I have no real idea what the ins-and-outs of 1099-K and so I could be completely wrong.
However, it seems like there may be some sort of threshold listed in the reporting requirements.
Would it be legally possible to allow your users to use the enhanced functionality of your platform up to the edge of that threshold?
Cutting off access to the premium services that the sellers of erotic coo-coo clocks (or whatever) have come to value might incentivize them enough to overcome the 1099-K hurdle. You could make the process gentler by constantly displaying the amount of revenue left that they can transact before being cut off.
Be careful though. Cutting off access will equally incentivize users to bypass the restrictions you've put in place by creating multiple accounts, etc.
Lacking the above you could also try to focus on the part of your platform the sellers do want to use and sell a premium tier to sellers that has features that would make them stand out to buyers. For example premium users could have flair (think something akin to a verified checkmark) next to their listings in searches and the ability to post an extra video of their clocks.
A mercenary satellite is a wild concept. It raises an number of ethical questions.
It also feels like another step down the path toward a cyberpunk dystopia. I'll add it to the list with robotic policing and subscription based airbags.
Colleges often make deals with local businesses. If you look around you may find that the student council, or student affairs, or somebody can hook you up with cheap movie tickets, coupons for pizza, etc.
At the college I attended I found that administrative guidelines were not as inflexible as they seemed on their face. I can't remember the number of times I was wait-listed for a class but was able to get in anyway because I showed up the first day and asked the professor if they could help me out. Generally my strategy to any bureaucratic problem I encountered was to work my way up the food chain until I found someone that was empowered to help me.
> At the college I attended I found that administrative guidelines were not as inflexible as they seemed on their face.
This is a really big one. My college experience was probably very different to the American one, as the system here in Germany is just very different. But I spent quite a while just accepting failure in courses when working with the professor and faculty could have led to passes.
Most universities also have ways to help with financial problems, psychological issues and many other things, too many students hesitate to use them.
Back in the 90's I remember my family got a new Compaq (I think) PC. On it it came preloaded with this great dos tutorial that was essentially a fake terminal that would walk the user through DOS commands letting them try various things in a safe environment and let them see the effects.
It was definitely effective in teaching my young self the basics of DOS and was a big step on my path to becoming proficient with a computer.
This gopher hole is a good example of how Gopher doesn't have an notion of cookies. You can see what is either gamestate or some sort of session id encoded in the URL.
Another way to do this kind of thing is to generate "parallel universes". It involves generating enough gopher "directories" AKA "pages" to encode every possible game state and then link them together like you would a "Choose Your Own Adventure". Essentially trading dynamic page generation for hard drive space.
You can see an example of the "parallel universes" approach used in the easter egg text adventure game located at:
There is a video game wiki gopher hole that I use occasionally. gopher://giantgopher.com/ is a gopher front end for GiantBomb.com but with what I find to be a better search interface.
There aren't a whole lot of good Gopher browsers out there for Windows. I use http://jaruzel.com/gopher/gopher-client-browser-for-windows with the text color set to green and the background set to black. From what I hear there is also a Gopher chrome plugin that isn't too bad.
For those interested in playing around with gopher development in addition to the tools that are mentioned in the the article there is an old abandoned yet serviceable gopher version of flask kicking around out there that is quick and easy to get going.
Cool gameplay loop! Lots of short jumps makes it easier. Maybe change it so that every time a paddle is hit the player gets 10 points but looses a point every time they jump.
I was trying to figure out what font they are using and when I was inspecting the page I found the comment below. I have nothing in particular to say about it. I just thought it was interesting.
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Pretty sure that is from the church of satan. Which is not about worshiping satan but more humanist / atheist / there is no god but you should still be a force for good.
It's just that their imagery is intentionally quite jarring to christians.
To quote the satanists. It is not them who believe in Satan, its the christians who believe in Satan.
As a European, I find it quite amusing that religion is so central to american culture, that they even figured out a way to make a christian version of atheism.
As a fellow European, I feel we have nothing to be amused about. What the church thinks still has excessive weight in lawmaking and people's opinions. Publicly funded schools have "religion" classes where the local mainstream christianity variant is the main content. And the tax authority is still tasked with collecting the "church tax".
As former resident of several European countries, I find your statement, while not entirely incorrect, a bit too "blanketing".
All this may be quite dependent on where you live (the mention of the "church tax" makes me suppose Germany, as they have a Kirchensteuer, but I'm sure other countries must have a similar tax). In any case, there are European countries without church tax, beyond normal taxes that could be used for preservation of historical sites, religious or otherwise (which I agree may be somewhat biased in what religious sites can pretend to be considered historical).
Similarly, many countries do not have "religion" classes in "publicly funded schools", especially in countries that are (supposedly or admittedly) laic. That being said, there's also often a bias there as a lot of holidays are tied to religion and Christianity in particular, and it'd be quite common to explain in class the origin and nature of these holidays. I'd hardly think it counts as "religion" class, though, but that'd depend on what the teachers do.
In Germany, I was pleasantly surprised that some parties up for election have (regionally) expressed the will to abolish relgion-based studies in public schools. It makes me a bit hopeful, especially since I recently got the impression that young people are skewing more religious again. I have also seen some proposals to abolish the laws currently prohibiting singing and dancing during certain religious holidays.
I think in Germany this is really crying out of boredom. If you want to, you don't have to come in contact with any of it. It was still relevant 30-40 years ago, but not today. Not in any relevant capacity.
Other european countries are more laical or secular, but that is pretty much just flavor today.
Some eastern countries are more involved, but if you propose the church having relevant influence in central or western Europe, you really slept the last two decades.
How so? Religion is still central in many countries in Europe, eg Croatia, Poland, etc. It's even getting stronger as the populace is leaning more to the right every day. Plenty of religious people in the media here raving against covid vaccines etc.
The problem is that Europe is split up into dozens of countries with very somewhat different values and cultures, so whenever you say "In Europe X happens", then you can always invoke some version of your argument.
Europe is France, Netherlands, Albania, Moldova. All of these are very different in various statistics.
To some degree yes, but mainstream US is still far more culturally uniform from state to state than Europe's countries are. In Europe most of countries are nation-based and as such encapsulate also all the possible differences in ethnicities, languages, culture, religion and history to a much higher degree. Imagine each race/denomination/ethical group in US having their own independent state with their own laws and ways of life, and you get something like Europe.
But there is still a common language in the us.
And national TV-networks with lots of viewers in both those states.
Neither of those are true for Europe.
I would argue that it is fair to say that the US is more homogeneous than Europe, especially if you are talking about the entire Europe, and not just the EU.
I have never been to Croatia or Poland, but of course you are right in that there are European countries where religion has a more central role than in other European countries.
But, how common is it really in Croatia or Poland to use christian terms such as "satanist" when you want to say that you are an atheist?
There was an important piece left out of the description of the Church of Satan: it is typically used as a device to test civil liberties and separation of church and state.
If, say, a courthouse has a statue of a religious theme, then by the law of the land, the courthouse must be willing to erect a statue for any religion. Like, say, a statue of Baphomet. Or they can remove _all_ of the religious iconography. That demographics are mostly Christian and so such things are overtly offensive makes it more effective.
So, atheists or agnostics or even people of more orthodox religious persuasion are using the Church of Satan as a vehicle of representation for a strong stance on the separation of church and state.
>It's just that their imagery is intentionally quite jarring to christians. To quote the satanists. It is not them who believe in Satan, its the christians who believe in Satan.
Seems anti-social, especially when injected into a non-religious context like a site about web design.
What I realized years ago is that the upvote on Stack Overflow don't mean "I tried this and it works for me" or "I'm an expert and this is the answer". No, the upvotes on Stack Overflow are along the line of the upvotes/likes one would find on Reddit or HN. More like "you sound confident" or "I was looking for this but I haven't tried it yet"
> No, the upvotes on Stack Overflow are along the line of the upvotes/likes one would find on Reddit or HN. More like "you sound confident"
I think you're right that online scoring systems tend to incentivise false confidence. This happens with blog posts too, where a student of some topic writes a confident and subtly incorrect blog post, and it then ends up on the HN front-page. Only someone with a relatively deep knowledge of the topic can then call out the errors. Ideally it should always be made clear upfront that the author is new to the material.
Somewhat related: Stack Overflow's unfortunate norm of calling out mistakes in answers in a way that goes beyond confidence and strays into condescension and borderline hostility. For a lot of people it seems it's not enough to be seen to be right, they also feel the need to paint someone else as clueless, while just about passing as acceptably polite by keeping the aggression passive. If challenged, they'll brush it off as 'directness'.
> Our sites are all intended to be a sort of representative democracy. Moderator elections are an important part of that plan, but voting on questions and answers is the primary mechanism through which the community governs the site on a day to day basis.
And it can fall to all the errors and issues of democracy too - especially the “pseudo-expert” one. At least you can leave a comment on the answer if there’s an issue.
The number of times I've seen the only correct answer being a terse explanation with a short code snippet and having zero upvotes astounds me.
They may not have been the attention seekers like other posters. But they provided exactly what was asked for. And when I come across their post years later I upvote.
Meh, I'm usually there looking for how to do something, and if a response helps me do whatever I was looking to acomplish, or at least on the right track, it was helpful and worth an upvote. I've never upvoted just because someone sounded confident.... at least not on SO.
It's a user experience issue and it's hard to solve. You can't possibly expect people to come back to one of their SO tabs AFTER they get code to work.
However, it seems like there may be some sort of threshold listed in the reporting requirements.
Would it be legally possible to allow your users to use the enhanced functionality of your platform up to the edge of that threshold?
Cutting off access to the premium services that the sellers of erotic coo-coo clocks (or whatever) have come to value might incentivize them enough to overcome the 1099-K hurdle. You could make the process gentler by constantly displaying the amount of revenue left that they can transact before being cut off.
Be careful though. Cutting off access will equally incentivize users to bypass the restrictions you've put in place by creating multiple accounts, etc.
Lacking the above you could also try to focus on the part of your platform the sellers do want to use and sell a premium tier to sellers that has features that would make them stand out to buyers. For example premium users could have flair (think something akin to a verified checkmark) next to their listings in searches and the ability to post an extra video of their clocks.