amazing reading this thread and realizing just how much HN is disconnected from the reality of majority of people in America. returning food and hitting multiple stores is like a daily thing for several people I know
It's a great joke (and yes, a hilarious thread!), it's $10 in the original joke though so I would say it still works for now (not sure what a banana costs in the US today. Here it's about $1).
credit card company’s primary purpose is to protect me, I am making them a ton of money. hence, they should ablige to my every request (stop payment being number one on the list). insane they won’t help you without a ceremony. I never talked to the vendor first, the first thing I do is stop payments through my credit card and then I reach out to vendor.
Not sure if making a company a ton of money has anything to do with obliging anything. Many companies I ship money to (this post for AWS for instance) won't do anything for you at all, except, hopefully mostly, provide the service you paid for. If the credit card company (or it's AI) has any reason to not help you, they won't, guaranteed.
the credit card company makes money each time I tap my card. there has never been a time when they did not oblige to my request (and I was wrong before several times with legit transactions me (or my wife) made and did not recognize).
it is management that is successfully convincing people that it is a tough job market - it is not - it is same as before. I am a contractor, have more work offered than I can take (same as before, maybe even slightly more). four friends/former colleagues got new jobs since the beginning of December, each had multiple offers and got decent to significant pay increases compared to previous positions.
If we’re doing anecdata I haven’t been able to get w-2 work in over a year and have been taking sporadic contract work.
I’m several hundred applications in and have hired a recruitment firm to help me find positions. Multiple companies where I referred by friends of mine declined to even phone screen and then those respective friends reported that the position was closed and they were given zero info as to what was happening.
remote work is pretty much done, if you are looking for 100% remote work you'll have a very hard time finding it unless you get a job through a referral of a former colleague or something like that
US is infinitely worse than EU but selectively based on what ruling party wants you to both see and post. try to get some coverage from gaza or west bank and/or post something slightly critical of israel and see how that works out for you. EU, China… are at least up front about what they want to censor and why, US censors every fucking imaginable thing while people are too stupid to see it and go “oh my, look how bad EU/China are…”
I mean there are an increasing number of states that are requiring age gating for pornography access for sites like PornHub. It's only a matter of time before that age gating expands to non-pornographic entities, which is the ultimate goal of the plan.
Another lie. The government has the same right to politely request sites to remove disinformation as you and I do. No one "made sure" of any such thing.
Eh. Asking sites to remove information while concurrently litigating against them is very "nice site you have there, shame if something were to happen to it."
The real issue here is that accusations of hypocrisy are misdirection. Two wrongs don't make a right and it's not a competition to see which government can screw people worse.
If your murder rate is up 300% and your defense is "well what about the murder rate in <other country>", the most conspicuous thing about that response is that it contains zero absolution from your murder rate being up 300%. The same is true of the censorship rate.
The problem is any mechanism you put into place to fight "disinformation" will be used to suppress information the government doesn't like.
Covid is a great example, since most of the disinformation was coming from public health authorities, and people who were skeptical about vaccine safety and effectiveness were ruthlessly suppressed online. People who turned out to be right.
That's exactly what I'm talking about. You're confidently calling Ivermectin, a drug that's been used in human medicine for decades, "horse paste". You're just ingesting propaganda without putting any thought into it.
If you're not in the US, you probably don't understand how our system of federalism works. We have 50 different states, some of which are basically run by the Christian equivalent of the Taliban or the Shiite mullahs of Iran. These state governments often come up with goofy, performative laws such as age verification that are normally set aside by higher courts as First Amendment violations.
I say "normally" because the same religious factions are rapidly expanding their dominance over those very courts. Absolutely no historical freedoms can be taken for granted in the US right now. Nevertheless, the fact is, there is no national Internet censorship regime including age verification. No such laws are currently under consideration at the national level.
(Yes, you can be prosecuted for downloading or distributing child pornography, but that is not an Internet-specific issue, and there is no other country I'm aware of where such laws are not also on the books.)
Edit: if you are willing to move the goalposts that far, there is probably no way to convince you that the facts are as stated. Nevertheless... those are the facts. For further reading, look up the term "prior restraint." That's what's actually different in the US versus other countries that use technical means to enforce legal restrictions on Internet speech.
What are you smoking? Access to porn has been legally restricted in every state to 18+ for decades. Adding the Internet only made things easier because nobody enforced it the same way they were already enforcing brick and mortar stores that had the exact same materials.
Likewise, there are plenty of rules and regulations around adult content on broadcast airwaves managed by the FCC.
Challenging adult content as "free speech" has happened and already settled precedent at the Supreme Court.
Yes, individual states are still trying to figure out how to actually best enforce the laws on the books at the Internet level, but there's no pretending that it is just a few states that actually have those laws.
I AM in the USA. And yes, we are heavily censored, but not simply in content. Its a financial censorship, or cut off from banking, or payment processing. And being the "Home of the (everything costs so damned much) Free", starves all initiatives that threaten companies or government.
Wikileaks is one such. Operation chokepoint, another. OFAC sanctions. Holder v Humanitarian Law Project. Knight First Amendment Institute.
But thats the point - USA speech says you can say "Hitler did nothing wrong" and its legal. But you infringe on Powers that Be, and money is involved, your speech via money will quickly be eliminated.
It is hard to discuss these things with people that post such comments as the one you replying to... off the deep ledge where there is no coming back from
(Shrug) If you're not already posting from some Eastern European or Russian hellhole, you need to spend some time in places such as those to gain some perspective.
Or, in general, any other country that people die trying to get out of, as opposed to trying to get into.
keep shrugging but your mind has been totally polluted to think you live in some "free" society where you have "rights and shit" and oh other countries don't have that. but this is good training you went through, you have been told these lies all your life and you believe in them strongly - and that is fine, it is what it is.
the truth of course is much harsher and hopefully you'll never run into it but you absolutely do not live in a free society, the censorship is all around you (if you care to look deeper), the freedoms you think you have are daily being taken away, you can't carry a bottle of water or a f'ing toothpaste onto the airplane (and apparently we have 4th amendment?)... - this is all normalized in the US but we still think we are "free" and your best is "see how many people are flocking to come here, we must be great..."!!!! :) quite something...
Meta is beyond evil, like waaaaay beyond evil. In a normal society (that ship has said for us a while ago) the company would be shut down and everyone running it at the top level would be in prison for life
