It’s probably not even sales.
It’s an off-patent, mass-produced medicine (read: cheap) with multiple uses, not just abortions.
There are a bunch of medicines that are both patented (i.e. expensive) and with way lower demand. In other words: less profitable.
So my reading of this: low demand is an outright lie. They’re not carrying on the off-chance the fact they carry it becomes a burden.
What did the ALIEN expect? To be GIVEN water?
WE HAVE NO THINGS TO GIVE TO ALIENS.
ALIENS MUST PAY FOR THEIR OWN WATER. NOTHING IS FREE.
ALIENS COST US BILLIONS OF DOLLARS EACH SECOND. DO YOU KNOW HOW MUCH A PATRIOTIC ICE AGENT COSTS?
They are FAKE CITIZENS WITH FAKE IDS AND THIS IS ALL FAKE NEWS!
(/s if not obvious enough)
Subcaption Direct to Disk
Don’t have money? Try using guns nukes instead
The European Central Bonk
Wouldn’t that be a net decrease then?
Assuming the 2% before was on stuff like guns, soldier salaries, weapons, tanks, etc. and fuel/maintenance, does this now not include stuff they were already spending on roads, bridges and raiways?
I associate them with religious pundites and discrimination of payments. A payment is a payment, for christ’s sake! If it’s illegal, report it to the relevant authorities.
It is. Free for Trump to do as he pleases.
Of course this is not a recession. Business in America has been Made Great Again. And the One Single Most Best Businessman in the World has Made it Happen!
Especially a UK one.
With SKG going as well as it is, wouldn’t an ECI on chat control be in order?
Sure. Let them whatabout. But to us, consumers, it shouldn’t matter.
We know the stores aren’t responsible, so we shouldn’t attack them.
The processors are. For Visa and MasterCard it’s pretty obvious. Itch, as you said, puts direct blame on Stripe, and I think we can trust that.
As much as processors need banks, banks also need processors. It’s a sort of symbiosis. Damage to one actually trickles onto the other. So pressing onto processors isn’t a mistake. It’d be foolish at best and malicious at worst to suggest that.
Now that we have leverage as users and consumers, having started a push which made way and caused a response (first the prepared phone statement and now a press release), the absolute wrong thing to do is bacl down and say “sorry, we were wrong, it was B after all and not you, A”.
And look at it this way: There’s less payment processors and they’re smaller than banks. If you suddenly turn to banks, you won’t accomplish anything because to them, a few consumers who aren’t their customers doesn’t cause them even an itch. But if payment processors come to them it might.
It never was about the laws. If it were, Mastercard wouldn’t have been doing it for quite some time now.
It’s truly idiotic. They backed down to 200 phone calls from CS. They probably cited that rule, saying doing what they do (processing payments) will damage their brand.
Lo and behold, once they stopped processing transactions their brand got damaged. And due to the ego damage already associated, they won’t back down and backtrack not that they actually have a problem on their hands. What with their brand being seen as discriminatory, weak to undue influence and excersizing undue power against their own clients. Very “good brand” of you, Mastercard.
If Mastercard wants to display Christo-fascist family friendlyness they can slap a cross onto their logo and change the font to Comic sans.
Isn’t there an agreement between the UN and US requiring it to let people the UN wishes to be at their New York offices into the US?
I know Trump and friends don’t like rules, but surely they’d like to keep the UN a thing based out of the US.
How would you feel if someone labeled you an Imperialist or Fascist just because you’re American?
Not great. But would they be wrong more than 50% of the time? We did “elect” Mr. President for a 2nd time after all. And barely no one doubted the legitimacy of that election for more than a week. The fact he should’ve been disqualified? Apparently a non-sequitur.
So with around 50% of the voting population being MAGA idiots and the 33% non-voters their silent enablers, I’d take being called a fascist any day. It’s well deserved.
That isn’t just any duplo, it’s specifically LEGO Duplo. That’s like calling Word word instead of Microsoft Word or Chrome chrome instead of Google Chrome. What about Linux instead of ***/Linux?
Your dog should take extra lessons. How’s it passing school not knowing this?
In my opinion, AI just feels like the logical next step for capitalist exploitation and destruction of culture.
I don’t think AI is inherently bad. What’s bad is how we (or well, the corpos) use it. SEO, vibe coding, making slop, you name it.
About training material being stealing: hard agree here. Our copyright laws are broken, but they are right about AI - training is strong in a retrieval system, which is infingement. Shame they aren’t enforced at all.
What fascinates me is the similarity between AI and photography. That is, both are revolutionary tools in the visual medium. Imagine this thread being an opinion column in an 1800s newspaper, and replace all instances of ‘AI’ with ‘photography’. The arguments all stand, but our perspective to them may change.
Even if it is just the wage slaves for now, it won’t be for long.
The employees get a lot more work, that’s for sure.
However, by some stroke of good luck they haven’t been reolaced by AI… For now at least. Which means they do something Visa/Mastercard want/need.
That something just so happens to be replying to real questions. These protest calls take up their time (which is the point).
The damage also encompasses those unfortunate to actually need the call center now, of all times.
And if Visa/Mastercard can’t react to real incidents properly, some might go to a competitor or they might be on the hook for contract breaches.
Overwhelming the call center doesn’t just affect the call center personell. It affects one cog in the machine (the call center), throwing the entire machine off-balance.
Specifically, lower call throughput limits their ability to react to incidents, which is a critical day-to-day operation with potentially disastrous consequences. Middle management of the call center and a few execs are surely panicking as we speak.
I’d like to know whether that means he can drive for the 2nd hald of his prison term.