> cost per unit actually goes up as buildings get larger
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.
> Tap to pay can shave off a few seconds on every transaction
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.
This is fundamentally looking at it the wrong way.
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.
The "network" part of what they do could straightforwardly be done in a decentralized way using ordinary DNS (for the parties to discover the servers of the others) and TLS. When your card issuer is Example Bank then your "card number" would be 123@example.com and the merchant or their bank knows to contact the servers at example.com to initiate a transaction for that card.
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.
If you have an open standard decentralized protocol that banks are required to support, that's the network effect solved. Merchants and anyone making the software that merchants use would want to support it because you're getting rid of Visa's fees.
> From NETs in singapore to girocard in Germany, Alipay to UPI.
Singaporean here. NETS is a shitshow of a dinosaur trying to stay relevant. They started as more of a debit card system like EFTPOS [1], but now lean more into merchant acceptance for both credit cards and QR codes. (Singapore is huge about credit card rewards, so few people want to use a debit card with PIN entry and no rewards these days.)
I think the problem with them, and many companies that focus solely on a tiny market like Singapore, is that their organisations tend to be full of comfortable dinosaurs that don't stay up to date with financial software engineering practices (I've lost money from government site transactions that were a hassle to get back), and there's a captive market because of their duopoly.
The biggest reasons they still exist are because they're a joint venture between the big 3 local banks, and our government likes their initiatives to have some competition to emulate a free market.
Pix, from its Wikipedia page, sounds like a bank account aliasing system, just like PayNow in Singapore.
Ironically it's the central bank (and associated regulations) that cause these intermediaries to exist to begin with.
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.
Zelle, from my understanding, is a “protocol” – many banks support it in their own apps. (Scare quotes because I’m not entirely sure it’s a proper well-defined protocol.)
And there’s nothing preventing PoS from supporting individual wallet apps – see e.g. WeChat Pay / Alipay in China. (Alipay+ is also a “protocol”, i.e. other banks and wallets support it.)
What I mean by protocol is that there is an RFC or equivalent and anyone who implements the spec and has a bank account can then talk to their bank using the standardized protocol. If that exists for Zelle then where's the spec?
https://api.payments.jackhenry.com/docs/zelle/overview/ Is a white label api that you, as a bank, can implement/hit. Just like your local small business vendor can choose to also take Venmo and CashApp, they can also choose to take Zelle. I've bought a burrito with Zelle before.
I’ve searched for ‘zelle spec’ and came across this line:
> Zelle® is available in over 2,400 banking and credit union apps.
so I’m pretty sure there is a spec because there is no way in hell this many banks are using ad-hoc protocols to talk to each other and/or a centralized system. But yeah, I don’t see anything published.
Chances are it’s something ISO 20022-ish. (Either that or an Excel spreadsheet.) Speaking of which...
> and has a bank account can then talk to their bank using the standardized protocol
...if you’re a big enough business, you probably can also speak ISO 20022 to your bank. If you want it on your personal account however, well, that makes two of us, but from practical standpoint what I care more about is that I can punch in an account number and send money near instantly, which Zelle seems to provide in the US (but I have to make do with whatever Wise provides, probably regular ACH judging by speeds).
Congress can do that, can't it? Why can't it? It could declare all competing religions as terrorist organisations.
Obviously it'd be immoral, unorthadox and impractical but I expect Congress has a long history of promoting and stamping out ideologies and they can do it. What little I know about the civil rights era springs to mind.
Legally, Congress cannot do that, as long as it is "respecting" some religion. It's true that the US Constitution is more used as an excuse than upheld, but at least the language is pretty plain.
In theory. The issue is we've seen exactly what happens in a Congress v. constitution showdown once the Congresspersons put their collective feet down. Congress eventually redefines the law in a way that favours them. Plain language won't stop them if they get serious; they aren't supposed to be regulating the US economy the way they do either and a lot of stuff the military-industrial complex does looks like it should be unconstitutional (like the spying and the secret courts).
On the one hand there is a clear and comforting consensus in the US that they aren't going to force religious mores on anyone. So I don't see how the Congress could or would try. But if we ever end up in a situation where the US Congress decides it wants to go straight Catholic I really don't see how it would fail. They've got far too much power and they'll eventually rotate in a compliant judiciary and then redefine what words mean so they can do it.
It is a bit difficult when dealing with such an out-there scenario, but if Congress decides the US military should do something wild then eventually the military is going to do it. The realistic protection is that by virtue of good system design there isn't a plausible scenario where Congress would want to impose Catholicism on the US population by force.
The fact that Congress is currently abdicating its responsibility does not mean that it is actually powerless. Technically, Congress has tremendous powers if it chooses to wield it. SCOTUS can try to rule a law is unconstitutional but Congress can impeach and remove justices at any time. Of course, we hope Congress members will pay the price when it comes time for reelection but at the time of this decision, as long as they can somehow remain united, Congress reigns supreme.
> Congress can impeach and remove justices at any time.
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.
It actually is, and this is why there are separate judicial, executive and legislative branches to put those checks and balances on each other instead.
Your argument is that if Congress passes a law that says the military can summarily execute non-Catholics, the military should have the ability to do that, i.e. the courts or the public shouldn't stop them?
> 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.
No, not at all. How did you get "the courts shouldn't stop them" from "that's why there's a separate judicial branch to impose the checks and balances"??? That's literally the opposite of what I said.
> The DOW should (and does) have ability to do anything and everything that Congress has said they can do.
> 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.
I chose to read the comment charitably. The natural understanding of "everything X says they can do" is limited by external restrictions on what X is supposed to be able to authorize.
That reading would make it a meaningless tautology. They're allowed to do anything they're allowed to do.
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.
> Do you think in the military you can just be like “Yeah, I don’t feel it today, I’m going to take s sick day”?
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.
> What do you think happens if they refuse to do it?
In war time they can be shot on the spot for disobeying orders.
> 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.
I think you confuse the military with corporate environments. Worst thing that can happen in the private sector is that you get fired.
In the military you can spend the rest of your life in prison if “you did not feel like obeying orders”. The military is built ob discipline and followimg orders, not Gen Z mood swings.
But now you're using older designs to argue against not building newer ones.
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.
> Insuring against a major accident is prohibitively expensive
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.
We get to blame OpenAI et al for this one again. AMD is using their current allocation of TSMC 3nm production to make Epyc rather than Ryzen so Ryzen is jumping from 4nm to 2nm. But 2nm Ryzen is still a few months out, and the 4nm current ones are naturally at a disadvantage when Qualcomm is using 3nm.
"Desktop chip" hasn't been a meaningful variable for single-thread performance in more than a decade. A single core can't use more than a given amount of power or it would melt and laptops have that much in their power budget.
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:
Yes, where desktops differ is not so much the chips but rather the cooling capability. You have the space to have proper air flow and water cooling etc. So that do give quite a bit of performance.
> Arrest and imprison the fences and scrappers that pay cash to buy copper off the tweakers.
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?
They don't need to know if something was stolen. All they need to do is require an ID, not pay in cash, and pay 30 days after receiving the merchandise.
At which point people with legitimate copper to sell start going somewhere else because the repeat players resent having 30 days worth of interest stolen from them every month and the one-time sellers don't trust an IOU from a company they've never done business with before.
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.
> At which point people with legitimate copper to sell start going somewhere else
Make it required by law, and they won't be able to go somewhere else. Legitimate businesses with scrap to sell aren't going to risk committing a felony to get paid below market value 30 days sooner (Not to mention that many businesses are used to getting paid on a delay, and selling scrap for pennies is a tiny portion of their revenue flow).
Catalytic converter thefts have been decimated by similar policies. As it turns out, there are plenty of hoops that you can introduce that aren't a serious impediment to b2b transactions (which make up the overwhelming, massive majority of legitimate trade in this space), but are a serious impediment to tweakers selling stolen property.
> 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
Street dealers are trying to run a drug business, not a goddamn copper clearinghouse. If they wanted to run one, they wouldn't be out on the street slinging meth.
The engine block in an old car blew up so I ripped it completely apart and sold the parts online and in person to various people. I tried to sell my own catalytic converter to a shop I found online that was some kind of on-the-up-and-up licensed buyer.
What I didn’t know is they wouldn’t buy it from me if I wasn’t a licensed seller. I was irritated but realized it probably was for the best. And it worked, I still have it sitting in my shed.
I don’t know how to make that reality happen with copper, which is clearly much more abundant than cat converters are, but I imagine you could at least do something like what happens when you buy a pseudoephedrine product, they scan your ID and track the frequency of your purchases. Too much too quick and you’re on a short list.
I don’t see a feasiae way to invert that, selling copper requires an ID and infrastructure for maintaining a database of sellers, amount, and frequency, but I imagine if you started at the top and worked your way down it could become a regulated commodity to sell… somehow.
Some states (Alabama, for instance, as I'm told by a contractor business operator friend who lives in it), requires you to either have a receipt from a licensed contractor who replaced whatever you're scrapping, or a business license to sell scrap copper.
I'm not wedded to any particular solution that will stop tweakers from getting cash from scrap yards no questions asked. Any mixture of them will work.
FWIW, I've asked him if the state mandating a 30 day delay on payments, or banning cash transactions for it would affect him any. His answer was 'not at all'.
requiring some kind of license doesn't really fix the problem of theft at all. it just adds layers of middlemen to collect up the copper from the layer below and further legitimize it. so it does reduce the street price for stolen copper, but since copper and stolen bikes (which also have almost no value now) are one of the few income sources available, it could conceivably increase the volume of stolen copper.
The middleman need to be doing incredible volume for it to be worth the margin and the risk, and finding and shutting them down is very easy, because:
- They are trivial to find, because they need a large, physical, business presence. This sort of trade doesn't happen under a highway overpass, or in an alley off 3rd.
- There are paper trails that point to them from any legitimate businesses upstream of them.
- Anyone lower in the criminal chain will happily flip on them.
Is argument over this an example of learned helplessness, a desire for society to do nothing and declare failure, or just arguing for the sake of contrarianism?
We have evidence of trying it with catalytic converters, and it worked. Catching every thief is hard. Catching one thief, and having them point to their fence is easy.
no, its not really learned helplessness, and I don't know the industry that well, but I move a certain amount of scrap and there's methheads all over the neighborhood where I work. once they started being more careful at the scrapyard the tweakers started selling their copper to a guy I call 'mr froggy'. he's around a lot of the time, and he's a larger scale copper thief. I don't know who mr froggy sells to.
> And it worked, I still have it sitting in my shed.
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?
99,999% of people won't pull their car apart to sell the parts individually. We just take the whole car to the scrap yard.
So even though the ~17 people who take the time to do this are slightly inconvenienced by not being able to sell that one part, I'd say it's easily worth it given the millions of people who are not having their catalytic converters stolen any more.
> Make it required by law, and they won't be able to go somewhere else.
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.
In CA we had a clothes dryer motor replaced. As a result we were left with the old part.
I took it to a nearby recycling center, and they wanted my drivers license to pay me the $0.58 it was worth. I declined and just let them reap their windfall. I imagine I would have got the 58c in cash, that’s how it works with plastic bottles.
There is a very strong link with higher prices for copper with more wire theft, as anyone would expect. You pay more for it you get more of it.
There is a strong link between lower fentanyl prices leading to increased usage and overdosing. Areas with cheaper fentanyl experience more crime not less, any decrease in individual criminality is more than offset by an increase in the percentage of users. You know we live in a world where this data is already available.
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.
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