Bitcoin is sadly a failed experiment and you’re not a luddite for pointing out its various shortcomings. I was an early adopter back when you could get an entire coin for a buck or two, but never invested much in it and lost most of what I had when one of the early exchanges imploded.

The concept of bitcoin was great, a decentralized currency not under the control of any government or institution, but that was still reliable and pseudo-anonymous. The execution however was beyond disappointing. It was quickly commandeered by “investors” looking to gamble on something even more volatile than forex markets and ceased being able to function as an actual currency due to the wild swings in value. In order to be a useful currency something must have a relatively stable value. Additionally scammers and criminals also gravitated to bitcoin further driving legitimate businesses away from it not wanting the guilt by association. Finally it turned out that the anonymity was even easier to break than initially thought and the tax headaches involved in buying, selling, or trading in bitcoin or any cryptocurrency make it too annoying to actually use (massively compounded by its wildly fluctuating exchange rates).

It’s because they’re concentrating all the wealth. The wealth in the US used to be far more distributed, with the majority existing in the large middle class. Reagan started the policy by Republicans to pass laws and regulations designed to benefit the wealthy at the expense of everyone else, and then Clinton got the Democrats on board with the same strategy. We’re approaching the end game now where the middle and lower classes are nearly bled dry and the rich will start cannibalizing each other to be the last fattest rat in the garbage pile while the entire US economy collapses around them. Be on the lookout for the smarter rats to start fleeing the ship by transferring as much wealth as they can into foreign assets that will survive the collapse of America.

So that’s kind of missing the point. First as I pointed out you don’t actually have to buy anything to see the explicit preview images, so Steam is arguably in violation of those laws. Secondly the issue is that the Visa and Mastercard contracts require companies to be in compliance with local laws. It doesn’t matter whether someone is using a Visa or Mastercard to make the actual payment if the purchase would technically be considered illegal (which it arguably could be in some states/countries under the new super strict porn laws).

At the end of the day this boils down to a) terms of the Visa/Mastercard contracts, and possibly b) new anti-porn laws that are putting an onerous burden on services to collect customers IDs in order to prove age. This isn’t a question of common sense, in contract law (and law in general) it’s about the letter of it and not so much the spirit. Yes, it stands to reason that if you legally own a credit card, and you must be at least 18 to own a card, then you are obviously 18 or older. However that doesn’t matter at all when the laws are written such that services must validate age using a photo ID. It also does not account for stolen credit cards (never mind that that’s a far more serious situation than the possibility of under age kids seeing some naughty pixels).

This whole situation is stupid and Visa and Mastercard clearly need to make some changes to their terms and conditions, but until they do from a legal standpoint businesses like Valve and Itch.io have their hands tied.

You would think, but I believe the law(s) require verification of a photo ID. I haven’t looked too closely into the UK one, but the way the laws are written for a couple of the US states a credit card doesn’t meet the requirements. There’s also the fact that many of the preview images and videos for porn games on Steam show nudity and/or sex and you can access those without needing to purchase the game (just the birthday question to “verify” your age).

Edit: also steam gift cards are a thing, so you can purchase without using a credit card technically.

I don’t know that anyone has put together a complete list of games taken down specifically because of this, but you can look at steam-tracker.com and sort by date to see what has been removed recently. It doesn’t show why a game was removed, but you can usually infer a lot from the title and cover art.

Also I should clarify it wasn’t specifically multiple large waves, there was a large initial group, but the remainder have been slowly trickling in. I’d guess there’s someone going through Steams catalog slowly flagging games to remove. The first group was likely an easy keyword search, while the rest are being evaluated on a case by case basis most likely.

That’s what it started with but it seems to have quickly expanded to include a lot of more mundane things. Initial reporting was only on the first wave of censored games and didn’t include the stuff that was removed later on.

It’s a catch 22. You need a phenomenal amount of capital to stand up a payment network with all those criteria, but anyone with that amount of capital can’t actually be trusted not to abuse their position in exactly the same way the existing banking networks have.

They’re trying with GNU Taler, but it’s pretty much a pipe dream at this point.

The main reason is that the credit industry isn’t in the business of running an intelligence service or part of law enforcement. That said, what they are connected to is almost the same as an intelligence service, that being the advertising industry, and there’s literally nothing stopping them from selling or even being forced to give their data to law enforcement. The only reason it doesn’t happen more I’d say is just the optics of it.

Ultimately what’s needed is a digital payment system that’s at least somewhat anonymous, but that’s an incredibly hard nut to crack. Bitcoin tried it, but largely failed to do so (and immediately got corrupted by speculators that wanted to use it as a forex instead of currency). A couple of the other crypto currencies that have come out since then have claimed to be better but I’m still incredibly skeptical that there’s any real anonymity there.

Nobody on any side has cited any sections of any agreement specifically. The closest we’ve got is the statement from Stripe who is the payment processor who recently had to turn down business with a womens sexual education charity (despite spending months trying to get to an agreement) and the reason they cited was contractual obligations with banking networks including Visa and Mastercard. They stated they want to be able to process payments for porn companies, and that they’re exploring other options, but they couldn’t at this time.

Valves statement also matches with the claims of Itch.io, Stripe, and what Collective Shout themselves have claimed. So we’ve got two different claims, on one side are Visa and Mastercard, and on the other we’ve got literally everyone else. I feel pretty confident about which one is a load of bullshit.

It’s also worth noting that Visa and Mastercard are playing semantic games with their statements. Nobody ever claimed they were “refusing legal transactions”, rather what they’re doing is threatening to stop working with any business that doesn’t implement censorship that they’re happy with. It’s a subtle but important difference and they’ve never denied that’s what they’re doing.

Edit: rereading Mastercards statement they are claiming they don’t restrict how businesses operate (although they do weasel around a little bit about illegal content), although Visa still hasn’t denied that. They may also be playing games with that statement because porn is illegal in some countries that Mastercard operates in so they may be trying to claim porn is an illegal transaction despite businesses not selling it in the countries it’s illegal in.

Edit 2: It just occurred to me this could also be about the UK and some US states new (and horrible) porn ID laws. I’m not aware of Valve doing anything to implement the strict age verification those laws are requiring for sites that distribute porn, and Visa/Mastercard could be trying to argue that without that in place any porn games Valve sells are “illegal transactions”. In theory Steam does have age gating, but it’s the same “are you over 18?” easily bypassed check that porn sites have always used.

And then they’ll find ways to use the crash to make themselves richer too.

^cough too big to fail ^cough

Ah, now that I check it again the actual article title is different from the title posted on here. I was referring to the title on here.

This title and article confuses me. After reading the article it seems like there were a few lanes of traffic that were originally normal road lanes, but had been converted to bicycle only lanes at some point, and they are now talking about converting them back into normal traffic lanes. Where is the law in this? This sounds like a civil engineering exercise not a legal one. Did someone sue the government over this? The article title made it seem like the government was trying to ban bicycle lanes, but the article paints a very different picture.

Edit: I’m talking about the title of this post that says “Canadian judge rules law to remove bike lanes is unconstitutional, cyclists have a right to safety”

Edit 2: did the article title change after this was posted? If not this post seems to be violating the rule that the post title must match the article headline.

Wouldn’t reevaluating the road system to meet pedestrian needs better be a far saner response than trying to mandate everyone wear special clothing? Maybe convert a few of those roads from vehicle to pedestrian only and explore options to provide better lighting on both.

Men have exactly as much power to stop this as women do. None of the things you mentioned are acceptable. I don’t tolerate someone “memeing” Trumps “grab them by the pussy” remark except to paint Trump as a despicable person specifically because he made that remark (among many other reasons). Anyone trying to defend that kind of remark or shrugging off “all women are whores” as locker room talk is wrong and I would call out anyone who did so. But you also need to see how what you’re doing here is essentially the same thing. Someone said “all men are predators” and then when it’s pointed out that’s not acceptable you try to defend it by citing the statistics for women being assaulted and then dumping all the responsibility for fixing that problem on every man.

I’m not a senator, I’m not a congressman, I’m not a judge or governor, I’m not a cop, I’m not even a manager. My ability to fix society’s problems is highly limited, mostly what I can do is call out bad behaviour when I see it which is exactly what I did in this instance. Beyond that I can donate to charities that try to address these problems which I do, and vote for politicians that try to address these problems which I also do (not that it ever seems to make a difference).

You didn’t understand a single thing I said and keep trying to change the subject. You entirely missed the point of the analogy which was to demonstrate that using statistics to try to justify discrimination is wrong and does not in fact in any way justify discrimination but that sailed right past you and instead you’re hyper focused on the fact that the two analogous situations are not perfectly identical.

Then you went on and picked a different analogous situation but one which differs in a very critical way that undermines the entire analogy. You missed a critical point which was for a bear, not a population of bears, the longer you stay around and in close proximity to that bear the greater the chance you will be attacked. Bears, all bears, are dangerous. Not all men are dangerous. It doesn’t matter how long you spend around a man, your odds of being attacked don’t increase. Sure if you spend time around an ever increasing number of men your odds go up, but that applies to any interaction with anyone. The more time men spend around an ever increasing number of women the more the odds of the man being attacked go up. For a large enough population, no matter how small the likelyhood, the probability will always converge towards certainty.

Ultimately though it’s entirely a side tangent as the only reason the analogy was brought up was to illustrate why trying to use statistics to excuse discrimination is wrong.

Bigger problem -> overgeneralization -> backlash over the over-generalization while maintaining status quo. Wash, rinse, repeat.

That’s because making overgeneralizations doesn’t actually do anything to address the problem and only undermines otherwise legitimate complaints. Instead of wasting all this time trying to defend the overgeneralization, maybe instead focus on trying to solve the problem, because attacking everyone in the majority group regardless of their guilt or innocence just discourages any of them from wanting anything to do with you or even listening to your complaints.

You’re putting a bunch of words in my mouth here. I never said any of the things you’re claiming and this feels like moving the goal posts. My issue, was the assertion made in the post that “all men are predators”. There may or may not have been more context to that, but since that was all we were given that’s all we can go on. Either you believe that is an accurate and true assertion, in which case you disagree with me and really do believe all men are predators, or you agree with me that that is not an accurate and true assertion.

The rest of your post basically boils down to “you’re not allowed to defend against gender based discrimination unless and until you can show that you’re doing everything you possibly could to fix all of societies gender related problems”. If we all adopted that same premise nothing would ever improve. Or should we start demanding to see peoples credentials when they call out sexism, racism, fascism, etc. on the internet? Have you done everything you could to stop sexual assault? Have you been writing letters every day to your senators and congressmen to encourage new laws or reforms? Staging protests? Maybe working at abuse shelters? No? Well, seems like you don’t have the right to participate in this discussion then by your logic.

You immediately assumed that because I don’t agree with what you said I must think all men are rapists or sexual assaulters, or that I think that it’s okay to accuse all men of this thing. That’s not the case. But what I’m asking you to acknowledge is that this is a story on the internet with scant details about the interaction from a person who’s got every reason to lie by omission.

No, I didn’t. That was literally the point being argued over. I never claimed that there aren’t details missing or that there’s no potential subtlety here, in fact I very much agree with that, but that still doesn’t excuse broad discriminatory statements.

Had that point been made originally, that there’s missing context and we don’t know what the interaction was up to that point that would be one thing. I never said I thought OP was a good guy, I was just pointing out that saying “all men are predators” is sexual discrimination and wrong, just like the example given in another reply of “all women are whores” is also wrong.

You don’t stop discrimination by giving the minority group a free pass to engage in discrimination as long as it’s targeted at the majority. I would be making the same point (significantly more so) had OP been making discriminatory statements about women, the difference is I wouldn’t need to be defending myself from all of you. You should maybe think about that.

Does it suck to hear “All men are predators” if you’re a good one? Sure. But at the same time, people have no issues claiming all brown guys are terrorists or illegals. Or women are gold diggers. Or whores.

You literally just made my point for me. Every last one of those examples is wrong in exactly the same way. Or are you defending all of those as acceptable generalizations? You’re cool with men going around saying “All women are whores” and that just being an acceptable thing?

Ooph, that is both an incredibly subtle but also amazingly scathing burn. Some real murdered by words content there. I love how this works in multiple contexts at once.