With SKG going as well as it is, wouldn’t an ECI on chat control be in order?

Sure. Let them whatabout. But to us, consumers, it shouldn’t matter.

We know the stores aren’t responsible, so we shouldn’t attack them.

The processors are. For Visa and MasterCard it’s pretty obvious. Itch, as you said, puts direct blame on Stripe, and I think we can trust that.

As much as processors need banks, banks also need processors. It’s a sort of symbiosis. Damage to one actually trickles onto the other. So pressing onto processors isn’t a mistake. It’d be foolish at best and malicious at worst to suggest that.

Now that we have leverage as users and consumers, having started a push which made way and caused a response (first the prepared phone statement and now a press release), the absolute wrong thing to do is bacl down and say “sorry, we were wrong, it was B after all and not you, A”.

And look at it this way: There’s less payment processors and they’re smaller than banks. If you suddenly turn to banks, you won’t accomplish anything because to them, a few consumers who aren’t their customers doesn’t cause them even an itch. But if payment processors come to them it might.

It never was about the laws. If it were, Mastercard wouldn’t have been doing it for quite some time now.

It’s truly idiotic. They backed down to 200 phone calls from CS. They probably cited that rule, saying doing what they do (processing payments) will damage their brand.

Lo and behold, once they stopped processing transactions their brand got damaged. And due to the ego damage already associated, they won’t back down and backtrack not that they actually have a problem on their hands. What with their brand being seen as discriminatory, weak to undue influence and excersizing undue power against their own clients. Very “good brand” of you, Mastercard.

If Mastercard wants to display Christo-fascist family friendlyness they can slap a cross onto their logo and change the font to Comic sans.

Isn’t there an agreement between the UN and US requiring it to let people the UN wishes to be at their New York offices into the US?

I know Trump and friends don’t like rules, but surely they’d like to keep the UN a thing based out of the US.

How would you feel if someone labeled you an Imperialist or Fascist just because you’re American?

Not great. But would they be wrong more than 50% of the time? We did “elect” Mr. President for a 2nd time after all. And barely no one doubted the legitimacy of that election for more than a week. The fact he should’ve been disqualified? Apparently a non-sequitur.

So with around 50% of the voting population being MAGA idiots and the 33% non-voters their silent enablers, I’d take being called a fascist any day. It’s well deserved.

In my opinion, AI just feels like the logical next step for capitalist exploitation and destruction of culture.

I don’t think AI is inherently bad. What’s bad is how we (or well, the corpos) use it. SEO, vibe coding, making slop, you name it.

About training material being stealing: hard agree here. Our copyright laws are broken, but they are right about AI - training is strong in a retrieval system, which is infingement. Shame they aren’t enforced at all.

What fascinates me is the similarity between AI and photography. That is, both are revolutionary tools in the visual medium. Imagine this thread being an opinion column in an 1800s newspaper, and replace all instances of ‘AI’ with ‘photography’. The arguments all stand, but our perspective to them may change.

What a time. When ads were typeset in *checks notes* Calibri.

Damn. Never knew batteries catch on fire when angry.

For what? Being decent human beings?

Nor did you read between the lines.

Apple devices mostly aren‘t significantly more expensive than their counterparts by other manufacturers.

However, most of those offer cheaper alternatives that Apple doesn’t.

So, there are no Apple counterparts for what “other manufacturers” make.

And often times it isn’t. In fact, name-brand can ofter be worse for a multitude of reasons.

moral.doctrine@mastercard.com