Why would payment processors lie?

This is basically what I said earlier was probably their driving factor.

Mastercard has not evaluated any game or required restrictions of any activity on game creator sites and platforms, contrary to media reports and allegations.

Our payment network follows standards based on the rule of law. Put simply, we allow all lawful purchases on our network. At the same time, we require merchants to have appropriate controls to ensure Mastercard cards cannot be used for unlawful purchases, including illegal adult content.

Payment processors do not care about someone's social norms. Payment processors, however, do not want to get in trouble with a country, because getting their ability to operate in a country suspended would be really bad for them. As a result, countries have lots of leverage over payment processors, which is a good way to apply pressure to commercial websites that use payment processor services.

Collective Shout is in Australia. There are laws against some forms of adult content in Australia.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_banned_video_games_in_Australia

With the R18+ rating in place, it is expected fewer video games will be given the Refused Classification rating. Games may still be Refused Classification if deemed to contain material unsuitable for R18+ classification, such as depictions of sexual violence or the promotion of illegal drug use, as well as drug use that is related to incentives and rewards. More specifically, games which may be Refused Classification include:

• Detailed instruction or promotion in matters of crime or violence.
• Depiction of rape.
• The promotion or provision of instruction in paedophile activity.
• Descriptions or depictions of child sexual abuse or any other exploitative or offensive descriptions or depictions involving a person who is, or appears to be, a child under 18 years.
• Gratuitous, exploitative or offensive depictions of: (i) violence with a very high degree of impact or which are excessively frequent, prolonged or detailed; (ii) cruelty or real violence which are very detailed or which have an extremely high impact; (iii) sexual violence
• Depictions of practices such as bestiality
• Gratuitous, exploitative or offensive depictions of: (i) activity accompanied by fetishes or practices that are offensive or abhorrent; (ii) incest fantasies or other fantasies that are offensive or abhorrent

Classification is compulsory, and games refused classification by the ACB are banned for sale, hire or public exhibition, carrying a maximum fine of $275,000 and/or 10 years in jail.

There is some material available on some of these online stores

at least globally, and I'd guess in Australia

that violates those restrictions. Payment processors won't risk getting in trouble with countries.

But I'm not in Australia!

Probably not, but it's also not just Australia that has similar morality laws.

What I'd guess that the online stores are going to most likely do is have lawyers sit down, review the various countries that they sell games in, write up some list summarizing legal restrictions and embed that into their selling policy and add that it's not legal advice, the list may not be current and complete, and that if some published game does wind up violating the law in some country, that they may remove it from sale in that country to conform to the law. Then they're going to re-list the stuff that they're comfortable saying is conformant in the countries where it is conformant. At least some of them have already intended that (a) there's some kind of review process going on and (b) that they expect to be doing reinstatement of games.

Fun fact: they banned encryption on Amateur Radio frequencies.

Are you sure that this is recent?

https://www.reddit.com/r/amateurradio/comments/tge77a/is_it_illegal_to_encrypt_traffic_over_ham_radio/

is it illegal to encrypt traffic over ham radio?

OP, you should probably clarify which country you live in. The rules are different by country, but in the majority of places encryption on ham radio frequencies is not legal.

Specific to the United States, the very short summary is that there are narrow exemptions that allow encryption, but none that will let you legally send an encrypted message to another person, or have an encrypted two-way conversation that cannot be decrypted by someone else. Encryption in the US is only allowed for cases like protecting radio commands being sent to satellites from external tampering.

There are probably ways available to everyone to transmit data in an encrypted form. It sounds like some non-amateur frequencies that aren't that hard to get access to in the UK permit for encryption:

https://www.reddit.com/r/amateurradio/comments/tkbx8f/any_radio_with_encryption_that_is_legal_to_use_in/

Is there ANY handheld radio that is encrypted/has encryption that can be used in the UK

Get a business radio licence. They cost bugger all to get for what you'll need, from as little as £75 for a 5 year licence, and you can get digital radio gear from Kenwood, Motorola or Icom that'll do what you want.

You could use the licence free PMR446 but the range is utter shite.

I assume that given that WiFi exists and is usually encrypted, the unregulated spectrum permits for encryption, unless the UK deals with that range very differently than the US does.

Also, if you want a point-to-point link and can use lasers, I doubt that that's regulated.

Well, if so, I want to see a bloopers film with bats colliding in slow motion.

squeak squeak squeak WHACK SQUEAK SQUEAK

EDIT:

https://www.vice.com/en/article/bats-crash-into-each-other-all-the-time-high-speed-cameras-reveal/

Bats Crash Into Each Other All the Time, High-Speed Cameras Reveal

The sight of bats bursting forth from caves at dusk is majestic enough to dazzle any spectator, scientist, or Gotham City billionaire orphan vigilante. Comprised of hundreds of thousands of mammalian aeronauts, these massive clouds of biomass seem to move as one organism, demonstrating the extraordinary coordination of individual bats.

Or, so it would appear to the untrained eye. High-speed video cameras, however, reveal that bats are a lot more accident-prone than they look at first glance. A new featurette from the California Academy of Sciences follows bat biologists Nickolay Hristov and Louise Allen into the field near Hill Country in central Texas, to document the twilight flights of Brazilian free-tailed bats.

YouTube video containing said slow motion collisions

“We expected that they fly around each other and they never have physical contact,” Hristov said. “We have found, shocking to us, that bats crash into each other quite often. It’s a messy situation, but generally it’s very safe and it works very well.”

Note that they put the ruling at the bottom of the article; I didn't initially see it and was having a hard time finding the text online.

Also note that the government appears to be appealing the ruling, so probably going to be more to the story.

https://globalnews.ca/news/11311369/ontario-bike-lane-removal-plan-court-defeat/

https://www.fcgov.com/naturalareas/pdf/batarticle.pdf

Myth: Bats get tangled up in people’s hair.

Fact: Bats navigate and catch tiny insects using echolocation. This system is extremely refined and more sophisticated than radar. Bats can detect single strands of human hair and can easily avoid your hair.

And then there was Bugsy, who was kind of an idiot.

Erica Kahn, now 33, had recently lost her job as a biomedical engineer when she traveled to the Glen Canyon National Recreation Area in last August, she told NBC News.

After Kahn lost her job, she declined to pay for her former employer’s insurance for $650 a month through COBRA, the federal continuation of health coverage law.

The unemployed Massachusetts woman figured she could roll the dice as a healthy woman in her early 30s or at worst, could hastily buy private health insurance in a pinch, Kahn said.

I mean...you've the right to do that, but the flip side is that if you decide you don't want to do insurance, you need to pay for any medical care you get.

Insurers mitigate risk. You can't just get a condition and then go out and buy insurance to pay for it

they'll be structured to make that difficult, or they'd just be constantly losing money.

Kahn went online, bought a policy and then went to get rabies vaccinations and treatment in Arizona, Colorado and Massachusetts, believing she was in the clear.

Then the bills started pouring in, asking for a total of $20,749, because her policy had a 30-day waiting period before she could receive treatments covered by the plan, she said.

And, yeah, there's that structure.

Personally, I think that unless you're truly in a position where you really don't need risk mitigation, you probably want health insurance, since you could wind up with some kind of utterly catastrophic situation. Like, if you can reasonably cover any medical bill that comes up yourself, then yeah, it's just taking on some unnecessary overhead. If I were Bill Gates, I wouldn't get health insurance. But for most people, I'd at least get coverage for catastrophic events. Going with a high deductible is a more-reasonable way to reduce the amount of risk mitigation you're buying.

Isn't Night City supposed to be future Los Angeles, in California?

kagis

Ah, no. Up the coast. Future Morro Bay.

EDIT: I was gonna say that the landmasses don't fit all that well with Morro Bay, but it looks like there was supposed to have been a lot of building out over water in the Cyberpunk 2077 universe. Here's a map of present-day Morro Bay:

They sort of show the progression here:

https://cyberpunk.fandom.com/wiki/San_Morro_Bay

Also this week:

https://www.yahoo.com/news/articles/leavitt-time-trump-won-nobel-225301881.html

Leavitt: It’s time Trump won a Nobel Peace Prize

White House Press Secretary Karoline Leavitt said it’s “well past time” that President Donald Trump received the Nobel Peace Prize.

As a show of force, moving nuclear submarines around doesn't seem like a great play.

• A nuclear submarine's strongest asset relative to a surface ship is that one can't know where it is. It goes down, it doesn't come back up again for half a year, that makes it hard to identify. Why give clues that narrow things down at all?

• Because it needs to stay hidden, you can't show it to the party you're doing the show of force to to prove that you've done the movement, which makes your words just functionally words

the only weight here is the credibility your words hold. (Which in Trump's case may be one of, if not the, lowest credibility I'd personally assign to any historical US president.)

I mean, I think that moving literally any military asset other than submarines doesn't have this issue. Surface vessels, aircraft, land forces, whatever.

The article does not make it clear what type of submarine

attack (SSN) or ballistic missile (SSBN)

is being referred to. A "nuclear submarine" refers to both, as the term refers to the submarine's powerplant, not the armament. I am guessing, based on this response where the author says that he is not sure, that Trump never specified.

If the submarine in question is a ballistic missile submarine, it really doesn't need to be anywhere particularly near a target to hit that target. US ballistic missile submarines fire Trident II SLBMs. WP has the Trident II range as "More than 7,500 mi (12,000 km)[8][9] (exact is classified)[10]".

There are certain situations where you might want to fire an SLBM from less than that; you can fire it at a depressed trajectory to reduce the time until impact, which might be useful in a first-strike scenario where you want to destroy an opponent's nuclear weapons before they can get off the ground.

https://scienceandglobalsecurity.org/archive/sgs03gronlund.pdf

SLBMs flown on depressed trajectories would have short flight times, comparable to escape times of bombers and launch times of ICBMs, thus raising the possibility of short time-of-flight (STOF) nuclear attacks. We assess the depressed trajectory (DT) capability of existing SLBMs by calculating the flight times, atmospheric loading on the booster, reentry heating on the reentry vehicle (RV), and degradation of accuracy for a DT SLBM. We find that current US and CIS SLBMs flown on depressed trajectories would have the capability to attack bomber bases at ranges of up to about 2,000 kilometers, and possibly at ranges up to 3,000 kilometers. To target bombers based furthest inland, a new high-velocity booster might be required, and attacking hardened targets would require a maneuvering RV (MaRY).

However, in that case, you probably aren't going to want to hint that you are planning on doing so if you actually intend a first strike. Sure, you could try to so merely as a bargaining chip, but doing something that you probably wouldn't do in an actual attack undermines the credibility of the threat and thus devalues the bargaining chip.

The US doesn't really need to issue nuclear threats against Russia. It has strong conventional military superiority.

And there are some good reasons not to want to lower the bar for nuclear threats, as a convention. We don't want to nudge the world closer to a situation where a nuclear war actually starts accidentally

not just in this scenario, but in later ones.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Q53GmMCqmAM

She was an older lady too (maybe 50-60), but i guess she never traveled alone before and just hadn’t had to do it for herself.

I wouldn't be terribly surprised if her husband always did it, and he might have died.

One thing I think is a good idea in a marriage

which often, especially traditionally, divided up responsibilities

is to have the other partner do any important things at least enough to know how to do it at a basic level if they have to do so in a pinch. Could be taxes or making dinner or fueling the car or whatever. You may not always be available, and, to be blunt, one of you is going to die first.

Something I had not thought of but ran into with some people who lived with someone

not even always a spouse

and had someone die who always handled X and never learned how to do it themselves. If suddenly, in addition to someone dying, you now have to immediately deal with the fact that you don't know how how the family finances work, or paying utilities works, or where the X, Y, and Z subscription comes from, it just adds more load. It's a lot easier to deal with it ahead of time.

for my own experience, lost the tv remote, tv is now unusable.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Universal_remote

A universal remote is a remote control that can be programmed to operate various brands of one or more types of consumer electronics devices. Low-end universal remotes can only control a set number of devices determined by their manufacturer, while mid- and high-end universal remotes allow the user to program in new control codes to the remote. Many remotes sold with various electronics include universal remote capabilities for other types of devices, which allows the remote to control other devices beyond the device it came with. For example, a VCR remote may be programmed to operate various brands of televisions.