In the first quarter of FY 2025 54% of all new permanent residents adjusted, including 70% of those who got green cards through employment (and 84% of the first preference employment category) and 69% of those who got green cards through marriage to US citizen spouses.
The only large category of immigrants that does not come primarily through adjustment are the "family preference" categories for more distant relative such as adult sons and daughters and siblings.
> That excludes all fans who don't live in big cities. A lot of people travel just to go to shows.
Not really. The place that sells the tickets doesn't have to be the performance venue itself.
This sort of distribution was quite common pre-Internet. In theory it's even easier now, because so many of the venues have (unfortunately) consolidated under vertically integrated ownership (e.g. directly owned by Live Nation). Which incidentally, after scalping, is the biggest reason that ticket prices are so high in the first place.
> They ended up citing a state law indicating that no locality domains were to be used for _government_ purposes in MA as their reason to say no, when of course that has no bearing on private use…
> If anyone would like to band together to push city of Boston or Cambridge to start approving these, please let me know! I can revive some email chains.
I'm confused by this. Some have migrated away from the locality domains but some are still in use even by official/state purposes.
> Chargebacks. "Oh, honey, I don't know how that got there. A hacker must've stolen my card! I'll call the bank immediately!" Worked in the adult industry and traditional e-commerce. It's a perennial problem.
As explained elsewhere, this is a problem for the merchants, not for the platforms. The platforms don't lose money on this, and may in fact profit off of it.
I managed an adult platform with 200 employees and $75 million in revenue and a dedicated Risk Analysis team. I think I know a thing or two about this, but thanks for the input.
> pornhub doesn't even accept payment via credit card. A while back they were kicked off due to there being too much CSAM.
There are orders of magnitude more CSAM on other platforms, such as Facebook. As explained elsewhere in the comments, Pornhub was targeted by evangelical, anti-pornography groups which weaponized claims of CSAM against Pornhub for their own political purposes, despite the fact that Pornhub had vanishingly few instances even compared to other pornography platforms, let alone non-pornography platforms (like Facebook).
> The problem is that activists who are laser focused on eliminating adult content watch intently for the first thing they can use against the company, and even if it violates their ToS something problematic is eventually bound to get through review.
This is why Pornhub is always targeted under the pretense of "fighting CSAM" when in reality Facebook is orders of magnitude worse in terms of the prevalence of CSAM and the distribution.
Exodus Cry, et. al. don't target Facebook, because they don't actually care about fighting CSAM - they are simply weaponizing that rhetoric in order to attack the the thing they really want to end (pornography, and more broadly, anything "immoral" according to a right-wing, evangelical definition of that word).
> FOSTA-SESTA is the source of this. A well intentioned bill, that, once again, has unintended consequences beyond it's original intention.
You're right that these are connected to FOSTA/SESTA, but you're missing the actual connection.
FOSTA/SESTA were not "well-intentioned". They were the product of lobbying from explicitly religious, anti-sex, anti-pornography groups. Those same groups are behind recent campaigns to require providing government ID to access pornography, to allow attorneys general to prosecute LGBTQ content, and to ban pornography from platforms like Steam and Itch.io.
FOSTA/SESTA have worked exactly as they were intended to! The intention was to make it harder to conduct sex work legally and safely, and they accomplished that goal!
These policies have little to do with FOSTA/SESTA themselves, in that the text of those laws has no bearing here. But those bills were the first big, national victory of these campaigns, and they used that momentum to raise absurd amounts of money to lobby for the other laws mentioned above, and to target financial infrastructure as an easy point of leverage to accomplish their goal of banning pornography across the Internet.
> Those bills are the reasons banks/credit card companies are pushing this since it holds them liable.
You are either misreading those bills or confusing them with other similar bills which did target banking infrastructure (and which thankfully did not pass).
FOSTA/SESTA did increase liability for platforms, but the applicability of those laws to this specific case is minimal to nonexistent.
Banks didn't do this before 2018 as aggressively. Reputational stuff is always been there and chargebacks have always been there. This law is why they've been so aggressive over the last few years. There's nothing else that has changed
> This law is why they've been so aggressive over the last few years. There's nothing else that has changed
There is so much that has changed! If you think FOSTA/SESTA are the only thing that have changed, you're clearly not up to date on this topic!
> Banks didn't do this before 2018 as aggressively
Because after FOSTA/SESTA passed in 2018, the groups that lobbied for it started targeting financial infrastructure as the front in their war. This is not some secret; they've been very open about it and their lobbying efforts have been extremely well-documented.
> It's not people using stolen cards, it's people feeling shame or regret after making an intentional purchase and using chargebacks to "undo" the purchase
If this problem were as pervasive as people keep saying it is, it would put the merchants out of business long before it would have any noticeable impact on the card brands (Visa, Mastercard) who are typically the ones actually pushing bans like these[0]. Even if the merchant is successful in winning the chargeback, they are the ones who have to pay the fees for it, which means that any business with a predictable and consistently high enough chargeback rate will just stop collecting payments long before the upstream providers care.
A lot of people here don't actually understand how payment processing, risk underwriting, and chargebacks work - which is fair, because it's an arcane area of knowledge that most people don't interact with! But it means that a lot of things which sound like simple and easy explanations are actually completely off base and nonsensical.
[0] I do not have knowledge of the Kickstarter situation specifically, and the article is light on primary-source details, so I am explicitly not commenting on this specific case.
The majority of permanent residents gain their green card through a status adjustment (ie, from a nonimmigrant visa).
Status adjustments are the norm, not some fringe edge case.