ChairmanMeow

20% AfD is bad ofc, but also still puts them nowhere near power, even if the media hypes them up for clicks.

My girlfriend and I played a lot of Disney's Villainous. The game features a board (your realm) with four locations, and a villain tracker that indicates where your villain is. Every turn, you move to an adjacent location and perform all actions there, until one player eventually wins... Or so we thought.

We played with dozens of villains before eventually Oogie Boogie came out. And one of the Hero cards (that are supposed to fuck you up) abilities ends up being "You're only allowed to move the villain tracker to an adjacent location!". Which we thought was the rule all along, for all villains.

Queue us having to replay all other villains now knowing you can just move to any location at all, no matter your current location. Our minds were blown that day.

I think the biggest issue is that if you already need to separate payments, returns, shipping, etc... you're left with a shop that also advertises products for other shops, possibly competitors. Then the question becomes... why bother federating at all?

I think it'd be better to set up a FOSS shopping platform, eg something that competes with WooCommerce or the likes. That's significantly easier from a financial and legal perspective, and I think it's an easier sell to actual merchants (why pay a license for that shit, use this one for freeee). Then once you have that running, you could think about optional federation as an addition to an already well-functioning platform.

I work in the IT department for a fairly large payment service provider. I can tell you now that you seem to be vastly underestimating both the financial aspect of this as well as several legal aspects.

• Federation would almost certainly have to be opt-in rather than opt-out. I don't think you're going to pass KYC checks for any PSP if it's opt-out, the risk of someone (ever so briefly) selling illegal goods through your website is too great otherwise. Stripe would just shut down your account (if they even let you open it), PayPal probably won't let you open it at all.

• Selling goods from other sites through your own, makes you liable for any returns, warranty claims etc... Simply "passing these on" isn't going to cut it. If the other site disagrees with the customer claim, you are on the hook for it, because it was sold through your website.

• The financial logistics aspect here is really complex. If you're going to process payments on behalf of another site, you have to deal with reconciliation. After reconciliation you have to the send the money to the other shop, incurring additional (sometimes surprisingly sizeable) fees. And coming from someone who deals with (automated) reconciliation on a daily basis, every payment method does it differently and they all find extremely creative ways to mess up your systems. And that includes unannounced changes, mistakes, random unexplained fees, failure to deliver settlement files, etc...

• How do you deal with the risk of scam instances? E.g. instance A tells instance B that a product was sold and the payment was processed. B sends it out, but it turns out the customer was the owner of A, and there was no payment at all. B just lost a product with very little chance of getting it back.

• Then there's practical aspects. How do you deduplicate products in search? Or will you have dozens of listings for the exact same product?

The only remotely viable way I see this working is if only search is actually federated. Once you are on a product page, you can only pay using the payment page of the instance that has the product. You won't be able to pay for products of multiple instances at once, and you might lose some unified styling. But at least that approach has a chance of passing KYC and deals with all the legal issues regarding returns/warranties etc..., and it reduces the scam risk because you're in charge of your own payments. But at that point, you've only federated product search and nothing else, and then as a consumer you might as well just Google it instead.

I appreciate you have experience in running a business, but running a marketplace, especially a very complicated one, is really not like running a usual business.

I feel like this is far too dismissive for a comment that was in my eyes fairly constructive. He correctly pointed out that one of Amazon's main selling points is their whole logistics division. A federated website doesn't have that. So either:

• You somehow also start doing logistics, or
• You provide a good reason why shops don't actually care about Amazon's logistics all that much, and how they could to it themselves instead.

Maybe you could actually address the core of his criticism instead of outright dismissing it.

Absolutely true, yes.

According to https://projects.fivethirtyeight.com/polls/approval/donald-trump/ he still has a net positive rating.

Zelensky may not be the best, but I have zero doubts regarding him trying his best and his continued resolve to try and do whatever is best for his people.

One of the very few people in political office these days who deserve the title of "leader". An admirable man indeed.

The earliest source I could find is this one: https://fr.apanews.net/news/rdc-plus-de-70-civils-retrouves-decapites-dans-une-eglise/

Seems to be a local news agency. There are some other outlets corroborating the story, though I can't find any evidence (e.g. images/witness accounts) other than these stories.

This Newsweek article is a bit shit because it's using quotes from right-wing internet trolls about this, which is quite poor when it comes to quality standards. But I'm not so sure the premise of the article is a lie, it could very well have happened, and I don't have evidence to the contrary.

The entirety of the banking world uses XML very heavily, as it's part of the SWIFT standards.

There's a card game version of it: https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Werewolves_of_Millers_Hollow

Hasn't the Source SDK been out there for much longer?