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Whether or this standard enables banks to do such—I would not expect them to jump on the opportunity. They are businesses, and what’s the motive for shooting themselves in the foot?
Perhaps it would be a different story if the feds were making a coherent push. Finance won’t touch weed money while federal drug laws add all this risk. But any attempt to leverage private providers as a Second-Amendment fig leaf...well, I’d expect it to be plainly unconstitutional for the same reasons speech can’t be compelled. But I don’t actually have evidence of such.
This is no longer a sufficient objection. Social media companies make money off views and attention. Why do they keep banning people that bring them lots of views and attention? Game companies make money of gamers, why do they keep insulting them and telling them if they don't like their liberal agenda, don't buy their games? Why do media companies keep acquired IPs to harness the profitability of their fanbase, and then putting writers on the project that hate the material and the fanbase?
The world is replete with companies in industries ostensibly "shooting themselves in the foot" if their only motive were raw capitalistic profit seeking. We have near a decade of them doing it anyways. Obviously, we do not live in the framework they teach in Econ 101.
Once again, Scott Alexander called it.
I might need to re-read that, but... no he didn't. He's calling the opposite, the same old "it's just clicks for attention, bro" theory WhinningCoil is criticizing.
I wasn't posting it as a counter to WhiningCoil, but as an agreement: this has been "known" for a while, corporations do things that should rightly harm their bottom line and yet get rewarded anyways.
I don't think that's his point. As far as I can tell, they aren't getting rewarded, which is why the Econ 101 model is wrong.
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Strong agree, and it really shows you how wrong most people's model of capitalism is.
Company executives operate for their own benefit, not for the benefit of shareholders. Unless you are Blackrock or something, a shareholder has absolutely no ability to voice their concerns at all. All they can do is vote for or against a slate of directors chosen by management. Nevermind that most people own shares in an index fund anyway.
Company executives have no desire or need to answer to shareholders. They act for their own social and financial aggrandizement. For a CEO to keep their job, it is necessary only to please the board of directors - a group consisting of social elites often chosen by the CEO themselves. That's why a company can "shoot themselves in the foot" by turning away paying customers with no consequences whatsoever. And its why Twitter can have 1000% as many employees as it actually needs. Because there is no need to return profits to shareholders. Shareholders have zero power and will take the scraps they can get.
Shareholder capitalism is an illusion.
Thank Marty Lipton for that. Corporate raiders were great agents of cutting fat. Lipton largely introduced measures to prevent agents from doing so.
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The point is enabling this to empower activists within the credit card companies. No matter what Visa says now, they will fold when the blob uses this as leverage against them.
It's one thing for the CEO to say "this is against our principles, and besides, what would you have me do?" It's another thing entirely for him to resist the entire ESG/LGBTQ-ERG internal party cadre standing in his office screaming "PUSH THE BUTTON OR YOU'RE KILLING BABIES!" This change sets him up for the latter, just like Price at Cloudflare, who swore he would resist the pressure right up until he realized how much they could bring to bear on him, and how many of the people he relied on would stab him in the back.
Although very likely the CEO won't need to make the decision: it'll be done at some lower level and presented to him as a fait accompli that he would have to work against procedural outcomes to overturn.
Notice how on their page about the category code they don't openly say their objective is to prohibit all banks from dealing with firearms companies. They only say that on their other pages because they're good at compartmentalizing their propaganda.
I’m going to try and resist the urge to pick at that poorly-conceived website.
Cloudflare represented a single point of failure for an incredibly unsympathetic community. That made it a target. Gun owners have saintly public relations compared to Kiwifarms; there is no single bank which handles guns. Without a single, obvious lightning rod, activists will not generate adequate charge on one institution.
The existence of a lever is not a guarantee that it has leverage. If the LGBT “cadre” can go shout down CEOs for tangential causes—why haven’t they? What is it about this policy that will signal a revolution?
Nothing. It does not change the calculus of the last ten years. The tide of anti-gun sentiment is no stronger now than it was after Sandy Hook or Columbine. Banks didn’t decide to legislate from the vault back then, and they won’t now. Not without the kind of collective action that happens through government channels.
I would be willing to bet money on this. Apparently, I am, seeing as my main bank rates an F.
You’re not wrong, broadly speaking.
I want to be clear that cloudflare was the single point upon which Kiwifarms depended, and thus an obvious target. Not that kiwifarms was vulnerable because it used cloudflare specifically. Cloudflare definitely isn’t unique in having a gap between moral stance and practical vulnerability.
Banks don’t represent that single point of attack because...well, there’s more than one of them. So even if you get a mass protest, whether in person or extremely-online, that energy doesn’t have a single target. The only way to make a single target is to go through government. The end result is bland lobbying groups rather than toxic vigilantes.
“Is your bank loaded?” doesn’t have grand, symbolic targets. Just a boring scorecard. That puts them somewhere below Greenpeace in impact.
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Just pointing out- the 2a community is big and competent enough to prevent major deplatforming/denial of service/whatever the term is here, and the scenario in which they lose that power is one in which direct legal risks are a bigger concern than whatever people imagine this is a precursor too.
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