That’s absolutely it, before the NRA gave up on promoting gun rights and imploded its political power never came from “buying politicians with industry money.” It came from a large pool of highly active voters with a shared primary issue. Their report card was more effective than any donation or individual campaign. Mobilizing large groups of voters is far more powerful than deep pockets. That’s also why nothing has changed since their collapse, pro-gun voters had been jumping ship to more effective groups for more than two election cycles now. “Defeating the NRA” didn’t result in a gun control win because by the end the NRA’s corruption did more to hurt gun rights than anything Bloomberg could buy; ripping that bandaid off entirely allowed the community to rebound even harder.

I assume everyone is owned by someone terrible, but the individual policies and changes are what drives me to swap.

I pay for things on sites processed by PayPal too, I just don’t have an account.

It’s never been about the money, that’s just an easy scapegoat for someone not wanting to admit that they lost on any given issue. It’s really easy to say “evil corporations bought the law/result they wanted” than admit that a highly engaged voting base was behind it.

Just standard credit card processing for purchases and zelle or venmo for transfers.

The gun and anti gun lobbies are chump change in politics. Combined they amount to less than $10m. I literally can’t even find their relative ranking on mobile because they aren’t even a drop in the bucket compared to others.

https://www.opensecrets.org/federal-lobbying/industries

Good thing I deleted my PayPal years ago over a previous TOS change.

And this is where you went? This is literally Reddit’s bias taken to the level of hyperbole. The extremism groupthink here is the primary reason it hasn’t and likely will never go mainstream.

I feel like it would be pretty quickly determined that you are the “victim” in that scenario. I have actually carried explosives through a TSA checkpoint before though; it was the BEST LAYOVER EVER. They came to the lounge I was in asking for volunteers to train the dogs and then handed me a backpack with semtex in it and put me in line. The dog found me, I told him he was a GOOD BOY and got to throw his kong for him and rub his belly. 45/10, would layover again.

Depending on what airports they tried to go through they likely would have been caught. Even garbage security theater like the TSA catches concealed explosives fairly well.

How does Microsoft’s compare to M*crosoft’s?