Payment processing costs are a scam. They're 10x as expensive as they need to be to fund rewards programs and fund the financial system.
EU max credit card transaction fees are 0.3%, in the US they can be up to 4%.
It just doesn't cost 4% of a transaction to handle the exchange of funds. Just wealth transfer to finance people and the upper class who take advantage of credit card perks.
Can someone explain to me if EU card transactions are capped, why Stripe charges me (US) the full ride on my EU customer's cards? In fact, I get charged even more for EU cards – perhaps as much as 2.5% extra.
I just checked and I get charged ~8% in fees on a 10 euro transaction on Stripe. Of course some of that is the low transaction amount (flat 0.30), but it's brutal for a small business like myself.
The EU only capped interchange fees, which is the amount that goes to the bank that issued the card. It did not cap the fees that go the your PSP. Which makes sense, since you can pick the PSP you do business with, but you can't pick the bank that issues your customers' cards.
(And I don't think it applies to US merchants like you anyways)
perhaps they are capped only for EU merchants, because EU government works to protect their own companies and citizens from foreign artificial unregulated monopolies.
in US, the government is more protective of private monopolies due to lobbying
How are you defining monopolies? Companies that are successful? Because you seem to be defining most US companies that do business in Europe as monopolies. It seems that this is the kind of mindset that has kept Europe behind. Too bad. Regulation that keeps out competition or needlessly puts obstacles in place is bad for the consumer, bad for employment, and bad for the general standard of living. And If you think US companies are unregulated then you haven't seen the 20 ft of federal CFR regulations together with the regulations of 50 different states that US companies have to deal with everyday.
Interestingly, the EU did manage to cap interchange on US cards paid by EU merchants to pretty much the same rate as that paid for domestic/intra-EU cards, at least at the POS. Many things are possible with a regulator with teeth.
The funny thing about that is that HN used to say if the fee was 4% it's because that's what it costs and if it was any lower the card networks would just abandon the country that forced it to be lower, since they'd lose money.
Except in the US, it does. Depending on the card, it can cost as much as 4.5% (or more!) to run the card. You can argue that it shouldn't, but that's a different statement than it doesn't.
it is illegal for Merchants to charge credit card processing fees by law, they have to absorb these fees and cannot display them to the customer.
This naturally protects the artificial oligopoly of visa/mc/discover systems.
The moment you allow Merchants to charge cc fees (even 2-3%) and allow customer to choose low processing option (ACH/debit card/cash), the whole scheme falls apart and Visa/MC will slowly go bankrupt
the typical Merchant<->bank agreements all have clauses forcing them to absorb these fees and explicitly barring them from separately charging customer CC fee.
and most small/med businesses dont have clout to protest that, so they have to accept these terms in order to earn money
> the typical Merchant<->bank agreements all have clauses forcing them to absorb these fees and explicitly barring them from separately charging customer CC fee.
These clauses would be illegal in many states and countries these days, so they don’t.
This hasn't been the case for a wide variety of payment processors for quite a while now. Many of the new startup-based ones have features to help you pass through the fees even. Small business can use Stripe, Square, Clover, or one of many other payment processors that don't ban them from passing credit card fees forward to consumers.
The only good use case for a credit card is if you are buying something from someone you do not trust. I have a CC and it use it a few times a year. But using them to pay for groceries or ordering something from Amazon is just moronic.
The way I see it: you are either rich and don't care or you are poor and need to spend money that is not in your account (no judging I grew up poor and had to hide from debt collectors when I was a kid).
In some places Visa/MC is the default way to pay. Such as large parts of Europe now that the fees are capped. The cashier asks you to pay, you hold your card up to the terminal, and you've paid. Some places like Australia have their own local systems that are more commonly used by locals and probably have lower fees, but those POS also support Visa/MC. It's just the default way to pay internationally now.
The irony is that every couple you shop with just increases the prices of their items to deal with the fees, so you're just paying more for items to feel good about getting reward program benefits.
Most places other than the USA, when they use these card networks or their local country networks, are normally using debit cards. There's just no reason to overcomplicate a payment card by making it also a loan.
I briefly skimmed this, but why are you wasting my time? What does this have to do with me earning free trips from being smart about how I buy things? does not compute.
>I wonder if we can do something now that we know the source.
Russia signed the 1967 Outer Space Treaty (OST) in 1967, this may be a treaty violation of this or other treaties, something like that or retaliation regarding it may be possible.
You can hack the satellite, or use other electronic warfare options to jam or interfere with it's operations.
You can shoot it down with a missile.
The X-37B is in space right now and interfering with space assets is a pretty obvious possibility for why it exists at all, but it's secret so nobody says these things.
If you start shooting down stuff in orbit, it'll invite retaliation, but even without retaliation there's a huge risk of a Kessler syndrome (especially with all the stuff that SpaceX has put into orbit in recent years).
No, Kessler syndrome is pretty unlikely in this case. All of the guilty satellites are in Molniya orbits. Debris from destroying them would not greatly effect geosynchronous orbit or the low earth orbits used by Starlink.
> especially with all the stuff that SpaceX has put into orbit in recent years
I've heard this repeated a lot but I've never seen anyone do the maths. StarLink satellites are all in very low orbits, so intuitively it seems like most debris from a collision would just end up deorbiting.
LEO is crowded enough (mostly with Starlink) that satellites have to actively maneuver to avoid collisions [1]. There's research [2] arguing that we're probably already in runaway territory in some orbits — that is, debris from 1 collision likely produces more than one secondary collision — we're just way over on the left of the hockey stick curve. A bit of bad luck, or two megaconstellations that don't perfectly coordinate their operations with each other, could move us to the right pretty quickly.
90% of starlink satellites are >400km in altitude. They aren't in very low earth orbits where that intuition even might be correct. They're above the space station.
I've definitely seen math done - though I'd have to dig it up again. I think in FAA filings.
I've thought about this before - do you actually need to "shoot it down" (make it explode)? What if you just nudge it a little and either make it spin or change its orbit? If your missile can reach the satellite then these seem like things that should be possible, no?
Depends, if you nudge it only a little, its own onboard stabilizers / thrusters should be able to correct it. It'd have to be more than its own systems can correct for.
A missile intercept for explosions or a kinetic destruction the relative velocity will be measured in kilometers per second.
A little nudge doesn't do much, it's still a satellite in a substantially similar orbit. Any sort of nudge requires intercept, go up there and match its velocity so you can grab it and push. And still you have to push on it a whole lot to make a meaningful difference. Spin it up? You'd have to do enough to exhaust it's fuel it uses to orient itself.
You're sort of saying if you can chuck an apple hitting a car on the highway, surely you can tow it away to get it off the road. They're significantly different problems.
The whole thing is nonsense. DNS is terrifically reliable, complex schemes to update it are often fragile. Replacing DNS with /etc/hosts and... a complex scheme to update it with ansible isn't exactly a fix. The author even admits the high profile DNS incidents weren't actually DNS servers failing.
It is pretty insane to switch from DNS servers to pushing domain config to every single client every single update.
From TFA
>There are multiple(1) high-profile(2) incidents where DNS was involved. In these linked cases, the root-cause of the incident isn't the DNS system itself. Yet, because the root-cause affects the DNS service - which is in the critical path for virtually all services - the incident has such a huge impact.
From AWS incident report linked in TFA
>The root cause of this issue was a latent race condition in the DynamoDB DNS management system that resulted in an incorrect empty DNS record for the service’s regional endpoint
The next step for people like you and things like nations: what do we do with this extra electricity we have laying around so often?
What people figure out to do with actually free energy will be exciting. There are a lot of extremely "inefficient" things that might suddenly become commonplace.
Proto-replicator technology where you dump your garbage into a barrel and it gets decomposed and recomposed into something similar to crude oil, blocks of metal, pure gasses, etc? Hydrocarbon fuel from air? Flying cars? You name it.
Generating hydrocarbons at home from their air with excess electricity is like the ultimate endgame in my opinion. It’d be so sick and enable a million new possibilities, essentially getting us into a net-zero emissions state without needing to use batteries for everything.
I doubt that it ends up being actually better due to efficiency losses but it’d be really cool!!
There's a problem with statistics for this and many other things.
Guns attract idiots, idiots have idiot gun problems, it does not follow that if you get a gun, you'll have the same problems.
Similar statistics are easy to fool people with. Doing $expensive_thing is associated with health/wealth/success so if everybody did it everybody would be better off! But in reality there's just a selection bias and whatever the thing is just attracts rich people and the thing has no actual effect. For example: do a study of people who wear sunglasses to find the association between mortality and the price of the sunglasses you wear.
How many people are actually studying gun ownership without intentionally looking for one result or the other? It attracts a tremendous about of bias in both directions and not a lot of genuine curiousity.
Motorcycles are somewhat like this - they're both more dangerous than cars in terms of whether you might get into an accident of any sort. But however bad they are in that sense is amplified by how many people use them like utter idiots: I've lost count of the people I've seen on them in shorts and flip-flops, let alone without a helmet, not to mention people racing them and popping wheelies at racing speeds on 35mph streets.
The attempted (failed) fascist takeover of Minneapolis by ICE motivated plenty of new and existing gun owners. It is not reasonable to call that fear paranoia, and it's not about the sport. The fact that it failed doesn't mean that chapter of history is over, just that lessons will be learned and it will be a more difficult situation next time unless there are some really substantial changes we see no evidence of yet.
It seems like you're disappointed it wasn't a modern "noble savage" myth, that it was realistic instead of a fairy tale about a person coming from a bad place to a good place and being happy, wholesome, and free.
This kind of mythology is a pretty big problem in the western world right now as is the kneejerk reaction to it.
That’s a rather uncharitable take on what the poster you’re responding to wrote.
I read Persepolis a few years ago, and it’s hard not to come away with a similar impression. The first part often does resemble a fairy tale of sorts, while the second part is a pretty dark story of teenage alienation. The contrast is jarring, and it goes well beyond “duh nobody’s perfect”.
Both parts are excellent in their own right, and quite unlike any other book I’ve read, but there is indeed something strange going on in part 2. Most readers will remember this, I think.
What's jarring to many people is it isn't the three act hero's journey of a noble savage. The "something" going on is that it isn't a copy of just about the only narrative in western mythos:
1. Departure - from a humble background the subject leaves amid struggle
2. Growth and Initiation - the subject discovers who they are building themselves into the hero they'll become
3. Heroic Return - the now hero makes a return to their beginnings to great success
Instead, Persepolis is a much more realistic story and each act is around three very different kinds of strife experienced by our hero and only in the very end a kind of coda where things go well.
My criticism of the criticism is that Persepolis is tremendously more realistic than the hero's journey and people are jarred by it because it doesn't represent their imagination of what real world struggle is like, the fact that it upsets people is one of those deep core societal issues because of the wrongness of the lens people see the world through.
I think you make a fine analysis, but I would just offer that real life can be quite jarring and uncomfortable. So a story which paints a very real picture of life (rather than constructing a narrative) might just be unpleasant. I don't think her story is poorly written, and I think it is quite memorable.
For reference, I also really enjoyed the Catcher in the Rye, and there are some superficial similarities: a young person is scarred by events in their lives and succumbs to depression. (there are a myriad of differences between the two stories -- I'm not drawing an equivalence, just making one comparison)
Catcher in the Rye is probably best read as an angry teenager: you meet Holden Caufield and he's witty, cynical, funny, defiant, etc. You might fall in love with the character, but what you ultimately learn is that he's a miserable failure; he lost the battle with his depression and so many of the people he was cutting down were just normal, decent people trying to enjoy their lives.
Crucially, we never meet Holden when he is young, bright eyed, and innocent. The narrative structure shows us who he is right away, and we the reader learn that this is actually quite a bad thing throughout the course of the story.
Persepolis works a bit differently: we spend the first half of the book with innocent, bright-eyed Marjane and we fall in love with that character. The character we fall in love with is taken from us by the events of the story, by living unsupervised in exile, etc. It's nothing but sad. It's well-written, it's very memorable, but I don't think there's anything wrong with feeling unhappy about an unhappy turn of events.
> So a story which paints a very real picture of life (rather than constructing a narrative) might just be unpleasant.
May be, but to someone going through similar life experiences an honest story might give their internal emotions some validation. Art can do wonders in that "I am not the only one" aspect.
There is almost nothing more Western than this kind of self-criticism: blaming oneself for not having imagined a wider range of possibilities. By the time this reflex reaches your shore, any criticism you might address to it has already been pre-assimilated into its canon. Worse: you may not even be heard, because the whole discourse is already busy talking about the voices it has supposedly suppressed.
That is the trick. It is often less interested in articulating what was actually suppressed than in endlessly reaffirming that something was suppressed. Self-criticism becomes a passion of the self: the subject punishes itself for not being the idealized Other, and in doing so expands its own range of motion.
Criticism becomes assimilation: it uproots you from the very world it claims to redeem. And the only way out of the double bind is to set off for distant shores, carrying the trial with you.
Persepolis absolutely DOES use the “hero’s journey” narrative archetype you’re claiming it avoids. The second part even ends by explicitly stating that she has grown into a different person, and is now ready to “face the world” when she leaves her family for the second time.
Indeed, the story is quite Western overall, which is perhaps unsurprising, given that the author had already been living in the West for over a decade when she wrote it.
You mean Iran had been pushing itself west/modern and was quite western by 1979. So she was raised as a young girl into a western context, despite that people now want to deny this existed.
Even back then the mullahs and islam were looked upon as an external occupation force to some extent. Now 10x worse of course, but even back then. A lot of people seem to want to see some sort of alternative/sufficiently different state/society succeed, even if that means totally falsifying history.
I kind of resent that "western" started to be used as synonym for "America". Specifically this particular schema along with insistence with happy ending is specific feature of American book writing and cinema. Non American literature is much more likely to go out of that schematic.
To whoever is downvoting this: it is not even a criticism. Just a description. When you discuss stories, Americans will frequently insist on the "hero story is the only one possible fun story" and simultaneously interpret bad ending as punishment for moral failure. French wont argue that all that often. And European literature is in general more likely not be that.
And second, using "western" as synonym for "american" wherever the author knows a lot about American and just assumes everything in Europe is exactly the same is something I noticed multiple times on HN.
I'm talking about something much broader than the saccharine happy ending motif of Disney movies.
I'm paraphrasing The Hero with a Thousand Faces which is a study of world mythology, not 20th century American storytelling. This hero story is found around the world but PARTICULARLY in descendants of the proto-indo-european culture, particularly ancient Greece and the western Roman empire.
It's not "happy endings" I'm talking about but the hero being taken out of their world, finding themselves and growing, and returning... a hero, the story of individual progress and success.
And I am saying that when I read western literature from Europe, a LOT of it was not hero journey thing.
I am saying that hero journey as you desribe it is absolutely NOT the only western narrative, if you include non american literature. And I am saying that when someone insist on that being the only narrative, they are typically american.
And someone else (who probably reads more american then me) told me even american literature actually contains other narratives too.
But do these universities not have math placement exams? Not for admissions but just before you register for your first semester classes, a 30 minute math test should be a straightforward preventative measure. I did a test like this, I assumed they were pretty universal.
Social engineering as a problem goes away when anybody can get a model to do it for them for $5. It stops being possible, it's really the bank's problem when they can't have a minimum wage call center or a robot responsible for people's data.
Yes. There will be a few high-profile incidents, and then institutions will be forced to stop performing administrative actions based on people’s word.
This outcome is massively detrimental to humanity at large. By eliminating the human factor from support, you make it impossible to get support in edge cases that fall outside of the pre-planned bureacratic process. Everyone already hates that Google can arbitrarily ban anybody they please with no way to get in contact with a human, and you want to extend that to banks in control of people's life savings?
I don't think anyone is saying that. You will just need to be authenticated before giving any commands to the bank. Maybe some type of TOTP that you can use over the phone or in person.
That is the exact problem. You have identification tied to your device. Your device is lost or stolen. Now you can't access your bank account. Human support can help you out by finding flexible ways to ascertain your identity. This is the angle social engineers exploit, tricking employees trying to be helpful to abuse that area of flexibility. You can take away human judgment and all flexibility in the system, and that will make the system more secure, but it also results in a deeply uncaring system that makes life harder for people. Rigid bureacracy doesn't do a good job of accounting for a house fire destroying everything you own or your e-mail provider shutting down; these are fringe cases but they do happen and there are positive resolutions available as long as human discretion is involved.
Credit cards are lost and stolen all the time, and it isn't really a big deal when it happens, since charges can usually be easily reversed. This does not sound like the same scenario. It also doesn't account for people who lack friends/family nearby or at all.
> it breaks and you were too cool to provision a backup
If we're relying on the average person to back things up properly, this idea is doomed from the start.
> Everyone already hates that Google can arbitrarily ban people
Yet they’re still the predominate search engine, sadly the concerns of the few don’t interest monopolistic profit seekers without forced regulations, think how airlines are legally required to give refunds for delayed flights, there’s a reason it required legislation
EU max credit card transaction fees are 0.3%, in the US they can be up to 4%.
It just doesn't cost 4% of a transaction to handle the exchange of funds. Just wealth transfer to finance people and the upper class who take advantage of credit card perks.
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