And yet, nobody ever provides a cash discount. Funny that.
Thing is it would be stupid for a consumer to use cash. It's against their self interest. Credit cards are ALWAYS cheaper for the consumer than cash. Every single time.
There's no discount for cash, and you get points or cash back on credit cards. Even if you don't get points or cash back, you still get an interest free 30 day loan, that alone is worth something.
For the retailer it may be another story, but even there it's not so clear cut. I do know a major chain that tried to encourage cash at one point, but they ended up giving up. Their reasoning was that it was so much more expensive to handle the cash that it wiped out any savings (counting the cash, dealing with change, making deposits, accounting for differences in the register, etc) So even for a retailer credit cards can make more sense.
And then of course there is cryptocurrency, all the negatives of cash, AND all the negatives of credit cards, with none of the advantages of either....
I didn't say there was a conspiracy. That's 100% in your camp. You think the oil companies are colluding to hide AGW. I'm pointing out that almost all the funding comes from government, not oil companies, so that seems entirely implausible.
Science doesn't care who funds it. But researchers do. And you need to know who pays the bills if you want to keep funded.
I get the idea. I'm afraid you do not. Snow doesn't melt instantly. And in fact in the vast majority of the world, snow and water do not land on glaciers and the land downstream does not flood every spring. Even if you think landing on the glacier somehow changes this. Remember, every bit of snow that lands on the glacier melts every year (or at least the same amount of water) PLUS MORE. As such, someone living downstream from a glacier already gets more water every year than someone who does not. In fact the sign was very clear that the melting glacier itself was what provided enough water for the communities downstream. Something they would not have if the glacier was gone.
Of course it's also something they wouldn't have if the glacier weren't melting. But that text wouldn't fit the agenda of those who wrote the sign.
I was at a glacier recently, and there was a sign talking about how if the glacier kept melting due to global warming, it would vanish and no longer be able to be a source for water for the rivers it fed, and all the problems people downstream would have due to lack of water.
What they seemed to miss was the idea that if the glacier was NOT melting, there would also be no water downstream....
The government outspends any company hundreds to one in this area. So I think it's pretty easy to see which side of this you need to be on if you actually want your research to get any funding.
And as a counter point, I have never seen that practice at any gas station in any of the countries I have ever visited (including yours). So I'd say the sample size is extremely small. Which would stand to reason as it is also against their contract with their card processor to charge different rates for card vs cash so they risk losing their ability to accept cards at all. Which would also kill their ability to sell to any fleet. A risk very few businesses are willing to take.
Decentralized isn't necessarily the problem though, The average person doesn't understand the current financial system, nor do they care whether something is "centralized" or "decentralized". People simply look at the pros and cons. People will even accept more risk, if there's a tradeoff that offsets it. (look at IOT for example, people will accept the risk of their door locks being hacked for the convenience of having them accessible from their smartphone). But blockchain solves none of the problems people have with their existing payment solutions, while introducing several new ones. That's why it isn't a useful currency. Here are some of the top concerns people have about their payment methods, and how blockchain addresses them: - Fees. People complain about paying their banks for transactions, but realistically credit cards don't charge the end user, and the fee they do charge to the merchant is not waived if you don't use one in most cases (I know there are a small handful of businesses that reduce their price for cash purchases, but it's not normal) Meanwhile blockchain does have transaction fees (and sometimes incredibly high ones!), just to different people. Additionally many credit cards offer points of some form, or even cash back. It's cheaper for me to use a credit card than cash, and cash is cheaper than blockchain. - Peer to Peer. People want to be able to send money from one person to another quickly and easily. Most banks make this difficult. Unfortunately, transactions using blockchain aren't quick enough for someone trying to sell something to another person (I don't want to sit around waiting for minutes, hours, or days, to see if I should hand over the item) and also have added fees. Cash still wins this one. - Theft, people don't want to be on the hook if someone steals their wallet. Cash is gone if someone takes your wallet, but at least you probably don't have all of your money in cash in your pocket, most of it is probably in the bank. Credit cards idemnify you against theft, as does the bank. Blockchain has no protections at all against theft, and there's a high chance that you could have all your eggs in one basket (sure you COULD have multiple wallets and maybe only 1 will be hacked, but will you actually? and even if you do, can you guarantee an attacker won't get more than one?) Credit cards are the safest one here, followed by banks,
Now if they made great progress in the first 2 items compared to the traditional payment methods, then people would probably accept the third one. But when all 3 are worse, they won't adopt it. This means that nobody really uses blockchain currencies as a payment method, they use them to gamble that someone else will pay more for it than they did. And that's all it's really used for.
I didn't say it would be useless forever. just that it's useless right now. And it's not a scale thing like the internet or texting. It's a fundamental problem of figuring out a use for it. Right now there is no use case. I can't predict the future, and it's possible that there will be a use case in the future, but right now there's none. I won't write off the technology as a whole, but so far this is a solution in search of a problem. We may yet see this solve some problem, but it hasn't happened yet.
Our government claims our power grid has "competition". Of course that doesn't mean multiple sets of wires exist that you can switch between. It just means that they added a layer of bureaucracy on top of it, so now you pay 2 companies instead of 1. You pay the "wires service provider" AND the "electricity retailer". Surprisingly bills did not go down when they added "competition" in this way....
Depends how quickly you can cash out. It likely doesn't take long to cash out if you know how and have pre-arranged it, and you only need it to happen a fraction of a second faster than the time it takes the crypto currency value to tank.
But we know what value mastercard provides. We don't know what value blockchain provides.
Comparing the power use of the two is therefore somewhat irrelevant.
Mastercard allows me to shop both in person and online with certainty. I present my card, and within a couple of seconds we have certainty that my transaction is approved and will go through. I know that even if the merchant finds a way to double bill me, mastercard will indemnify me for it, and I know what the transaction will cost me in relation to the amount of money I have, and in relation to every other transaction I make, because they all use the same currency.
Blockchain transactions on the other hand have none of the certainty, none of the speed, and none of the security. They also aren't tied to the currency used for everything else, so the wild price swings can, and will, affect you. Also by your own admission, blockchain isn't even supposed to be for payment, just as a distributed ledger. Something that nobody has ever found a use for that isn't already better served by other existing tools.
I'm not saying the technology is completely useless. But I can confidently say that nobody has found a practical use for it yet other than to try to find the "greater fool" willing to pay more for it than it cost the original person.
This is exactly the issue. Nobody knows why we want it. Somebody came up with a cool new technology, but just because the technology exists, doesn't mean there is any actual use for it. People keep trying to kludge a purpose on to it, but so far every one of those purposes is better served with existing tools.
I'm not going to say that blockchain technology is useless. But I will say that nobody has yet come up with a good use for it.
So they bill the peering telco, but they still can't figure out that the number that peering telco is claiming is from WITHIN THEIR OWN NETWORK???
Sorry, I don't buy that level of incompetence as a technical defence. There is zero excuse why the CID of a calling party should EVER show as my own number, or a spoofed number from my local area which is served exclusively by my own carrier.
I disagree with you on almost every point, except the part where you state that it would mean a reduction in revenue for the telco. That part is real.
The rest is complete hogwash. And that's coming from someone who works for a telco.
You don't think they already have a database and perform a lookup each time a call comes through? They do manage to bill the right person despite it being SOOOOOO difficult to figure out who's calling.
There may be millions of possible phone numbers, but telcos know which network to route them to. When I call my neighbour who's a subscriber of the same telco I am, the call never leaves the carrier's own internal network. Yet if someone claims to be my neighbour when calling in to the network, they happily pass it along, even though they know it couldn't possibly be a valid CID because my neighbour is their customer, and they know that.
Worse yet, I often get spam calls that are spoofing my own number. The modern switches don't even have a facility for making a call like that, so it's pretty obvious that one's not legit.
Sure there are reasons why a company should be able to spoof an outgoing number to be another one they own, but the key is it should be one they own! CID was a ridiculous system right from implementation. The whole idea of allowing the end customer to dictate what it says instead of leaving that with the carrier was a disaster waiting to happen.
So in other words, someone is paying the local telco big bucks to tie directly in to their systems at the local level in various locations. Yeah, I'm sure they're in a rush to limit that revenue stream...
They aren't even willing to honestly tell you what country it was (passing on known fraudulent CID) why would they let you block entire countries? Keep in mind that long distance is still the biggest cash cow for telecoms. They don't want to discourage any use of it.
Great idea, all that's missing is any incentive whatsoever for the telecommunication industry to care. They make money from phone calls. They don't exactly have any incentive to reduce the number of calls on their network, and they don't care whether or not they're legitimate.
I'm afraid I don't see any of that changing without regulatory requirements. All of the technical solutions I've seen are dead easy to implement (compared to the scope of their business). What's missing isn't the means to make a change, it's the desire to do so.
Any legitimate cold calls should be honoring the national do not call registry anyways.
You're funny.
To start with, half the world is exempt from that, specifically the worst offenders (political parties and charities), and in my country for some inexplicable reason, newspapers are also exempt.
But beyond that, even "legitimate" businesses still call me all the time (assuming you can call furnace and duct cleaning companies legitimate, as those seem to be the bulk of the non-exempt callers that get through to me,) I do however report all of them to our national regulator, and surprisingly, I even had the regulator call me to follow up at one time as they were apparently building a court case against one of them. (They may be able to spoof CID, but if it's a business that actually wants to do business, they need to give you a real way of contacting them)
Almost all of these calls come from overseas call centers, and yet every single one is spoofing my own local area code and even local exchange prefix (they hope you'll think it's someone nearby calling and actually pick up). It's pretty obvious that not only is this outside the realm of "number portability", I can also guarantee that they are spoofing numbers that are from a completely different telco than they are calling from, probably even numbers from the telco they are calling in to.
I can't even imagine how much incompetence would be required not to be able to filter out CID coming from outside your network that claims to be coming from inside it. This has absolutely nothing to do with "can't" it's entirely "won't". The sad truth of the matter is that telephone companies are paid to process phone calls. They have no financial incentive to reduce the number of calls on their network.
As I said, the government here gave up on reflective 25 years ago to save money. So our plates aren't reflective, and they never replace them.
There was a push a couple years ago to design new plates with reflective and such, but there was so much public backlash against spending so many millions for no reason that the government was forced to give up. Nobody wanted the government to waste that kind of money when the current plates worked just fine.
10 years? I'm going on 18 with my plate right now and no end in sight. (Though I'll admit the annual registration stickers are getting a bit thick as they tell you not to remove the old ones when applying the news ones, and the renewal month sticker has faded completely to white)
My father's plate is now 34 years old. As for reflective coating. Government gave up on that 25 years ago, "cost savings"
Slashdot Mirror
In the US bribes are legally protected as free speech, so the end result isn't exactly a surprise.
Nobody is forcing the companies to call it unlimited when it isn't. That's their choice.
People should expect to get what they paid for, it's the companies' fault if they can't provide what they sold.
And yet, nobody ever provides a cash discount. Funny that.
Thing is it would be stupid for a consumer to use cash. It's against their self interest. Credit cards are ALWAYS cheaper for the consumer than cash. Every single time.
There's no discount for cash, and you get points or cash back on credit cards. Even if you don't get points or cash back, you still get an interest free 30 day loan, that alone is worth something.
For the retailer it may be another story, but even there it's not so clear cut. I do know a major chain that tried to encourage cash at one point, but they ended up giving up. Their reasoning was that it was so much more expensive to handle the cash that it wiped out any savings (counting the cash, dealing with change, making deposits, accounting for differences in the register, etc) So even for a retailer credit cards can make more sense.
And then of course there is cryptocurrency, all the negatives of cash, AND all the negatives of credit cards, with none of the advantages of either....
I didn't say there was a conspiracy. That's 100% in your camp. You think the oil companies are colluding to hide AGW. I'm pointing out that almost all the funding comes from government, not oil companies, so that seems entirely implausible.
Science doesn't care who funds it. But researchers do. And you need to know who pays the bills if you want to keep funded.
I get the idea. I'm afraid you do not. Snow doesn't melt instantly. And in fact in the vast majority of the world, snow and water do not land on glaciers and the land downstream does not flood every spring.
Even if you think landing on the glacier somehow changes this. Remember, every bit of snow that lands on the glacier melts every year (or at least the same amount of water) PLUS MORE. As such, someone living downstream from a glacier already gets more water every year than someone who does not. In fact the sign was very clear that the melting glacier itself was what provided enough water for the communities downstream. Something they would not have if the glacier was gone.
Of course it's also something they wouldn't have if the glacier weren't melting. But that text wouldn't fit the agenda of those who wrote the sign.
How about the fact that the last ice age ended a while ago, so it's somewhat expected that the ice may not remain frozen forever?
I was at a glacier recently, and there was a sign talking about how if the glacier kept melting due to global warming, it would vanish and no longer be able to be a source for water for the rivers it fed, and all the problems people downstream would have due to lack of water.
What they seemed to miss was the idea that if the glacier was NOT melting, there would also be no water downstream....
The government outspends any company hundreds to one in this area. So I think it's pretty easy to see which side of this you need to be on if you actually want your research to get any funding.
And as a counter point, I have never seen that practice at any gas station in any of the countries I have ever visited (including yours). So I'd say the sample size is extremely small. Which would stand to reason as it is also against their contract with their card processor to charge different rates for card vs cash so they risk losing their ability to accept cards at all. Which would also kill their ability to sell to any fleet. A risk very few businesses are willing to take.
Decentralized isn't necessarily the problem though, The average person doesn't understand the current financial system, nor do they care whether something is "centralized" or "decentralized". People simply look at the pros and cons. People will even accept more risk, if there's a tradeoff that offsets it. (look at IOT for example, people will accept the risk of their door locks being hacked for the convenience of having them accessible from their smartphone). But blockchain solves none of the problems people have with their existing payment solutions, while introducing several new ones. That's why it isn't a useful currency. Here are some of the top concerns people have about their payment methods, and how blockchain addresses them:
- Fees. People complain about paying their banks for transactions, but realistically credit cards don't charge the end user, and the fee they do charge to the merchant is not waived if you don't use one in most cases (I know there are a small handful of businesses that reduce their price for cash purchases, but it's not normal) Meanwhile blockchain does have transaction fees (and sometimes incredibly high ones!), just to different people. Additionally many credit cards offer points of some form, or even cash back. It's cheaper for me to use a credit card than cash, and cash is cheaper than blockchain.
- Peer to Peer. People want to be able to send money from one person to another quickly and easily. Most banks make this difficult. Unfortunately, transactions using blockchain aren't quick enough for someone trying to sell something to another person (I don't want to sit around waiting for minutes, hours, or days, to see if I should hand over the item) and also have added fees. Cash still wins this one.
- Theft, people don't want to be on the hook if someone steals their wallet. Cash is gone if someone takes your wallet, but at least you probably don't have all of your money in cash in your pocket, most of it is probably in the bank. Credit cards idemnify you against theft, as does the bank. Blockchain has no protections at all against theft, and there's a high chance that you could have all your eggs in one basket (sure you COULD have multiple wallets and maybe only 1 will be hacked, but will you actually? and even if you do, can you guarantee an attacker won't get more than one?) Credit cards are the safest one here, followed by banks,
Now if they made great progress in the first 2 items compared to the traditional payment methods, then people would probably accept the third one. But when all 3 are worse, they won't adopt it. This means that nobody really uses blockchain currencies as a payment method, they use them to gamble that someone else will pay more for it than they did. And that's all it's really used for.
See the last line of my previous comment.
I didn't say it would be useless forever. just that it's useless right now. And it's not a scale thing like the internet or texting. It's a fundamental problem of figuring out a use for it. Right now there is no use case. I can't predict the future, and it's possible that there will be a use case in the future, but right now there's none. I won't write off the technology as a whole, but so far this is a solution in search of a problem. We may yet see this solve some problem, but it hasn't happened yet.
Our government claims our power grid has "competition". Of course that doesn't mean multiple sets of wires exist that you can switch between. It just means that they added a layer of bureaucracy on top of it, so now you pay 2 companies instead of 1. You pay the "wires service provider" AND the "electricity retailer". Surprisingly bills did not go down when they added "competition" in this way....
Depends how quickly you can cash out. It likely doesn't take long to cash out if you know how and have pre-arranged it, and you only need it to happen a fraction of a second faster than the time it takes the crypto currency value to tank.
But we know what value mastercard provides. We don't know what value blockchain provides.
Comparing the power use of the two is therefore somewhat irrelevant.
Mastercard allows me to shop both in person and online with certainty. I present my card, and within a couple of seconds we have certainty that my transaction is approved and will go through. I know that even if the merchant finds a way to double bill me, mastercard will indemnify me for it, and I know what the transaction will cost me in relation to the amount of money I have, and in relation to every other transaction I make, because they all use the same currency.
Blockchain transactions on the other hand have none of the certainty, none of the speed, and none of the security. They also aren't tied to the currency used for everything else, so the wild price swings can, and will, affect you. Also by your own admission, blockchain isn't even supposed to be for payment, just as a distributed ledger. Something that nobody has ever found a use for that isn't already better served by other existing tools.
I'm not saying the technology is completely useless. But I can confidently say that nobody has found a practical use for it yet other than to try to find the "greater fool" willing to pay more for it than it cost the original person.
Because blockchain!
This is exactly the issue. Nobody knows why we want it. Somebody came up with a cool new technology, but just because the technology exists, doesn't mean there is any actual use for it. People keep trying to kludge a purpose on to it, but so far every one of those purposes is better served with existing tools.
I'm not going to say that blockchain technology is useless. But I will say that nobody has yet come up with a good use for it.
But for how long? regulators are already taking notice, and some are already regulating. The rest are sure to follow shortly.
And then what are you left with?
So they bill the peering telco, but they still can't figure out that the number that peering telco is claiming is from WITHIN THEIR OWN NETWORK???
Sorry, I don't buy that level of incompetence as a technical defence. There is zero excuse why the CID of a calling party should EVER show as my own number, or a spoofed number from my local area which is served exclusively by my own carrier.
I disagree with you on almost every point, except the part where you state that it would mean a reduction in revenue for the telco. That part is real.
The rest is complete hogwash. And that's coming from someone who works for a telco.
You don't think they already have a database and perform a lookup each time a call comes through? They do manage to bill the right person despite it being SOOOOOO difficult to figure out who's calling.
There may be millions of possible phone numbers, but telcos know which network to route them to. When I call my neighbour who's a subscriber of the same telco I am, the call never leaves the carrier's own internal network. Yet if someone claims to be my neighbour when calling in to the network, they happily pass it along, even though they know it couldn't possibly be a valid CID because my neighbour is their customer, and they know that.
Worse yet, I often get spam calls that are spoofing my own number. The modern switches don't even have a facility for making a call like that, so it's pretty obvious that one's not legit.
Sure there are reasons why a company should be able to spoof an outgoing number to be another one they own, but the key is it should be one they own! CID was a ridiculous system right from implementation. The whole idea of allowing the end customer to dictate what it says instead of leaving that with the carrier was a disaster waiting to happen.
So in other words, someone is paying the local telco big bucks to tie directly in to their systems at the local level in various locations. Yeah, I'm sure they're in a rush to limit that revenue stream...
They aren't even willing to honestly tell you what country it was (passing on known fraudulent CID) why would they let you block entire countries? Keep in mind that long distance is still the biggest cash cow for telecoms. They don't want to discourage any use of it.
Great idea, all that's missing is any incentive whatsoever for the telecommunication industry to care. They make money from phone calls. They don't exactly have any incentive to reduce the number of calls on their network, and they don't care whether or not they're legitimate.
I'm afraid I don't see any of that changing without regulatory requirements. All of the technical solutions I've seen are dead easy to implement (compared to the scope of their business). What's missing isn't the means to make a change, it's the desire to do so.
Any legitimate cold calls should be honoring the national do not call registry anyways.
You're funny.
To start with, half the world is exempt from that, specifically the worst offenders (political parties and charities), and in my country for some inexplicable reason, newspapers are also exempt.
But beyond that, even "legitimate" businesses still call me all the time (assuming you can call furnace and duct cleaning companies legitimate, as those seem to be the bulk of the non-exempt callers that get through to me,) I do however report all of them to our national regulator, and surprisingly, I even had the regulator call me to follow up at one time as they were apparently building a court case against one of them. (They may be able to spoof CID, but if it's a business that actually wants to do business, they need to give you a real way of contacting them)
complete BS.
Almost all of these calls come from overseas call centers, and yet every single one is spoofing my own local area code and even local exchange prefix (they hope you'll think it's someone nearby calling and actually pick up). It's pretty obvious that not only is this outside the realm of "number portability", I can also guarantee that they are spoofing numbers that are from a completely different telco than they are calling from, probably even numbers from the telco they are calling in to.
I can't even imagine how much incompetence would be required not to be able to filter out CID coming from outside your network that claims to be coming from inside it. This has absolutely nothing to do with "can't" it's entirely "won't". The sad truth of the matter is that telephone companies are paid to process phone calls. They have no financial incentive to reduce the number of calls on their network.
As I said, the government here gave up on reflective 25 years ago to save money. So our plates aren't reflective, and they never replace them.
There was a push a couple years ago to design new plates with reflective and such, but there was so much public backlash against spending so many millions for no reason that the government was forced to give up. Nobody wanted the government to waste that kind of money when the current plates worked just fine.
10 years? I'm going on 18 with my plate right now and no end in sight. (Though I'll admit the annual registration stickers are getting a bit thick as they tell you not to remove the old ones when applying the news ones, and the renewal month sticker has faded completely to white)
My father's plate is now 34 years old. As for reflective coating. Government gave up on that 25 years ago, "cost savings"
Solution without a problem comes to mind.