there may not be punishment enough for versace bedouin

didn’t you know? kids exist in perfect social isolation taking social cues only from their parents and no other information or humans they have contact with! and it’s not like parents have issues either, right? I mean who’d have issues and then go pop out some kids?! madness

(utter and complete /s ofc. the aforeposter in question is the intended recipient)

that was indeed another input to the heuristics

(post-hoc, to be honest. but it’s still fucking hilarious)

that was indeed another input to the heuristics

nominative determinism strikes once again!

a ghoul’s impressionist rendition of an actual person

I got a handful of paragraphs into reading that and then realized I definitely don’t want to read that tonight

def fuck that guy tho

for many years, I went blessedly unaware of who this random fuckjack was, knowing only: 1) ambiently knowing the name, 2) that I ambiently know the name (these two things together are usually a decent heuristic for me to not bother digging)

and then I got jumpscared by a full-scale mrbeast standee in a shop some months back

may I soon be able to forget about this fuckjack once again

yeah you make a valid point there on the social angle, that kind of vibes club shit has definitely clung to a lot of the recent shit

gonna have to do some digging sometime to see how this was swung with some of these propositions in the past. and, probably, find some translators, given how many of these will have been in places whose languages I don’t speak

that’s almost certainly a thing on the supporter/stan side, and probably not not a thing with the people that suggest these citybuilding, but I don’t know if it’s necessarily the prime motivation (or one of the primaries, as it were)

armchair analysis: the broad stroke of it is that suggesting a whole new thing instead of figuring out how to fix a thing sells simpler. on the face of it, “start fresh” means none of that messy “figure out how to address problems and work around them”, none of the politics, etc. of course this rarely holds up to scrutiny or realworld interaction at all, but the pitch is nice and clean. it’s a really big part of why we’ve seen a lot of these things (and a major driver behind the then-popularity of the many coins (alongside the lies of a golden payday)). but as to why it is so frequently cities, instead of anything even a bit smaller (new railways! new ports! new airlines! new $x…), that’s the thing that’s a standout wtf for me in this

it continues to be weird how many of these things want to Just Build A New City as magic solutionism. the same strain of “that’ll fix it” it shows up with Neom and some others too. dunno if I have a conclusion with that really, just that picking cities of all things seems like the fucking weirdest all-in-one pick to go with

anyone happen to know if there’s someone that’s studied this and written a bit about it?

okay wait there’s one possible failure mode in this reference which we might have to consider

“tapping the api”

checks out

“you just don’t understand me!” wails the sealion at the door

“have you got tap?” / “can i tap?” is a common local verbiage here

(also “got snapscan?” but that’s more popular in some cities than others, depending how much inroads snapscan has made)

(we also still have a fairly healthy cash market)

probably because the vagueposting in the top half of your comment wasn’t actually clearly stating what it meant, and the latter half suffers from internet-stalking-horse incorrect conclusionism

just a guess tho.

lol god that’s even worse :/

so have nfc and value-capped transactions even made inroads there yet?

they ever so very slowly started doing chip (not necessarily with PIN) from 4~6y ago, state depending

probably need to give them another decade.

You’d be surprised

I wouldn’t be :) have visited many of them, and worked in a fair couple too

what was shocking (on my first visit there) is how absolutely fucking antiquated US infra is across multiple dimensions. not shocking these days, I now understand so many of the reasons for it

that understanding also makes so much of what comes out of the US (and its weird obsessions with specific non-solutions) make a lot more sense

you know, here in ZA (and across Africa) services got past the “your phone number is your security layer” thing in the early 10s because we had fraud and related issues way back

but no, the US is insistent that they have to retread that path and learn those lessons over. can’t go and learn from an african country, that wouldn’t be fitting of an imperial hellhole A First World Country

why no, I’m not salty about services making me have worse security settings at all, why do you ask…

I’m just looking at that username and, I’m like, bad brain puns about “NT Zero” and beating microsoft to things