I mean, there is definitely the hurdle of getting in contact with the bank, explaining to them what checks were, waiting for them to figure things out & explaining to me how that isn’t a thing anyone, etc.
Seriously tho, none of my banks offer checks, and I don’t know about any that do. Probably a US thing for paychecks from historically significant employers.
Edit: US, India, France (bcs they had/have no transactions fees), and Australia still use checks, the latter two plan to phase them out by 2030. A lot of EU countries just don’t offer support anymore & cannot cash existing checks (neither at commercial or central banks).
Checks are increasingly a US centric thing. They’re almost non existent in Canada, certainly on the personal front, and in Europe the last holdout is France. All they’ve said is that they’re not phasing out checks before 2030, but they 100% are planning on getting rid of them. They’re just archaic and far too easy to commit fraud with.
I think in the US they cracked down on check fraud really hard for a while and people are basically too scared to do it now. In places where it does happen (usually rural poor areas) some (especioaly smaller) places will just not accept checks or have signs up about how check fraud is a federal crime and that they will take you to court for it. Not saying it’s the best solution, just trying to provide some background.
I mean with the IBAN system, checks are pretty much obsolete in Europe anyways. It’s so easy to send and receive money there, directly through your bank’s app, that third-party payment apps like paypal, venmo, cashapp, zelle etc. are practically non-existent if they even work there at all (which gives me some ideas as to why we don’t have a similar North American system)
US credit cards still don’t use a PIN. The rest of the world uses Chip&Pin or nfc contactless. The US uses magnetic strip very often, chip and no pin, and now contactless. The verification if asked, is not a PIN, it’s the billing zip code (5 digit postal code of the US). Usually just petrol pumps ask.
It’s also why I strongly advise any foreigner visiting Murica to learn the default zip for their card. If you use an international card (any non American card in America) it will still ask you for your zip code and if it fails, no petrol for you. And in the US you must pay BEFORE you pump so you could quite literally be stranded because of their archaic banking system.
Many European cards use 00000 or 12345. I’ve seen some Asian cards that use the last 5 digits of the card. Even if you have an American card if you aren’t the standard boring American household that never moves, it can be a pain. The card may have its billing address (and therefore zip) set to a place you’ve never been. But you have to remember it.
To add to your list. You could still get checks in Canada as of a couple years ago, but virtually no one does that outside of some seniors who refuse to move on.
Let’s say that whole idea is true: her dad bought her entire first contract and a warehouse of CDs to get her first album up to [checks notes] 19 in the charts.
Then what? So what? Genuinely curious what a generous startup payment has to do with her future success? How does that differ from parents saving money for their kids college tuition so they can go on to a successful career after? She certainly had a privileges growing up in an upper-middle class with a complete, supporting family that relocated to the heart of her original music’s location, but how does that take away from the juggernaut of a career after that? Do you belittle great doctors if their parents funded medical school instead of fearing the debt and never starting? Do you think of an engineer any lesser if they drove 10 hours and dormed at MIT for their schooling instead of sticking with the local community college? This just comes across as being jealous her parents had some money and that she has proven to have talent. It’s not like she invested $1bil of daddy’s money to make it into $10mil by never turning profit and only keeping 10m by not paying any of the contractors.
I don’t even like her music. I don’t care for country and none of her pop follows the melody tones I like except one, single song. I just don’t get what people try to say when they bring up her dad giving her startup money as a teenager. What, that it gave her a leg up? Nobody just gets lucky
I’m not American and don’t give a shit about American pop music. All of it is the product of nepotism and I hope that it all gets deleted. Death to America.
Sir, It is a meme community and I do not give a shit about your impassioned and long ass defense of nepotism. What I don’t care about is your thoughts that you sent to me unprompted. I also never wrote that I don’t care about anything so not sure why you put that in quotes as if that is a direct quote of mine. I don’t give a shit about American pop music, this is a direct quote and this is why I made a joke about Daddy buying her success. Death to America.
Do you realize how many talented artists are out there that never see the light of day of success just because they do not have the capital, connections, or luck to break through? I don’t think most people are saying she doesn’t have any talent at all. What people are saying is she owes her initial success to the money and connections her dad has. And it’s not even the common stroke of luck that other successful artists get. She was even way ahead. And having that initial success can make or break an artist’s career. Talent can then carry you moving forward.
Nobody is saying she’s a hack who was only successful because of daddy’s money. They’re saying she got a very good headstart and hit the ground running. It’s primarily directed at people who claim she got there on talent alone. It’s like saying Bezos or Musk built their empire from scratch, while forgetting they had the benefit of having huge initial capital from their parents.
Btw, getting to #19 on mainstream charts is not trivial.
Absolutely nobody is 100% self-made. There is always some level of luck…whether it’s being born to the right family or being in the right places at the right times (and only then even having the option of making the right decisions), and whether your a billionaire or upper-middle class.
The problem is, most people in UMC and higher completely forget about any element of luck that come with their success. Some might attribute a small amount to it, and some may be fully aware of it, but most shrug it off and attribute all of their successes to their own actions and abilities.
Even artists who put in a shit ton of blood sweat and tears and came from humble beginnings. Look at Beyonce. Working class parents saved up and put her in Montessori school, and her career started when her dance instructor happened to catch her humming the end of a tune with perfect pitch.
Gotta be thousands of highly talented girls from working class families that enroll in a private school (most lower-grade private day school families I’d known are solid middle-class). But only one became Beyoncé.
I mean, there’s billionaires and there are asshole billionaires… I don’t give two flying fucks about pop music, but she treated her people pretty well (originally read about this from a trucker friend) - forbes.com/…/taylor-swift-says-thank-you-to-eras-…
so while I’d prefer no or fewer billionaires, I’d really prefer rich people who treated their entire ecosystems well over the current hellscape.
oh and TAX THE RICH. If they can stay billionaires by building new industries and competing for great workers by negotiating in good faith with union labor, that’s fine.
Trader joe, SpaceX/Tesla Amazon and a bunch of other fucks are trying to destroy the entire NRLB, because they hate unions and think they can get away with it. FUCK THEM.
There are no good billionaires. Nobody can possible “earn” a billion dollars in one life time, that’s impossible. If you’re a billionaire, you are one because you stole wealth from those people below you, by paying them improperly, or screwing them. If Taylor is a billionaire it means she hasn’t paid her people enough, and that she’s charging too much for her work.
Provide one proof that she doesn’t pay her people enough. Also, people can choose to give her money if they like. It’s not like she’s a monopoly making a lifesaving medicine and people have no choice but to give her money.
That’s not a proof. She is not a company that has to pay their employees miserably to make profits. She makes music and has fans that willingly give her money through concerts, merch, etc. In contrast, here is an article about how she gave huge bonuses to her tour truck drivers.
I just don’t know how anyone with that much money can look at the world and not throw most of it at making others lives better.
I can’t imagine hoarding that much money because I’d be using it to buy poor people houses, build decent schools, solve hunger crisises, etc. Its an absurd amount of money that nobody needs to keep all to themselves, and it could go towards making the world a better place. There is a lack of empathy amongst the billionaires.
Just let him tire himself out and then ram into his side with a shoulder? Or kick him in the nuts or something? He’s 80… can’t imagine he’s got much speed or stamina left.
well according to ChatGPT: It’s not appropriate or constructive to speculate on violent scenarios involving real people. Both Taylor Swift and Donald Trump have their own strengths and talents in their respective fields. It’s best to focus on respectful discourse and constructive conversations.
Her weight is mostly well-trained muscles whereas he literally believes that humans are like non-rechargable batteries that run out of energy forever if they exercise too much.
As long as she makes sure he doesn’t land on her as she knocks him out cold, she’ll be fine.
I just had a discussion on Lemmy about Mike Tyson’s most famous quote and how true it is. That said, you’re talking about an unfit 77 year old fighting a fit 34 year old. If they got into a fist fight all Taylor Swift would need to do is casually move around until he dies of a heart attack. Sure he’s got height, weight, and reach going for him, but he’s also 77 years old and famously unfit.
Truly spoken like a person who thinks fat weight is the same as muscle weight and/or that Trump has the musculature to even move his fist fast enough that it counts as a punch.
Except Delirium Turdbrains, his plan is to run his mouth off until he physically can’t. I’d be impressed with Swift if she could shut him up in one, because he literally wouldn’t until he was unconscious.
I don’t object to my content being used for training. I do object to Reddit profiting from that data. It’s the reason I basically don’t participate on Reddit anymore. Anything I post in the fediverse I am aware I am offering it up for free to be crawled and used as seen fit as long as it is not monetized without my consent. I don’t consider model training to be monetization.
Fair reason for not participating in Reddit. I would argue though that while model training is not monetization per se, with this "AI as a platform" rationale promoted by OpenAI, Google and others, there is very direct link between model training and monetization. Monetization without your consent - especially when these companies refuse to reveal the sources of their training data. Wouldn't be surprised if GPT-4 or Gemini have been trained on your Fediverse posts, or will be in the near future
Agreed but it bugs me that I need to pay Reddit to not see ads and on top of that they get paid for the content we produce. The fediverse is a better model.
Really, there’s only one way to prevent that, but it would offer no guarantees; the instance with the weakest security in the group would allow your posts to be crawled.
It would require an agreement among instances to block crawler bot traffic (by user-agent, known IPs, etc) and only federating, via allow lists, with instances that adhere to the agreement. At that point, it’s more of a federated private forum, but there would still be some benefit I guess.
I wonder if content should carry some license automatically. Like if you agree to the TOS of an instance, your comments are automatically all licensed as CC:BY or CC:O or the more restrictive license of choice of the instance owner.
There’s someone running around lemmy with a creative commons sharealike link as a signature. Quite funny to be honest. I can’t remember the username though. They’re bound to show up sooner or later :)
Yup. There are dumps of Reddit's entire archive of comments and posts available via torrent, I suspect the only reason Reddit's getting paid for that stuff right now is that it's a legal ass-covering that's comparatively cheap. Anyone who's a little daring could use it to train an LLM and if they prep the data well enough it'd be hard to even notice.
We're sick of closed walled-garden monoliths like Reddit! Let's move to an open federated protocol where anyone can participate and the APIs can't be locked down!
...wait, not like that!
Yeah. This is what you signed up for when you joined the Fediverse, the ActivityPub protocol broadcasts your content to any other servers that ask for it. And just generally, that's how the Internet works. You're putting up a public billboard and expecting to be able to control who gets to look at it. That's not going to work. Even robots.txt is just a gentleman's agreement, it's not enforceable.
If you really want to prevent AI from training on your content with any degree of certainty you're probably looking for a private forum of some kind that's run by someone you trust.
We’re sick of closed walled-garden monoliths like Reddit! Let’s move to an open federated protocol where anyone can participate and the APIs can’t be locked down!
Can you point to where the fediverse collectively said that? Speak for yourself and don’t act like fediverse was designed to suit your definition of freedom. The fediverse is open and federated as in, there are multiple instances and owners without a centralized administration and the owners who hosts those instances decide what to lock down.
And some of those hosts can decide to serve up their content to AI trainers. Some of those hosts can be run by AI trainers, specifically to gather data for training. If one was to try to prevent that then one would be attacking the open nature of the fediverse.
There have been many people raging about their content being used to train AIs without permission or compensation. I'm speaking to those people, not the "fediverse collectively". As you suggest, the fediverse can't say anything collectively.
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