Hatreon launched as an alternative to Patreon. Know why Hatreon closed down? Visa shut it down. [1]

If Visa bans you, no payment processor will work with you. Not PayPal. Not Stripe. Not Braintree. Not Authorize.net. You are cut off.

So yes, of course Conte says he "welcomes competition" in the article. Any legitimate competition, that caters to the voices booted by Patreon, gets squashed by Visa. There cannot be any competition.

So all anyone actually has to do if he wants to share views the American elites find distasteful is go start his own bank (takes $12 to $20 million and jumping through a load of regulatory hurdles, according to Wikihow [2]), roll out his own credit card, get mass market adoption of that card, create his own payment processor to process the card, found registrars and hosting companies that use that processor, and start a platform.

We need a digital Bill of Rights set up before there's nothing left online but the most sanitized, P.C.-friendly content. A place where everyone has to act fake-nice and pay lip service to beliefs he doesn't really hold so no one will think he's guilty of bad-think. That might sound like a utopia to some, but to many of us it sounds like the opposite.

> To be honest, I'd be OK with going beyond that and just rewriting the laws to European-style "no Nazism allowed anymore", so sadly sighing and talking about how disgusting I am for wanting a world without Nazis isn't exactly going to shame me into changing my mind, y'know?

A simpler way to put this is just "anyone who does not agree with me should go to a reeducation camp, or to jail, or maybe die."

People with views like these were behind the French Reign of Terror, the Russian Bolshevik Revolution, and the Nazi concentration camps. In the end, in all cases, the instigators ended up on the receiving end of the same kinds of punishments they put in place for those who disagreed with them.

History is filled with examples of policies boomerang'ing back on those responsible for them. Just another way of saying, be careful what you wish for, because few wishes come without a catch.

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hatreon [2] https://www.wikihow.com/Open-a-Bank

According to Sir David King (head U.K. climate scientist) in 2004, all continents other than Antarctica will be uninhabitable by 2100 due to manmade global warming.[1]

I wouldn't be worried about New York. I'd be on the next ship down to Antarctica to go stake my land claim right now before it all gets gobbled up.

I mean, if this manmade global warming stuff is real, and it's as bad as they say it is.

[1] http://web.archive.org/web/20100817023019/http://www.indepen...

We were on a paid tier. In 2012 we decided to try sending our own email via arpReach + SES. Once we set this up we asked MailChimp how to pause our paid account. We wanted to stop sending email and return to a free account until we needed MailChimp again.

Their response was that there was no way to do that... I recall it being something like "we do not like" or "do not allow" customers to return to free accounts. You could either keep paying, or delete your account and everything in it.

We'd already moved our MailChimp-collected emails over to arpReach (on our own server). At that point, I just opted to delete our MailChimp account.

Everything was fine while we used them. But that strange incident left a really bad taste in my mouth; it was one I never forgot.

Walter would appear to be safest with "thinking entity's game."

Then he has full coverage for men, women, intersex, asexual, androgynous, and non-human identities. His game will also still be relevant and inclusive once we've made contact with non-human extraterrestrials, and uplifted animals and machines to sentience.

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Otherkin

https://www.ratical.org/ratville/CAH/warisaracket.html

I would love to hire female employees who are every bit as driven, thorough, methodical, and accountable as our best male employees (the ones we don't fire), who are also cheaper. But they do not seem to exist.

The rare female prospective hires who are available and seem good are often priced so high I assume their rates are the result of Fortune 500 companies competing over them to have an effective female on the team. Good for them, but until effective females become cheaper than effective males it doesn't make sense for us to hire them from a value perspective (we don't need the social signaling points).

http://www.magnitskyact.com/

http://reclaimdemocracy.org/powell_memo_lewis/

Hadn't heard of it. Just read it. Interesting stuff.

It's very clearly a call-to-arms for business leaders against Marxists/communists. Not the working class.

Most Communists, at least in the West, spring from the middle- and upper-middle class, not the working class.

And Communist countries, historically, tend to make their working classes worse off, not better.

Equating a defense against communism with an attack on the working class would seem a stretch.

And how Democrat presidents are always portrayed by partisan conservatives as morally corrupt degenerates (Clinton as a murdering, philandering drug kingpin; Obama as a Kenyan-born Muslim homosexual on globalist puppet strings)?

Usually I just assume this is confirmation bias + partisans being partisan.

But sometimes I like to wonder, "What if it's all true?"

The history of man suggests otherwise. The more our civilization progresses, and the more the population swells, the broader the array of philosophical positions those within the civilization tend to hold. We have no evidence for everyone eventually coalescing around one 'right' belief set.

History is also littered with non-reproductive sects, like the Essenes, aesthetics, or, today's answer to these, anti-natalists and child-free individuals. These groups don't tend to be very good at passing their belief systems on to new generations however, as one might expect, and they don't tend to last particularly long once they've emerged on the civilization scene.

Why are there no other detectable signs of human life, like smoke signals, territory markers, or emissaries from any more but a handful of other tribes? Surely if advanced humans existed, they would have contacted these tribes by now, to share technology, discoveries, and medicine. Yet they haven't.

How can the whole planet be so... silent?

China is no longer about communism any more than the U.S. is about the Enlightenment. China today is about Gilded Age-type capitalism with a strain of collectivism running through it.

Every Chinese today is caught up in a mad scramble for personal enrichment, often at the expense of his fellow man. Most American Marxists would shrink back in horror at the capitalist fever that grips the average Chinese. Even most of those on America's political right do not have the stomach for the level of Gordon Gecko-ness that animates many Chinese. While many on the American right prefer to retreat to dens, family, and countryside, Chinese capitalists are busily trying to get rich any way they can (ethically or otherwise).

The Chinese Communist Party functions the same way Chinese government has functioned for thousands of years. Anyone can join, if he can pass the necessary tests. Passing tests to gain a coveted spot in the government has been a national priority since before Confucius's day, 2.5 millennia ago, and continues to be today.

China does not have legally enshrined freedom of speech. But at a societal level, the 'real' freedom of speech is greater than what I've experienced in America. In America, you must very carefully watch your words, lest you offend any of a number of easily offended groups. You won't go to jail for it (unlike certain parts of Western Europe - Germany and Britain, for instance), but you will lose friends and you may lose your job. The result is that while speech may be legal in America, it ends up stifled nevertheless. Large chunks of American society no longer value free speech, and there is actual debate in many corners of the country about whether certain speech ('hate speech') should be outlawed. In China, so long as you do not loudly criticize or subvert the Chinese government, you are free to speak your mind - and won't be harassed by the government OR be James Damore'd / Donglegate'd out of a job.

As for the "10s of millions dead", there's extremely good reason to be skeptical of these claims.[1] They become harder and harder to swallow the more older, Mao-era Chinese you talk with - most of whom, no matter where in the countryside they hail from, know of no one who died of starvation or malnutrition. The press is the propaganda arm of a nation's powerful - whether in China or America. Don't believe it just because they tell you to.

[1] http://www.unz.com/article/mao-reconsidered-part-two-whose-f...

I don't care so much about the ideological positions. What I care about is the constant, systemic undermining of science.

Take your comment, for instance. You throw about the notion of 'scientific truth', as if this is even a thing. Science does not deal in truth. Truth is for the priests and the philosophers. This 'Temple of Science' American Leftists have attempted to create, where all beliefs of the American Left (like climate change, organic food, socialism, tabula rasa, and Boasian anthropology) are enshrined as 'Science', unassailable to criticism (criticizing them means you are 'not educated' or 'don't understand science') regardless the flimsiness of the papers published to support those positions, makes science a partisan field.

The American Right has been trained to hate and distrust science. They hate it. They think scientists are all frauds. Why? Because 'scientists', they are told, again and again, support all these Leftist ideological bents that are not science, and that those on the Right know, at some level, are not science.

Anthropogenic global warming, as an example, is utter nonsense. Without NOAA, NASA, and GHCN doing heavy manipulation of the raw data before the thousands of scientists who work on it ever see that data, you don't have climate change.[1] Without concealing historical sea ice data, these agencies don't have anything abnormal to report on that front.[2]

Right now, you have a situation in America where a bunch of zealots have claimed science as their own, to push their decidedly non-scientific, partisan ideologies... and the other bunch of zealots on the other side of the aisle have disclaimed science as full of shills and charlatans hoaxing the public for tax dollars.

I don't know if you actually care about science. I suspect you don't - otherwise you wouldn't be using 'scientific truth' (no such thing) as a shield for your ideology.

But I do, and frankly, when I see one side of the most powerful nation on Earth using science as its meat shield and the other side concomitantly coming to view science with hostility and suspicion, when science used to be an apolitical source of wonderment for people from all ideological backgrounds in that same country half a century ago, I am deeply afraid for the future of real scientific investigation.

[1] https://realclimatescience.com/100-of-us-warming-is-due-to-n...

[2] https://realclimatescience.com/government-arctic-sea-ice-fra...

Pick up your suitcase and get outside North America for a bit. The world's a lot more diverse and interesting than the education system might have you believe.

Every few generations some brave, ballsy kid shrugs off these old wives tales, goes and camps out in area X, and gets ill and dies not long after. The legends endure... at some cost.

Of course, it depends how strong the radioactivity/toxicity is. If it leads to cancer 30 years down the road, and no immediate signs, then it gets a lot messier.

In China, there is the objective of China, where there is a singular focus on what is good for the people and the country. Groups that would take away from this to empower their own group are viewed as attacking the collective.

America until the middle of the 1960s or so was like this to a large extent. Various minorities (Italians, Irish, Eastern Europeans) entered the country, kept separate identities for a while, but eventually integrated into the whole. The death of John F. Kennedy signaled the end of a unified America and the birth of a far more divided house.

Today, America has fractured into a litany of squabbling sects. In China, you have the Chinese. In America, what used to be called "Americans" are now called whites, blacks, Latinos, Asians, Indians, Arabs, gays, straights, bisexuals, pansexuals, transexuals, liberals, conservatives, nationalists, globalists, Christians, atheists, Muslims, Jews. There are feminists and men's rights activists and Black Lives Matter and the Alt-Right. Each sect wants the spotlight; it wants advantages over other groups (masked with euphemisms like "equality" or "recognition" or "reparations"); and it views the overall identity of the country as an oppressive enemy that must be fought.

That is not to say one condition is better than the other. These seem to be natural cycles nations go through. John Glubb notes the Byzantines squabbling amongst themselves over their divisions as the Ottomans blew holes in the walls around their city in 1453. [1] Byzantium, like America, had been the world's greatest super power at one time too. It seems likely the slide into infighting and decadence is a natural state of every nation advanced in the cycles of civilizations.

But of course, a people that spends its time tip-toeing around and arguing about what labels to use to refer to this group and who can use that word and who can't use that word and how many of which group you have to hire to not get sued has very different priorities and will achieve very different outcomes than a people that is relentlessly focused on a more singular, unified objective, other things being equal.

In America's case, I suppose the question is: do the benefits of diversity (which has become a sort of national religion over the past two decades) outweigh the costs?

The test case of American "maximum diversity" vs. Chinese maximal industriousness may prove as close as we'll get to a controlled study on how these two very different national priorities stack up against one another head-to-head on the world stage over the coming decades.

Place your bets now folks....

[1] http://people.uncw.edu/kozloffm/glubb.pdf

So they did an analysis and determined that only 6,000 or so of the products they carried sold in any significant amount. The other 12,000 were niche items that sold in small quantities and made little money.

Before they nixed the other 9,000 products though, the company decided to make one additional analysis, of who bought what in what combination. And it discovered all those little items were being bought in small quantities by people who bought large quantities of the big items.

The analysis further determined that if the supermarket nixed those 9,000 niche products, it would no longer be the "one stop shop" for its customers. Those customers would only be able to buy some of what they needed at the supermarket, and would need to buy the rest elsewhere. If a competing supermarket carried all of what a customer needed, that customer would eventually learn to do all his shopping at that supermarket to save the hassle of needing to journey to 2+ places to get what he needed.

After this final analysis, the supermarket chain decided to keep almost all the products it kept on its shelves, eliminating only 200 or 300 products, instead of 9,000.

It was not so much that the supermarket was very nice and charitable to niche spices and exotic Asian sauces and imported curries and whatnot.

Rather, it was that the supermarket realized that if its customers could not find everything they wanted on its shelves, they would eventually find everything they wanted on a competitor's shelves instead.

In YouTube's case, no good competitor presently exists. But a big part of the reason why is because YouTube has sucked all the oxygen out of the video hosting and streaming niche by being a one-stop shop. If it stops being that, there will be a lot more oxygen in that niche again.

(that said, I do not think demonetizing videos with low view counts / subscriber numbers constitutes injecting oxygen back into the market. "Not letting" niche video creators user their platform, however, probably would)

https://www.newscientist.com/article/dn12301-man-with-tiny-b...