Not easily, and not at the time, no, it really was a very easy way to quickly reduce bot problems at the time.
You’d get random spam for stuff that could flood your forums or etc, and setting up captcha had an extremely immediate and palpable effect on reducing the spam that came in from random bot farms and shit.
I can personally confirm that when I implemented captcha on my forums i maintained 14 years ago, it pretty substantially reduced spammers by a huge degree.
I can personally confirm it very much did help curb botting issues on my website.
It’s a free service that’s been provided to website makers to easily add a way to reduce bot spam. And for a very long time, it worked
Captcha got tonnes of free training data, and in return website maintainer got an incredibly handy free tool to help secure their site.
Captcha 100% could have charged licensing for their tool, could charged money for developers to use their service.
They didn’t, and I think it’s perfectly reasonable they got the training data as “payment” instead.
Your favorite free websites you use get to have another part of their architecture stay free.
The website maintainer get an awesome free tool.
Captcha got training data to profit off of.
That’s good internet where everyone wins without the need for bullshit licensing and fees and royalties and subscriptions.
Would you have rather your Netflix account cost an extra 15 cents per month or whatever to offset yet another licensing cost for some captcha tool?
Terrible idea, that new country would instantly realize how awful it is needing to negotiate for oil when you have zero local sources of it.
The US has Texas, and Canada has Alberta.
You do not wanna form any kind of new pseudo country that doesn’t have oil in 2025, you will have some serious issues within a couple years.
The only people that talk about any states or provinces separating are the people too ignorant of just how deeply they are dependent on all the rest of their country’s exports, imports, and production.
Yes, even backwater places have an absolute fuck tonne of stuff they produce that you depend on every Just because you might think mineral mines, farms, oil, steel factories, forestry, etc etc isnt of major value, it is and you literally depend on it daily
You cant break out from that, but too many people have become too deeply dumb to grok how fucked their life would become if their specific state/province seperated.
You’re cost of living would fucking skyrocket to levels you cant even imagine. So much random shit you currently take for granted still being affordable would vaporize as you suddenly realize “Oh yeah I guess we dont make that here locally do we, where does that come from? Shit it comes from there? I never knew they made this stuff, I use it every day! Now I cant have it at all? I can still, it just costs a lot more and is imported? Well how much does it cost? (spit take) IT COSTS HOW MUCH NOW?!?!”