You definitely don't have to be rich to get a zero annual fee card. Its actually the rich who do tend to pay the annual fees since those cards usually have lower interest rates, tie in with things like airport VIP lounge access and other such benefits that us peasants will mostly never get to see.
The bank account is a totally different story though. Those do get cheaper and cheaper the more you have in them. Someone who typically runs $1000 balance is going to be losing a LOT of money just for having it open. Unfortunately its hard to do much of anything without a bank account these days between ubiquitous debit cards and direct deposit paychecks so as usual, the poor get screwed while the rich get to slide.
If you're walking away with the thing, then it hasn't been "provided" yet, legally speaking. The only situation where the goods could be "provided" prior to payment is something like a restaurant or bar where you're actually consuming the good on-premises before paying.
If you're walking out with the item physically in your hand and you didn't pay for it, its a cut and dry case of theft regardless of what excuse you come up with. I can't go to Walmart, pick myself up a vacuum cleaner and expect to walk out of it when they refuse to take my Indian rupees. "Well I offered to pay for it! That's good enough right!?"
What about the case where you didn't see the "cash only" sign and you don't have enough bills on you? You're kind of in the same situation.
But regardless, restaurants are still free to not accept cash as payment.. they just would have to accept the occasional loss like that, and would probably treat it as a dine-and-dash.. not worth the cost to pursue it but you won't be welcome back a second time.
Nah that 2.5% is a service fee. You could argue that its too high perhaps, but they are providing a service for it.
The closer thing to a "tax" is bank fees, where you're literally paying them to keep your money.. and they're generally loaning and/or investing your money as well, and of course you don't get any return on that. So you get a quarter percent interest.. and then charged $13.00 just to have the account open. Meaning just to break even you need to have $5200 in your account at all times (or whatever rate your bank uses of course.)
Banks and credit card companies do a lot of other shady shit too. I discovered the hard way that if you have even one cent of balance on your account at the end of the month, they will charge you interest based on the maximum amount you ever had on the card during the entire month. So if you buy something for $1000.01 on December 1, then put $1000 on the card that same day thinking the 1 cent won't matter.. well it does. I ended up getting charged effectively something like 400% interest relative to the actual overdue balance in my case. And somehow that's legal.
Also, if you buy something on a Saturday and put in a payment same day.. the purchase gets applied immediately but the payment doesn't get applied until the following Monday. Which normally is fine, but if Saturday happens to be the 30th of the month.. well lets just say I found that out the hard way too. Somehow that's also legal.
Both of those instances were Visa by the way, though from all I hear that's standard industry practice and has been for a long time.. but nobody thinks to mention it until they get bit in the ass and have zero recourse beyond just ranting as I'm doing now. (Well that's not true. I'm sure its buried somewhere in their 300 pages of illegible usage agreement.. most of those things could be replaced with a single page that just said "FUCK YOU" in giant bold letters and be just as meaningful and accurate to anyone who isn't a lawyer.)
And they really have no incentive to compete on price. Adoption rates in whatever jurisdiction are far, far, far more important in most cases. Paying 2.5% instead of 3% isn't great if you have to gut 20-30% of your potential client base to save that extra half point.
Which is why Visa dominates, Mastercard is more than a few steps behind in most places and Discovery/Amex are really only useful in the US -- Visa went balls out a couple decades ago pushing their services into countries all around the world and now you can use your Visa -- at least at bank ATMs to withdraw some local currency -- pretty much anywhere on the planet.
So consumers will almost certainly have a Visa (they might have others as well and maybe even prefer the others, but they almost certainly have a Visa as well.) Meaning as a merchant, if I have to choose just one CC company to partner with, Visa is probably going to be my first choice. (Luckily there's rarely any reason merchants can't accept any number of competing cards so they rarely have to make that choice.. at least in North America..)
restricting the behavior of players who would otherwise act in their own best interests
WTF are you talking about? I don't believe any of the "players" are forced to take the deal, nor are they even forced to work with Visa if they'd prefer to deal with Mastercard or Amex or Discovery or whoever.
And who are you to say whether its in my own best interests? If my store does basically no cash sales anyway then taking a free $10k most certainly is within my best interests. If I do 100k in cash and very little card sales, then it probably isn't. I still get to decide. There's nothing restricting my freedom to choose.
government-backed cash as a competitor
Wait, aren't you zealots supposed to want the government to butt out of your free markets? By typical zealot logic (such as applied to the municipal broadband debate,) you should be thrilled that the government is getting kicked out of the market!
the markets would likely succeed and the merchants would still take cash
What markets? No market theory I've ever heard of made any significant distinction between paper dollars vs electronic dollars (or vs coin dollars or vs yen or well basically anything else.. your intro to economics textbook might use dollars in the examples but the theory is agnostic to the actual form of currency -- as long as it is a currency and not a barter trade.)
might go negotiate their own private deals with Visa
Well one of the other replies to your rant says Visa doesn't do that, and since I don't have knowledge of Visa's practices I'm just going to believe them.. but even if they did do that.. since when has negotiating deals not been part of a free market?
"Shop somewhere else"
Yes it is. There is zero onus on my shop to serve you. I can refuse service for any reason I damned well please.
far too much burden on the consumer
Not my problem. Is it too much burden on the consumer if I refuse them service when they try to pay with Indian rupees? Those are perfectly fine government-backed notes (albeit a different country's government but you weren't specific.) Of course not you'd say its their problem to go to a money changer. Same deal. Go get yourself a prepaid card if you really really want my products but refuse to get an actual credit or debit card.
threatens the viability of these government-backed notes
Again, not my problem. If the government doesn't like it its up to them to do something about it. But again I'm wondering why you're so interested in the government getting involved this time around.
the public has not affirmatively agreed to.
If the public doesn't agree to it, then companies choosing to take Visa's deal with soon find themselves out of business. You not agreeing to it is not the same as "the public" not agreeing to it.
don't even have a choice.
Yes they do. They can go somewhere else. Or live without my product. Or, as I noted above, go buy a prepaid card. They're sold in kiosks at practically every shopping mall.
"Cardless not welcome in our restaurant" simply should not fly.
There's a very big difference between "I was born with dark skin, boobs, or other historically discriminated against feature" and "I'm too lazy to go down the street and get a prepaid card." And if you're legitimately too broke to get a bank card or a prepaid credit card, you probably can't afford anything being sold at a place that's decided cash isn't worth their effort anymore.
So you get home and post on Facebook about how you just bought the cutest pair of jeans with your cash.. We traded our privacy for convenience long, long ago.
China's a bit of a different case though of course where privacy implications aren't just "we'll target more ads at you" so much as "we'll disappear you and maybe your family as well." Of course that's offset by the culture being well used to having to mind their tongues and their actions in case big brother is watching, so having to apply caution in one more area of life isn't exactly a stretch..
Walmart isn't likely to do something like that no. But those trendy LA fashion shops where you can go to buy a shirt for $1500? Those kind of places are where these trends start. I mean if you walked in with a half mill stack and offered to buy out their entire store they likely wouldn't say no but for your average person coming in and just purchasing things normally.. those kind of semi-affluent folk are far more likely to be cashless than cardless anyway.
Visa cares about them, since they're usually the one who picks up the tab when their cards are used fraudulently. Which is why card security shot went from "just sign the slip" to chips and PINs and whatever else in short order once ecommerce took off and nabbing CC numbers was easy money. (Some places will still take just a signature of course but they're getting fewer and fewer by the year, at least up here in Canada.. I've heard the US is behind us on that front but I don't have first hand knowledge so I can't say for sure where it stands down there these days.)
There's a lot of reasons to not take cash.. security being the primary one. If you have no cash on premises, then your cash can't be stolen (either by robbers or by unscrupulous staff.)
But there are also smaller benefits like not having to have a cash drawer (saving counter space if you're in a small building,) not having to count and reconcile the cash against the sales (which can be time consuming if you've made a lot of sales, meaning you're having to pay your staff for additional hours.) Not having to maintain floats for change, not having to count and roll change to deposit at the bank, etc.
Basically, they're paying Visa 3% or whatever the rate is these days to save a lot of hassle and headaches (and getting a $10k payout doesn't tend to turn people away either.) At the cost of not being able to serve the (small, and shrinking) number of people who don't carry any form of credit or debit.. especially if you're trying to pass yourself off as even remotely high-end and specifically targeting people of moderate affluence and above.
The same would be true if you only carried cards and went into a store that would only take cash. And people who don't carry cash are a lot more common these days than people who don't carry at least one credit or debit card at all times.
Trouble with that is that it then places the burden on the 911 operators to determine whether you need a "high capability" or "low capability" ambulance, and all they have to go on is whatever you tell them so there's a very high chance that they'll make the wrong call given that some people freak out over a hang nail while others have half a limb chopped off and think it'll be fine and finish whatever they were doing before they even bother calling.
To some degree of course, the same argument could be made against an Uber driver having to take someone to the hospital -- they'd have to decide on the spot whether they'll take the fare or call an actual ambulance (and even more wait time for the patient.) But the hospitals can't control that one so there's not much to be done about it short of Uber blanket refusing to take people to the hospital at all and throwing the onus back on the ambulances.
Since journalists weren't scientists so.. basically always, assuming you only ever read the newspaper stories and don't care to dig into the actual papers and whatnot for yourself. It probably doesn't help that the major publishing organizations for research papers call themselves "journals," even though they have nothing to do with journalism in the newspaper sense of the word. I'm sure there's some historical reason for that but its certainly a bit weird by today's common usage of the words.
The Chinese system goes way beyond school zones. Like to the point where you (meaning the poor classes of course) can't legally even live in an area not designated by your Hukou. This is of course because of ancient laws meant to keep peasants actually on the land doing their job (enriching the landowners..)
The CCP is actually in the process of changing things a bit because those rules are starting to cause them problems as farming becomes more and more mechanized and they need workers in the cities & factories rather than in the fields.. but they're likely only going to replace them with new rules that sound just as ridiculous to those of us who are used to having things like freedom.
The ghost cities were a failure but I don't know if I'd call them an "epic" failure. They weren't primarily built to house people. They were primarily built to stimulate the construction industry (and thus the economy,) and to that extent they were moderately successful even if they've become a bit of an embarrassment after the fact.
Which is where Tesla's coming in with their massive battery installations.. and likely other companies soon enough given Tesla's success with them (though I don't know the economics yet but that will come..) The batteries can balance out the unpredictability in near real-time, and compensate for the biggest drawback of renewables.
Of course its not all upsides. There's extra space required to house all of those batteries, you have to account for the manufacturing of the batteries when determining the relative cost of renewables vs traditional power generation, and of course they're very new so its possible that we haven't yet discovered all of the potential failure modes that could arise when we start relying on them to large extents like that.
And with the way governments around the world have been going in the past few years with regard to mass surveillance, failing to at least consider the absolute would be naive.. sometimes even when you are presented with a boundary.
That's kind of my point. Its not easy, even for a human, to distinguish a 17 year old from an 18 year old based on pure visual clues. But other than extreme cases of precocious puberty its usually pretty easy for a human to tell a 10 year old from an 18 year old. Meaning that at least in principle, the latter should be doable by a smart enough AI (which is not saying such an AI is necessarily easy to build of course. Just that it should be possible based on how easy it is for us humans to do the job.)
There's something admirable in getting rich. But of course "we" tend to confuse wealth earned with wealth inherited and treat both groups as simply "the rich." Only one of those groups actually deserves it.
No. We can make systems that behave like they have negative mass. But that's not the same thing. Here is a layman-level video about it.
Energy is easier to think about in a way since we have a defined ground state to work from -- a vacuum at absolute zero. Normal energy of course is any deviation above that state. Negative energy would be a deviation below that state. How can you get below a ground state? Well the only real way is if the ground state is not an actual ground state. In calculus terms, what we see as the ground state now is actually a local minimum but not an absolute minimum.
Of course the problem there is even if that's true, and you find a way to get below our local minimum.. you'd probably destroy the universe as it snaps itself down to the new minimum you've found. So that's not great.
Obviously even with that loose description, there's some caveats. In particular, we don't know with any degree of accuracy what happens when we go smaller than the limits of quantum mechanics. Where does the "borrowed" energy come from for virtual particles? Why do they have to return it? And why is there such a mathematically concise relationship between how much they borrow and how quickly it has to be returned? We know the math works (by testing it intensely,) but not even the smartest scientists in the world can answer the "why" questions. So its possible that whatever we're borrowing that energy from does indeed briefly get what we would consider to be negative energy. Not that it would be any use to us even if we somehow proved such a thing happens.. we can't break the laws of nature no matter how well we describe them.
Its a bit deeper than that, in the sense that stuff is changing so fast that the guy on top of everything today might be the troglodyte literally tomorrow because something happened somewhere else and he wasn't aware of it.
Today's "unknown alloy" may well be something Dupont or 3M just figured out how to synthesize last year and by next year will be the building material of choice after they've ramped up production and marketing.
Slashdot Mirror
You definitely don't have to be rich to get a zero annual fee card. Its actually the rich who do tend to pay the annual fees since those cards usually have lower interest rates, tie in with things like airport VIP lounge access and other such benefits that us peasants will mostly never get to see.
The bank account is a totally different story though. Those do get cheaper and cheaper the more you have in them. Someone who typically runs $1000 balance is going to be losing a LOT of money just for having it open. Unfortunately its hard to do much of anything without a bank account these days between ubiquitous debit cards and direct deposit paychecks so as usual, the poor get screwed while the rich get to slide.
Quite pompous. Luckily for the story (and unluckily for you and your daughter,) there is no shortage of pompous people in the world.
If you're walking away with the thing, then it hasn't been "provided" yet, legally speaking. The only situation where the goods could be "provided" prior to payment is something like a restaurant or bar where you're actually consuming the good on-premises before paying.
If you're walking out with the item physically in your hand and you didn't pay for it, its a cut and dry case of theft regardless of what excuse you come up with. I can't go to Walmart, pick myself up a vacuum cleaner and expect to walk out of it when they refuse to take my Indian rupees. "Well I offered to pay for it! That's good enough right!?"
What about the case where you didn't see the "cash only" sign and you don't have enough bills on you? You're kind of in the same situation.
But regardless, restaurants are still free to not accept cash as payment.. they just would have to accept the occasional loss like that, and would probably treat it as a dine-and-dash.. not worth the cost to pursue it but you won't be welcome back a second time.
Nah that 2.5% is a service fee. You could argue that its too high perhaps, but they are providing a service for it.
The closer thing to a "tax" is bank fees, where you're literally paying them to keep your money.. and they're generally loaning and/or investing your money as well, and of course you don't get any return on that. So you get a quarter percent interest.. and then charged $13.00 just to have the account open. Meaning just to break even you need to have $5200 in your account at all times (or whatever rate your bank uses of course.)
Banks and credit card companies do a lot of other shady shit too. I discovered the hard way that if you have even one cent of balance on your account at the end of the month, they will charge you interest based on the maximum amount you ever had on the card during the entire month. So if you buy something for $1000.01 on December 1, then put $1000 on the card that same day thinking the 1 cent won't matter.. well it does. I ended up getting charged effectively something like 400% interest relative to the actual overdue balance in my case. And somehow that's legal.
Also, if you buy something on a Saturday and put in a payment same day.. the purchase gets applied immediately but the payment doesn't get applied until the following Monday. Which normally is fine, but if Saturday happens to be the 30th of the month.. well lets just say I found that out the hard way too. Somehow that's also legal.
Both of those instances were Visa by the way, though from all I hear that's standard industry practice and has been for a long time.. but nobody thinks to mention it until they get bit in the ass and have zero recourse beyond just ranting as I'm doing now. (Well that's not true. I'm sure its buried somewhere in their 300 pages of illegible usage agreement.. most of those things could be replaced with a single page that just said "FUCK YOU" in giant bold letters and be just as meaningful and accurate to anyone who isn't a lawyer.)
And they really have no incentive to compete on price. Adoption rates in whatever jurisdiction are far, far, far more important in most cases. Paying 2.5% instead of 3% isn't great if you have to gut 20-30% of your potential client base to save that extra half point.
Which is why Visa dominates, Mastercard is more than a few steps behind in most places and Discovery/Amex are really only useful in the US -- Visa went balls out a couple decades ago pushing their services into countries all around the world and now you can use your Visa -- at least at bank ATMs to withdraw some local currency -- pretty much anywhere on the planet.
So consumers will almost certainly have a Visa (they might have others as well and maybe even prefer the others, but they almost certainly have a Visa as well.) Meaning as a merchant, if I have to choose just one CC company to partner with, Visa is probably going to be my first choice. (Luckily there's rarely any reason merchants can't accept any number of competing cards so they rarely have to make that choice.. at least in North America..)
restricting the behavior of players who would otherwise act in their own best interests
WTF are you talking about? I don't believe any of the "players" are forced to take the deal, nor are they even forced to work with Visa if they'd prefer to deal with Mastercard or Amex or Discovery or whoever.
And who are you to say whether its in my own best interests? If my store does basically no cash sales anyway then taking a free $10k most certainly is within my best interests. If I do 100k in cash and very little card sales, then it probably isn't. I still get to decide. There's nothing restricting my freedom to choose.
government-backed cash as a competitor
Wait, aren't you zealots supposed to want the government to butt out of your free markets? By typical zealot logic (such as applied to the municipal broadband debate,) you should be thrilled that the government is getting kicked out of the market!
the markets would likely succeed and the merchants would still take cash
What markets? No market theory I've ever heard of made any significant distinction between paper dollars vs electronic dollars (or vs coin dollars or vs yen or well basically anything else.. your intro to economics textbook might use dollars in the examples but the theory is agnostic to the actual form of currency -- as long as it is a currency and not a barter trade.)
might go negotiate their own private deals with Visa
Well one of the other replies to your rant says Visa doesn't do that, and since I don't have knowledge of Visa's practices I'm just going to believe them.. but even if they did do that.. since when has negotiating deals not been part of a free market?
"Shop somewhere else"
Yes it is. There is zero onus on my shop to serve you. I can refuse service for any reason I damned well please.
far too much burden on the consumer
Not my problem. Is it too much burden on the consumer if I refuse them service when they try to pay with Indian rupees? Those are perfectly fine government-backed notes (albeit a different country's government but you weren't specific.) Of course not you'd say its their problem to go to a money changer. Same deal. Go get yourself a prepaid card if you really really want my products but refuse to get an actual credit or debit card.
threatens the viability of these government-backed notes
Again, not my problem. If the government doesn't like it its up to them to do something about it. But again I'm wondering why you're so interested in the government getting involved this time around.
the public has not affirmatively agreed to.
If the public doesn't agree to it, then companies choosing to take Visa's deal with soon find themselves out of business. You not agreeing to it is not the same as "the public" not agreeing to it.
don't even have a choice.
Yes they do. They can go somewhere else. Or live without my product. Or, as I noted above, go buy a prepaid card. They're sold in kiosks at practically every shopping mall.
"Cardless not welcome in our restaurant" simply should not fly.
There's a very big difference between "I was born with dark skin, boobs, or other historically discriminated against feature" and "I'm too lazy to go down the street and get a prepaid card." And if you're legitimately too broke to get a bank card or a prepaid credit card, you probably can't afford anything being sold at a place that's decided cash isn't worth their effort anymore.
So you get home and post on Facebook about how you just bought the cutest pair of jeans with your cash.. We traded our privacy for convenience long, long ago.
China's a bit of a different case though of course where privacy implications aren't just "we'll target more ads at you" so much as "we'll disappear you and maybe your family as well." Of course that's offset by the culture being well used to having to mind their tongues and their actions in case big brother is watching, so having to apply caution in one more area of life isn't exactly a stretch..
Walmart isn't likely to do something like that no. But those trendy LA fashion shops where you can go to buy a shirt for $1500? Those kind of places are where these trends start. I mean if you walked in with a half mill stack and offered to buy out their entire store they likely wouldn't say no but for your average person coming in and just purchasing things normally.. those kind of semi-affluent folk are far more likely to be cashless than cardless anyway.
Visa cares about them, since they're usually the one who picks up the tab when their cards are used fraudulently. Which is why card security shot went from "just sign the slip" to chips and PINs and whatever else in short order once ecommerce took off and nabbing CC numbers was easy money. (Some places will still take just a signature of course but they're getting fewer and fewer by the year, at least up here in Canada.. I've heard the US is behind us on that front but I don't have first hand knowledge so I can't say for sure where it stands down there these days.)
There's a lot of reasons to not take cash.. security being the primary one. If you have no cash on premises, then your cash can't be stolen (either by robbers or by unscrupulous staff.)
But there are also smaller benefits like not having to have a cash drawer (saving counter space if you're in a small building,) not having to count and reconcile the cash against the sales (which can be time consuming if you've made a lot of sales, meaning you're having to pay your staff for additional hours.) Not having to maintain floats for change, not having to count and roll change to deposit at the bank, etc.
Basically, they're paying Visa 3% or whatever the rate is these days to save a lot of hassle and headaches (and getting a $10k payout doesn't tend to turn people away either.) At the cost of not being able to serve the (small, and shrinking) number of people who don't carry any form of credit or debit.. especially if you're trying to pass yourself off as even remotely high-end and specifically targeting people of moderate affluence and above.
The same would be true if you only carried cards and went into a store that would only take cash. And people who don't carry cash are a lot more common these days than people who don't carry at least one credit or debit card at all times.
Trouble with that is that it then places the burden on the 911 operators to determine whether you need a "high capability" or "low capability" ambulance, and all they have to go on is whatever you tell them so there's a very high chance that they'll make the wrong call given that some people freak out over a hang nail while others have half a limb chopped off and think it'll be fine and finish whatever they were doing before they even bother calling.
To some degree of course, the same argument could be made against an Uber driver having to take someone to the hospital -- they'd have to decide on the spot whether they'll take the fare or call an actual ambulance (and even more wait time for the patient.) But the hospitals can't control that one so there's not much to be done about it short of Uber blanket refusing to take people to the hospital at all and throwing the onus back on the ambulances.
Since journalists weren't scientists so.. basically always, assuming you only ever read the newspaper stories and don't care to dig into the actual papers and whatnot for yourself. It probably doesn't help that the major publishing organizations for research papers call themselves "journals," even though they have nothing to do with journalism in the newspaper sense of the word. I'm sure there's some historical reason for that but its certainly a bit weird by today's common usage of the words.
what does Obama's skin color got to do with any of this?
Its the Trump era.. blatant racism is the only argument you need in any discussion!
*Pre-Obamacare I mean, of course.. when your only real option for health insurance was through your workplace.
And in the US, every dollar your company pays for your corporate health insurance plan is a dollar they can't add to your paycheck.
As with everything in life, you pay for it one way or another.
The Chinese system goes way beyond school zones. Like to the point where you (meaning the poor classes of course) can't legally even live in an area not designated by your Hukou. This is of course because of ancient laws meant to keep peasants actually on the land doing their job (enriching the landowners..)
The CCP is actually in the process of changing things a bit because those rules are starting to cause them problems as farming becomes more and more mechanized and they need workers in the cities & factories rather than in the fields.. but they're likely only going to replace them with new rules that sound just as ridiculous to those of us who are used to having things like freedom.
The ghost cities were a failure but I don't know if I'd call them an "epic" failure. They weren't primarily built to house people. They were primarily built to stimulate the construction industry (and thus the economy,) and to that extent they were moderately successful even if they've become a bit of an embarrassment after the fact.
Which is where Tesla's coming in with their massive battery installations.. and likely other companies soon enough given Tesla's success with them (though I don't know the economics yet but that will come..) The batteries can balance out the unpredictability in near real-time, and compensate for the biggest drawback of renewables.
Of course its not all upsides. There's extra space required to house all of those batteries, you have to account for the manufacturing of the batteries when determining the relative cost of renewables vs traditional power generation, and of course they're very new so its possible that we haven't yet discovered all of the potential failure modes that could arise when we start relying on them to large extents like that.
And with the way governments around the world have been going in the past few years with regard to mass surveillance, failing to at least consider the absolute would be naive.. sometimes even when you are presented with a boundary.
That's kind of my point. Its not easy, even for a human, to distinguish a 17 year old from an 18 year old based on pure visual clues. But other than extreme cases of precocious puberty its usually pretty easy for a human to tell a 10 year old from an 18 year old. Meaning that at least in principle, the latter should be doable by a smart enough AI (which is not saying such an AI is necessarily easy to build of course. Just that it should be possible based on how easy it is for us humans to do the job.)
There's something admirable in getting rich. But of course "we" tend to confuse wealth earned with wealth inherited and treat both groups as simply "the rich." Only one of those groups actually deserves it.
we can make minescule amounts of negative energy
No. We can make systems that behave like they have negative mass. But that's not the same thing. Here is a layman-level video about it.
Energy is easier to think about in a way since we have a defined ground state to work from -- a vacuum at absolute zero. Normal energy of course is any deviation above that state. Negative energy would be a deviation below that state. How can you get below a ground state? Well the only real way is if the ground state is not an actual ground state. In calculus terms, what we see as the ground state now is actually a local minimum but not an absolute minimum.
Of course the problem there is even if that's true, and you find a way to get below our local minimum.. you'd probably destroy the universe as it snaps itself down to the new minimum you've found. So that's not great.
Obviously even with that loose description, there's some caveats. In particular, we don't know with any degree of accuracy what happens when we go smaller than the limits of quantum mechanics. Where does the "borrowed" energy come from for virtual particles? Why do they have to return it? And why is there such a mathematically concise relationship between how much they borrow and how quickly it has to be returned? We know the math works (by testing it intensely,) but not even the smartest scientists in the world can answer the "why" questions. So its possible that whatever we're borrowing that energy from does indeed briefly get what we would consider to be negative energy. Not that it would be any use to us even if we somehow proved such a thing happens.. we can't break the laws of nature no matter how well we describe them.
Its a bit deeper than that, in the sense that stuff is changing so fast that the guy on top of everything today might be the troglodyte literally tomorrow because something happened somewhere else and he wasn't aware of it.
Today's "unknown alloy" may well be something Dupont or 3M just figured out how to synthesize last year and by next year will be the building material of choice after they've ramped up production and marketing.