I’m on verbal sublet so I can shift at any moment but short notice I’ve been given urgency to seek rehousing after a dynamic fallout between me & a conservative roommate:

I stick to myself as much as possible but have been on the receiving end of verbal assault, degradation, and gaslighting, for months while doing everything I can to attempt to please these people and stop the hurt, I can take no more after today. I’m too vulnerable and my vulnerabilities are being taken advantage of inside this home :(

I’ve been having one of the saddest birthdays of my life after being berated by a bunch of playbook astroturf gaslighting, queerphobia and transphobia, and I feel overwhelmingly alone in traumatic emotions spurred on by this individual .

I’ll be okay but I truly know as a wake up call that I need to find new housing soon for wellbeing and a healthy future while I’m on the precipice of achieving stability for the first time in my life.

I’m still hunting for a job, in the PHX area 😓

Even a lead on a job would shoehorn in the ability to make more work of things on my own but I’m in a pickle because financially I’m on fumes and the timeline pushed itself up from making it to lease closure to needing to abandon ship.

I'm a bit privy to more of an inside view into payment processing than most people, even though I have barely any, because I have programmed credit card systems before. and while you should not ignorantly trust all information on the matter, hopefully you at least glean a bit of insight on this, and helps you understand reading other resources on the subject like the Wikipedia page on credit card processing.

there are a lot of issues with the credit card system, and the first big one is that it has way more intermediate parties trying to scoop money out of the process than you realise. in addition to the payer, the payment system (visa/mastercard), and the payee, there's also acquiring banks as well.

essentially, an acquiring bank is responsible for holding the money directly after a transaction takes place, and they pay out to the actual company who received the transaction less frequently. effectively:

• the issuing bank gives a person a card, and holds the money from people paying for things
• the acquiring bank takes the money paid via card
• visa/mastercard just facilitate this process (and, of course, take their cut)
• acquiring banks will pay back to regular issuing banks for companies at a much slower cadence

these acquiring banks operate like regular banks, not taking any money but instead relying on interest from held money. one of the biggest things they facilitate is also chargebacks, a loadbearing aspect of the credit card system.

basically, when you call your card company saying your card was stolen, and that someone made purchases on your behalf? or that a company charged you when they shouldn't have? that's a chargeback, and they are very bad for acquiring banks.

chargebacks sometimes cost up to 40$ for the company who offered the sale, per transaction, meaning they can be quite expensive. even if the company ultimately proves that the purchase was genuine and gets to un-refund the money, they don't get that fee back. acquiring banks will only do business with companies that have very low chargeback rates, so, it's in a company's best interest to avoid anything that might cause this even if customers are lying, saying that purchases were fraudulent even when they weren't

which leads into why payment processors are so aggressive on lewd content: it is the most likely to be charged back, because of an existing puritanical environment. if your wealthy, conservative account holder calls you and said someone bought a bunch of porn with their card, they won't take it well if you accuse them of buying all that porn themself, even if they likely did. so, banks generally agree to charge back, which ultimately hurts the person selling it: if they get too many, the literal bank that receives the money for them might decide to close the account

so, any business that actually sells lewd content effectively has to game the system, doing what amounts to effectively money laundering: constant shuffling transactions between a large number of banks to avoid any one bank receiving too many chargebacks. they also have to work with rather sketchy companies to do this, since all the "respectable" ones like Stripe will refuse to work with you. this is effectively just seen as the price of doing business for large companies selling adult content, and usually, the payment processors just look the other way, but for individual creators, this is an impossible barrier to entry

a big part of why we have this absolute mess of payment processing is because the system is optimised for wealthy individuals who flaunt cash wildly but hate to lose it. despite the security theatre of chip readers and various other things credit cards offer, ultimately, typing in a single number to pay for things is an inherently insecure system, and the system is designed with chargebacks in mind to deal with that, instead of being more secure.

for example, did you know that address verification on credit cards is entirely optional? you literally have the option to choose whether you refuse transactions that type the address wrong, or just let them go through anyway. the stated purpose of this is to let stuff like subscriptions work even if your address changes, but you can also consider it as people openly admitting that they are okay taking the money if your card is stolen, and will only get upset if you actually try to work and get it back. the "security" code on the back of the card also falls under one of these optional checks, but I think we can all understand that a three-digit PIN is just security theatre.

I'm not saying that chargebacks are inherently bad; the idea of everyday people being able to get their money back in the event of fraud is a good thing, given our broken payment system. but maybe the system is completely broken and should be replaced.

I don't think that "all-in-one" processors like PayPal are good, where everything takes place in temporary "bank accounts," but at least it has the right idea. people should be able to split their money into a much larger number of pools so that if any one pool is compromised, that doesn't mean they go broke. I just don't want more people to hold onto money, and I don't want individuals to have to micromanage this when they barely have any money to begin with

I dunno what the solution should be. but hopefully, understanding the problem helps a little bit

please remember to be kind while we’re all still alive on this weird little planet of ours

we’re all gonna fuckin die one day, what matters is what good we do for others