mikey way with a microphone

As of June 15th, 2018, PayPal has changed their user policy with little to no fanfare at all in ways that could literally destroy your business. I’m going to say this as plainly as possible:

DO NOT USE PAYPAL AT ALL IF POSSIBLE.

I know this is a lot to ask, especially since PayPal is the most globally accepted digital tender, but unless you want to lose access to your funds for six months and PayPal possibly forever, you need to read this.

PayPal Business accounts are now being flagged, locked, and completely shut down if:

1. If you haven’t shipping anything within 21 days of your first transaction

2. You’ve received more than 200 orders

and/or

3. You’ve made an excess of $20,000 (USD)

If this happens to you, you will not be able to access your money for up to six months. PayPal is NOT willing to work with you, all they will say is there’s nothing they can do, they’re cutting business ties, and offer you the MAILING address of their legal department. That’s right, you can’t even get a direct line to these people, they’re just going to tank your business by dicking around with your money for six months. Your only options are to:

1. Wait six months and frustrate customers, and by-proxy tarnish your reputation.

2. Refund everyone, possibly lose their business, and tarnish your reputation.

3. Pursue the matter legally, which will likely take longer than six months anyway, not to mention cost money out of pocket.

Thankfully most of my stuff is filtered through other sites first but fucking here we go again.

It used to be you could get around this by marking your stuff as digital goods that dont need shipment notification but I dunno if that’ll work anymore. All I know is paypal has been making it increasingly difficult for a lot of artists and creators lately and it’s a logistical nightmare for a lot of us.

It started out with “you can’t use a stage name unless you have a business account”. Which means you get a chunk of your money taken as a processing fee, but get to use a “business” name instead of your real name AND LOCATION, cause that’s a thing they were forcing you to post too unless you upgraded.

People used to tell me all the time when they put a tip in my tip jar that it was telling them my real name and the city I lived in, so eventually I bit the bullet and upgraded to avoid that. (Which is why ko-fi was/is so great, because it’s essentially a paypal wrapper that lets you use the service while not revealing your identity and location.)

But they’ve been making it increasingly harder and harder to run an online business for anyone who doesn’t ship physical items that can be tracked. Like part of it is likely to ensure that customers are getting what they paid for, but when it comes so quickly on the heels of numerous policy updates regarding sex work and adult content, it is undoubtedly linked to making it more difficult for those people to use their services.

Patreon might be doing my head in with their site constantly breaking, and they fuck up on communication issues a lot, but this is largely why they changed who they do their payment processing with, to avoid paypals “no naughty business” policies. They still use paypal and Stripe, but they moved their handler to other countries with less draconian laws, and broadened to other payment processors because of this kind of thing.

I don’t know if this works at all, but better be safe than sorry.

Remus:

McGonagall: Mr. Lupin? You and your friends wouldn’t have anything to do with what happened in the dungeons, would you?

Remus:

Dumbledore: why do you want this job?

Lupin:

Even little kids have a wage gap

Boys, on average, spend two fewer hours doing household chores per week than girls do (they play two hours more).

If they live in households where children are compensated for doing chores, boys make and save more money.  

A 2009 study conducted by University of Michigan economists found a two-hour gender disparity in responsibilities per week in a study of 3,000 kids.

75 percent of girls had chores, while just 65 percent of boys do

This disparity in chores and free time continues into adulthood all over the world.   According to the Organisation of Economic Co-operation and Development (OECD), men “report spending more time in activities counted as leisure than women. Gender differences in leisure time are wide across OECD countries.”

Year after year, studies repeatedly confirm these patterns.

The problems women face with unequal pay and housework duties actually start in childhood.

The fact that boys’ chores appear to be more profitable makes the childhood chore gap even more disturbing. Turns out, parents tend to value the work that boys do more. 

Gender stereotypes dictate these patterns. 

i have no fucking need to know who is or is not trans, all youve done is outed them and proved to me that i cant trust you. the first thing i find out about your friend shouldnt be that they trans. actually i should never find that out about your friend from you

they have to make a character of color a metaphor for lgbt people & their struggles instead of, yknow, recognizing that poc face a lot of struggles themselves even without being part of the lgbt community. or they have to make them have adhd or autism or something like that, before they can properly headcanon something and then they Only headcanon those characters with traits they can see in themselves & approved of to be relatable, effectively erasing everything else and making those characters a carbon copy of literally all other white characters that have vaguely the same struggles.

let us have characters of color that have traits that are intrinsically colored! let them be themselves without immediately jumping the gun and going “well i can’t relate to x being into this specifically cultural thing that is a big part of their character, but hey they’re a gen z kid, so obviously they’ve read homestuck and like memes!” stop. doing. that.

“The United States Government is offering you a piece of land of your own.”

“We have our own land.”

“No, it’s not yours. It’s the US Government’s.”

Me, watching those characters get together as the media doesn’t use them for queer baiting: NICE