sp3ctr4l

They would have to roughly make their own form of PayPal, alongside their own bank.

If you didn't know, PayPal technically isn't a bank, it and Venmo use Synchrony Bank... which is an actual bank.

If they did something like that, it could work, but it would have to be at a similar scale as PayPal, that is to say, massive....

Because doing this would/could basically be the nuclear option:

MC and Visa and PayPal would/could drop them.

So, they'd have to basically develop a massive project, in total secrecy.

... Which is something Valve has arguably done a number of times, they are notoriously opaque as a company.

......

Sort of as you mention, they already have a barebones backend framework to scale up from the steam gift card / user gift card balance system.

I am... uncertain if their backend for that already does or does not include an actual legally defined bank though.

...

Problem is that this would necessitate a massively costly undertaking, as well as ongoing maintenance costs, and Valve is also notorious for basically running on what most other firms would consider a skeleton crew for the size and scope of what they do.

Worth also noting is that Monero also, not too long ago...

They specifically rewrote/updated the uh, block solver problem that miners solve for a reward...

They updated it to make ASIC mining basically not work.

Because they do not want it to be feasible for some rich assholes to build an ASIC mining farm.

They want mining to be distributed, done by individuals, in remotely collectivized mining pools.

Yes, it is individually, not as energy efficient as PoS system... but if you have a PoW system, that is specifically difficult to scale a large scale mining operation for...

Well, then basically no one does that.

Go lookup how much power gets thrown into Bitcoin or Eth., vs Monero.

Yep, they have much larger transaction volumes, but they are also way, way, way more energy intensive due to at least in significant part, it being profitable to run a large scale mining op.

And, not having people able to run huge mining ops, also just keeps things more stable on the value/price/txn speed front.

Monero is the least worst of all cryptocurrencies in terms of being an actual, private, secure currency.

Everything else is to a different degree, some kind of a speculative investment asset, the major ones also all happen to be orders of magnitude worse at overall energy consumption, which is largely used to just do crypto forex trading... people still do not really buy anything tangible with BTC or ETH, outside of either basically, or just actually, some kind of scam.

Well, given our low voter turnouts...

Roughly 1/3 of our population is so stupid and hateful that they would rather have a President that hurts people they don't like, than uh... anything else.

I feel like a lot of non US people really do not fully comprehend the level of just literal hatred that fuels many Americans, as well as how common it is to be extremely charismatically performative in a massively hypocritical way, in just every aspect of life.

We are a country of adults that read at an average of a 6th grade level, with astonishing levels of religious extremism and cults (compared to other countries with similar levels of economic development), who are aware our society is collapsing, but are largely too stupid to even understand why.

We were sold the lie of American Exceptionalism, were indoctrinated into it as a sort of secular cult, it is now apparent this is/was all a lie, and people are (have been) essentially having a kind of mass psychosis in terms of how they handle this revalation.

Our systems are massively corrupt, they've been incrementally corrupting for decades, but the effect has been snowballing.

A few people and groups would pop up from time to time and point this out, and push for a specific, meaningful reform to actually stymie this at a systemic level, and they would be crushed by both corporate and political PR campaigns, but also just a general sense of 'you are overreacting and hysterical' in the broad population, that came from that smug security of the American Exceptionalism ethos.

Basically, we are largely a nation of incurious, brutish, overconfident, malignant narcissists, who revel in biased reasoning ortiented toward justifying an already held belief, who are often already taught from a young age to evaluate the world with the irrational magical thinking of religious cults, which normalizes cognitive dissonance and conspiracism, which then leads to the present outcome you correctly find to be so absurd.

Unleas you 'watch' the game with some kind of image training AI, that then learns how to approximately hallucinate a game.

https://gamengen.github.io/

So, technically, you can "watch" a game and sort of cause that to result in a sort of playable game.

This is however vastly more time and compute intensive that just ripping a movie, and results in... something of a fever dream version of a game, that tends to lose accuracy and stability the longer you play it.

This is the same guy who effectively overrode the seperation of church and state, and mandated bibles in every single school, basically just makes teacher teach PragerU propoganda instead of actual curricula, and is now also using a PragerU designed political purity test to weed out non-theofascist teachers.

https://slate.com/news-and-politics/2025/07/oklahoma-woke-teacher-screenings-ryan-walters.html

Porn for me but not for thee!

What a hypocritical piece of shit.

Hooray two tiered legal system, huzzah!

/s/s/s

Not intentionally, but, accidentally once.

Computer froze, stupidly tried to just unplug it instead of flipping the PSU switch, ended up grabbing the prongs while they were still mostly plugged in.

That caused my heart to skip a few beats, literally, gave me an arrhythmia for about 15 minutes.

Again, do not recommend.

Yep, same here, just 'hrm... i... wonder...'

I actually did this, tasered myself with my ... friend who is a girl but was not my girlfriend... with her self defense contact taser.

In summary:

Ho-Lee Fuck.

Yeah, that shit hurts quite a fucking lot.

I mean, I was laughing as well, but mostly out of being zapped into, ahem, a state of shock, full adrenaline dump on that much sharp, specific pain.

Up to that point in my life, I'd never been electro zapped beyond one of those plasma ball things or the ole rub a balloon on your hair thing...

Yeah, yeah, a loooot more voltage and amps in a taser, do not recommend, unless you just are an actual masochist.

Alternate plot based on similar concept:

Mr Garrison goes back to being Trump for some absurd reason, and then Stan and Kyle make a comic mocking him, Cartman basically becomes Steve Bannon/Alex Jones and leads an insane campaign against Stan and Kyle for making the comic, and ...

...now there is a whole conspiracy, invented by Cartman, about horrific secret encoded messages in a supposed secret vault or collection of all the student's doodles and comics and passed paper notes...

... and after not too long, Cartman stops talking about Mr Garrison being any kind of related to this supposed 'naughty vault', focuses instead on an insipid profundity of CSAM kept from the public...

... and then it turns out (revealed to the audience but not any characters beyond Garrison) that there is actually a 'naughty vault' of confiscated student messages and drawings and such (nothing beyond schoolyard insults from tem), but the only detailed, explicit CSAM is from Mr. Garrison himself, who has beem uh, doodling his own comics, and keeping all this in a vault in the school office somewhere that only him and the janitor have access to...

... janitor dies in a suspicious manner, Mr. Garrison wishes his wife well, janitor wife ends up being convicted of producing CSAM doodles, Cartman is now screaming for the entire 'naughty vault' to be released, Kyle and Stan think this is all I mean, yeah, bad, but Cartman is kinda going off the rails

Part (Episode) Two:

Summer break montage, which involves a bunch of rednecks breaking into a random pizza joint, trying to assasinate Garrison, and also then breaking into the school and largely destroying it... one or two of them are looking for the naughty vault, but mostly they're just angry for nonsense reasons, such as 'they took erh jerbs!'...

... somehow, Cartman becomes some kind of official school liason/resource officer/investigator, who is now formally/informally leading an outright pogrom, sentencing any students he thinks may have their works in the naughty vault to onerous amounts of after school detention, including Kyle and Stan.

Kyle and Stan are beyond fed up at this point, as Cartman has 'assigned' them to make a formal apology video for their involvement in the naughty files, so they just do the thing, make the callback reference to 'we're sorry' in the most sarcastic and insincere way possible...

... but basically half the town thinks its real.

Then, uh, somehow, Cartman gets Garrison's key to the naughty vault, and finds copious amounts of CSAM that is obviously drawn by Mr Garrison, while Mr Garrison is busy for the weekend judging a school beauty paegent.

Cartman has a mental breakdown, jams the contents of the naughty vault into a ... trapper keeper... then b-lines to the beauty paegant to confront Mr Garrison in real time.

During some kind of lunch break or something, the confrontstion occurs between Garrison and Cartman.

Garrison points out thar Cartman's own doodles and horrid missives are in the naughty vault, Cartman and Garrison begin brawling over all the documents, the fight stumbles into the girls changing room, the trapper keeper is ripped in half, documents comically go flying everywhere, Cartman is dazed, Garrison laughs maniacally and says he wrote all his stuff on flash paper thst easily combusts.

As the girls are now all scrambling to get dressed and flee, while Garrison pulls out a lighter and tries to burn everything that he can, but this literally blows up in his face, Garrison runs out of the girls changing room, past a bunch of crying half dressed girls, with his hair (toupee) literally on fire, hands red from his own blood from injuries sustained fighting Cartman, all infront of the paegant attendees returning from the lunch break, and a local media crew with camers rolling, getting b roll footage / interviews.

-end scene, roll credits-

I mean...

Looking at mic_check's figures...

Lets say we are just talking straight, hetero people.

We got all straight men at 43:55 Dem to Rep, thats a 22% higher chance of a woman randomly picking a Rep instead of a Dem.

Meanwhile you can just, as a woman who is looking into dating a man...

Just pick a random, single, never married dude.

Bam!, now its 61:37 Dem to Rep, a 65% higher chance a random, never married dude will be a Dem than a Rep.

...

We are talking about these stats in the context of dating, right?

Where people like, talk, get to know each other?

Not just being randomly assigned partners from a slot machine?

Do dating apps not like, allow you to filter by something like this, or... talk/chat to a person, and ask them questions before you meet them...?

Its kind of silly to paint individual people with a broadly accurate brush... when the ostensible whole point is to get to know a person individually.

Sure, use broad stats to form a broadly accurate general worldview, but realize its limitations.

Disclaimer: Please consider this a sort of fork of your discussion so far, I only mean to say anything about the parts of your comment I actually reference.

...

Why would women seek out a women-only app? And inversely, why would men seek out a men-only app? The answer to each will be fundamentally different, which means the user bases will be fundamentally different as well.

To a significant degree, yes, but I think you are overstating that degree.

Tea is imo more like a gossip app, ala Nextdoor, just specific to dating.

Tea isn't a dating app, it is... I guess you could call it ... dating-app-meta-review app, from a technically minded standpoint?

A supplement to a (or many) dating app(s).

~~But it doesn't actually directly link to~~

[(EDIT: whoops I accidentally a sentence there.)]

It is named 'tea', as in gossiping, the deets, the low down, the real story, etc.

Literally this is their own marketing:

https://www.teaforwomen.com/about

It is literally just a replacement for Facebook 'Are we dating the same guy' groups, but better, if you pay, because the Premium account allows you to run background / criminal / sex offender records.

...

So, a rough equivalent for guys would probably be named something like MPH, officially Miles Per Hour, unofficially, Miles Per Hoe, I dunno, something edgy for the manosphere crowd, where guys would gossip about cheating girls/women, and also be able to run background checks on them for a premium.

I can guarantee you that men would be broadly interested in such an app if it existed.

...

Now imagine the inverse. Most guys probably wouldn’t even think of using a men-only app for safety reasons. Like it’s not even on their radar, because safety while dating isn’t something they’re concerned with.

Maybe not as much in the safety sense of immediate physical danger, but absolutely in the sense of... is this person financially abusive, emotionally manipulative, do they have kids, or a massive amount of debt/bad spending habits, an STI, etc, that they don't mention untill they've been dating you for some time, do they have a history of acting like they're committed when they've in the past cheated whilst acting like they were monogamous?

These kinds of things apply to both men and women, and are far more common to occur in a dating/relationship than physical abuse.

Yes, women are more likely to be the victim of physical or sexual violence or stalking...

But its not like this doesn't happen to men.

I can personally tell you that I, a guy, have been so lucky as to have had all three of those happen to me, done by women.

But lets not just use myself as an anecdote, here are the stats on that from the CDC, last updated before the Trump Admin got into power, doesn't look like they've fucked with this page.

https://www.cdc.gov/intimate-partner-violence/about/index.html

IPV is common. It affects millions of people in the United States each year. Data from CDC's National Intimate Partner and Sexual Violence Survey (NISVS) indicate:1

About 41% of women and 26% of men experienced contact sexual violence, physical violence, or stalking by an intimate partner during their lifetime and reported a related impact.

Over 61 million women and 53 million men have experienced psychological aggression by an intimate partner in their lifetime.

We could quibble about the exact stats of what sex/gender the partner was, and they do cite some studies directly, but uh, oversimplifying to pretend only heterosexuality exists...

About half as many men have been seriously, violently victimized or stalked as women, and I'd be willing to bet the psychological abuse numbers are at least a bit closer to equal if you account for men being unwilling to admit to being victimized in that way due to internalized machismo, 'shut up and deal with it', whatever you want to call it.

...

Point of me saying all this is to throw numbers toward countering your claim here:

Most men probably wouldn’t think of seeking out a men-only app at all. So the pool of men who would be willing to go out of their way to engage with a men-only app is going to look vastly different. The average user likely won’t reflect the average man, because the average man wouldn’t even think to seek out a men-only app.

I agree that it wouldn't represent the average man, but we've got a potential user pool of 50+ million men in the US who've been through a bad relationship and would probably also not want to go through that again.

Again, yes it is absolutely true that women more often experience a more severe form of relationship than men, no argument there.

But I don't think you can just say that a man version of tea would only appeal to blackpilled manosphere men.

Yes, that would likely be a large proportion of the user base, but there are tons of men who are not misogynists and also would like to avoid being played or abused.

...

Also, uh:

You say that,

The active engagement is seen as a positive thing, and she’s willing to jump through a few hoops (like uploading a photo ID) to get there.

But what I am seeing is:

To access Tea, women have to verify their gender by submitting a selfie, which is then verified by the app’s team.

https://www.fastcompany.com/91374409/everything-to-know-about-tea-the-viral-and-controversial-app-that-lets-women-mark-men-as-red-flags

The rest of that quote is that the picture is 'verified by the Tea team', but I think we both know that almost certainly means they just use an AI face scanning tool.

Anyway, point is: taking a selfie is a way, way lower bar to entry than taking a picture of your driver's liscense... basically every dating app already does the former, this is totally normal now, whereas the latter is... so uncommon I cannot think of an example.

So....taking a selfie is not that much of a trifle, not a strong potential blocker, for a guy who's already used a dating app in the last 5 ish years.

...

EDIT 2:

Occured to me on reviewing this:

... Yeah, an AI face recognition to verify gender?

How... does that work for trans folks, or even probably just non white women, and are women who are maybe bald or have more typically masculine coded shorter hair cuts, with less stereotypically/heuristically feminine facial features?

AI has fucked up this kinda shit in the past quite badly.

Wow that was fast.

I did not even know this app existed untill about 8 hours ago.

Already comprimised.

EDIT: Also, lol, this arguably is not even largely a hack.

These idiots just had everything stored in a fucking publically accesible firebase bucket... amazing.

They didn't delete anything they claimed to.

Either way you look at it, anywhere on the spectrum from:

A ] A bunch of women reasonably concerned for their safety

B ] A bunch of gossip mongers

... well, they've now all been doxxed, ironic from each angle.

What a fucking disaster.