https://thedalesreport.com/cannabis/euroclear-to-stop-suppor...
I just thought it is very much left field for an own-managed share account
My first thought was I had gotten hacked (yay lastpast) & someone is trading on my account
Have you considered that this may have been a decision based on “we might get sued for being party to human trafficking” reasons?
The public was becoming too liberal, didn't have a strong enough reaction to "prostitution" anymore. Hence they started relabeling most voluntary prostitution disingenuously and even changing laws to make clearly "nothing special" also be "sex trafficking" ... like a man traveling for a weekend getaway to another city with two half-sugar baby half-prostitites.
No it’s not. Whatever moral judgement the government assigns to a crime is irrelevant to a company who is staring down the barrel of a lawsuit for being party to said crime.
In the end, all it would take is one case of a pimp accepting payment for his underaged prostitutes via this company for the payment processor to be sued into oblivion, so they made the rational decision to not open themselves to this risk any longer.
Payment processors are really hard to sue unless they are directly involved in fraud. Which is why person to person payment processors like Venmo can operate.
What? No it's not. Here's an example of a payment processor that got sued for being the payment processor used by a debt settlement firm that merely "overcharged consumers, took untimely fees, misrepresented the value of its services, and failed to make critical disclosures about consumer harms."[0]
> Payment processors are really hard to sue unless they are directly involved in fraud.
All of that is merely a question of the scale of the activity and how badly the government wants to stop it. Same reason cryptocurrency escaped taxing/reporting requirements for many years -- the scale and the ire of the government just wasn't there yet.
Relevant to this discussion, the payment processor in question is associated with a company that makes no bones about providing services for people engaged in work that is illegal in many jurisdictions! If you don't think that would eventually land both companies in the government's crosshairs, I don't know what to tell you. Take "fair" out of the equation, if you're a business owner it's not about "fair", it's about saving your ass. It's not a moral judgement for a company to voluntarily disassociate themselves from another company engaged in illegal behavior.
> Which is why person to person payment processors like Venmo can operate.
Venmo's TOS has named restrictions on what customers can do (and "at our discretion" clauses), and they absolutely will ban users for violating them if it either Venmo can prove it or if they government starts threatening them over it.
0: https://www.mass.gov/news/ags-office-reaches-settlement-with...
It was a pretty clever and creative bit of lobbying, if I remember. Right up there with the plot to make the F-35 program impossible to cancel by redistributing jobs to key congressional districts.
The issue for gambling and sex payment processors is that they are easy targets for politicians looking for votes: someone who hates them will vote for such a candidate and few will bother to come out in support. Those politicians become the regulators, so in exchange for chilling on some issue or another the payment processors agree to “crack down”
I was surprised by it. Literally every congressional district, not just every state.
I thought the plane was cool, but even as a teen I could see that it was pointless.
It’s fine to create regulation that’s voted upon, it’s not okay to use financial firms to push moral or societal change in collusion with governments.
EDIT: Never mind. I see that the previous poster had confused the two and linked to the consumer products company, not the tobacco company.
The British Empire, a “democracy”, used to invade countries for slave trading. Then when slavery was made illegal it then invaded countries under the guise of stopping slavery!
This is probably the link you meant to post:
"Reynolds American parent BAT named third-highest rated ESG performer in global ranking"
https://www.prnewswire.com/news-releases/reynolds-american-p...
I don’t think payment processors care, but they have margins they want to maintain. Dipping their margins for particular companies or industries would be making a moral decision.
For your mutual fund, I expect similar in that weed stocks aren’t performing as well as they once were and aren’t projected to perform as well so they no longer fit the targets of your fund. I’d read the prospectus before assuming some moral aversion to weed.
Sex workers get a lot of repeat business and aren’t used for the kind of stolen credit card validation that hits many online businesses.
Then again I don't hire prostitutes in the first place. I suppose those that do probably have a higher tolerance for criminal risk.
The evidence on this is readily available via Google. Just search for high risk industries for payment processors, it will always include sex industry stuff.
Then in order to sell the lie to their spouse, they call the credit card company and say, "Of course I didn't make those purchases! I would never do such a thing! I'm not some kind of pervert! Remove these charges immediately or I'll close my account!"
And then the credit card company's thought process is like, "Well, you probably did! But we can pretend you didn't, if that's what it takes to keep you as a customer so we can keep making money off you."
Financial institutions should not be allowed to discriminate against law abiding citizens. If a transaction is legal it should be their job to move the money from party A to party B.
This "freedom of speech isn't freedom of consequences" line is exactly the sort of attitude people take in the countries in which the government does suppress free speech, and they think it's just perfectly fine. You have freedom of speech and every country then, the consequences just going to jail.
There's a limit to this. There should be consequences for you saying things that are wrong, lying to people, spreading hatred, and so on. However, protecting basic human decency in the ability to continue to participate in society is incredibly important to preserving free expression across our nations.
Being able to purchase things, being able to post to the internet, are both aspects of this. It's fine to have this attitude when they're is a strong diversity of companies that allow you to participate and is likely that not all of them can collude with each other.
We have two payment processing companies. Four social media companies, and those four all literally live in the same city.
The patj you tread is a path leading to suppression of speech, and the point of free speech is to ensure that people are able to speak without fear of undue consequence.
There is even old communist-era joke about that:
Is here in USSR the same freedom of speech like in western countries?
Yes, there is freedom of speech, but in western countries there is also freedom after speech.
OP cited "1st amendment protected behavior." While pedantic, it's correct to point out that the First Amendment isn't relevant here. Lawful behavior and free speech are.
Every time someone mentions that what they are doing is protected free speech, there is someone on HN that feels necessary to make "Freedom of speech doesn't mean freedom of consequences" as an argument.
Sure, at it's most simplistic this is true. However, if exercising a right results in you being homeless when your behavior was legal, and protected as a matter of course by the law, then there is something wrong.
What you are missing, and what everyone who makes this argument is missing, is that Freedom of Speech isn't /just/ a law, it's also a social more, and that social more has shifted, which means speech is now a universally dangerous behavior, regardless of whether or not you will be prosecuted. This isn't just a collective decision of society, it's a consequence of our more interconnected world, the concentration of wealth and power, and how that wealth and power unequally is applied to people based on whether or not they're liked by the wealthy and powerful.
Multi-national corporations, that literally hold charters to sit on the boards of central banks, that are deeply interconnected with the US government, while actively extra-governmentally, do not get to go "muh consequences" when they penalize citizens in life-altering ways for doing legal activities. Banking isn't exactly a right, but you should not be stripped of your ability to bank for doing completely legal things. Being forced to be unbanked, being unable to take payment for your work, and/or being fired from your job are not "muh consequences", they are an attempt by the wealthy and the powerful to utterly suppress speech they don't like, and to oppress the people, the individuals, who dare to utter, write, or share things they disapprove of. In many ways, these are more material than government action.
It is also true that there exists behaviors that are unacceptable, socially.. but that should not be illegal. I can lie all I want in most cases, legally, but there are social repercussions for that. I can treat people disrespectfully, but it might cause them to no longer interact with me.
There absolutely MUST be cases where actions have social repercussions, but are not actually illegal.
That being said, I totally agree that freedom of speech is a social construct that goes beyond just the law. And the impacts on someone for their speech has grown more and more out of hand over time.
Absolutely. Social repercussions are not the only consequences however, and the "muh consequences" crowd conflates social repercussions (I didn't get invited to the party) with material life repercussions (I had my bank account closed). These are not the same.
Individuals have a right of free association. Small businesses arguably have a right of free association as well. Massive multi-national corporations do not and should not, they are allowed by society their size and breadth so that they serve the needs of society, which includes providing services to every member of the public. You should not be deprived of necessary services for a normal life because of behaving in a legal manner and exercising a legal right.
So, Joe's corner pharmacy should be allowed to kick someone out of their store who's protesting, acting unpleasant, wearing a KKK outfit, or other First Amendment protected activities, but Walgreens shouldn't be able to? Where do you draw the line?
Walgreen's and CVS as a consequence of their duopoly/monopoly position do not have the right to kick you out of their pharmacy and prevent you from getting the medication you need to sustain your life (possibly quite literally) because they don't like the racist slogan on your t-shirt.
If you don't agree with this, you don't agree with freedom of speech, and any further conversation is basically pointless. You don't get to kill people by proxy or make people homeless by proxy because your don't like what they say as long as you can proxy it out so it's not the government literally directly doing it. It's just as unethical as the government warrantlessly wiretapping all Americans by buying data from data brokers hoovered up by FaceGoog, rather than building said system itself directly to skirt the laws.
The Constitution was conceived at a time when the government was the most powerful entity. Modern multi-national megacorps are arguably more powerful, and should be reigned in with similar restrictions.
Since I've entertained your scenario, in your reply to me, I'd expect an acknowledgement that preventing someone access to medication required to sustain their life, due to their speech, is effectively equivalent to killing that person due to their speech. You cannot have "freedom of speech" in a society where you can legally kill people because of their speech.
There's a huge gap between "social consequences" and material life consequences, and this is why "muh consequences" is a disingenuous argument made by people who actually are opposed to freedom of speech, but don't have the balls to say it (ironically, because they have the right to do so, but are afraid of the consequences).
Blanket rules and arbitrary size limits won't work. If you have a blanket rule that companies can kick people out for any[1] reason, then you have your "only one pharmacy in town" problem. If you have a blanket rule that companies must serve everyone regardless of their speech/behavior, then you can't kick a disruptive customer out of your business. If you say life-or-death companies must serve everyone, then you get into the endless debate about what counts as a life-or-death company. We have to eat. Do grocery stores count? Restaurants? We spent 2020 agonizing over what counts as an Essential Business. If you say companies over a certain size (or monopolies) must serve everyone, then you have to set an arbitrary size and debate over whether company X is a monopoly. I don't know what the answer is.
1: Any reason besides discriminating against "protected classes" https://subscriptlaw.com/protected-classes/
Speech discrimination is just another form of discrimination, and whether you can compel an individual acting as a sole proprietor or a family business to do something is a different question than whether you can compel a multi-national megacorp to do something. I don't know that "20 employees" is the line to draw, but it should be obvious on its face that a small business and an MNC are not the same, and they operate in society under different reasonable standards.
If 4 companies owned 100% of the property and in a region (as Visa/Mastercard/Discover/Amex do in the credit card industry) and worked together to limit the rights of people they disagree with to protest, you'd have a better point. That's clearly not the case. When you kick someone out of a store, they have the ability to protest anywhere else, and those are very real alternatives. I can grant you that that still limits the protester's speech to a small degree, but the ability to easily protest in many other ways mitigates the harm of that limitation. By contrast, people that are locked out of payments platforms have no alternative.
Similarly, if Walgreen's and CVS had a total oligopoly on pharmacies and colluded to exclude people based on political views, that would be a strong argument to regulate them.
Similarly, I'm not "harmed" as a Stripe user when an OnlyFans model or someone whose politics Stripe's executives disagree with receiving payments through the same platform. If there is a higher objective economic cost, pass that on through fees and stop trying to force the moral views of a few tech executives on everyone in the country.
That's fair.
They are the same, they merely vary in degree. If my neighbor walks up to me and asks for a loan of $1000 and I say no because my neighbor regularly calls my wife a whore, there are certainly material repercussions to not having access to that $1000 (maybe he really needs it) but it is clearly a social repercussion of his actions. I don't think I should be legally required to give him $1000. Likewise if someone walks into a restaurant and starts shouting "this food is the worst I've ever ate" it should be perfectly legal for the restaurant to refuse to serve food to this person, even though being denied food is perhaps one of the most severe material repercussions one could experience depending on what other options were available. Other people do not know nor are obliged to know your circumstances and what you need. It is your personal responsibility to make sure your needs are met, which includes making sure at least some portion of society tolerates you. If you piss off one bank, bank with someone else; if you piss off every bank, you screwed up.
Everything is a matter of degree, that's not a counter-argument. The issue here is that "social consequences" are a matter of individual relationships, material life consequences are generally a matter of policy. If you find yourself afoul of a banking policy that banks as a group have chosen to take to discriminate against you for lawful speech, you find yourself having material life-altering consequences for your speech.
You are imaging a scenario in which someone is unbanked because one bank rejected them, when in fact the lived reality of the unbanked in the US is that they are unbanked because /all banks/ reject them, or at least all banks they have access to in their community. And it's not as if they've taken specific and directed actions against those banks, in many cases it can be as simple as having priors, which makes it both harder to get and maintain employment, as well as harder to impossible to get banking services. Nearly 10% of the American adult population has prior felony convictions, but once you serve your time it is morally reprehensible to mark you with a scarlet letter that prevents you from getting basic services required to exist in society, like banking.
So sure, someone screws up? Do we damn them forever for screwing up? Is MERE SPEECH enough to damn someone forever? Because that's what we're talking about here. That's the "muh consequences" argument you're making by implication, even if not explicitly.
The way you imagine "consequences" working, is not how it actually works. Your delusion is not reality, and reality is a harsh mistress. We are accountable for the arguments we make and the policy positions we espouse to their actual reality, not to our imagined outcomes.
Be brave enough to just say that you don't believe in freedom of speech, and that you're okay if 10-20% of the population ekes out an abject miserable existence or dies due to their belief system or utterances, because that's the reality of "muh consequences".
Freedom of speech means you're not going to go to jail for what you believe in, you're not going to be fined, no one can legally beat you or invade your home or do anything else to you that they are not allowed to do to everybody.
But the idea that a bank has an obligation to you just because you really need a bank is absurd. If I believe you to be damned forever because you looked at me funny, the government has no right to force me to believe otherwise, because that's what freedom of belief really means. I'm sorry that you live in a real world where being ostracized from society is extremely undesirable, but maybe consider doing things that don't get you ostracized from society. Alternatively, go live alone in the woods. Those are the options we all have.
If you think people should be compelled to endorse the speech of others, then just admit you don't believe in freedom of speech.
Offering a public service does not constitute endorsement of the speech of others. Effectively banning people from a public service as a matter of policy is not about individual relationships and is materially different than the situations you describe.
The only reason the line of reasoning you're putting forth is under discussions is that right-wing christo-fascists almost got Pornhub and OnlyFans knocked off the Internet by putting pressure on Visa and their banking partners.
If you are unable to understand the difference between an individual choosing not to associate with you due to disagreeing with your speech vs being banned from a public service necessary for existence in our society due to some people disagreeing with your speech and manipulating policy, I don't know how to help you.
You continue to conflate two things that are not the same. Yes, public services should be compelled to not discriminate against people because they exercise their legal rights. This is a pretty straightforward argument and you doing a lot of mental contortions to not address my actual argument. Thanks, though, for confirming you're okay for up to 20% of the population to die because they said something you disagreed with.
Once twitter banned trump, suddenly so did all the other tech giants. Once visa banned Wikileaks so did Mastercard. These giant corporations typically act in a block.
And you still can't shout fire in a crowded theater.
You responded like I'm making a Libertarian argument here, but it sounds like you're embracing the dystopian cyberpunk future where Megacorps control the world and can arbitrarily destroy people's lives for things they say, so I'm not really sure you have a grasp on my politics. I don't know what your politics are, but I know that you hate people who say things you disagree with, because you are completely fine with their oppression, up to and including loss of materially necessary services for living their life. Killing people by proxy for uttering something is not supporting freedom of speech, so maybe rather than being snarky and making disingenuous statements you can just come out and admit you directly oppose freedom of speech so we can have a real conversation?
> Financial providers shouldn't be issuing moral judgements. It seems to be more common too.
I am perfectly fine with banks being exempted from first amendment rules if the bank has no relation with governments and when the government do not depend on banks to operate the financial system within the nation. Otherwise the bank is just an extension of the government, indistinguishable from a government department.
It may be necessary to revisit the fascist question - we certainly seem to be revisiting the socialist one so horseshoe theory pretty much guarantees we will - but I will not entertain any fascist positions unless the person arguing for it acknowledging that that's what they're doing.
Legality isn't black and white. Banks are held responsible when they process illegal transactions. That means they have to decide what is and isn't legal. I agree they've been given too much authority in this respect. But the balancing factor would be not penalizing them for e.g. money laundering.
>aren’t projected to perform as well
To be clear in my case this was not a managed portfolio. They literally dumped individual shares I had specifically selected and purchased
What kind of account did this?
What you’re describing is a lot of work, when there are higher margins elsewhere. Why would a payment processor build a special system just for porn? If it’s profitable someone will eventually create a product.
My assumption is that they looked into this and decided it wasn’t worth it.
I remember years ago the issue of chargebacks is due to shame and people in relationships denying that they ever did it to appease partners. So it’s pretty hard to be in a business that has to fix shame and relationship problems to succeed. If they could do that, they need to release it as a psychology tool.
But you don't. You just have to extend the current system for calls about hitting a limit, fraud, etc.
"So it’s pretty hard to be in a business that has to fix shame and relationship problems to succeed."
You don't have to fix shame. You just need to pre-approve the transaction so they can't later charge back without a compelling argument for why the person on the phone wasn't really you.
In the current system banks as private businesses can refuse service to whoever they want. We don't own even our dollars in the bank, we're a creditors. If the bank fails anything that's uninsured may be lost, because the vast majority is not held in legal tender, it's book money which no other party will accept as payment.
Your story seems extreme, that would not be legal in my country because stocks are your own property, the bank can't touch them. Either way, none of this should be allowed in the first place. The financial system is completely messed up and the only reason people think it's normal is because they don't know any other way. Money itself should be neutral, it should not be controlled by any single group and people should have free access to basic transactions.
If only there were something like a public bank ledger that belongs to everyone...
Feels like proper legislation might also be a solution to the human problem, rather than just throwing technology at things. Maybe both?
Of course, neither may actually be feasible in some places.
Possible compromise:
We try the decentralized public ledger. Then, should that fail, we can still attempt to legislate morality for the... well, darn- I've lost count of the failed attempts but maybe it will work next time.
1) Stick to overcollateralized stablecoins (MAI, DAI, FRAX, sUSD, sEUR, etc.) & Layer 2s (Arbitrum, Optimism, zkSync). If you're okay with the centralization risks, then USDC & fiat-backed stablecoins can enter into the picture.
2) Account abstraction's an important step in providing the necessary security & recovery features to make it easier to use & secure. One of the parts required was ERC-4337, which has been in the works for some time and was recently publicly announced.
https://github.com/ethereum/EIPs/blob/master/EIPS/eip-4337.m...
Before the contrarians come in for the quick gotcha and say that it bring in centralization: That's been made painfully aware multiple times over. However, Vitalik's 2021 post on social recovery wallets puts it best:
https://vitalik.ca/general/2021/01/11/recovery.html
> One common response to suggestions to use any form of multisig, social recovery or otherwise, is the idea that this solution goes back to "trusting people", and so is a betrayal of the values of the blockchain and cryptocurrency industry. While I understand why one may think this at first glance, I would argue that this criticism stems from a fundamental misunderstanding of what crypto should be about.
> To me, the goal of crypto was never to remove the need for all trust. *Rather, the goal of crypto is to give people access to cryptographic and economic building blocks that give people more choice in whom to trust, and furthermore allow people to build more constrained forms of trust*: giving someone the power to do some things on your behalf without giving them the power to do everything. Viewed in this way, *multisig and social recovery are a perfect expression of this principle*: each participant has some influence over the ability to accept or reject transactions, but no one can move funds unilaterally. This more complex logic allows for a setup far more secure than what would be possible if there had to be one person or key that unilaterally controlled the funds.
[1]https://www.heart.org/en/news/2018/10/26/can-daylight-saving...
GP could probably purchase the shares and be issued stock certificates that they could physically own, in which case there would be no chance of a brokerage being able to sell them.
(I'm not disagreeing that the brokerage's action was sucky, mind you)
You legally can hold shares of any company, but you'd have to spend insane amounts of money. Even when companies are acquired the shares aren't actually transferred to the acquirer. One of the custodial companies just merges the shares into the acquirer.
As an example, I used to own a couple of shares of both Apple and IBM. My shares were held directly in my name by computershare, which is the transfer agent for both companies.
When I sold them, someone _probably_ bought them through a brokerage, which means that computer share updated the registration to name Cede & co as the registered owner of the stock, and cede updated an entry indicating that the buyers brokerage owned the shares, and the buyers brokerage updated an entry that said that the buyer owned the shares.
This is irrelevant - a US brokerage cannot arbitrarily trade your shares, whether or not your shares are held in street name.
> GP could probably purchase the shares and be issued stock certificates that they could physically own, in which case there would be no chance of a brokerage being able to sell them.
This is equivalent to suggesting someone put their cash in a mattress rather than using a bank. The real solution is to find a better bank.
Indeed. It seems most people think the Hypothecation agreement on a Margin account is something brokerages can do without having such an agreement on file. They can't.
But you're right, if you care to not trust that, you do have the ability to either get certificates (if they're issued for the stock in question) or do a direct registration (DRS) so they're held directly in digital form at the Transfer Agent. Just of course bear in mind that if you're NOT intent on holding these shares forever, selling at this point can become a multi-day process, so you become a bit less able to react quickly to market activity.
The illegal sex industry is a big one, and if you have a scalable and available online platform that illegal transactions can be hidden from the authorities that is a problem.
It is a problem if your payment processor is taking payments for nonconsensual sex, rape and payments to have sex with children. Not just a moral panic issue.
Downvotes are to be expected on that topic as soon as one says something mildly against the prostitution "business"...
"Sex consumers" don't want to take responsibility for the damages they cause or the crimes they participate in, for them it's a "simple commercial transaction" between "consenting adults", forgetting all the coercive tactics pimps have been using for ages, the grooming, the drug addiction...
Of course it's a legal risk for any payment processor involved in that kind of "business".
Don't worry about the downvotes, your arguments are completely reasonable and nobody can silence you no matter how hard they try.
There are sex slaves in America, and anyone that covers for that is worse than a coward.
That ship has long sailed, my friend. We spent the past 7-10 years intentionally drawing corporate America into politics. I mean, Donald Trump was banned from Twitter. Apparently people want it this way, so here we are. This time it's a left-leaning cause that gets screwed.
https://www.washingtonpost.com/business/2022/08/01/visa-mind...
You're totally right, in this case it's child porn. The lawsuit proves Visa's paranoia isn't entirely unjustified, either. That's the thing that pierces the corporate veil and puts executives in jail. Hence the cut off. I'm not sure how we improve the situation though
> The other day I got a notification that was "FYI we sold your shares in company X (NASDAQ listed)". They've decided they're no longer keen on weed companies and have taken it upon themselves to fix my portfolio to remove such evilness.
You are aware that cannabis is still federally illegal, right?
Amazon's firearm accessory rules seem to contain plausible examples of such. Permitted accessories include:
Vise blocks designed to hold firearms, except for those intended for "assault weapons."
Magazine loaders, except for those which can accommodate the following common rifle calibers: .223/5.56; 7.62x51; 308; 7.62x39; 5.45x39
Armorer's wrenches, except those specifically for assault weapons, particularly AR pattern rifles.
Hand gun grips, but not "assault weapon grips".
Implicitly permitted are jig kits except those for ARs specifically (no mention of other assault rifles/weapons. It bans "AR-specific jig kits")
Source with many more examples, many of them sensible restrictions likely motivated by state laws, but many of them perplexingly specific: https://sellercentral.amazon.com/help/hub/reference/external... Is there any state in this union in which restricts sale or possession of vise blocks designed to hold ARs? Not as far as I'm aware.
They also restrict "Offensive and Controversial Materials", saying:
> We maintain these policies to ensure a welcoming environment for our global customers and sellers to do business while offering the widest selection of items on earth. We promote trust and respect, as well as adherence to the law.
> We exercise judgment in allowing or prohibiting listings and we keep our global community of customers and cultural differences and sensitivities in mind when reviewing and making a decision on products.
One of the examples of products they ban is "Products that promote intolerance based on race, religion, and sexual orientation.", which interpreted in an impartial manner would obviously ban the Bible and many other religious texts, but in fact Amazon doesn't actually ban those. They're exercising a lot of judgement in the application of these rules and many apparent contradictions can be found. For instance they claim they won't sell products which promote or glorify terrorism, yet they sell the Unibomber's Manifesto and t-shirts of Che.
https://sellercentral.amazon.com/help/hub/reference/external...
People widely applauded Visa et. al move, as this Gab guy is a horrible person that ends each message with dreaded "Jesus is King" quotation. So "the people" was happy.
Now people learn the hard lesson, one day your opinion, business, etc. might irritate the powers that be and you'll be crashed, as those who you helped to crash before.
Let's this be the lesson for everyone.
There's much more to the "Gab guy" than how he ends each message.
Sure Anakin, sound argument that one.
Not quite.
Where free speech is concerned, if we don't fight for each other, we are our own enemy.
If one of the golden age characters can be patriotic about limits of free speech, I think you can figure out that middle ground too.
I'd rather have that shit out in the open instead of festering somewhere hidden.
How controversial is it to say "genocidal calls for violence should be frustrated by any means necessary, including force"? If Captain America decides to suddenly do a 180 and police the one-drop rule you have my permission to deck him in.
Tolerance is something that should be extended to everything but intolerance. We fought an entire global war about this, but took the wrong lessons when all the major players in the Third Reich got promotions to the UN, NASA, etc.
Gab is a cesspool of hate speech up to and including people using it to advocate things like treating Jewish people like livestock, holocaust denialism, and being used to coordinate conspiracy theories and harassment of innocent people and individuals
“What if your opinions become deemed unacceptable?” “What do you mean? My opinions are acceptable.” “But what if one day they aren’t?” “They are though. Why do you keep saying they aren’t?”
Then they came for the trade unionists, and I did not speak out— Because I was not a trade unionist.
Then they came for the Jews, and I did not speak out— Because I was not a Jew.
Then they came for me—and there was no one left to speak for me."
- Martin Niemöller
Nothing to do with "morals", everything to do with the risks associated with prostitution. Same thing with Cannabis businesses, which payment processors tend to not do business with.
These companies have very little morals, but their executives don't want to be thrown in jail for being digital pimps.
Yet we have figured out how to let 16-year old kids drive 5,000-pound blocks of metal in public.
The distinguishing element of the two cases is morality. (Substitute porn for prostitution to sidestep the question of legality; the result is the same.)
I don't want the government to legislate morality. Everyone in a free society should have the choice to be moral or immoral; otherwise there is no morality. But if the U.S. government wants to effectively eliminate cash through post-9/11 KYC/AML laws, structuring laws, increasingly strict service-industry cash-transaction reporting requirements, and so on, then either the government needs to establish a genuinely amoral and private electronic-payment system that allows disgusting, vile, reprehensible, but legal transactions. Or the government must actively affirm the obligation of private payment processors like Visa and Mastercard to support transactions that conflict with their moral preferences.
Our freedoms of speech and association are being swept aside as the government shunts nearly all financial activity through private enterprises. What good is the Bill of Rights if you can't do anything without a debit card?
It isn't a circular argument, running a business is all about risks management, choosing not to do business with people that could be link to sex trafficking mafia is very much effective risk management, that platform can go take their business elsewhere.
This isn't even a partisan issue, prostitution is frowned upon by most payement processors for very objective reasons. It's a non story.
Of course society should indeed profess the meagerest moral rights and humanity for all and protect that.
So I donated BTC, and this is when I realized why we need crypto despite all the scams.
Self-sovereignty and self-custody prevent third-parties from making decisions for you like this, and the removal of intermediaries (like payment processors) also prevent anyone from restricting you ability to transact with your desired counterparties.
The kind of freedom this enables also has disadvantages of course, but I strongly believe the few real "bad" transactions that gets blocked by the current system are a drop in the ocean compared to the billions of people deprived of access to the system and the millions of others who are included but seriously limited in what they are "allowed" to do on it.
It is just a convenient way to convert the crypto to fiat that these processor handle for their customers. There are ways to handle this step without a third party (P2P exchanges are one).
Less convenient for sure, but ultimately if you care about your economical freedom you will adopt them... or you will live in a walled garden, at least as long as your activity fits the current agenda/policies of these intermediaries (and your government). As soon as you don't, you get kicked out/cut from the system, even if your activity is not illegal.
A closer comparison would be to a bank that doesn't let a you deposit the cash your business earned at the end of the week. It would be an annoyance, but it doesn't actually prevent you from conducting your business.
Except that, as we have seen, Bitcoin rarely is used for "we need financial freedom" activities and mostly for "buy into my Ponzi scheme" activities.
Someone could have constructed the crypto equivalent of PayPal. Someone still could and maybe right now is even better since the Ponzibros are getting hammered.
Unfortunately, nobody seems to be doing it. That speaks volumes.
[1] FOSTA/SESTA https://en.wikipedia.org/w/index.php?title=FOSTA-SESTA&usesk...
I'm pro-BLM but learning Silicon Valley Bank gave BLM millions of dollars before it collapsed rubs me the wrong way.
I need my banks and financial institutions to do their primary job first and foremost. I'm getting to the point where DIE marketing is become a signal of poor upper management trying to hide failures.
Basically the Claremont Institute tallied up announcements of corporate charity that went to anything related to racial minorities, and called that "giving to BLM and supporting riots."
This isn't a moral judgement so much as it is an attempt to avoid association with high fraud risk transactions, which lead to more chargebacks, potential implication of the bank in criminal activity (e.g., money laundering), and greater government scrutiny under initiatives like Obama's Operation Choke Point.
A large segment of the population unfortunately have extremely distorted moral compasses, and a disproportionate number of them likely work in conservative industries such as finance.
Americans on average consider pornographic actors to be more immoral than lobbyists, spies, and lawyers, and second only to politicians. I'm not surprised at this chart but it really depresses my spirits.
Some industries get to get away with making a lot of their own decisions there and just shooting themselves in the foot if they feel like it, but with the thick regulations in the capital markets, this sounds like an overreach. They can kick YOU off the platform, but even when doing that, they typically need to leave your securities alone in an account that you still get to choose when to sell.
The other day I got a notification that was "FYI we sold your shares in company X (NASDAQ listed)". They've decided they're no longer keen on weed companies and have taken it upon themselves to fix my portfolio to remove such evilness. Left me slightly speechless...I'm paying you to hold shares not be moral police ffs.