2025 Santa doesn’t even stop for the bad kids anymore, he just rolls coal at their house from the sleigh.

Same here. Once my iMac G3 and 2nd gen iPod Touch shit the bed, I was out. My parents are mac people and frequently ask me for help with random, outlandish issues on their Macs (since I’m a “computer person”) and I’m usually at a loss.

I too was raised with religion (Catholicism) in the US, while my wife grew up going to Baptist churches - our childhoods could not have been more different. I was taught that studying science and the processes of observation and inquiry bring you closer to God, while for her the sciences were alternately ignored or lied about. Our family gave into the collection basket of our own will because we believed raising funds for good causes was the right thing to do. Her family was under compulsory tithing - 10% of all income. I was allowed to read whatever books, consume whatever media, and wear whatever I wanted, she was not. The list goes on…

I’m not trying to whitewash Catholicism - it obviously has its own major issues that shouldn’t be ignored, but it’s a far cry from the fundamentalist book burners who my family thought of as zealous nut bags.

Not sure what point you’re trying to make. The seat of Catholicism in Europe and American fundamentalists have very few things in common. Even American Catholics have very little crossover with their evangelical counterparts.

Is that some kind of labubu?

I would go further and say they shouldn’t have the ability to block any transaction consumers are making, regardless of legality.

I basically want them classified like utilities (or the Internet), and the money they’re processing should operate like digital networked cash. If I hand you a dollar bill, it doesn’t arbitrarily decide to stop being money if it thinks the transaction might possibly be even tangentially related to crime. That’s how you end up with these corporations becoming so invasive in the first place, with their overbroad policies blocking entire groups/categories from being in the economy.

Don’t think that I’m pro-crime – but only actual crime is crime. A transfer of funds itself is only sometimes a crime. You don’t see the federal reserve trying to foil small-time drug deals in cash, and for good reason – legitimate crimes should be investigated by law enforcement, not “prevented” at the whims of overeager corpos. It’s not the payment processor’s right or responsibility to prevent or they to predict crime, especially once they’ve built such a system as to become indispensable for most of us. If they are allowed to do that they will always do it the easy way – blanket bans with massive collateral damage to non-criminals.

These companies should be disbanded and their systems should be handed over to the public. Hot take, I know, but I’m of the mind that transaction processing (much like air and water) should not be privatized. You may think at this point that I’m a crypto-head, but not really. It seemed promising at one point and may be still, but now it’s perhaps permanently associated with unsavory types. I’ll use it if it fits the purpose, but expecting the general public to use it as money is insanity. Crypto brought us part of the way there, but such a system can’t really flourish in furtherance of the public good in the current environment – even disregarding the bad PR.

I wonder if AI applications other than just “be a generalist chat bot” would run into the same thing. I’m thinking about pharma, weather prediction, etc. They would still have to “understand” their english-language prompts, but the LLMs can do that just fine today, and could feed systems designed to iteratively solve for problems in those areas. A model feeding into itself or other models doesn’t have to be a bad thing.

It’s gonna be the year of the Linux phone, I can feel it!