Censoring Naked Yoga
eff.org
eff.org
Businesses like payment processors should not be allowed to refuse to provide their services to any legal clients. And legality is up to the courts to decide not payment processors or any other middlemen.
If enough people really want to ban porn (I don't know or care if this particular site was really porn) then go through the proper channels, and make a law explicitly banning it don't try to get private companies to do the work of enforcing arbitary rules.
The balance, according to my limited understanding, is that certain types of activity including porn-adjacent sites have much higher card failure rates, so banning some activity is a way to reduce chargeback costs falling on Stripe's shoulders.
In that case, wouldn't the solution be to charge higher processing fees (possibly much higher) for websites in that category? Why ban them entirely?
Which will the lead to deliberate miscategorization, and more costs to verify claimed categorization, and...
I agree it's bullshit, but it shouldn't only be called out when it affects the right people.
I think one of the effects of the gridlock in US politics is that more and more actual policy is now implemented by circumventing the "normal" lawmaking process: e.g. through executive orders, court decisions or appeals to private companies or citizens.
Whichever side you're on, this can't be a good thing for a democracy.
Forcing companies to do business with everyone creates a ton of wrong incentives as well.
A law banning porn. Woof. Enough has already been written about that one.
Applying common-carrier rules to a particular, already highly-regulated, key industry to commerce is not “fundamentally at odds with the framework of US jurisprudence”.
> It would require changing the Constitution: namely butchering the 1st Amendment.
No, it wouldn’t. Just like it didn’t when we did it to telecoms.
The extent to which I want the government to have access to my day-to-day purchases is another matter, but even that's better than commercial operations where I have no recourse.
If I were to make a trade-off, I would implement many more transparency measures for organizations, not for individuals. If I can see what happens in my local school, municipal government, corporation, university, church, and non-profit, that would cut down on all the corruption I've seen, dramatically. I see no downsides to transparency measures which don't impact individuals, and they have a lot more impact than corporations snooping on me.
Indeed, in one case I saw corruption, corporate snooping meant that the corrupt place had more leverage over a whistleblower. That's no good.
Yes, I do understand the connection between corruption and money laundering. That touches on one form of corruption. There are many others. If I were to eliminate corruption, I'd take measures like:
- Extend laws like FOIA and Open Meetings, dramatically, so we have a much clearer understanding of government. In particular, I'd extend enforcement and penalties. Wilful violations should be criminal.
- Extend such laws to cover non-profits as well. I should be able to ask a church, a university, or any other organization exempt from taxes for documents, or sit in on governance meetings.
- Put in stronger whistleblower protections, and eliminate a lot of the power of NDA / non-disparage / etc agreements
- Increase SEC-mandated transparency measures
... and so on. Those have nothing to do with money laundering, and to me, are strict wins.
Very little of the corruption I've seen involves bags of money. Most corruption involves things like (not directly financial) preferential treatment. If I give you a raise you don't deserve, give your child preferential treatment at my school, or cut a sweet deal for your company, that doesn't show up in a Paypal transaction.
As I said, that's precisely because the world works the way it does, rather than the way you wish it did. The bottleneck for lots of otherwise extremely profitable criminal endeavors is their reliance on traditional financial intermediaries.
> That touches on one form of corruption.
I'm talking about the type of corruption that keeps entire countries from developing economically. I don't know what you're on about. And no, your series of suggestions, which amount to saying make the current regulations stronger, doesn't come close to closing a huge loophole created by giving blanket immunity to financial intermediaries.
Edit: honestly it sounds like you ran into some unfortunate situation somewhere and hold a personal grudge. But that's not a particularly meaningful basis for policy recommendation, especially given that it's quite clear that you don't understand the domain particularly well.
> Most corruption involves things like (not directly financial) preferential treatment. If I give you a raise you don't deserve, give your child preferential treatment at my school, or cut a sweet deal for your company, that doesn't show up in a Paypal transaction.
Most corruption is like this when you live in a country where corruption isn't much of a problem.
I'm done here.
No, you can't infer how much someone knows about a topic, at least from the discussion here. You can infer they know something different than you do. That happens when you get a modern-day Republican and Democrat in the same room, and each believes the other to be an idiot. The same happens if people are from different countries, cultures, or hold different values.
Groups develop groupthink, with a common set of information, logic, and conclusions. It's natural to assume anyone who doesn't share those is an idiot. My own experience is that they're often not idiots, and if I go in with an open mind, I often learn something (and quite often, we both do), although that's been harder with recent political polarization. Nowadays, discussions usually shift to people calling me an idiot if I don't line up 100% with their worldview. It's been rarer and rarer to have intelligent discussions.
Perhaps my conclusions were wrong. They often are; on average, we're right about half the time in discussions, and that's fine. Perhaps yours are too. Perhaps we're right in different contexts (we might live in different countries, for example).
However, where you took this discussion, neither of us has any chance of discovering what the other's opinions were informed by. If you doubt something I'm saying, you can ask for evidence, rather than assuming and insulting. Perhaps each of us might have learned something.
In either case, that's as far as I'm willing to take this discussion. I nerd on topics like these for fun. Getting insulted is tiring and draining rather than fun. You're welcome to believe I'm an idiot.
I propose we terminate this discussion. People are welcome to be wrong on the internet.
> If I were to make a list of my top-10 problems, corruption would be near the top. None of the cases I've seen involved money laundering.
rather clearly reveals your lack of understanding of the topic at hand. The fact that you think this has anything to do with political polarization is another clue that you have no idea what you're talking about. Your repeated attempts to anchor all of this to your personal experience are also quite revealing with respect to both your bias and lack of grounding in the subject.
And this isn't about your conclusions being wrong - it's just that you (and people like you) seem to form absurdly strong opinions when you don't even have the slightest clue regarding why things are the way they are.
Btw, since you are now pretending that you were this intellectually eager person just trying to have an honest discussion and I somehow poisoned the exchange, let me remind you that this was your first contribution:
> If I were to list my top 10 problems in life, money laundering would not make the list.
Which, of course, is combative, dismissive and arrogant. Why on earth is your personal list of "top 10 problems in life" relevant to any discussion? Who the hell do you think you are? It's the type of response that immediately signals lack of interest in learning anything, which you have since confirmed.
> I'm done here.
> I propose we terminate this discussion
You can do whatever you want - is your next reply also going to mention how you're really done this time?
And social media? Careful, this position is making you fascism-adjacent. Now is the time to decide if that's really where you want to be.
This is the problem. Four days is ridiculous in a circumstance where the business or content hasn't changed and it's just Stripe who changed their mind.
It should be 60 days in these circumstances.
You block porn apps on the app store. You block custom browsers on the app store. So the only way to consume porn is to use Safari/WebKit. That seems anti-competitive to me.
the anti-pornography crusaders have really escalated things over the past few years.
im not anti all porn and nudity - i am anti internet porn.
Weird, I wouldn't have expected beauty would be a qualifier for teaching yoga. Nor would I have expected "uncensored photo sets" to be a dot point on an education site.
Unless.
That's too general. "Ugly" has too many dimensions. For example, a lot of women would consider most of the latest "Mr. Olympia" contestants as grotesque and ugly. One could also be greatly fit and still have an extremely unattractive face.
Now, if you want to say that you've never seen a successful, out-of-shape personal trainer, I'd probably concede that. Being in-shape is marketing for the expertise you are taking payment for.
For example, 400 years ago small breasts are considered beauty. You can't say the same today and instead had turned 180 into "small boobs shame" among the youth.
edit: adding on to their porn flags, their main splash page updates the image everytime you navigate to it. It appears to be entirely comprised of images of the top half of their female models showing neither their male models or any full yoga poses. This is the kind of tongue in cheek "were totally not engaging in that behavior you said wasn't allowed" setup that isn't going to convince the government you're regular non porn content
If it’s problematic for you take it up with the courts, these sorts of things were decided long before I was born
am I only allowed to have sex if I'm married in a church you approve of?
I know nothing about this industry but I would kind of assume the problem is with the credit card companies themselves (Visa and MasterCard), who are probably concerned with brand safety or some such.
Can the EFF not tell porn when they see it? Is softcore porn no longer porn?
not to mention, even if it is porn, who cares? are we such a nation of five year olds and nanny businesses that we can't be trusted with a titty?
So... the answer to your question is "yes".
[1] https://www.guttmacher.org/fact-sheet/abstinence-only-progra...
Really if the eff wants to take on nonsexual nudity then the payment processors and social media platforms aren't the starting point. They're way down the list. First start with topless equality recognized nation wide in the USA. Not just in public but also in print and broadcast media. Get the FCCs indecency regulations revised. Probably a good thing would be elimination of the FCC if free speech is your goal.