39,433 karma · joined March 30, 2012
Having the merchant manually process every payment using the bank-specific app on their personal phone isn't it.
But the disadvantage of bureaucratic authoritarianism is even larger in a low-trust society where everyone is in it for themselves, because then you can't trust the bureaucrats not to be corrupt and they're still sitting on a monopoly.
Which is to say, what you always want is a high trust society and what you never want is a monopolist.
It seems like the primary thing they actually do is currency conversion, which a) isn't strictly required (e.g. plenty of small US merchants might hardly notice if they only accepted payment in US dollars), and b) could just as easily be transparently provided as an optional service by either of the card issuing bank or the merchant bank for cardholders or merchants who expect a non-trivial number of foreign currency transactions.
Construction cost per unit goes up a little, but land cost per unit goes down a lot, because you buy the same plot of land and put N times more units on it.
I don't really get how this can be possible. A person can definitely get their card out of their wallet in less time than it takes the cashier to finish scanning their items.
Obviously if the customer is confused then it can take arbitrarily long, but how is a phone less confusing than a card? People don't get to the register only to realize that their card's battery is run down or it's the first time they've used a phone for payments and then they want to stand there for 15 minutes in front of you trying to set it up.
Why do we need my bank to send money to your bank via Visa or the Federal Reserve or any such thing, instead of having my bank send money directly to your bank? All they need to do is both support the same openly specified protocol for transferring money.
A protocol to support decentralized payments is a hobby project for an individual. You give each institution an identifier (e.g. their domain name) and each institution gives each customer an account number. If you're account 123 at Chase then you sign in as #123@chase.com, tell Chase you want to send $5 to #456@bankofamerica.com, they send the money and Bank of America tells their customer they have a new deposit. If you want to collect money from someone, you tell your bank to send their bank a payment request and they can either approve it manually (e.g. so you can deliver the goods for a one-time purchase) or configure some rules for which accounts get approved automatically up to some threshold amount (e.g. for recurring payments). Also no reason for banks in different countries not to all support the same protocol.
That doesn't require a central bank or any centralized third party payments intermediary. All it requires is for banks to know how to send money to other banks, which they obviously already do and the specific implementation of that isn't even relevant to the customer-facing payments protocol. So how does this not exist? It can't be that no one wants it, so it's got to be that someone (e.g. Visa/MasterCard) doesn't want it.
Which seems especially unfavorable in context, since "the ability to perform mass surveillance on American citizens" is naturally the sort of thing they ought not be allowed to do.
The impeachment process requires a majority of the House and two thirds of the Senate, and then any replacement would have to be nominated by the President rather than Congress. Meanwhile the existing decision stands, and even the dissenting Supreme Court Justices (if there were any) should follow it as a result of stare decisis, and might even be inclined to because removing their colleagues under those circumstances could make them uneasy.
What do you think happens if they refuse to do it?
Either nothing, or if they get sued or prosecuted for not doing it then they get brought in front of a court, and a judge who is doing their job would say that they were right not to do it.
> Me: That's not how it works.
> You: It actually is
Moreover, regardless of what the courts do, the military still shouldn't execute a law like that, because they too have the ability to refuse to violate the constitution even if Congress tells them to.
> Congress shall make no law respecting an establishment of religion, or prohibiting the free exercise thereof; or abridging the freedom of speech, or of the press; or the right of the people peaceably to assemble, and to petition the Government for a redress of grievances.
> No person shall be held to answer for a capital, or otherwise infamous crime, unless on a presentment or indictment of a Grand Jury, except in cases arising in the land or naval forces, or in the militia, when in actual service in time of war or public danger; nor shall any person be subject for the same offense to be twice put in jeopardy of life or limb; nor shall be compelled in any criminal case to be a witness against himself, nor be deprived of life, liberty, or property, without due process of law; nor shall private property be taken for public use without just compensation.
Example chosen specifically for its unambiguous unconstitutionality.
That's not how it works.
The explosion at Chernobyl wasn't actually a nuclear reaction. It was that the reactor got hot enough to separate the cooling water into hydrogen and oxygen, and then you can get a hydrogen explosion.
If the primary coolant is water. And the reactor is designed in such a way that that can happen.
Meanwhile you can use other primary coolants or other designs where that isn't a thing. There are designs that don't explode even if you lose power entirely. At which point the cost of an evacuation that the design doesn't require you to do, isn't a cost that you have to pay.
Isn't this the thing where you require something in one case but not the others?
If every oil drilling operation had to carry enough insurance to cover Deepwater Horizon and every hydroelectric dam had to carry a policy large enough for Banqiao and every solar panel factory had to insure against leaving Superfund sites that leak into the groundwater in some of the most expensive real estate in Silicon Valley then they'd be in trouble too.
> the kind of inspection+maintenance regime that's necessary for safety isn't amenable to cost reductions.
People often say things like this and then if you actually have someone go through the existing process you find out that more than half of the labor is going to inspect things that aren't actually safety-related, or some corruption is involved which is quadrupling the cost because the contractor bribed a politician to make use of their services required by law or create artificial scarcity for something which is actually important but shouldn't cost as much as it does.
Where a desktop's TDP is actually useful is for multi-thread performance, and naturally the multi-thread chart is topped by Threadrippers.
Moreover, Geekbench is rubbish in general. For example, it has Threadripper 9980X with a <50% higher multi-thread score than Ryzen 9 9950X even though it has twice the memory bandwidth and four times as many of the same cores and you have to look pretty hard to find a real multi-threaded workload where it's not significantly more than twice as fast:
https://www.phoronix.com/review/amd-threadripper-9970x-9980x...
Isn't that exactly the problem? That's your property, which you now can't sell. So it's sitting in your shed. Most people in that situation are ultimately going to chuck it in the trash, which means not only that you've been harmed, but that those rare elements aren't getting properly recycled.
> you could at least do something like what happens when you buy a pseudoephedrine product
The thing that causes grief at scale for anyone with a cold but has produced zero reduction in the availability of street drugs?
So then you inconvenience the legitimate businesses but not the ones who don't follow the law.
> Catalytic converter thefts have been decimated by similar policies.
Correlation is not causation. When you get a lot of a particular problem, people try 50 different things at once to try to make it happen less, and then it happens less. Sometimes because one of them works (but not necessarily your thing) and even more often because of reversion to the mean.
This is how we get the accumulation of bad laws. People pass something ineffective but at the same time as an unrelated reduction in the problem, and now if you want to get rid of it you have people pointing to the chance correlation.
> Street dealers are trying to run a drug business, not a goddamn copper clearinghouse.
They're empirically willing to operate a car wash or similar to launder their money, why not a scrap yard?
And they don't even have to own the business, just be willing to wait the 30 days.
Are there actually people who claim this? Microsoft has plenty of money but the premise that they use it to improve the user experience seems contrary to evidence.
When something sucks on Linux with no alternatives it's usually because most people don't use the feature you want, e.g. because there is another way to do the same thing and more people are doing it that way, and then no one bothers to make thing you want because their desire to have that is already being satisfied by something else.
Of course, one of the choices you have is to build the thing you want yourself, which is why it works out that way. The chances of someone having done that go up the more people want it to exist. When the number is low, you have to decide if you want it enough for the person who makes it for everyone to be you. And it's fine if your answer is no, but now you know why that thing doesn't exist.
Meanwhile you just create a new line of business for fences who are willing to pay cash today in exchange for a margin and then take the IOU from the legitimate scrapper and turn a profit in 30 days. Or the drug dealers take the copper as payment and then don't care about the 30 days if it means they can sell more drugs.
You can't make a commodity not worth money. At some point you have to actually catch the thieves.
Have a look here:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_most_popular_social_pl...
Can you find a US or EU-based social media platform launched in the last 15 years that isn't now a subsidiary of one of the incumbents?
The closest you can come is things like Signal or Discord that are more like messaging apps than social media, and even then both of those are more than 10 years old and both of them put together have less than 10% of Facebook's user base.
Network effects are wicked when incumbents are allowed to purposely impede interoperability.
How does it in any way "degrade" their product to allow the customer to do something with it that the customer is not required to do?
> People were fully aware of what Apple was when they bought the products, Apple didn’t trick anyone, or anything.
We can disagree about this one too. Consider what happens if a company simultaneously has no ads and prohibits ad blockers. People aren't really going to object to the prohibition on ad blockers in that case, right?
Then they introduce ads and suddenly the prohibition on ad blockers becomes relevant, but your reply is that ad blockers have always been banned. Okay, but now there are ads.
If your claim is that you can't object if something doesn't change, does that imply you do get to object every something does change?
> They also are not the sole phone OEM and they don’t have a monopoly.
They have more than 50% market share in the US. The trope that anyone who has less than 100.0% market share can't violate antitrust laws is invalid.
Moreover, "two companies together have >99% of the market" is an oligopoly the likes of which is exactly what is meant to be broken up, regardless of what the split between them is. A duopoly is not a competitive market.
> There’s nothing stopping Samsung or (especially) Google from putting more effort into their lineups to match the performance, fit and finish that Apple users like.
We're talking about competition for operating systems. The GrapheneOS Foundation isn't Samsung -- and Samsung locks their bootloaders, so they can't even use Samsung.
> The appropriate comparison would be if another OEMs OS had a messaging feature baked into their OS
Only in the sense that then they would both be engaged in anti-competitive behavior.
How do you expect the scrappers to know if something was stolen and not just some old wires you've been stuffing in a bin until you accumulate enough to justify a trip to the scrap yard?
How do you even expect to catch the scrappers who knowingly pay for stolen copper if you don't have a way to know that what they throw into the smelter was stolen?
Meanwhile if the idiots keep stealing copper from the same place over and over, is it really that hard to maybe put up some cameras or set up a sting?
"Bad thing has occurred previously, therefore nothing should be done about it"?
> If Android or Linux OEMs want to convince people to move to their ecosystem they should just produce better products that the majority of a population would actually want.
That's what they're trying to do. "OS that people would actually want" is the one that runs their existing apps on their existing hardware. That's the thing the incumbents are blocking them from doing.
"If you want to make a new OS you must first reproduce the entire hardware supply chain and replace the entire installed base of user devices with a new system that has no existing users" is basically saying that you're not allowed to do it.
> There is nothing Apple is doing to lock competitors out of the market. iMessage, Facetime? Convince customers that your option is better.
If I create a messaging app which is exactly as good as iMessage, but Apple preinstalls theirs and not mine on the majority of US phones and messaging apps have a network effect, what happens?
If I make a better messaging app, but Apple bans it from their app store which is the only way to install it on the majority of US phones and messaging apps have a network effect, what happens?
> Apple has never once advertised the OS is changeable or the ecosystem is “open”
Ma Bell never once advertised that you can use your own phone on their phone network.