AmbitiousProcess (they/them)

Most can, but they still rely on your phone getting an internet connection later, on your phone being trusted to send data over itself, and of course still require your phone to actually be charged. (Can change if it’s a regular card depending on the issuer though)

Also, if you’re just generally curious about stuff related to offline payments, there’s actually a major security hole that Visa refuses to fix, which allows a device to pretend to be an offline-only card reader, then charge any value to someone’s card, and get away with it, even if their device is locked.

Not really a point in favor of my original argument though, since CBDC infrastructure would require replacing or updating all the readers anyways, and implementing the standards to prevent such an attack, like MasterCard has used for a while now.

In 2026, when is your phone running out of battery

Not too regularly to me, but it happens frequently to most of my friends, and some street performers I know who don’t always have good access to a power outlet, or the money for a portable charger.

…or losing wifi?

I and many other people regularly experience complete cell dropouts when at my local grocery store. No service. (Works fine outside and slightly down the block) We are in a city, not the middle of nowhere either.

There have also been internet dropouts for my local store’s machines, meaning people paying with cash could go instantly, whereas people who only had cards or phone payments had to wait in a massive line since every transaction took 2 minutes to go through.

You can also just get a crypto card if your worried about your phone being unreliable.

Sure, but at that point I could just get literally any card. I was only commenting on CBDCs, though I suppose the same critiques could apply to direct crypto transfers.

At the end of the day, CBDCs tend to rely on phones to work, and thus can’t work if your phone doesn’t, unlike cards, and especially unlike cash. (given cash relies on nothing but you and the person you’re transacting with believing the cash is real, vs phone payments or even just cards still requiring an internet connection at some point, and power to the reader, plus permission from an external gatekeeper as the cherry on top)

I don’t think they’re shitting on “pricing coming down”. They’re shitting on “company raises pricing, faces backlash, promises not to do it again after clearly having no qualms about screwing over consumers”.

The point isn’t that “prices going down = bad”, it’s “prices going down ≠ company won’t screw you over later”

Not even just permission, especially given most of these systems are made to operate on your phone rather than through a physical card.

Oops, your phone died? Sorry, no groceries for you! Did your internet connection stop working on your phone? Sooooooooooorry, you’re not gonna be able to pay your bus fare.

First amendment lawyers are gonna have a FIELD DAY with this one 😭

It’s one thing for a working person to spend whatever income they don’t need to live at a baseline on others, it’s another for someone to hoard so much money they couldn’t necessarily physically spend it all if they tried, let alone spend it on things that would actually measurably increase their happiness.

You can argue regular people should donate more, and many actually do donate more than billionaires (as a % of assets/income) depending on which source you trust to give a good enough picture, (given a lot of donations are hard to track, both from large billionaire foundations and DAFs, to smaller donors with hard to classify spending) but there is a massive gap in how much a regular person can donate relative to a rich person, even just as a % of their income.

If you live paycheck to paycheck, but have, say, $20 left over at the end of the month in actual money to your name that hasn’t already gone to groceries, rent, etc, (and we assume you have no other assets), your net worth is $20.

If a billionaire donates $999,000,000 to charity, that would be the equivalent of that person donating $19.98.

Unlike that person though, the billionaire would have a million dollars in net worth, enough money to buy a house, while the regular person would have $0.02.

Even if these conditions aren’t perfect, and you assume maybe the person has some more net worth than $20, the point still stands. A billionaire can give up almost all of their net worth and still have enough money to comfortably live, or at least meet basic living standards for the average person. For most Americans, if they lose their job, have any surprise bill, or don’t make as much money as they expected to, they will instantly become homeless the next month rent is due, even if they give up none of their existing assets and just stop adding more money on top.

This is why “billionairism” (not a real term ofc) is such a damaging condition. It not only causes you to become obsessed with hoarding wealth that you don’t necessarily need, but it causes you to do so at the expense of others you could readily help without experiencing any material downside in your everyday life. There is no reason to hoard so much wealth.

Money is just a means to get or do things. If you are not spending that money, and you have more money than you’ll ever need to spend, that excess dollar value past your realistic spending for the rest of your life is just a valueless number to you. It’s a number that will never impact your life, but it can impact others. Hoarding it is stupid and immoral.

Only if other reviews are missing major context.

If a product I bought a year ago breaks, but everyone else wrote their review the day after they got it and said it was great, I’m gonna write a review telling you it might not last as long as you think, for example.

Once I got pulled aside before even getting through the security line, then the people rummaging through my bags and patting me down started gambling real money with each other about what my age was before I told them -_-

Mozilla uses “they’re” to refer to Kit, but other than that there’s no explicit statement at all.

Kit is a companion, not a commentator. They’re not here to deliver punchlines. Kit shows up as a small signal that Firefox is working for you, then steps back so you can keep moving.

Hence why this article is about them leaving the openly Nazi billionaire’s platform while remaining on other platforms that are mainstream and still provide a lot of reach :)

I think Reuters had a much more clear headline as to the actual impact of this.

DHS says US could stop processing international travelers at some airports in ‘sanctuary cities’

If you’re a tourist, go home. If you leave, you can’t get back in.

No international flights would likely be able to land, since no international travelers would be able to enter, U.S. citizen or not.

What are we even doing, man…

Exactly. AI slop is just that. Slop.

If it’s just an AI doing something useful, we don’t call it slop, we just call it AI.

When Google’s AlphaFold predicted the folding of over 200 million protein structures, and won a nobel prize for it, I don’t think anyone would call all the research using it to make cures to diseases slop.

For the love of god please do not diagnose yourself as being “neurospicy” based solely on if you like stacking coins by size 😭🙏