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.

Then scaring it out

The nightcap is cheap and low effort. All you really need are two pieces of scrap fabric to sew together. A knit beanie has to be, well, knit. Now we have machine/robotic knitting, but hand knitting consumes a huge amount of time and energy. The nightcap clearly came about at a time when clothing was straight up made in the home, often from scrounged fabric. Nowadays the higher quality beanie is the obvious choice. It’s snug to your head, can be purchased at many different price points, is manufactured using cheap outsourced labor halfway around the world and can be at your door step 12 hours after a mouse click. I don’t think I’ve ever seen someone unironically wear one of those floppy night caps in my life unless it was part of a cheap children’s novelty pajama set or costume.

I’d puff a few hits of the oil vape out on the porch and stick a fat prilla of swedish snus under my lip. By my side a cup of herbal chai tea or seltzer, maybe a nice beer or just still water. Throw on a record - I’ve got The Beatles, Bowie, Jimi Hendrix, pink Floyd, Radiohead, spoon, dr dog, the shins and a lot more!

OR turn on my ham radio for some scan and chill on the uhf/vhf repeaters where the other weirdos of my flavor chat about nerd stuff and life, trade gossip and just generally hang out at night.

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.

The chart is actually a circle with the two ends connected

Don’t know, the weekly reporting system reports stopped coming months ago. I thought it was just me switching to New Outlook but I guess it’s everyone?

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