I do not wish, in any way, shape, or form, for my dreams to enter the material world. You ever have that dream where you spend hours picking chicken out of your teeth? How about the one where you need to pick up your great-grandparent’s remains from a firebombed warehouse that is simultaneously in the middle of the city and surrounded by swamp? Or the one where a turtle comes out from under the stove, a spider starts stalking it, and every time you look away and look back they get bigger, then the turtle is a beetle, and then the spider finally catches the beetle by impaling it on 4cm fangs?

No? Just me? Fair.

Oooh, retirement-age gossip. And debunked gossip at that.

Live Nation of being woke

Many people are saying it. Good people, honest people.

Only my whole life. Not even sure what point you’re trying to make.

I love how it seems that the entirety of the US refers to it as “lockdown,” despite most retailers being open for business, Karen bringing all 6 kids with her to Walmart, Kyle assaulting anyone who even looks like they suggest that he wear a mask, and legions of “essential workers” being treated like shit on all sides. Sure, “lockdown.”

That doesn’t normally happen… does it?

Mosquitos are the opposite tho, where at some point it will just stop having any effect.

I’m not sure my histamines got the memo. 😒

That’s the paint, the toxins are the primer.

we’re fucking exhausted

That’s the exact reason why it’s not stopping.

Financial. Incentive. To return. The carts. 🤯

And this bread! I can smell it through the plastic!

Can confirm, had one on semi-perma-loan for a few years. Bought a secondhand Canon from a friend and never looked back.

Those things were like the perfect compromise between frisbee and throwing star.

Just Regular Giuseppe, to my knowledge.

Join us at !gundam@ani.social if you haven’t already. There might be a dozen of us!

It’s a butphor. Glad you remembered to bring it.

Maybe there’s a reason turnout has been falling that goes farther than “people had a case of the stupids suddenly”.

Sorry. I asked for a ballot with a non-genocidal name on the ticket and was told I needed to leave the building.

¯\_(ツ)_/¯

I got diagnosed with laziness in school.

The word lazy still hurts today.

This was me growing up in the 80s. I wasn’t disruptive, and I aced the tests, so obviously I didn’t do the homework because I was “lazy.” Fuck that noise.

I’d imagine payment software … historically … not have an unnecessary middle man.

I used to work in the payments industry, and it’s middlemen all the way down. Visa/MC/etc. don’t deal with small fry. There is an enormous amount of regulatory overhead (which is not a bad thing here, fraud is rampant and it’s a cat and mouse game). Unless you’re buying from a heavy hitter like Walmart etc., that business is going through at least one layer of transaction processing before it gets to the issuer. The smaller the business/processing traffic, the more likely it is that there’s several hops in the chain.

Example: Processor A has direct connections to V/MC (which involves hosting V/MC’s hardware in a secured datacenter with multiple redundant network connections, and paying for the privilege). Unless a client does $X in volume, the overhead outweighs the revenue from that client. Clients that process less than $X still need servicing, so Processor B contracts with Processor A (hosting Processor A’s hardware, paying for dedicated data lines, etc.), dealing with smaller clients that add up to at least $X so Processor A is happy. Processor B may have a volume floor as well, in which case the chain continues. Each hop takes a percentage, and generally the clients with the lowest volume pay higher fees per transaction. Now add in other card types like Amex and Discover, debit transactions (which require dedicated hardware to decrypt/encrypt the PIN to verify before passing the transaction), EBT, etc. Only the largest processors are going to have direct capability to handle all of that. More typically, mid-sized processors contract with multiple other processors to cover the spectrum… or just not worry about Discover or something.

tl;dr there’s a whole lot more to it than just rolling your own point of sale software.