“Obscene” is broad and is generally saved for cases of pedophilia being spread. Paypal has no right to enforce other people’s copyright–however, it is their duty to enforce it at the request of a company. So, for example, if Disney says “hey this fucker is breaching our copyright”, they have every right to slap you with that fine because Disney’s legal department will probably go after Paypal for allowing it. The final part most likely reaches to cases where someone might be peddling porn, kiddie porn, incest porn, or bestiality where it is not legal to do so.
uhh disney has the right to take you to court and ask for monetary damages if they so please (though they will probably not win much favor with a judge)
that is not the same as paypal proactively claiming that they have the right to just take your money from your account and keep it for themselves
So this might be relevant to people who are ALREADY riding in legally dubious/illegal territory. Guess what? All of that already affects them regardless of which service they use. What matters is how it’s enforced; Paypal won’t be enforcing it unless the copyright holder files a claim to them, since if they did try to enforce every case it’d be an obscene cost to them (anyone remember the RIAA?).
try reading the thing you’re complaining nobody read
the RIAA actually went through the legal system. paypal is saying:
PayPal may deduct such damages directly from any existing Balance in the offending Account or any other Account you control.
i.e., you agree that if you break the rules, they can just take your money. no court, no judgment, no effort on their part. they just take your money.
oh and even better
You acknowledge and agree that $2,500.00 USD per violation … is presently a reasonable minimum estimate of PayPal’s actual damages
$2500 is the minimum. so they are free, according to this agreement, to take more. how much more? who knows! they don’t say. they do say actual damages are “extremely hard to estimate”.
i’m a little suspicious that this would actually stand up in court, but i imagine most of the people that this would affect would have trouble affording a lawyer after they’ve had thousands of dollars taken away
You will find this EXACT ToS on pretty much 99% of all websites. Tumblr has one very similar, for example, but doesn’t enforce it unless the directly affected party reports it or enough people report it. Just the other day I saw a post with people bawling about how their kiddie porn ship was being mass deleted off Tumblr.
OK except we’re not talking about whether they should ban it or not; we’re talking about how they will just take your money if you do it anyway
also tumblr’s ToS allows porn, but asks that you flag your blog nsfw if you regularly post porn. and it doesn’t use the vague catch-all of “obscenity” anywhere. so it’s actually not much like paypal’s terms at all.
It’s not a perfect service, BUT you are not gonna find a single payment service that allows you to distribute porn or copyrighted material. Because if they did, they’d be breaking the law and putting their asses on the line. Instead, they usually just turn a blind eye until someone reports it.
porn is not illegal, and all material is copyrighted. i don’t know what you think the goalposts are any more but they are out into the stratosphere damn
also you know what payment services allow you to buy basically whatever you want without question and somehow aren’t liable if you buy something illegal? banks. so it’s kinda weird that paypal feels the need to aggressively moderate what you use it for. (i don’t actually know why this is; i suspect it’s a combination of fraud, too-stringent terms written by lawyers who don’t much care about indie artists, and byzantine credit card merchant agreements.)
Anonymous asked:Hey eevee about the PayPal post, do you have any recommendations for payment sites for artists/NSFW artists? With paypal's new policy that can be really bad if we rely on commissions for living expenses.
most things are US-only which already kind of sucks
there’s square cash, which does a no-questions-asked money transfer with zero effort and no fees (no fucking around linking bank accounts, no balance stored in their wallet) but both parties have to have a US debit card. otoh the money moves from bank account to bank account in like a day, and you can send money in about ten seconds by just writing an email, no login even required
square also has an invoice thing apparently, which might support international credit cards (unclear, conflicting info, lmk if you try it out), but definitely supports US credit cards
there‘s also stripe, another credit card processor thing, but i think they’re more about integration than about making it easy for individuals to move money around. also i think they have explicit rules against porn, though i’ve never heard of them being enforced against artists.
other things i have heard of:
- dwolla (US only, requires linking a bank account and not just a credit card, has its own balance like paypal, flat fee of 25¢)
- venmo (US only i think, don’t really know much else about it but people always bring it up when i complain about paypal)
Ohhey, something in the Paypal TOS change that’s actually worth mentioning (cutting some stuff out to make it more to the point):
10.3h If you violate the PayPal Acceptable Use Policy, … you will be liable to PayPal for the amount of PayPal’s damages caused by your violation … You acknowledge and agree that $2,500.00 USD per violation … is presently a reasonable minimum estimate of PayPal’s actual damages … PayPal may deduct such damages directly from any existing Balance in the offending Account or any other Account you control.
So if you’re one of those commission artists that gets clients to send payment as a gift to avoid fees, good luck getting dinged $2500 for each transaction.
Can people stop snipping out legalese to try and interpret it using their complete lack of knowledge of legalese?
No, this one’s even easier: You failed to include the PayPal Acceptable Use Policy. This is what it is:
You may not use the PayPal service for activities that:
1. violate any law, statute, ordinance or regulation.
2. relate to transactions involving (a) narcotics, steroids, certain controlled substances or other products that present a risk to consumer safety, (b) drug paraphernalia, © items that encourage, promote, facilitate or instruct others to engage in illegal activity, (d) stolen goods including digital and virtual goods (e) items that promote hate, violence, racial intolerance, or the financial exploitation of a crime, (f) items that are considered obscene, (g) items that infringe or violate any copyright, trademark, right of publicity or privacy or any other proprietary right under the laws of any jurisdiction, (h) certain sexually oriented materials or services, (i) ammunition, firearms, or certain firearm parts or accessories, or (j) ,certain weapons or knives regulated under applicable law.
3. relate to transactions that (a) show the personal information of third parties in violation of applicable law, (b) support pyramid or ponzi schemes, matrix programs, other “get rich quick” schemes or certain multi-level marketing programs, © are associated with purchases of annuities or lottery contracts, lay-away systems, off-shore banking or transactions to finance or refinance debts funded by a credit card, (d) are for the sale of certain items before the seller has control or possession of the item, (e) are by payment processors to collect payments on behalf of merchants, (f), are associated with the sale of traveler’s checks or money orders, (h) involve currency exchanges or check cashing businesses, or (i) involve certain credit repair, debt settlement services, credit transactions or insurance activities.
4. involve the sales of products or services identified by government agencies to have a high likelihood of being fraudulent.
5. violate applicable laws or industry regulations regarding the sale of (a) tobacco products, or (b) prescription drugs and devices.
6. involve gambling, gaming and/or any other activity with an entry fee and a prize, including, but not limited to casino games, sports betting, horse or greyhound racing, lottery tickets, other ventures that facilitate gambling, games of skill (whether or not it is legally defined as a lottery) and sweepstakes unless the operator has obtained prior approval from PayPal and the operator and customers are located exclusively in jurisdictions where such activities are permitted by law.
For a tl;dr of this: They will fine you $2500 if you try to use their service for illegal activities or legally dubious activities.
Can you guys stop picking apart PayPal’s ToS already? This is the second time I’ve seen people COMPLETELY botch the meaning, and that shit gets spread so fast that you get thousands of people saying “OH SHIT I BETTER STOP USING PAYPAL AND SWAP OVER TO SOMETHING ARCHAIC THAT NO ONE USES”.
For a tl;dr of this: They will fine you $2500 if you try to use their service for illegal activities or legally dubious activities.
maybe give that another read crowvo
“items that are considered obscene”
like porn
“items that infringe or violate any copyright, trademark, right of publicity or privacy or any other proprietary right under the laws of any jurisdiction”
like fanart
“certain sexually oriented materials or services”
like porn
so maybe this is relevant to people who draw porn, or fanart, or porn fanart
especially since i’ve seen people get booted off paypal for such things before
and now paypal claims it has the power to fine those same people
juuust sayin’
(fuck paypal tbh)
VAT MOSS: the facts - updated with new info from the UK government - News
With the new EU VAT regulations, designers and artist who sell digital products online are faced with a world of tax confusion and seemingly unnecessary bureaucracy. We cut through the red tape.gonna reblog this again to point out that this affects EVERYONE and not only ppl within EU. Please spread the awareness and if you have any more information or updates about this please add it to the post.
This is the reason I can no longer use Patreon. According to VATMOSS-rules, I would not have to register for or keep track of anything as long as I use a third-party site - like Patreon.
Unfortunately, this arrangement depends on Patreon registering for VATMOSS in my stead. That is, they would have to keep track of all the identification-details for each of their users living in the EU, save those details for the next ten years, AND calculate the individual VAT-rates on each individual payment from an EU-resident. Which amounts to 75 different VAT-rates in 28 different countries.
And since it looks like Patreon doesn’t have any intention of complying with these rules, I am shit out of luck.
And, I reiterate, this applies to everyone, including non-EU creators using Patreon, as long as those creators have EU-residents as backers. As long as Patreon fails to comply, you aren’t following the rules, and are - to quote the article linked above - subject to an unlimited fine.
Spread the word, warn US-creators as well.AGAIN, THIS IS IMPORTANT FOR BOTH PATREONS OUTSIDE AND INSIDE THE EU.
If you have people from EU who pledge money to your patreon, you are resposible for VATMOSS. Doesn’t matter if you live in the US.
You have to register for VAT-taxes and pay taxes in ALL the EU countries where your buyers are located.Patreon has decided that this is not their responsility and are fucking over A LOT of people using patreon right now.
If you as a creator on Patreon don’t deal with VATMOSS (yes even if you live in the US), you might get in trouble for tax evading.
Patreon is making a douchy move just so they can avoid doing this shit themselves, even though I’m positive that they have the resources to do so.
This is a fucked up law that not only affects Patreon, but sellers of digital products in general.
This needs to be talked about! Patreon needs to feel the pressure!If you want to help out; share information, create discussions and posts about VATMOSS, since a lot of people don’t seem aware of it! People can be charged for tax crimes without knowing!
Links:
• Petition to suspend the law for micro businesses and sole-traders
• EU VAT Action Campaign Group (FACEBOOK)
• Use the #VATMOSS hashtag on twitter
• Talk, share and discuss!I’m having to ditch our Engelbaum Patreon too before it even starts if Patreon don’t change their tune in the next few months. Their unhelpfulness is going to cost them the majority of their userbase. The gross thing is that they are allowing users to continue without warning them. Everyone with digital Paywall/perks has been breaking the law since Jan 1st and Patreon have no intent to help fix it. Apparently you’d have to contact each backer individually… which is fine if you’re just starting up. What about the people with hundreds of backers?
Idiocy.
I’m now looking for alternatives that will step the fuck up for their users.
there is so much wrong here i don’t even know where to start
MOSS is not the evil thing; it is something that saves you from having to register in 28 different countries. (it’s short for “mini one stop shop”.) you register for MOSS, give them all your collected VAT, and they distribute it as necessary.
you are not affected by this if you live outside the EU. i direct you to these charts, comparing the rules in 2014 versus the rules in 2015. observe that the bottom rows, for non-EU businesses, are identical! you were supposed to pay VAT based on the customer’s home country before (since 2003!), and you’re still supposed to do it now.
the UK guidelines do briefly mention that the rules affect non-EU businesses, and then completely fail to elaborate further on that. so i’m highly inclined to believe the UK guidelines are just wrong.
if you live outside the EU and weren’t paying VAT before, you have no extra incentive to pay it now. you don’t live there. odds are you’re not even a registered business (and note all the text about this refers to “businesses”) in any country. what are they going to do, tax you? how would they even know you exist?
better question: are you collecting and paying sales tax for your own country on your Patreon? if not, why on earth are you worried about collecting sales tax for another country?
i note that on a platform like Patreon, there is nothing personally identifiable about any of the users by default. there is no billing address, you don’t have access to IPs, and there is generally no country-specific product. you could very well argue that you have no reason to suspect in the first place that any of your patrons actually live in the EU.
their suggested methods for locating a customer are pretty ridiculous and i suspect they will be the ultimate reason this falls apart, especially for the small guys. the suggestions are very clearly written with specific large players in mind: billing address, location of a cable box, maybe get an IP. if you use PayPal, you have none of these things. so what are you doing to do, ask the customer to tell you where they are? that’s completely unreliable.
their Explanatory Notes very briefly handwave this problem:
9.5.7. What if the supplier does not have two items of non-contradictory evidence in the context of Article 24b(d)?
In the event that a supplier has difficulties to collect two items of non-contradictory evidence to determine the place where the customer belongs, he should nevertheless continue to seek further evidence such as relevant commercial information.
In cases of doubt priority should be given to the place that best ensures taxation at the place of actual consumption of the services supplied.
in other words, if you’ve got nothing to go on: guess. so if you have a patron with an
@gmail.comaddress, well, they’re probably in the US. oh hey that’s basically everyone problem solved!the semantics of Patreon aren’t that you’re really buying anything; you’re lending individual support to someone who wants to create things anyway. i would not legally bet on this argument, though.
tl;dr: don’t believe legal or financial advice you read on tumblr
including mine
This is what I’ve been trying to say for years.
now consider that the money going towards halloween is spent by millions of people
whereas the money going towards federal elections is spent by, like, two
confessionsofacollegerepublican:
confessionsofacollegerepublican:
How’s that universal healthcare working out for you, eh?
That’s because here not as many people go in because they know they can’t afford it.
I’d like to know where you picked up that little tidbit….
I looked up the average emergency room wait times in both the US and Canada, in hopes of eliminating the concern of financial burden on patients, as most US emergency rooms are obligated to treat patients, regardless of their ability to pay. Now, not only did I discover that Canadian hospitals have the longest emergency room wait times in the developed world, but Canadian patients will on average wait four times longer for emergency treatment than Americans.
The importance here is not the wait for specialty care or even the worry: it’s the outcome. Longer waits increase mortality and morbidity. As much as insurance allows, primary care sends patients to specialists. Primary docs also order all the tests they can ahead of time. There’s maybe a 2-7 day wait for most tests; if your doc thinks it’s better you get the CAT scan today, you go the ER. If they think you should see a specialist today and you can’t see one, you go to the ER and the attending in that specialty will see you… eventually. It’s not the best use of the system but you are less likely to die or get sicker. But ideally, the specialist gets the primary’s notes and tests results ahead of an appointment. You get on the schedule quickly, sooner if things are very concerning this way: a) you don’t die waiting for a needed coronary by-pass, b) you don’t let your suspicious pap become Stage IIb Cervical cancer waiting to see the gyn oncologist, c) your renal insufficiency and high blood pressure doesn’t become end-stage renal failure and oops you are on dialysis forever. In Canada (and Australia), you also wait weeks/months for the freaking test along with the appointments so once you see the specialist, definitive treatment can be months to years.
No one is ever, EVER turned away from an ER. In fact, if you show up to an ER that does not have the type or level of care which you need - such as burn care, trauma-level, dental, psych, eye - you will be transported by ambulance or even medivac helicopter when necessary. All will done to ‘err on the side of life’ whether you are someone who appears to be a homeless uninsured 70 year old drug addict or the Queen of bloody England. Same treatment (ok sure, we have a couple inpatient ‘VIP rooms’ in most hospitals for, you guessed it VIPs but also for employees or higher profile people in the community especially if they are in for sensitive reasons).
and yet, i would still avoid going to the ER in the US if i could possibly avoid it. because they will sure want you to pay if you can, and that’s a massive clusterfuck i just don’t want to deal with.
and, here’s the kicker: i have very good health insurance.
your trump card is that people in the US don’t have to wait so long for tests to come back? from where i’m sitting most people in the US don’t even get tests done. i’ve even heard this from my own doctors: people don’t bother coming in with minor problems until they become more serious problems. i have friends who’ve tolerated cavities for years because they couldn’t afford to see a dentist.
i would gladly take longer wait times over knowing that many people’s health insurance plan is “don’t get sick”.
Anonymous asked:Do you think it's bullshit that we have to pay for people's birth control and abortions with the HHS mandate?
answered:I’m starting to get annoyed with not having the freedom to choose where the money I earned is going. I also don’t think it’s fair to have the government force private businesses to pay for these things that go against their morals (like in the case of Hobby Lobby). It’s not the government’s job to decide what is moral and what isn’t; that’s subjective and personal. You shouldn’t be forced to have to abandon your morals just because you want to start your own business. I don’t think the government has the right to force people to pay for things that go against their principles. That’s overstepping its bounds. (I’m starting to agree more with the Libertarian point of view on this)
jehovah’s witnesses are morally opposed to blood transfusions. so why should they have to pay for your emergency surgery?
i don’t really believe in war, so, should i get to have my money not allocated towards that?
hell, if i have a moral opposition to organized religion, what impact should that have on churches’ tax breaks?
what about the people who have a moral opposition to taxes? are they off the hook entirely?
how do you prove that someone “actually” holds some moral? if it’s possible to get out of taxes just because you don’t believe in them, what stops everyone in the whole country from using the same argument?
i notice hobby lobby is based in oklahoma, which led the country in capital punishment per capita until just a couple years ago. where do you think the money for all those government-sanctioned murders came from?
also lol at complaining about birth control. did we already forget that thing about how medicare spent $172 million on penis pumps in six years, or that even a decade ago, new york alone was spending $6 million a year on viagra? so it’s fine to spend hundreds of millions to help men have sex, but not women. (who do you think the women on birth control are having sex with, praytell?)
surprise, the right to hold your morals ends approximately where others’ rights begin, and the government has decided that women have the right to abortion and people have the right to health care. (well, sort of.)
addendum: presumably hobby lobby buys products and supplies and services from other companies, who presumably have employees, who presumably have health insurance. do they have a problem with that, i wonder?
seems like basically every artist makes a point of exclusively using paypal
what a shame since paypal is evil incarnate and i want it to die a gruesome and lonely death
dwolla and square cash are neat, and the latter is basically zero setup, but alas they…
Yeah, it’s always a bit envy-inducing whenever a European asks, “Wait, why the hell do you need PayPal? Why can’t you just wire transfer it to me?”
I did pay for a service with a wire transfer once (in the US!) because the person insisted on it, and it was a quagmire all around. Took forever to go through, the recipient had no notification of it taking place, and I got to pay an extra $10 fee on top of it too. I would have much rather just written a check, and that’s just dumb.
This. Blame whatever it is that makes transferring money across the Atlantic a bureaucratic nightmare. What am I supposed to do, give up most of my income as a form of protest? Wish I could, believe me.
accept other things and encourage customers in the US to use them, so the demand for PayPal decreases and the demand for other things increases, and your customer base widens to include people who don’t want to have PayPal accounts?
Anonymous asked:What's your opinion on Venmo?
i don’t have much of one; i’ve only heard of it in passing a couple times. seems like basically the same idea as paypal, except that they have an APP, ooh, shiny, that makes it totally different
and of course it only works in the US
so it’s paypal without either of the things that make paypal popular
seems like basically every artist makes a point of exclusively using paypal
what a shame since paypal is evil incarnate and i want it to die a gruesome and lonely death
dwolla and square cash are neat, and the latter is basically zero setup, but alas they both only work in the US
i guess there’s always bitcoin
square is cool but last time i tried to set one up i accidentally used the wrong last name and it couldn’t tie the account to my SSN; the result was me permanently being disallowed from taking credit cards
guess i can’t make a new square account until i change my name, my SSN reflects my new name exactly, and i get a new email address
i get paypal’s shitty but it’s also way more a usability thing
- it works internationally
- doesnt involve conversion of an insecure, wildly-fluctuating crypto-currency
- works with a lot of online retailers if for some reason you don’t want to move the money to your checking account
- anyone who’s ever used a mundane retail service like ebay or etsy likely already has a paypal account to match
and like. it’d be great if there were viable alternatives! but of the 3 listed two only work in the US and one is a hassle and a risk. not the greatest things in the world.
haha bitcoin was tongue-in-cheek don’t worry
“everyone already has one” is somewhat mitigated by square cash, where you literally just send an email to someone with a subject of like “$400”. if you’ve never used it before then you’ll get a followup email asking for a debit card number. and then you’re done, and in my experience the money moves within an hour. i don’t know how this works but it’s fucking amazing and is how all money transfer ought to be.
(ps cubey: square cash is separate from square, so maybe that would still work for you. i’m amazed you could never get that fixed, though, like that is really uncool of them. yell at them on twitter??? seems to work for me B))
but yes, only works in the US. like all startups. hell, it doesn’t even work in the entire US; last i saw you couldn’t use it in hawaii or kentucky, for reasons i’m sure are hilarious and terrible.
dwolla has a neat thing going but they have the same three-day initial setup window as paypal (hey we sent you two tiny payments, wait for a week and then tell us what they were) which is probably why i am the only person i’ve ever met with a dwolla account. but payments under $10 are free, absolutely any other amount is a flat 25¢, and they’re working on making dwolla-to-bank transfers instant rather than three-day affairs.
but i and the people around me have been burned by paypal way too many times. porn, arbitrary locks when they feel like it, terrible cs, the usual. the last fucking straw was when i was trying to buy styx, and i was way out in the middle of fucking nowhere, and i had to log into my paypal account but couldn’t remember my password right away (because i don’t know any of my passwords) and it decided my account needed to be locked right there and then and demanded i call from a landline to unlock it. i don’t own a fucking landline so i had to irc and ask someone else to call them and get the unlock code, meaning they didn’t actually care who called them as long as it wasn’t a cell, meaning it was all a colossal fucking joke they put in just so i’d feel like i was doing security things. i had to dick around with this for a fucking hour at the breeder’s. i closed my account that day.
if i absolutely need to paypal someone i just ask em to send me an invoice, and then i can pay via credit card without needing a paypal account. (so i get to see all the ways paypal tries to trick me into signing up for one again, like a reminder email some time ago that i “forgot to finish setting up my account”.) but that’s a hassle for all involved so more often i just don’t buy paypal-only things.
seems like basically every artist makes a point of exclusively using paypal
what a shame since paypal is evil incarnate and i want it to die a gruesome and lonely death
dwolla and square cash are neat, and the latter is basically zero setup, but alas they both only work in the US
i guess there’s always bitcoin
I suspect any payments system that gains enough traction will end up going the same way that Paypal did.
Of course artists could always just do something via Gumroad or something, like having a “buy a commission” page or whatever.
i’ve grumped about this plenty of times before but i am extremely disappointed that moving money around is still such a colossal pain in the ass
if the other person is local then it’s literally faster to just go to an ATM and give em cash than to fuck around with any electronic thing
us financial system is a colossal stone-age joke
seems like basically every artist makes a point of exclusively using paypal
what a shame since paypal is evil incarnate and i want it to die a gruesome and lonely death
dwolla and square cash are neat, and the latter is basically zero setup, but alas they both only work in the US
i guess there’s always bitcoin
ms-jessie asked:Re the "lowering the minimum wage to reduce unemployment" thing from a while back, the problem is that unemployment has consistently been painted as a Bad Thing™, and thus reducing it at any cost must be good, right? Whereas it seems more likely to me, given precedent, that unemployment must trend toward 0 as we automate more and more things, therefore the more pressing issue is how we're going to handle financial support and such in a low-employment world. And I don't have any answers to that.
i assume you mean employment must trend towards 0
but yes, this is going to be a problem in the next few decades
well, no, frankly i’ve seen it argued as being a problem now; i recall an article a couple years back saying the jobs lost in the recession aren’t really coming back even though the economy is otherwise doing okay now. and iirc there’s research right now into basically automating fast food
i mean, consider: http://www.bls.gov/news.release/pdf/ocwage.pdf
among the 10 most common jobs in the US are retail clerk (4.5m), cashiers (3.3m), fast food (3.0m), waiting (2.4m), CS reps (2.4m), stock work (2.3m), and secretarial work (2.2m).
that’s 19 million people doing jobs that are either moving objects around or acting as sort of a proxy between humans and other humans. those are tasks we’re already not too shabby at automating — and we’re getting better all the time. how much of your shopping do you now do via amazon? when was the last time you dialed your operator to get someone’s number?
there are 144 million workers in the US. those people are 13% of the workforce. one in eight employed americans.
there have been revolutions in the past, of course. agricultural, industrial, various smaller ones in between. but those always produced new different work to be done, saved us from working 24/7, and let us explore other pursuits.
this seems a unique case to me. we’re already fairly comfortable (as a society as a whole). we’re no longer primarily working just to make food and clothes for ourselves. there are entire industries built around selling the middle class a multi-hundred-dollar cell phone that’s slightly better than the one everyone bought last year. and we continue to aggressively optimize.
so we are barrelling towards the very awkward point where we just have more people than we have work that needs doing.
i see a handful of options, which will probably all happen in some form. (but only after many years of high unemployment, because having the government serve its population would be socialism!!)
- basic income, where everyone just gets a regular paycheck from the government, zero strings attached. enough to keep everyone above the poverty line. if you can’t find work or just don’t want to work, cool. if you want more money, you can go earn more. it’s been tried before on small scales and seems to have worked out.
- far, far more government investment into R&D. the classical way for the government to make jobs is to just go build stuff, because building stuff requires having people build it. upgrade our networking infrastructure, give us cross-country transportation that’s not from the 19th century, send stuff into space again, destroy the credit card industry and give us easy instant money transfers.
- heavier appreciation of creative pursuits. above i said we would run out of “work that needs doing”, i.e., work that is immediately profitable. we may be set on food and clothing, but there’s always room for more art. the entertainment sector is skewed to all fuck right now: movie stars and pop bands and football players are all part of a huge established well-oiled machine that gives them millions of dollars, whereas people working on their own often have to practically beg for money. open source software has a similar problem. we’d need a significant cultural shift (and financial shift, see #2) to put more value on indie efforts, but if we can manage it, we could build an economy where people can support themselves without a huge struggle just by making stuff.
disclaimer: IANAE
sorry for reblogging the same endless comment thread several times; i’m on my phone
i see several economic geniuses haughtily suggesting that this will raise unemployment and thus is a huge mistake
but what they’re implying is that the optimal thing is to LOWER the minimum wage until we have zero unemployment
i am not sure people understand the problem we are attempting to solve here
agoodcartoon:
“millions are employed by businesses that the cartoonist believes can’t afford to pay a living wage, therefore everything is fine” ???