Additionally, the GrayKey has built in future capabilities that will begin to be leveraged as time goes on
Holy Crap! Should invest in those guys because they are from the future, so much so they have built in capabilities for bugs and security features that don't exist yet! So sweet! (Other than that, sounds like marketing on GrayShift's part)
A more "rational" explanation is that Grayshift is sitting on (or at least wants people to believe they are sitting on) a few-zero day exploits that they think will keep them in business for the foreseeable future...
Given the fact that the principals working at Grayshift are ex U.S. intelligence agency contractors and ex-Apple security engineers, I wouldn't be so quick to bet against them having a few zero-days lying around...
How many times do people charge their phone off a "public" USB charge port in an airport or on public transportation? Any one of those ports could be trying to slurp confidential data.
If you rely on either your phone's security, or trusting whatever 3rd party provides a charge port, you're doing it wrong.
Just use a charge-only cable that has only power wires, but no data lines in it. Or bring an AC -> DC adapter as well, and use an AC mains outlet. Or bring a powerbank. Or charge from your laptop.
And hope your phone doesn't have the blueborne vulnerability which renders all of your efforts moot.
For those people who do not have iPhones, they implant a similar system inside one of their teeth. That is the sources of the voices I hear in my head.
Video compression is typically lossy. The Weissman score only applies to loseless.
The Weissman score is fiction (a product of HBO screenwriter request to a professor make up something "tech-sounding").
It isn't even an absolute score (because it depends on the unit of time you use to measure it and that isn't defined so if you happen to use something that results in the value 1, your score is infinite). Using a Weissman score in real life is like how fanbois convolute a Hollywood-ism like... "made the Kessel Run in less than twelve parsecs" into something that isn't totally gibberish (when it actually is gibberish)...
Even if it were actually somehow useful to measure compression, it doesn't measure anything useful for video which is generally compressed off-line...
Well if you read the article and not the summary, the authors are discussing that there doesn't seem to be any fundamental changes coming anytime soon. Sure newer codecs are coming out but they are all the same approach. It's like if we discussing public key cryptography and the algorithms used. Imagine if RSA was the only real technique and the only new changes coming out were merely larger keys and that other techniques like elliptic curves didn't exist.
I think your analogy is somewhat flawed. Public key cryptography was in somewhat of the same "rut" as video codec. Video codecs have been stuck on hybrid block techniques and Public key cryptography has been stuck using modulo arithmetic (RSA, and Elliptical curves both use modulo arithmetic although they depend on the difficulty of inverting different mathematical operations in modulo arithmetic).
There are of course other hard math problem that can be used in public key cryptography (lattices, knapsack, error-correcting codes, hash based) and they languished for years until the threat of quantum computing cracking the incumbent technology...
Similarly, I predict hybrid block techniques will likely dominate video encoding until a disruption (or in mathematical catastrophe theory parlance a bifurcation) shows the potential for being 10x better (because 1.2x or 20% better doesn't even pay for your lunch). It doesn't have to be 10x better out of the gate, but if it can't eventually be 10x better, why spend time optimizing it as much as hybrid block encoding. Nobody wants to be developing something that doesn't have legs for a decade or more. The point isn't to find something different for the sake of difference, it's to find something that has legs (even if it isn't better today).
The problem with finding something with "legs" in video encoding, is that we do not fully understand video. People don't really have much of a theoretical framework to measure one lossy video compression scheme against another (except for "golden-eyes" which depend on what side of the bed you wake up on). Crappy measures like PSNR and SSIM to estimate the loss-ratio vs entropy are still being used because we don't have anything better. One of the reasons people stick to hybrid block coding is that the artifacts are somewhat known even if they can't be measured so it is somewhat easier to make sure you are making forward progress. If the artifacts are totally different (as they would likely be for a different lossy coding scheme), it is much more difficult to compare if you can't objectively measure it to optimize it (the conjoint analysis problem).
So until we have better theories about what makes a better video codec, people are using "art" to simulate science in this area, and as with most art, it's mostly subjective and it will be difficult to convince anyone of a 10x potential if it is only 80% today. If people *really* want to find something better, we need to start researching more on the measurement problem and less about the artistic aspects. It's not that people haven't tried (e.g., VQEG, but simply very little has come from the efforts to date and there has been little pressure to keep the ball moving forward.
In contrast, the math of hard problems for public key cryptography is a very productive area of research and the post-quantum-encryption goal has been driving people pretty hard.
Generally speaking, if you measure it, it can be improved and it's easier to measure incremental progress than big changes on a different dimension.
I'm surprised that they didn't engineer some way to at least superficially clean the panels. The panels are hinged and they were folded in transit. Obviously something so delicate wasn't spring loaded to smack open. Could they really not reprogram the servos to have the panels tilt up and down to let the sand fall off?
Dust sticks electrostatically. I think the panels are fixed, but the rover can tilt. Unfortunately you really you can't shake it enough to overcome the electrostatic attraction of the dust.
To actually clean the panel (rather than just leave it to occasional opportunistic car washes by martian dust-storms) the only ways appear to be: to actually smack it (vibrate it) enough to overcome the electrostatic dust attraction OR use some sort of electric field to manipulate the dust.
If the system is "first to file", but patent invalidation is based on "first to invent", then isn't the end result "first to invent"? Why have the extra complexity of a system where the granting criterion isn't the logical-not of the invalidation criterion?
Because if you are the first to invent, but did not file, you do not necessarily get a patent retroactively.
Best case not-filing-first: if the time expired to file (e.g., someone publishes or makes known your idea the clock starts ticking) it is likely nobody gets to patent it as the filer's patent would be invalid because of prior art (which is the same result as if the first to invent declines to patent the idea because they think it is "too" obvious).
Worst case: the first-to-file gets the patent even if they are not the first-to-invent because the first-to-invent can't show that their invention wasn't published or sold to the public before the priority date to be considered valid prior art.
The theory is that this first-to-file system give people incentive to file and get the idea out there quickly rather than hold on to ideas (via a first-to-invent priority date) and only attempt to patent them when other people stumble upon them. Because if you wait to file, you are risking some public disclosure which precede your first-to-file priority date and cause your patent application to be invalidated by your own prior art, or someone else will file and beat you to the punch.
Do you know what kind of specific percentages high risk merchants have to pay payment processors? I didn't even know it was a formal category before just now. Is there a legal reason buyer credit rating isn't used to determine eligibility when purchasing from a high risk merchant, or is it a cultural thing?
A merchant is not allowed by visa/mc to know the credit rating of the card holder. Basically a merchant is required by the visa/mc rules to take payment or deny payment on a non-discriminatory basis (in fact they aren't even supposed to ask for your id).
A payment processor is contracted by the merchant to accepts charge request from the merchant and clears them (usually by contacting the issuing bank through the visa/mc network). The bank who does know the credit rating and charge history of the card holder and presumably knows whether it should accept or reject the request based on credit limit or fraud detection metrics.
However, there's always a risk of a chargeback (the cardholder claims that the charge was fraudulent, or that they didn't get the merchandise or service they paid for), and then it gets into a dispute resolution. At some point, since the payment processor cleared the original charge with the bank and credited the merchant's account, the bank and the payment processor need to fight it out if the card holder refuses or cannot pay. Because payment processors operate on slim margins (the banks are gettting the interest payments from the card holder, the payment processors have to split the transaction fees with visa/mastercard/amex), and they have already paid-out to the merchant account they want to mitigate their chargeback risk, so instead of providing payment processing services to anyone, they rank the merchants they do business with and set their rates based on how many chargebacks they are likely to have to eat if the merchant goes belly up and can't refund the money that the payment processor advanced them and they set their merchant fees accordingly.
For "high-risk" merchants, payment providers may also have contract terms that limit payments to merchant that exceed certain chargeback percentages so the merchant doesn't get any money until the bank pays (so the payment providers don't have to waste lawyer-budget fighting with the bank and/or card holders) so the payment processor can withhold payments to the merchant. As you might suspect merchants in this situation might not want to accept too many credit cards...
Similarly with "low-risk" small-payments, payment processors have different merchant terms (e.g., you don't have to sign for small payments at a coffee shop or lunch counter, and they clear charges at a lower merchant fee rate).
My credit rating is 800 and all my accounts are on full monthly autopay. They are nothing more than intermediaries that take a cut from every transaction. Even aside from that, only a complete idiot thinks that blanket credit denials for an entire category of spending involves any risk assessment.
FWIW, right now the big banks are also considering a restriction and/or ban on using credit cards to purchase guns as well. Citigroup has already required all of their corporate customers that sell guns limit sales of bump-stocks and high-capacity magazines.
Also, the New York Comptroller is pushing for BofA, Chase and other banks to reclassify merchants that sell guns as high-risk merchants on par with those that sell drugs like opiods. Merchants considered high-risk have to pay significantly more to payment processors and are generally subject to tight limits on chargeback ratios leaving many to abandon accepting credit cards for purchases because of the risk that the "intermediaries" won't pay the charges that their customers will rack up...
Generating debt by buying cryptocurrencies is stupid.
More stupid than using your credit card for gambling? Why ban just cryptocurrencies and not all other forms of gambling?
Wells fargo is not alone in banning cryptocurrency purchases. BofA, Chase, Citi, Discover, CapitalOne, Lloyds, and TD already have bans on cryptocurrencies...
FWIW, I seem to remember visa and mastercard already banned charges from known gambling sites after the UIGEA passed... Also several states have laws against buying securities/stocks using credit cards.
Does a person in the UK "deserve" to earn 100 times more than the same person doing the same job in India? Unless you want the UK to look like India that isn't going to happen.
Middle class people in India can afford full-time maids and live-in child care for their four kids. Middle class people in the UK make four times as much, but live in shoebox apartments and can't afford to have children at all, so the government has to encourage immigration to keep the population from dropping.
Economic classes are not directly comparable country to country. Paper numbers do not make reality.
Depends on what you call the "middle". Median? Mean? I doubt that neither the median nor the mean income in India can support full-time maids and live-in child care.
Certainly a person with a job in India that has a job internationally-competitive comparable to a "middle" class job in the US or Europe will be able to afford those kinds of things. However, people that have that kind of job in India are definitely not middle class in India, they are definitely in the upper 1% of income earners... The upper 1% of income earners can afford all those types of things in the US and Europe too... Strange how that is...
The real missing question is right there, in the headline: "The World Isn't Prepared for Retirement". What the fucking!!!???
"The world" is very well prepared for retirement, thank you very much. This, like mass assassinations, is very much a USA-only problem and the solution is, again just like in the mass assassinations case, very much fucking obvious for everybody but USA: you fucking collect taxes, and you pay fucking retirement pensions out of these taxes. Problem solved; no need to understand stock versus mutual funds, compound interests or stock versus public debt evolution.
One small problem in this is that many countries who claim to have this "solved" weren't counting on an aging population. That will make it incredibly difficult to simply collect "fucking" taxes to pay "fucking" retirement pensions.
As far as I know, only the following countries have universal pensions: Bolivia, Botswana, Brunei, Guyana, Kosovo, Namibia, Netherlands, New Zealand, Samoa, Suriname, Seychelles.
The others that do have some sort of public pension have some sort of means-test for their pensions and pensioners often rely on private pensions in these countries. This is the case of many of the countries in Europe.
Unfortunately, because of population dynamics and budgetary indiscretions, some countries which have massive shortfalls in their public pensions have taken drastic steps such as seizing private pension funds to make up for public pension shortfalls (like Argentina, Poland, Portugal, Russia, and Hungary). Expect to see more of this as the aging population dynamics put more pressure on public pension funds. This will of course delay the day of reckoning for government pension plans and they will eventually need to choose between lower benefits (angering the current pensioners) or higher taxes on an increasingly smaller working population (compromising the future).
Of course voters can (and will) remain blissfully ignorant of stock vs mutual funds, compound interest or stock versus public debt evolution and vote accordingly (as they generally do)...
Oh yeah, BTW 59 isn't really part of the greatest generation, they are the boomers.
Well, that's just like, your opinion, man. I believe the boomers are the greatest generation. The generation before boomers didn't even have cell phones or video games so how could they be "greatest"?
Perhaps a few members of the *real* greatest generation might want to respond to you with an immortal *telegram*;^)
Suicide because of pessimism about the state of the world is actually a good thing. To make the world a better place, we need all the hard-working, non-substance-abusing optimists we can find. The more of you existential pessimists we can get to autodarwinate, the better off the rest of us are.
The people who deserve the most sympathy are those who have personal problems. We need a better mental health system. Small wonder that the closure of state mental hospitals nationwide has given us homelessness and suicide rising in tandem.
Although I agree that we need a better mental health system, I don't agree that people who deserve the most sympathy are those that have personal problems. Why single them out for sympathy when you throw the "mere" pessimists under the bus?
Then we have the internet, it's giving the poor access to see what's going on in the world better, they can see just how rich the rich are becoming, they can see the death of the world better than ever before, they can communicate with each other (as I am right now) elaborating on why there's little hope.
Co2 is up, heat is up, methane bubbles are going off in siberia, animals are dying out, bees are dying off, America is slowly crumbling into debt. (no, I'm not American)
Um...while I'll agree it's depressing to learn how people are fucking up the country and in fact the earth itself I'd rather know than be blissfully ignorant. Maybe that's just me.
People are not killing themselves over rising CO2 levels, people are killing themselves over crippling depression. When I think of things that depress me CO2 only makes it to #10 (and only because I enjoy diving and it is destroying reefs that it took many thousands of years to build). Money and family issues are like...99% of this among people that didn't already have problems. Incidentally these suicides also account for something like 50% of the "gun violence" we have in the USA.
And there are more suicide deaths than auto/traffic deaths in the US, which means we should worry about that at least as much as we do auto safety...
Although the suicide deaths among teens and early twenties is still the highest, an alarming trend in the last few years of increased suicide of 50yo+ (almost a 50% jump in the last decade). Some have noted that the jump in suicide rates of older people seems to correspond with the addiction rates seen in the opioid crisis as applied to people as they get older. That might be a better explanation than standby narratives like money and family (which have always been problems throughout history in varying amounts). I remember the 1970's in the USA, today is *much* better than the 70's...
And may I say you still look pretty good for your age? And you appear to have most of your faculties. I salute you members of the Greatest Generation. Sometime, you'll have to tell us what it was like when Vietnam invaded California and how you charged your phones at Woodstock.
As a matter of fact Vietnam *did* invade California in the '70s and '80s (currently about 350,000 which is the largest number of Vietnamese outside of Vietnam 160K is San Jose alone)...
They didn't have many phones at woodstock (very rural area), but they did have *telegrams* (kindof like ancient form of SMS, not the anonymous peer-to-peer messaging app)...
One of the telegrams received by the act Iron Butterfly from the event promoters has been immortalized in history...
For reasons I can't go into / Until you are here / Clarifying your situation / Knowing you are having problems / You will have to find / Other transportation / Unless you plan not to come.
This telegram was apparently in response to a request to have a helicopter sent for them to bypass the traffic jam...
Oh yeah, BTW 59 isn't really part of the greatest generation, they are the boomers. Boomers are the ones that protested Vietnam, not the generation that experienced WWII and built the world we have to day. People born before 1924 (and saw WWII) are part of the greatest generation...
_I_ didn't. My family - my mother in law specifically - may very well have. She still can't get over our marriage and yes she is the cranky old bat type.
I highly doubt these companies require consent from everyone involved. Those databases are used by Government agencies after all.
And sometimes those databases are used to catch a serial killer...
Of course the serial killer didn't give any consent, but he was apparently identified anyhow by tracing through a third cousin who uploaded their dna profile...
I'm going to go to space and change mine so it's no longer useful to them. Then I'll be able to count on one hand the seven reasons I'm never doing business with them again.
You don't have to go that far, Chernobyl and Fukushima are both accessible w/o a rocket...
There will be no more support for cross-platform games on the Mac, then, I guess. Until someone makes a translation layer that will translate OpenGL calls to Metal, that is.
If Apple follows their standard game plan, no apps that translation layers not available in source form will be allowed on the platform. Fortunately, Valve has convinced MoltenVK to release their Vulkan 2 Metal translation layers in open source to allow this.
Unfortunately, Vulkan isn't OpenGL, but it's OpenGL evolved, so unless there is someone that wants to do this for backward compatibility purposes, OpenGL is dead...
Then lab grown diamonds need to fight them at their own game. create some flawed diamonds and challenge De Beers to detect the real ones. Then when they inevitiably fail you market the "perfect diamond", we can create the flawed diamonds De Beers sells you if you want, or for a cheaper price we can sell you perfection, something De Beers used to put an extreme premium on until others worked out how to create it.
If you get the right spokesperson to spin your story...
I get the feeling I'll be 200 and being called a whipper snapper by 230 year olds.
The older you get the longer your life expectancy... Only the oldest person in the world can outlive his or her own life expectancy. For the rest of us, there is always someone older.
This is related to the common misconception that prehistoric men died around 35. That's really because the life expectancy at birth is skewed by high infant mortality rates. Skeletal remains show a significant fraction lived past 65, and comparison with modern day hunter gatherers in a study by Gurven and Kaplan show that modal adult life span (not life expectancy) likely in the range 68–78 years if you reached the age of 15 for prehistoric hunter-gathers which isn't too different than say the Victorian age which many regard as the beginning of the modern era...
Slashdot Mirror
Additionally, the GrayKey has built in future capabilities that will begin to be leveraged as time goes on
Holy Crap! Should invest in those guys because they are from the future, so much so they have built in capabilities for bugs and security features that don't exist yet! So sweet! (Other than that, sounds like marketing on GrayShift's part)
A more "rational" explanation is that Grayshift is sitting on (or at least wants people to believe they are sitting on) a few-zero day exploits that they think will keep them in business for the foreseeable future...
Given the fact that the principals working at Grayshift are ex U.S. intelligence agency contractors and ex-Apple security engineers, I wouldn't be so quick to bet against them having a few zero-days lying around...
How many times do people charge their phone off a "public" USB charge port in an airport or on public transportation? Any one of those ports could be trying to slurp confidential data.
If you rely on either your phone's security, or trusting whatever 3rd party provides a charge port, you're doing it wrong.
Just use a charge-only cable that has only power wires, but no data lines in it. Or bring an AC -> DC adapter as well, and use an AC mains outlet. Or bring a powerbank. Or charge from your laptop.
And hope your phone doesn't have the blueborne vulnerability which renders all of your efforts moot.
For those people who do not have iPhones, they implant a similar system inside one of their teeth. That is the sources of the voices I hear in my head.
Something like this? ;^)
Even this report is a dupe of a report from the exact same MIT research group back in 2013...
https://tech.slashdot.org/stor...
Video compression is typically lossy. The Weissman score only applies to loseless.
The Weissman score is fiction (a product of HBO screenwriter request to a professor make up something "tech-sounding").
It isn't even an absolute score (because it depends on the unit of time you use to measure it and that isn't defined so if you happen to use something that results in the value 1, your score is infinite). Using a Weissman score in real life is like how fanbois convolute a Hollywood-ism like... "made the Kessel Run in less than twelve parsecs" into something that isn't totally gibberish (when it actually is gibberish)...
Even if it were actually somehow useful to measure compression, it doesn't measure anything useful for video which is generally compressed off-line...
Well if you read the article and not the summary, the authors are discussing that there doesn't seem to be any fundamental changes coming anytime soon. Sure newer codecs are coming out but they are all the same approach. It's like if we discussing public key cryptography and the algorithms used. Imagine if RSA was the only real technique and the only new changes coming out were merely larger keys and that other techniques like elliptic curves didn't exist.
I think your analogy is somewhat flawed. Public key cryptography was in somewhat of the same "rut" as video codec. Video codecs have been stuck on hybrid block techniques and Public key cryptography has been stuck using modulo arithmetic (RSA, and Elliptical curves both use modulo arithmetic although they depend on the difficulty of inverting different mathematical operations in modulo arithmetic).
There are of course other hard math problem that can be used in public key cryptography (lattices, knapsack, error-correcting codes, hash based) and they languished for years until the threat of quantum computing cracking the incumbent technology...
Similarly, I predict hybrid block techniques will likely dominate video encoding until a disruption (or in mathematical catastrophe theory parlance a bifurcation) shows the potential for being 10x better (because 1.2x or 20% better doesn't even pay for your lunch). It doesn't have to be 10x better out of the gate, but if it can't eventually be 10x better, why spend time optimizing it as much as hybrid block encoding. Nobody wants to be developing something that doesn't have legs for a decade or more. The point isn't to find something different for the sake of difference, it's to find something that has legs (even if it isn't better today).
The problem with finding something with "legs" in video encoding, is that we do not fully understand video. People don't really have much of a theoretical framework to measure one lossy video compression scheme against another (except for "golden-eyes" which depend on what side of the bed you wake up on). Crappy measures like PSNR and SSIM to estimate the loss-ratio vs entropy are still being used because we don't have anything better. One of the reasons people stick to hybrid block coding is that the artifacts are somewhat known even if they can't be measured so it is somewhat easier to make sure you are making forward progress. If the artifacts are totally different (as they would likely be for a different lossy coding scheme), it is much more difficult to compare if you can't objectively measure it to optimize it (the conjoint analysis problem).
So until we have better theories about what makes a better video codec, people are using "art" to simulate science in this area, and as with most art, it's mostly subjective and it will be difficult to convince anyone of a 10x potential if it is only 80% today. If people *really* want to find something better, we need to start researching more on the measurement problem and less about the artistic aspects. It's not that people haven't tried (e.g., VQEG, but simply very little has come from the efforts to date and there has been little pressure to keep the ball moving forward.
In contrast, the math of hard problems for public key cryptography is a very productive area of research and the post-quantum-encryption goal has been driving people pretty hard.
Generally speaking, if you measure it, it can be improved and it's easier to measure incremental progress than big changes on a different dimension.
I'm surprised that they didn't engineer some way to at least superficially clean the panels. The panels are hinged and they were folded in transit. Obviously something so delicate wasn't spring loaded to smack open. Could they really not reprogram the servos to have the panels tilt up and down to let the sand fall off?
Dust sticks electrostatically. I think the panels are fixed, but the rover can tilt. Unfortunately you really you can't shake it enough to overcome the electrostatic attraction of the dust.
To actually clean the panel (rather than just leave it to occasional opportunistic car washes by martian dust-storms) the only ways appear to be: to actually smack it (vibrate it) enough to overcome the electrostatic dust attraction OR use some sort of electric field to manipulate the dust.
https://www.technologyreview.c...
What about this one?
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/...
If the system is "first to file", but patent invalidation is based on "first to invent", then isn't the end result "first to invent"? Why have the extra complexity of a system where the granting criterion isn't the logical-not of the invalidation criterion?
Because if you are the first to invent, but did not file, you do not necessarily get a patent retroactively.
Best case not-filing-first: if the time expired to file (e.g., someone publishes or makes known your idea the clock starts ticking) it is likely nobody gets to patent it as the filer's patent would be invalid because of prior art (which is the same result as if the first to invent declines to patent the idea because they think it is "too" obvious).
Worst case: the first-to-file gets the patent even if they are not the first-to-invent because the first-to-invent can't show that their invention wasn't published or sold to the public before the priority date to be considered valid prior art.
The theory is that this first-to-file system give people incentive to file and get the idea out there quickly rather than hold on to ideas (via a first-to-invent priority date) and only attempt to patent them when other people stumble upon them. Because if you wait to file, you are risking some public disclosure which precede your first-to-file priority date and cause your patent application to be invalidated by your own prior art, or someone else will file and beat you to the punch.
Do you know what kind of specific percentages high risk merchants have to pay payment processors? I didn't even know it was a formal category before just now. Is there a legal reason buyer credit rating isn't used to determine eligibility when purchasing from a high risk merchant, or is it a cultural thing?
A merchant is not allowed by visa/mc to know the credit rating of the card holder. Basically a merchant is required by the visa/mc rules to take payment or deny payment on a non-discriminatory basis (in fact they aren't even supposed to ask for your id).
A payment processor is contracted by the merchant to accepts charge request from the merchant and clears them (usually by contacting the issuing bank through the visa/mc network). The bank who does know the credit rating and charge history of the card holder and presumably knows whether it should accept or reject the request based on credit limit or fraud detection metrics.
However, there's always a risk of a chargeback (the cardholder claims that the charge was fraudulent, or that they didn't get the merchandise or service they paid for), and then it gets into a dispute resolution. At some point, since the payment processor cleared the original charge with the bank and credited the merchant's account, the bank and the payment processor need to fight it out if the card holder refuses or cannot pay. Because payment processors operate on slim margins (the banks are gettting the interest payments from the card holder, the payment processors have to split the transaction fees with visa/mastercard/amex), and they have already paid-out to the merchant account they want to mitigate their chargeback risk, so instead of providing payment processing services to anyone, they rank the merchants they do business with and set their rates based on how many chargebacks they are likely to have to eat if the merchant goes belly up and can't refund the money that the payment processor advanced them and they set their merchant fees accordingly.
For "high-risk" merchants, payment providers may also have contract terms that limit payments to merchant that exceed certain chargeback percentages so the merchant doesn't get any money until the bank pays (so the payment providers don't have to waste lawyer-budget fighting with the bank and/or card holders) so the payment processor can withhold payments to the merchant. As you might suspect merchants in this situation might not want to accept too many credit cards...
Similarly with "low-risk" small-payments, payment processors have different merchant terms (e.g., you don't have to sign for small payments at a coffee shop or lunch counter, and they clear charges at a lower merchant fee rate).
My credit rating is 800 and all my accounts are on full monthly autopay. They are nothing more than intermediaries that take a cut from every transaction. Even aside from that, only a complete idiot thinks that blanket credit denials for an entire category of spending involves any risk assessment.
FWIW, right now the big banks are also considering a restriction and/or ban on using credit cards to purchase guns as well. Citigroup has already required all of their corporate customers that sell guns limit sales of bump-stocks and high-capacity magazines.
Also, the New York Comptroller is pushing for BofA, Chase and other banks to reclassify merchants that sell guns as high-risk merchants on par with those that sell drugs like opiods. Merchants considered high-risk have to pay significantly more to payment processors and are generally subject to tight limits on chargeback ratios leaving many to abandon accepting credit cards for purchases because of the risk that the "intermediaries" won't pay the charges that their customers will rack up...
Generating debt by buying cryptocurrencies is stupid.
More stupid than using your credit card for gambling? Why ban just cryptocurrencies and not all other forms of gambling?
Wells fargo is not alone in banning cryptocurrency purchases. BofA, Chase, Citi, Discover, CapitalOne, Lloyds, and TD already have bans on cryptocurrencies...
FWIW, I seem to remember visa and mastercard already banned charges from known gambling sites after the UIGEA passed... Also several states have laws against buying securities/stocks using credit cards.
Does a person in the UK "deserve" to earn 100 times more than the same person doing the same job in India? Unless you want the UK to look like India that isn't going to happen.
Middle class people in India can afford full-time maids and live-in child care for their four kids. Middle class people in the UK make four times as much, but live in shoebox apartments and can't afford to have children at all, so the government has to encourage immigration to keep the population from dropping.
Economic classes are not directly comparable country to country. Paper numbers do not make reality.
Depends on what you call the "middle". Median? Mean? I doubt that neither the median nor the mean income in India can support full-time maids and live-in child care.
Certainly a person with a job in India that has a job internationally-competitive comparable to a "middle" class job in the US or Europe will be able to afford those kinds of things. However, people that have that kind of job in India are definitely not middle class in India, they are definitely in the upper 1% of income earners... The upper 1% of income earners can afford all those types of things in the US and Europe too... Strange how that is...
"The real missing question?"
The real missing question is right there, in the headline: "The World Isn't Prepared for Retirement". What the fucking!!!???
"The world" is very well prepared for retirement, thank you very much. This, like mass assassinations, is very much a USA-only problem and the solution is, again just like in the mass assassinations case, very much fucking obvious for everybody but USA: you fucking collect taxes, and you pay fucking retirement pensions out of these taxes. Problem solved; no need to understand stock versus mutual funds, compound interests or stock versus public debt evolution.
One small problem in this is that many countries who claim to have this "solved" weren't counting on an aging population. That will make it incredibly difficult to simply collect "fucking" taxes to pay "fucking" retirement pensions.
As far as I know, only the following countries have universal pensions: Bolivia, Botswana, Brunei, Guyana, Kosovo, Namibia, Netherlands, New Zealand, Samoa, Suriname, Seychelles.
The others that do have some sort of public pension have some sort of means-test for their pensions and pensioners often rely on private pensions in these countries. This is the case of many of the countries in Europe.
Unfortunately, because of population dynamics and budgetary indiscretions, some countries which have massive shortfalls in their public pensions have taken drastic steps such as seizing private pension funds to make up for public pension shortfalls (like Argentina, Poland, Portugal, Russia, and Hungary). Expect to see more of this as the aging population dynamics put more pressure on public pension funds. This will of course delay the day of reckoning for government pension plans and they will eventually need to choose between lower benefits (angering the current pensioners) or higher taxes on an increasingly smaller working population (compromising the future).
Of course voters can (and will) remain blissfully ignorant of stock vs mutual funds, compound interest or stock versus public debt evolution and vote accordingly (as they generally do)...
Well, that's just like, your opinion, man. I believe the boomers are the greatest generation. The generation before boomers didn't even have cell phones or video games so how could they be "greatest"?
Perhaps a few members of the *real* greatest generation might want to respond to you with an immortal *telegram* ;^)
Suicide because of pessimism about the state of the world is actually a good thing. To make the world a better place, we need all the hard-working, non-substance-abusing optimists we can find. The more of you existential pessimists we can get to autodarwinate, the better off the rest of us are.
The people who deserve the most sympathy are those who have personal problems. We need a better mental health system. Small wonder that the closure of state mental hospitals nationwide has given us homelessness and suicide rising in tandem.
Although I agree that we need a better mental health system, I don't agree that people who deserve the most sympathy are those that have personal problems. Why single them out for sympathy when you throw the "mere" pessimists under the bus?
Um...while I'll agree it's depressing to learn how people are fucking up the country and in fact the earth itself I'd rather know than be blissfully ignorant. Maybe that's just me.
People are not killing themselves over rising CO2 levels, people are killing themselves over crippling depression. When I think of things that depress me CO2 only makes it to #10 (and only because I enjoy diving and it is destroying reefs that it took many thousands of years to build). Money and family issues are like...99% of this among people that didn't already have problems. Incidentally these suicides also account for something like 50% of the "gun violence" we have in the USA.
And there are more suicide deaths than auto/traffic deaths in the US, which means we should worry about that at least as much as we do auto safety...
Although the suicide deaths among teens and early twenties is still the highest, an alarming trend in the last few years of increased suicide of 50yo+ (almost a 50% jump in the last decade). Some have noted that the jump in suicide rates of older people seems to correspond with the addiction rates seen in the opioid crisis as applied to people as they get older. That might be a better explanation than standby narratives like money and family (which have always been problems throughout history in varying amounts). I remember the 1970's in the USA, today is *much* better than the 70's...
Anyhow...
And may I say you still look pretty good for your age? And you appear to have most of your faculties. I salute you members of the Greatest Generation. Sometime, you'll have to tell us what it was like when Vietnam invaded California and how you charged your phones at Woodstock.
As a matter of fact Vietnam *did* invade California in the '70s and '80s (currently about 350,000 which is the largest number of Vietnamese outside of Vietnam 160K is San Jose alone)...
They didn't have many phones at woodstock (very rural area), but they did have *telegrams* (kindof like ancient form of SMS, not the anonymous peer-to-peer messaging app)...
One of the telegrams received by the act Iron Butterfly from the event promoters has been immortalized in history...
For reasons I can't go into / Until you are here / Clarifying your situation / Knowing you are having problems / You will have to find / Other transportation / Unless you plan not to come.
This telegram was apparently in response to a request to have a helicopter sent for them to bypass the traffic jam...
Oh yeah, BTW 59 isn't really part of the greatest generation, they are the boomers. Boomers are the ones that protested Vietnam, not the generation that experienced WWII and built the world we have to day. People born before 1924 (and saw WWII) are part of the greatest generation...
_I_ didn't. My family - my mother in law specifically - may very well have. She still can't get over our marriage and yes she is the cranky old bat type.
I highly doubt these companies require consent from everyone involved. Those databases are used by Government agencies after all.
And sometimes those databases are used to catch a serial killer...
Of course the serial killer didn't give any consent, but he was apparently identified anyhow by tracing through a third cousin who uploaded their dna profile...
I'm going to go to space and change mine so it's no longer useful to them. Then I'll be able to count on one hand the seven reasons I'm never doing business with them again.
You don't have to go that far, Chernobyl and Fukushima are both accessible w/o a rocket...
There will be no more support for cross-platform games on the Mac, then, I guess. Until someone makes a translation layer that will translate OpenGL calls to Metal, that is.
If Apple follows their standard game plan, no apps that translation layers not available in source form will be allowed on the platform. Fortunately, Valve has convinced MoltenVK to release their Vulkan 2 Metal translation layers in open source to allow this.
Unfortunately, Vulkan isn't OpenGL, but it's OpenGL evolved, so unless there is someone that wants to do this for backward compatibility purposes, OpenGL is dead...
I guess Apple doesn't want to play with others?
You just noticed that?
CFC-11:
Either someone's making a shed-load of fridges.
Doing a load of resonance imaging.
Or...
Someone's hyperscale offshore cryptomining datacenter has an unregulated cooling system which sprung a leak...
If we are just tossing out things...
Then lab grown diamonds need to fight them at their own game. create some flawed diamonds and challenge De Beers to detect the real ones. Then when they inevitiably fail you market the "perfect diamond", we can create the flawed diamonds De Beers sells you if you want, or for a cheaper price we can sell you perfection, something De Beers used to put an extreme premium on until others worked out how to create it.
If you get the right spokesperson to spin your story...
I can't keep up with what middle aged is, our life expectancy seems to jump up every time I approach it.
Because that's how life expectancy works.
I get the feeling I'll be 200 and being called a whipper snapper by 230 year olds.
The older you get the longer your life expectancy... Only the oldest person in the world can outlive his or her own life expectancy. For the rest of us, there is always someone older.
This is related to the common misconception that prehistoric men died around 35. That's really because the life expectancy at birth is skewed by high infant mortality rates. Skeletal remains show a significant fraction lived past 65, and comparison with modern day hunter gatherers in a study by Gurven and Kaplan show that modal adult life span (not life expectancy) likely in the range 68–78 years if you reached the age of 15 for prehistoric hunter-gathers which isn't too different than say the Victorian age which many regard as the beginning of the modern era...