Eh, almost.

Liberal (left-leaning) find depictions of murder, and tools to cause murder to be offensive. Yet these same people tend to have no problem with cigarettes and cannabis. Liberals tend to only object to porn that violates age-of-consent and consent in general. So "rape" games (Where your character is either the perpetrator or the victim are both forbidden) along with any game where you would maybe prevent/protect victims from it, or having a character resolving having being victimized. They generally do not care how gay the material is.

Conservatives (right-leaning) find depictions of sex-before-marriage (not the lack of consent) to be offensive. Conservatives are fully on board with protecting pedophiles (see epstein, see low age-of-consent states, see pushes for child marriage) in one context, and completely on board with banning all adult content (anything that could be objectively labeled porn/erotica) including video games, comics, photos, films, and books, if there is even a suggestion it might be gay.

There's no real happy middle to meet on here, at least in the United States. At best, the correct answer is visual censorship "when" bottom nudity or sex, or extreme violence/gore is involved in a game, and to have free DLC available from the publisher's website that removes the censorship, if the user wants that removed. When the game has the censorship removed, and it's compartmentalized, the game will still interject before any "hardcore" thing happens with a "do you wish to watch the next scene?", where as a non-compartmentalized game (Eg a 3D shooter) will just warn the player that censorship is turned off once when the game starts up. For all other content (Eg comics, movies) you basically just have to release two versions, one version for Apple/Walmart, and one "directors cut - uncensored" that is only available later on sites that are not under VISA's thumb.

There is no distinction.

The tame sex scenes and nudity in BG3 and the hardcore violence in BG3 both would make it "adult content" to the Australian censorship. Yet why? Who cares. If you were buying it to be a sex and violence simulator, so? Prepare to be disappointed in at least one of those.

In an above comment I used the most obvious examples of games that the point of the game is pretty obviously to get your main character into bad situations so you see the "unfortunate consequences". Those games are pretty bad as far as being "games" but they require as much of your brain filling in the blanks of what is actually happening when looking at still images or censored images (Japanese porn is minimally censored, at best) and even when it's animated, a lot of these indie adult games don't really know anatomy that well. One of the reasons why "loli" and "adult asian woman" are often the same thing is because artists don't draw anatomy correctly when they want it to be horny. So it's easier to just draw everyone with breasts the size of beachballs to get that monkey off their back.

Vampires = Hypnotism = "Oh I was hypnotized into paying for this, chargeback!"

Literately a site I run tech for, basically had a VISA review at some point, and the nitpicked some really weird things that might have made sense if it was a live porn stream but it's an adult artwork site.

Like let me give you some questionable ones:
- Breastfeeding is not allowed
- Vampires and most monsterf*cking is not allowed if they don't have human anatomy. Want artwork of someone being f*cked by the Xenomorph, sorry not allowed unless it has a human cock. Werewolf? Must have a human pair of breasts or human cock (or both). We always had rules against the furry anatomy because of VISA, an that still wasn't good enough that they also decided that sex with a human shaped robot was not allowed.
- A comic that had a one page flashback to a child (in a non sexual siutation) made the entire comic series get removed
- A comic that had a character's body de-age as a joke (without a sexual situation) got the comic removed

Honestly this explains why there is so much Futa porn out there, because there is literately no way VISA can say no to it because it passes all the "human anatomy" rules, and real futa's do not exist in that context. It basically replaced the "tentacle rape" genre which is essentially not allowed under the existing ones. The rules against bestiality have always been there, but if it's a plant? Real plants don't/can't do this, and has to be human initiated.

Crypto was never going to solve this, because they aimed to replace the central bank, and take a large chunk of every transaction.

Really what we need is the equivalent of the "canadian tire money" or disney dollars (corporate scrip) for entertainment works. Basically just a non-crypto currency that is denominated in USD that you have to actually buy somewhere. Any entertainment company who wants to sign on, agrees to accept it without conditions. The company then exchanges it back to USD at par plus a 0.5% redemption on the total or $3 per transaction, whichever is lower (making it cheaper than credit card and ACH in general.)

Like one way of solving this in the mean time is just by having transit systems ticket systems open their systems to being used for non-transit uses like they do in Japan. Imagine just being able to tap your transit pass to pay for things, and the VISA/MC/AMEX can just pound sand because it would not be privy to what the amount is used for.

They did at one point. The cost of using bitcoin outstrips the benefit of it.

Realistically, Steam should probably just roll it's own gift-card system ... oh wait THEY DO. Problem solved.

In all seriousness, what steam should be doing is what sites like Skeb and webtoons are doing, where they have a simultaneous "points" scheme (Which guess what, also violates these VISA/MC policies) where you buy one kind of points with VISA/MC/AMEX/JCB/etc and you buy another kind of points with gift cards. The gift card balance can be used on anything, but the VISA/MC balance/instant-pay can only be used on games VISA isn't going to raise a stink about.

There are no games "With child abuse and incest". They are video games with no real people in them. That is literately the "murder simulator" argument from the 90's. There is almost no video game made since the 90's that even uses real people footage.

I wish people would get it through their head that there are no victims in video games, just like there are no victims in comic books and anime.

Yes, you can make the argument that a video game about children beating up monsters that turn around and sexually assault them when they fail, as being "questionable", but you don't need to play it. That is no different from shooting monsters in a video game that explode into giblets. Neither of these things are actually happening.

I personally find those kinds of games disgusting, but I don't actually care that they exist, just like I don't take people's cigarettes and pot and step on it when I see them smoking. Not MY problem.

VISA has been the puppet master behind all commerce censorship in the last 20 years.

Can't find a NSFW game? Blame VISA
Can't find a hyper violent game? blame VISA
Can't find a find information about abortion? blame VISA
Can't find artists willing to sell you furry smut? blame VISA
Can't find webcam models able to cosplay as vampires? Blame VISA

Literately VISA pulls the "brand safe" card the same as the advertisers do, and companies like paypal and stripe have to bend the knee. Paypal itself has additional rules that basically make purchasing of any artwork practically impossible.

Cause they're clearly incompetent.

I've run like 20 servers remotely for between 10 and 20 years, and have never even set foot in the state's they are in. The remote hands have never had to reboot them most of the time, and only after power issues at the data center (eg they literately went and powered off everyone's servers to do a maintenance)
They didn't need to do this, and they definitely aren't saving any money in doing so. If anything the site's probably one moronic AI away from being destroyed on accident.

>Because Cloudflare cannot remove content it does not host, other service providers are better positioned to address these issues. Among other things, any blocking by Cloudflare is of limited effectiveness, as a website will be accessible if it stops using Cloudflare’s network. Cloudflare therefore regularly pushes back against attempts to seek blocking orders.

Lie. You send a DMCA to a pirate on cloudflare, cloudflare sends them your personal information, and then your email address ends up on the receiving end up GB's of junk emails for years. F**k those guys.

Make cloudflare liable for any domain they "protect" that is known to peddle in CSAM, Piracy, Troll/Doxx sites, etc.

No dude. The problem is that the payment networks are acting as a censor at all. A payment provider should not be preventing payments of anything legal.

The problem with NSFW content is that people get embarrassed and chargeback. Oh no, the wife saw the bill and saw "BIGBOOBTHOTS" on it or something.

Reality check. Steam, DLSite, melonbooks, Patreon, Fansly, onlyfans, Twitch, Youtube are all the victims of VISA and Mastercard stretching the definition of bestiality to mean all furries, and the defition of child sex assault to mean all images of asian women.

The irony is this is a country that likes robots.

But I think people aren't recognizing that the reason AI doesn't do well in most countries is that the native language speaking population is what the LLM trains on, and Japanese, Korean and Chinese are "compact" are single-country languages, so the only people who can develop a LLM in Japan, are Japanese companies. Japan also has copyright laws that do not allow fair use, so creating a LLM is pretty much impossible in Japan.

China on the other hand does not give 2 cares about infringing copyright and has likely been stealing works en masse for decades that LLM's can train on. There is an interesting technique that you can pass "broken chinese" basically the unicode for the individual strokes ( U+31C0 to U+31EF ) to some LLM's and they will vomit all kinds of strange data.

See Greece and Italy after the US financial crisis

Generally not.

People are happier when they can AFFORD the place they live. If you live in NYC or LA, you're probably happier than Dallas or Miami. If you can't afford to live in the city, then you are probably going to be miserable living somewhere cheaper where there is literately nothing to do, no jobs, no healthcare. Basically everything is in the city, and less and less are in smaller cities.

If you want to be happy, and not have to be bound to a vehicle, move to Europe or Asia, because North America is a constant drain on your finances if you want to be happy.

Because they can not afford children.

You need a house or a large apartment, those are exceedingly not being built, or being built so poor quality that they become death traps after a few years. There's a pile of youtube shorts of a building inspector going through homes in arizona where he finds 100's of defects, some of them being absolutely ridiculous structural failures that all but ensures the home falls apart or needs extensive repairs in a decade.

Now assuming the housing was not the first obstacle, you have the lack of childcare, lack of hospitals and lack of services in smaller communities, so people with families often move out to the countryside until their kids are adults, and then try to move back to the city to retire, only to be priced out.

So if you don't want to be priced out, never have kids.

I think the plan was the right idea but the wrong values.

The older a vehicle gets, the higher the insurance.
The bigger the engine is, the higher the insurance.
The more accidents a vehicle model has, the higher service requirement to be insured.

You want to disincentivize running old vehicles that are safety hazards. If an old vehicle is reliable, then it's insurance goes up slowly. If a specific model of vehicle has a high safety failure rate (especially brakes and steering) then you put it on a list of vehicles that insurance is unobtainable and the vehicle must be surrendered, or can not leave a private property. Most old vehicles will just age slowly and the vehicles that will have to be surrendered will mostly be stuff that would have been on the lemon list anyway.

Like remember all those issues with the Cybertruck? That would have made it completely uninsurable because out the door it was already unsafe. Indian's who import one would not be allowed to drive it off their property with this idea.
>What is the most unsafe car in India in 2024?
> According to Global NCAP ratings, Maruti Suzuki Eeco, Maruti Suzuki S-Presso, Hyundai Grand i10 Nios, Maruti Suzuki Alto K10, Renault Kwid, Maruti Suzuki Wagon R, and Maruti Suzuki Swift are the least safe cars in India.

So therefor those vehicles would likely become uninsurable after 8 or so years, depending how many are left. Meanwhile the safest:
>The safest vehicles in India for 2024, according to Global NCAP crash tests, include the Tata Harrier, Tata Safari, Skoda Slavia, and Volkswagen Virtus, all achieving 5-star ratings. Other notable safe vehicles are the Tata Nexon, Skoda Kushaq, and Volkswagen Taigun, also with 5-star ratings.

Like let's just be honest, a lot of people drive vehicles until they don't start, or they get wrecked. Why do they get wrecked? Poor maintenance, bad driver skill. Why don't they start? Poor maintenance, Poor storage. If someone maintains their car, they should be able to keep using it. But if they aren't maintaining it, insurance goes up.

It is in the insurance company's best interest to not insure poorly maintained vehicles.