I think you’re missing the bigger issue. They exclusively used rogers. They had a single point of failure. That single point of failure happened to be Rogers, but it would eventually have caused a problem if their ISP had been a different one. This was a national card processor serving 30+ million people.
On Iran specifically:
And more generally:
A Canadian-only solution isn’t really all that useful. Part of what makes Visa and Mastercard useful is that they work around the world. This also means that they have datacenters around the world that are built in a redundant way so that even if one is destroyed by terrorism or a natural disaster, the remainder will take over the load. Meanwhile Interac failed in 2022 because their only service provider was Rogers, which went down.
I don’t know why there are no Interac credit cards. Visa doesn’t issue credit, it’s just the payment processor attached to the bank’s credit card. It seems like theoretically it should be possible to have a credit card with multiple payment processors attached. I seem to remember there used to be cards that had Cirrus, Plus and maybe also Maestro on them. You could just have a credit card with a priority list of processors attached. Try interac first, if that’s not supported fall back to visa.
It’s probably not done that way because the big companies are willing to spend money to prevent it. I would bet that Visa and Mastercard require that any card where they’re a payment processor is one where they’re the exclusive payment processor. Canada could probably pass a law that exclusive cards weren’t legal. But, Visa and Mastercard would probably use their billions to lobby to prevent a law like that from passing.
This is good for bitcoin.
Not just better, but sounds a lot smarter.
President Camacho was actually a great president. He didn’t seem to be abusing the office for any kind of personal gain. He was an inspiring public speaker. He listened to the voters, he tried to find the smartest person and appoint him so that he’d solve the problems facing the USA, he let the genius try out his solution even though it seemed absurd, and only ordered him to be executed when it only made the situation worse. Also, once the problems were solved, he left office without any complaints.
I watched it again recently, and the thing that really stood out for me was Camacho’s speeches compared to Trump’s. I think if they re-made Idiocracy today, they’d have to make Camacho sound a lot more stupid in those speeches. Trump has lowered the bar so much.
If Trump is still in charge when the bubble pops, he’ll do everything he can to bail them out. Altman knows how to flatter people, and he’s doing that constantly with Trump. A significant part of Trump’s base is silicon valley techbros who will lose their shirts if the bubble collapses. They had enough sway to get their guy installed as the VP. Getting a bailout will be easy for them. If they get poor, they won’t be able to fund the MAGA movement.
Even if Trump isn’t in charge anymore. Businesses that have fired a lot of employees and replaced what they did with LLM slop will say their businesses will be ruined if the bubble suddenly pops, so they’ll frame it as the economy collapsing if the LLM bubble is allowed to pop. Not to mention they’ll claim it’s a national security matter because if American LLMs disappear the only ones left will be Chinese ones, and that would be a threat to national security. The fact that the military is extensively using LLMs in their bombing of Iran shows how integrated they now are into the way the military does things, and you can’t ask the military to just go back to how things were done 5 years ago!
I expect that when the LLM bubble starts to pop, there will be enormous bailouts from the government, adding tens of trillions to the US debt. That’s a long-term thing and will be someone else’s problem.
And because they can frame it as being a national security issue because otherwise China’s LLMs will dominate.
Probably the only one who trained for it.
Sucks especially hard for the Canadian on board.
Do you know anybody else who had 2 generations like that? It used to be more common but even back in 1970 the average was above 21. These days it’s above 27.
https://www.northwell.edu/news/the-latest/geriatric-pregnancy-increases-complication-rate
With every average there will be people above and below the average age. And since there are some people having their first child in their 40s, the median is actually probably below the average.
I found it more suspicious that both times the father was supposedly aged at the suspiciously round number of 20.
Here baby, come meet your 32 year old grandma.
The models that cost 3x as much now suck. At least it used to be possible to get one that didn’t suck.
It’s more the printer companies that are evil.
Printers from the 90s and early 2000s were still pretty good. They had problems with paper jams, but that’s not really surprising when you’re moving a physical object around like that. The models designed for office use were really sturdy and built to handle a work environment that was still mostly based around paper. So, they expected to be used heavily.
Since then, they’ve cheaped out on a lot of the components because printing is much less common so they’re not expected to handle as much heavy work. But, more importantly, the DMCA has allowed manufacturers to load them up with DRM that refuses to use any ink that isn’t sold by the printer manufacturer.
Countercounterpoint: this is a short comment by a 4chan anon, so it’s probably a lie.
That’s when the word “about” is useful. My grandpa is “about 60” and my dad is “about 40”, he got the PS1 when my dad was a kid. My dad had me when he was “about 20”…
I don’t think people tend to make up specific ages that are not accurate when they’re trying to obscure someone’s exact age.
The only slightly suspicious thing here is that both grandpa and pop had kids at exactly age 20. Not only is that a little younger than average, it’s also a very convenient number for a made up but easy to calculate scenario.
Because that’s the root of the issue. Genital inspections are a (terrible) way to determine someone’s gender. The reason why that is seen as necessary is that sports are segregated.
I’m not sure what that has to do with the question I asked.
Did it though? EFF says that the number of impressions their content received is why they left:
Then
But, I wonder what the real numbers actually are. Do we think Elon is honestly reporting real numbers to people? And, of the “impressions” that are real, how many of those are actually from bots rather than actual human users?
IMO, one of the biggest tricks Elon has managed to pull with Twitter is to convince celebrities and brands that it’s still a thriving site full of other people, leading to them sticking around because supposedly no other site gets as much traffic.