Well no, as a consumer you need to feel comfortable that you know how to get your money back if there's a problem with your purchase, as a merchant you need similar protections and a stable cost model, and as a bank you need an income model to cover all the costs and risks associated with processing the transaction. Moving the money is the easy part and is not the main set of problems that the card payment schemes have solved.
I've never understood this insurance defense of high payment card fees (percentages instead of flat fees).
If it is a truly valuable insurance for the shoppers, why is it not opt-in?
My anecdotal experience from EU is that no-one even knows chargebacks exists or how it works and if this was turned into a transparent honest insurance, prompted via a question on the payment terminal/online checkout such as "Do you want to pay 1-3% to insure this purchase?" the vast majority of people would click no on the vast majority of purchases because there is already inherent trust involved between the merchant and the shopper.
Now add the chargeback pains that merchants go through for credit card frauds and you have what appears to be a sickly system where both shoppers and merchants lose, with the only winners being visa/mastercard & the acquiring and issuing banks they cooperate with.
If I buy a burger from a restaurant and its bad, i tell all my friends and i don't go back. I don't need insurance.
If I buy a service on steam, i already trust valve fully for those smaller amount sizes, I don't need insurance.
My gut feeling is that >99,9% of purchases made via payment cards are not relevant to insure meaning following the simpler risk model of cash for those would work just fine.
Chargebacks are indeed quite detrimental to merchants as they are the ones paying it. And if you have bad customers(maybe competition is trying to put you out of the business), you might get deep into red quite fast. Usually it is anywhere between 20 and 50 euros, which is crazy when it is just a reverse of the bank transfer which is the tech in the background. Like if you run a small online store and you sell 10€ items where you make a 5€ pre-tax profit, having a 20€ chargeback on such sale can be really dangerous.
There is no difference to the bank transfer(as that is what all of this is just wrapping inside). If you are paying with a debit card, you have the same "protections" as basic bank transfer. And from personal experience, the bank is near useless and you won't be even able to call your card company.
On the other hand, credit cards are something else. Those are essentially short-term loans that are insured. As there are many parties involved that profit from you use of these, there indeed is a lot of protection in this case. But credit cards are very niche part of online card payments and mostly it is a USA thing.
> Moving the money is the easy part and is not the main set of problems that the card payment schemes have solved.
Nailed it. Anyone can move money.
As a consumer, I always opt to pay for credit card where available. The safeties provided to me facilitated by everyone in the network – from issuer to acquirer and everyone in between – is exactly why. I don't want to consider waiting 12 months in line at small claims to get back $200 sent over Interac for services that were never provided by a shoddy business owner.
The cost of those consumer safeties and convenience is incurred by the merchant. This is the cost of business.
When you buy something from Amazon, who protects your purchases, Amazon or the credit card company?
This "insurance" could be offloaded to a neutral third party that isn't controlled by the credit cards. Often, you purchase additional protection insurance on your big ticket items. This could easily be extended to cover whatever credit cards would have been relied upon in the past.
> This "insurance" could be offloaded to a neutral third party that isn't controlled by the credit cards.
I had not considered this. My first thought is how technically and operationally complex it would be for an insurer to underwrite these transactions "on-the-fly" from merchants they don't know, but it is probably a great idea.
I don't have a makefile example, but I do functionally the same thing with shell scripts.
I let GitHub actions do things like the initial environment configuration and the post-run formatting/annotation, but all of the actual work is done by my scripts:
wow, maybe it's just that I have as little greek as gaelic, but Homer's mad flow gave me the same vibes as https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=8Sf0htzbMKk&t=34s (composed ~2750 years later, and to be honest, these lads are not exactly under the aegis of Athena Glaukopis — if anyone's, Dionysus Acratophorus)
Yes! Many of the responses here are intellectual, missing something more earthy. In particular, hearing Lombardo reading from his translation of the Iliad [0] stirred me deeply. For sure I'm going to find a print of his version.
To me, that is exactly the kind of challenging question that a journalist or editorial writer should be asking and answering. You have two opposing sides essentially accusing the other of disenfranchising votes using different mechanisms.
However, despite all the crowing about voter fraud, there's yet to be produced any evidence of voter fraud rising to even within a few orders of magnitude required to change an election. While there's no such thing as perfect security, a single-digit number of fraudulent votes in districts (or even whole states) accounting for hundreds of thousands to millions of votes is about as good as you can hope for.
On the other hand, voter suppression is being done quite brazenly out in the open -- the most notorious of which includes reducing the number of and moving the locations of polling stations in districts where the "wrong" people vote, resulting in many of them having to to wait hours to vote and some even having to travel long distances to get there.
In that context, treating the two as equal, opposing concerns is nothing short of propaganda.
That’s the point of asking the question, to clarify the difference. I’m sorry but adopting the attitude that the question itself isn’t allowed to be asked, or simply by asking the question somehow invalidates the person asking the question doesn’t get you to a clarification. You would continue to perpetuate the belief by being unwilling to have the public conversation.
>…within a few orders of magnitude required to change an election…
Bush was elected in 2000 by a margin of just over 500 votes in a state with a population at the time of 16M. So I really don’t buy into the argument that voter fraud isn’t a problem because where it has been discovered has not reached the level of actually changing an election. The right amount fraud in swing districts in a swing state could make a difference in a close election.
If somebody with a criminal history gets caught red-handed, and their response is "no, you're actually the criminal," justice is not giving equal time to both claims. (Nonetheless, the issue was indeed investigated, and there were even a few recounts, but no effect on the election was found. Of course, getting an answer was never the point. The point was FUD.)
> "no, you're actually the criminal," justice is not giving equal time to both claims
It is if both sides are doing something criminal. Which…admittedly is happening. Your argument seems to be centered around “Even though voter fraud happens, it hasn’t affected anything yet, so we should ignore it in favor of this other thing which is more important to my side.”
That argument is akin to “even though my neighbor is a burglar, he hasn’t robbed my house yet, so there is no reason to lock my doors when I go away”
Given the numbers, every single election has some degree of fraud. It is not really possible to prevent 100% within our current system, and any time it's been investigated, the number of fraudulent votes has been extremely low. Moreover, there is no concerted effort by any political party to cast illegal votes.
In contrast, the Republican party is loudly all-in on gerrymandering and other disenfranchising rat-fuckery.
I made something with a similar inspiration recently: https://mwenge.github.io/blog/io10.html
The idea is that you create data pipelines and operate on each step in the language of your choice.
