Uruguayan artist blacklisted by PayPal because her name contains “iran”
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Totally arbitrary polices, they say 'they need this' then it doesn't work, they need more, or it takes 3 weeks, but they can't tell you how long.
We need a new bit of regulation for the new era which requires companies to provide clarity on all operational aspects and timelines etc..
I am trying to implement payments on my site. I tried PayPal but found Stripe to be easier to deal with.
I am end user, and for me paypal usual works fine, and I don't have to worry too much about entering my CC and personal info all over net.
I like the fact, that only Paypal has to know my real name and address, and not every other website I migh want to purchase something from. I don't think there is an option for that with Stripe.
Unless you mean just credit card processing, then sure Stripe can probably do better. But at least for some like me not supporting paypal means site needs to clear higer bar for me to buy something from you.
PayPal is considerably more 'interventionist' with sales, and they seek to protect buyers etc so it can be a huge problem sometimes.
Stripe is more of a classical processor.
Of course Stripe does not offer a user oriented alternative to the PayPal product.
PayPal has many undocumented processes which make it very challenging to deal with.
Stripe meanwhile bricked my account after misidentifying the category of business we were in, and refused to provide anything more than a form email when I reached out with documentation as to our SIC code and business practices.
We switched to a FirstData reseller ultimately and pay $0.05 per transaction plus 0.2% over interchange now, its the least I have ever paid for card processing and the money is in my account next day. Stripe used to take a week to process payouts, often longer for bank account payments.
Have now been using Transferwise for a couple of years and can highly attest that it's the way things should be for an international payment processor (they don't of course offer web payments without putting a card number in, but still amazing).
Haha, I'd love to hear from the engineer who wrote the feature.
Liberal estimate of missed earnings multiplied by 10 paid to the victim. Some fininte number of offences before the CEO spends a fortnight in jail. Computers are not and should not be a shield for taking full responsibility.
I think it says enough about the industry that there's so many people who are dead afraid of rigorous quality standards.
Given the amount of software outages on this planet, if software engineers were building planes they'd collectively fall out of the sky once per week
Killing people just because you want to build something "more exciting". Enough to make one's gorge rise.
See, snarky comments like that are easy, not particulalry clever, amusing nor helpful and bring down the tone of discussion. Maybe make your point a little better than that here?
And you've outlined many good reasons in that second paragraph for that.
It's pretty radical to suggest that we have a situation where you should avoid consequence for it.
Where on earth are you seeing "off with their heads?" Not from me.
Are you really supporting financial incentive to make and not fix errors in your own favour? Should we apply that principle to bank tellers and shop assistants too or only if a computer is involved? Does it need to be a statistical algorithm? Or is an if statement good enough to shield you?
I think maybe you're having a completely different argument with someone else?
In principle, imagine your government wrecking your business doing the exact same thing. Hey why not the IRS! Equality before the law.
No consequences. No restitution. The algorithm has spoken. Because your principle has been established and you have to stick to it.
(Goodhart's law)
All these comments are like 1960s level of conversation around safety engineering. Everyone thought back then that if you just ramped up punishments, things would get better. Turns out they didn't.
Anyway, to save you from getting it from an inferior source (me), I'll give you some good ones:
- The Field Guide to Understanding Human Error by Sidney Dekker
- The Challenger launch decision : risky technology, culture, and deviance at NASA by Diane Vaughn
You don't have to but you can also read how the FAA only pursues civil actions in severe cases. The equivalent penalty for a thing like this would be the lowest level action, either administrative action (pretty much a notice and a record on a file) or require proof of correction.
Maybe the thing we should actually issue fines for is commenting on subjects without first reading about how they're handled well. Maybe 10x the hourly wage of each person who read it. Yeah. That'll be good. Comments will probably be great then.
There were consequences for the Challenger disaster - there was a full, televised enquriy. Feynman was there. That's a pretty deep and expensive consequence. Obviously NASA differs from Paypal. Beyond that I'm pretty sure those involved would feel consequence about their colleagues having died. Total sociapathy at that level is relatively rare in my experience. This is a quite different thing to make peace with to screwing some very small percentage of customers.
To apply exactly what I said to _this_ case the consequences are: Estimate the loss to this person, 10k seems like a reasonable liberal guesstimate but yes, actual data would be better to get a harder number. Paypal pay her $100k as compensation. She's happy and paypal have a cost function to optimise sesibly. That's a start on proper incentive.
Then if they do it more than N times then they're not taking the consequences seriously and they are only optimising that cost function considering breach as merely a business expense with no regard for ruining people. Someone needs to have a real, non-financial consequence for making a decision like that wittingly or unwittingly. The CEO is good because the buck stops there. It's his or her job to make sure that kind of "we'll screw over this many people because it's in our financial interests not to fix that" does not happen.
Now we can discuss what the value of N should be. Should it be 10, 100, 1000? What should constitute a breach?
Nowhere is a guillotine part of this. I can't actually see /anything/ you've argued a part of this.
I see the outraged comments as being yours. You seem utterly outraged at my holding an opinion I do not hold and did not advance.
Washington does not execute people and certainly not for misdemeanors.
How do I know? I'm Iranian and have experienced the wildest blocking systems.
I was playing around with timezone once and set my timezone to tehran. My credit card company blocked my account and I couldn't get it back until i faxed a notarized form.