So funny how people think this is a moral crusade. You should read articles around the tech stack for payment processing at any adult site. People try to do chargebacks all of the time on these kind of services. "Hunny what is this transaction on our account for BigBussomsCom?" .. "Oh must be some kind of fraud" "then let's call the bank and straighten it out". It's variations of this, over and over that lead to the high chargeback rates. I seem to recall that chargebacks are an order of magnitude higher for adult-oriented transactions. Unless you have a system of countering this with a team devoted to it, you will have a lot of successful chargebacks. I doubt Valve has the specialized team needed to deal with the amount of chargebacks, this the CC companies trying to avoid the headache.
Valve confirms credit card companies pressured it to delist certain adult games
761–770 of 967 posts
Re: Valve confirms credit card companies pressured it to delist certain adult games
#762[dead]
Re: Valve confirms credit card companies pressured it to delist certain adult games
#763Earlier quoted context omitted.
>> It’s annoying, but not onerous. > So government regulating stuff like that does go against much of the thing you said in the comment above? It isn't law. But even if it was, that doesn't contradict what I am talking about. I'm talking about the export of puritanism. If you think having to turn the porn button from 'off' to 'on' in your phone contract's options is the same, then I don't know what to say. > When gov…
> I'm talking about the export of puritanism Sure, technically its government imposed domestic puritanism which isn't exported. I agree its a completely different thing. > The topic was about puritanical beliefs in the US and how its export affects the world Yes, US has its quirks but it's not that exceptional as you are implying. e.g. when it comes to banning/regulated video games Australia is inarguable much more r…
So how does the US deal with age restricted games? I find this much more related to actually willing to implement a rule, rather than having rules for the sake of it (like the US buying alcohol rule - it is forbidden for people under 21 to drink but 40% of the people between 18 and 21 drink ?! source: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Alcohol_consumption_by_youth_i...).
Re: Valve confirms credit card companies pressured it to delist certain adult games
#764Earlier quoted context omitted.
Yeah, and then most of them left and came here, which the article cites as having caused a "radical" divergence: > Almost all Puritan clergy left the Church of England after the restoration of the monarchy in 1660 and the Act of Uniformity 1662. Many continued to practise their faith in nonconformist denominations, especially in Congregationalist and Presbyterian churches.[2] The nature of the Puritan movement in Eng…
If you’re looking at the geographical distribution of their influence, isn’t it weird that the place where the puritans settled (“New England”) is arguably the least puritanical region of the US?
New England is perceived as less religious than the South, but one reason for that is that New England's moral perceptions had a strong influence on US political beliefs. In other words, the Puritans morphed into the Congregationalists who morphed into the Unitarians, who basically took over (in the 19th Century) US political thinking (or at least the Left side of it), giving the appearance that New England does not having any particular or special moral or religious beliefs (at least to those on the Left half of the US political divide).
I grew up in New England and have lived in the South and in California, and IMHO morality is a bigger determinant of the behavior of the average person in New England than it is in the other places I've lived (all in the US). The South and California are more pragmatic, less moralistic.
Re: Valve confirms credit card companies pressured it to delist certain adult games
#765Earlier quoted context omitted.
> absolutely awful usability compared to the Euro In what way? One unpleasant discovery I made in Portugal (and also saw to some extent in Spain) was that ATM’s - every one I could find, including those that were bank-owned at physical branches - had a limit of EUR200 per transaction regardless of my own bank limit (at USD1000/day, that should have been at least EUR800). And while convenience stores, fast food, etc.,…
I went last year to Lisbon and Barcelona, from Brazil with 0 cash in any currency. I had a debit card with some hundreds of EUR already charged, but I ended up using it with an NFC enabled smartphone. No issues at all, even going in far places outside Barcelona. Everyone very receptive in BCN. I looked at ATM terminals and they seemed full of rules and complications. I tried to get some cash just to collect the notes…
Okay, but OP specifically said that USD are inferior to EUR for cash. Never had issues spending with card in PT or ES.
Re: Valve confirms credit card companies pressured it to delist certain adult games
#766Earlier quoted context omitted.
Croatian banks didn't get the memo about SEPA; I get charged to receive a SEPA transfer!
I'm from Croatia but I don't send money abroad, I only use credit cards and banks locally. As far as I can see from our local banks' websites, they implement SEPA standards. There must be some sort of misunderstanding or error.
Perhaps is because it's a payment to an OBRT account?
Banking in Croatia is like UK banking 40 years ago, or at least it is with Erste. Charged even just to have the account.
They even charge me to send me an email to tell me I logged in to the online banking.
Re: Valve confirms credit card companies pressured it to delist certain adult games
#767Earlier quoted context omitted.
Say what you want about crypto, but it does solve this problem at least.
It doesn't "solve" the problem, it's just not regulated the same way. If governments decided to extend the same regulations to crypto transactions, what recourse would a person have?
I'm not some crypto evangelist, but as far as I know, crypto at its foundation is a lot less "watertight" in terms of ascertaining who is who. Your government could pass laws to pressure your local money-to-crypto exchange service into complying with whatever regulation is needed. But they can't force the entire network of crpyto transactions to have real names tied to accounts, demand reasons for payment, discriminate based on what's being paid for, etc. So, circumventing payment processors' "grassroots" self-moderation requires finding a way to bypass basically the entire payment pipeline. Circumventing a hypothetical highly-regulated crypto environment just requires finding a way to sneak your money into the system. And there will probably be foreign or grey market services that don't care about what your specific country thinks.
Re: Valve confirms credit card companies pressured it to delist certain adult games
#768Earlier quoted context omitted.
Yeah, and then most of them left and came here, which the article cites as having caused a "radical" divergence: > Almost all Puritan clergy left the Church of England after the restoration of the monarchy in 1660 and the Act of Uniformity 1662. Many continued to practise their faith in nonconformist denominations, especially in Congregationalist and Presbyterian churches.[2] The nature of the Puritan movement in Eng…
> Church of England Doesn't mean that continental Europe wasn't full of puritanical nutjobs. Calvin himself ran a dystopian theocratic state\hellhole in Geneva yet hardly anyone references that when talking about conservativism in Switzerland. > Even 120-130 years after the point There was a significant generational backlash towards puritanism and a push towards pluralism/secularism by the late 1700s. IMHO Second/Thi…
> Calvin himself ran a dystopian theocratic state\hellhole in Geneva yet hardly anyone references that when talking about conservativism in Switzerland.
I'm not familiar with Swiss politics, but if there's a significant Christian element to it, it seems like it would be pretty reasonable to wonder about whether the historical basis for this is related to Calvinism. If it's not significantly Christian, then it's not surprising it doesn't get mentioned.
> There was a significant generational backlash towards puritanism and a push towards pluralism/secularism by the late 1700s. IMHO Second/Third "Great Awakenings" had a much bigger impact than a handful of Puritans inhabiting New England in the 1600s.
Sure, but those those were backlashes themselves to the backlash to the secularism that you mentioned happened beforehand. I'm not saying that there weren't Puritan-like influences elsewhere, or that there were no other developments in between the Puritans and modern Christian conservatism in the US, but there's a clear historical tradition of Christian conservatism in US politics, so I don't know why you don't think it's unreasonable to recognize how that has influenced what we see today.
To explain at a higher level where I'm coming from: I don't see historical analysis as making claims about the state we're in today as being a deterministic outcome based on the events that happen in the past because that's not any more possible than predicting exactly what will happen in the future based on the knowledge we have today. The most we can do to explain why things are the way they are now is to look at what things in the past have influenced where we are today.
Re: Valve confirms credit card companies pressured it to delist certain adult games
#769Earlier quoted context omitted.
>Chargebacks of legitimate purchases on most large platforms are extremely rare. Most will be from stolen cards. I never used ecommerce back in the day on the internet but I can imagine that ecommerce fraud was widespread. And that's why excluding other reasons Satoshi invented Bitcoin[0]. I wonder if cryptocurrencies didn't exist would someone nowadays burn the midnight oil to figure out P2P crypto coin since modern…
I don't see how this makes any sense. A reason for the creation of Bitcoin was offering less service than traditional methods? "Financial institutions cannot avoid mediating disputes" is nonsense, they "can't" because it's constantly demanded by their clients, attempting to sell that as a bug rather than a feature is preposterous.
Satoshi wanted to bypass banks and make P2P direct payments with no trusted party besides Bitcoin protocol hence >no mechanism exists to make payments over a communications channel without a trusted party
And crypto community speculated that Satoshi or team behind Bitcoin worked at the internet gambling industry and what use to happen is that angry customers would chargeback the money they lost at the internet casino and cause numerous problems for "merchants" or in this case internet entrepreneurs.
Re: Valve confirms credit card companies pressured it to delist certain adult games
#770If you don't like it, start another payment processor that doesn't cave to pressure. Where are all the free market proselytizers at? I expect all of you complaining about this to never once complain on legal grounds about Apple's 30% tax in the app store or when a bakery refuses to sell a cake to a gay person. This is what unrestricted freedom for every entity looks like. And this is why we need laws and regulations…
> proselytizers Off topic: I heard this word for the first time last night and now I’m seeing it here. Funny how that works sometimes.
Baader–Meinhof if you want to find more about this phenomenon.
Off topic, but when I was looking at cars when my old one died, I started noticing way more of the models I had been considering on the road. Funny how the mind works.