Yeah, it sounds like they’re going away altogether—no PINs, no signatures, nothing required whatsoever. I mean, it makes a certain amount of sense; with chip-based cards, it theoretically means they can’t be skimmed/duplicated (of course, the magnetic strip negates this security), while online transactions—where most…

If you’ve eaten in restaurants abroad, you know that you usually have to swipe your credit card via a hand-held terminal that a server brings to your table.

I mean, I buy physical games whenever possible too, but, when I look at games like Final Fantasy XV and No Man’s Sky, where they have been so extensively patched and modified with downloadable updates, at some point they’re no longer “physical” anymore, and you’re still left with the possibility that those patches and…

Frankly, leftist Americans aren’t interested in actual socialism and certainly not communism. What they want is a “mixed economy” with regulated capitalism and a strong welfare state, with modern Scandinavia as the model (although even the U.S. was once a pioneer in this arena with the Progressive Era of the early…

It’s because Apple dropped support for 32-bit CPUs and apps in iOS 11. The 5S was the first 64-bit capable iPhone, so anything older is entirely out of luck.

Ammo definitely will...it will be highly sought after.

Fiat currencies are backed by the strength and credit of its backing nation; it may be abstract, but it’s not “nothing.” Even gold, which is often held up as an ideal by those against modern currencies, is equally an abstract—if the apocalypse comes and the entire global economy shutters, even gold won’t stop you from…

Basically, this falls on the legislature for continually allowing the executive more and more power for the simple reason that if you don’t have to vote for or against a war, regulation, etc, then you don’t have to defend your action or lack of during your next campaign.

It was never necessary—just look eastward to all the married clergy in Orthodoxy whose traditions didn’t change on this matter. Mandatory celibacy happened during a time when Western Christianity became especially hostile to sex, seeing it as an evil with celibacy as the highest ideal.

There’s a part of our brain that makes whatever music we listened to in our youth lock in as the only good music.

This is, incidentally, how I feel about most of the stores currently being squeezed by the Internet. Blockbuster? Walmart? Barnes & Noble? Best Buy? All these stores crushed local competition when they had their chance back in the 1990s, and now they’re being taken out themselves. I don’t feel nostalgia for any of…

If you look at her actual posted views, I’m also not even sure she can be called “left-wing”:

It’s called a mixed economy, which pretty much means “regulated capitalism with a welfare state.” Considering the U.S. was a pioneer in this respect at the turn of the last century with the Progressive Era, we don’t especially need to reinvent the wheel as much as rediscover our roots.

It’s called the Southern Strategy, although it now covers the entire country, not just the South. It’s been going on for 50 years and is Nixon’s true lasting legacy.

There’s also the phenomenon of “audience sophistication.” It’s a good reason why certain popular films and TV shows seemed great 30 years ago, but seem like complete crap now. I feel like it’s really quite obvious when it comes to special effects from the late 1990s, which now generally look horrendously dated. Of…

Heh...yeah, I remember watching this show back in the day, and I completely remember Schneider’s character. Like most shows of this era, though, I imagine it hasn’t aged well at all.

They absolutely can and do. Ever live in a condo? Every suite owner has a property tax bill. Even your traditional communal living arrangements still have to pay taxes.

Good luck paying your property taxes with this plan.

I don’t think it’s too far off to say that the entire Democratic Party is a mess and has been for a long time. Sure, the GOP “is worse,” but for a supposed election strategy, it has failed repeatedly, so much so that the GOP is dominating across the nation. So, in the face of all this, the plan now is to double down…

I’ve heard that much of the UK also suffers from a pretty oppressive “class ceiling,” as well. It seems that American companies may not have that problem so much, at least: