include, sex, age, nation of origin, and race. (This list is not exhaustive.)

Now, that means, if you operate a business open to the public, you cannot refuse service to someone simply and solely because they are a woman, or because they are black.

States can add to the list of federally protected classes, but may not remove anything from that list.

Colorado, where the bakery/gay-wedding case took place has added sexual orientation to that list.

Which means that the bakery could not, legally, refuse service to the couple simply because they are gay.

If the bakery had been booked solid, and could not have produced the wedding cake in the time required, it wouldn't have been a discrimination case.

If the bakery didn't even offer wedding cakes as one of the services they offered, it wouldn't have been a discrimination case.

But because they do make wedding cakes, and because the owner made it clear he wasn't selling the couple a wedding cake because they were gay, it was discrimination, and it was illegal under Colorado's laws.

"News for nerds" includes anime nerds.

I personally don't care for stories on pretty much anything Apple does, but they still should be posted. Nobody is making you read them or comment on them.

Except that with Net Neutrality, even if you only have one choice of ISP, there are certain things that ISP is still not legally allowed to do.

Without Net Neutrality, congratulations, you still only have that one ISP, but they can choose to make tiered content brackets such that unless you pay for the higher tiers, you can't get access to Facebook. Or CNN. Or whatever.

Now, I don't know if any of the ISP are really going to go that far. I suspect that it might be more along the lines of "You haven't paid for this tier of service, therefore Facebook is in the slow lane", rather than blocking it altogether.

Hell, I don't even get a bill. My internet access is rolled into my rent, and I don't receive an itemization of that.

So yeah, my rent could go up because of my internet bill going up, and I wouldn't even know whether I should be mad at the ISP or the Landlord.

Except that if you do a bunch of small pledges, you're being hit repeatedly with this.

Let's say, under this new plan, I make a $1 pledge a month to an artist whose work I like. Well, I don't get charged $1. I get charged $1 + ($1 * 0.029) + $0.35, for a total of $1.379 (rounded up to $1.38).

Now, let's expand on that. Let's say that there's 20 artists on Patreon I like. I do the same $1 a month pledge to each of them. That's that $1.38 times 20, or $27.60.

Before this change to the fee scale goes live (I don't believe it goes into effect until later this month), if I did 20 $1 pledges, it cost me $20.

Now, that's a bit of a difference there.... $20.00 vs $27.60. It's not much to me, but it can mean the difference between supporting certain artists or not.

Now, in neither case (either before these fee changes or after), was the artist I was supporting getting the full $1. Patreon was taking a minor cut out of that as well.

With this fee change, they're charging donors a fee for pledging money, and charging recipients a fee for receiving money.

More to the point, when they run my (from the example above) 20 separate $1 charges, they're not doing it as 20 separate transactions to the credit card companies. Because then they (Patreon) would be hit for 20 transaction charges. They're running it as one transaction.

Now, I get it, Patreon is a business. They need money to stay afloat so they can continue to offer this service. But they're basically screwing everyone involved in using Patreon and trying to float it like it's oh so fucking amazing.

Hell, I've already seen multiple creators ask if there's a way to take on the fees themselves instead of the people donating the money, because that way, the donators aren't the ones being hit for the extra charge.

Okay, let's say you do that.

This morning, 0.001 Bitcoins would have been worth about $13.70. Right now, that same 0.001 Bitcoin is worth about $15.65. (It's down from it's earlier high.)

That's $1.95 in difference.

What's the cost to cash out? Okay, I don't know that. So I can't say how much of that $1.95 you'd lose to that. (And that's not even taking into consideration any costs associated with mining that Bitcoin, if you were even the one mining it.)

But nobody's retiring on $1.95.

Even if you had 1 whole Bitcoin, that would only be $1950. Still not enough to retire. Sure, that's not the goal of every transaction. No one reasonably looks at a single stock market transaction as "this will set me up for life".

Sure, there's currency speculators involved in this. It's a given. And they might have enough money behind them to make some serious money on this. But most people? They can't. They don't have the money lying around to invest/speculate in this at the scale where any profit would mean more than a down payment on a new car.