These platforms are starting to let people bet on wildfire activity. What a fun way of incentivizing arsonists.

Well, yes. For many years, presidential candidates, both Democratic and Republican, referred to the United States as "the indispensible nation". And my reaction was always, "Doesn't that mean the US is a single point of failure for civilization?"

We are currently performing an experiment which addresses this question: can the US enjoy the benefits of soft power without the cost? That's the whole point of obeying *norms*. No individual force is going to punish you if you are treacherous, mercurial, foul-mouthed, disrespectful and generally unpredictable. Everyone will punish you.

I think an inevitable cost of this experiment will be that the world will decide that the US can't be a single point of failure for global democracy any longer. In many ways, that's something that will be good for us. But it's also going to cost us in painful ways. When the world decides to move away from the dollar as the international reserve currency, you will see both inflation and higher interest rates on everything from credit cards to mortgages, to business loans that will offset the export advantages. We will need *more* business investment to shift the economy to producing low value goods again, so the transition will be rocky.

Based on what you've written, your PayPal experience is largely as a payor, and not a payee. That's certainly the most common case.

The other side of the transaction is very different. PayPal is heavily biased toward the former. That's a problem, because PayPal is quite unforgiving for payees. A big part of the problem is that payees are often ignorant, reckless or outright criminal, and their heads are often filled with small-business-person shit. People think they're clever or take things for granted with PayPal and get caught: accounts get frozen or shut down when people fuck around, and people do a lot of fucking around.

They frequently don't see it as fucking around. But that's a chronic condition, especially for business folks. You'll notice the lack of details seen from PayPal haters. When they do share, you'll learn all about how fast PayPal picks up on all the screwball things people try to pull, and how little patience PayPal has for the nonsense in the heads of these people.

PayPal isn't perfect. Handling money is complicated, and PayPal has made mistakes. But you can safely chalk up about 99% of the PayPal hate you see to payees that learned the hard way that their bullshit won't fly with PayPal.

You're conflating your emotions with facts, in a field you very likely know very little about.

Always anonymous, always cowards.

This.

Culturally it would have been a big shift, even given the talent they have, but they just don't have the courage of leadership it would have taken to do this. It's been 60+ years since IBM had that, when they bet the company on the 360. The PC doesn't count; that was essentially a side project for IBM. They didn't create the hardware or software for it, and the companies future wasn't riding on it.

It's a part of their business, but not a majority of it, even before AI. They've added AI coprocessors to their Telum CPUs for their Z series platform, but it's not a significant player in the world of AI money. More of a checkbox me-too thing that probably will be of use for legacy customer applications, but no one is building data centers full of Telums to compete with OpenAIAnthropticGoogleEtc.

I suspect GP's point is that every malware blocker in every browser is likely to treat this kind of script as hostile, except for Chrome because Google are currently nerfing the ability for blockers to intercept hostile scripts in one of the most blatantly user-hostile changes they've ever made.

If Apple play along with Safari then every other browser and its malware blocking plugins are about to be toast in a huge retrograde step for Internet privacy. But not even Cloudflare is going to get away with blocking every iOS device if Apple continues to allow blockers to intercept this kind of script.

Did anyone mention recently that simultaneously controlling both the most popular web browser and several of the most popular ad-supported web properties might be a little anticompetitive, and that it's about time that Google was broken up? It's probably time for that drum to start beating a bit louder again.

Maybe. I doubt it: Intel seems to have figured out that x86 is not it's exclusive future, a change in corporate mentality that long overdue.

Also, this story must be fake news: Tariffs Don't Work! member?

This is the real answer. A lot of people are afraid of the speech Nazi's that ruin the lives of anyone committing wrongthink. They know the social media companies are moderated by privileged tech weirdos that are protected and immune, and readily bury the people they hate with no consequence. Sane people don't engage with stuff like that.

It's a trade off: you get abundant free energy to run the server, with extreme constraints on cooling because your server is running in the most perfect Thermos bottle ever.

Others are taking the opposite tack: undersea data centers for abundant free cooling at the expense of having to get the power down to your servers.

If had to bet on which one is more practial, I'd go with undersea servers. Build them off the coast of Chile, run cables out from batery-backed solar plants in the Atacama desert.

Insane Clown Posse, is that you?

Once they realized you'd pay the hire price, if the fees are gone, the businesses are just going to go 'yummy more money for me'.

This is dumb shit. Many stores around me explicitly charge you the difference if you pay by credit card to cover the service fee.

I have never had my debit card compromised. Ever. The fact that it's a direct line is what makes it not usable to buy things online, etc (generally). But it's very nice to use in person - I like that when I spend money, I'm actually spending it and not creating debt. (Don't get me wrong, I always pay off my credit card bills every month, which are not trivial sums .. but I'm only using them because they're the only things you can use online.)

Credit cards, on the other hand - we all pay for the insurance. It's not really the banks problem, its a problem that you have protection for because you pay for it.

"Just give me 1% in cash"

That's still money that comes from somewhere. Like .. from you.