Corporate taxation is the most efficient form of taxation we have. On one side you have a ruthlessly efficient system that tries to pay as minimum as it can and on the other we have a system that has cataloged every tax payer & tax rules. There aren't a lot of moving parts. Both sides understand the ever changing & complex tax rules defined by a multi-sided chess game. It is a very good balance. You eventually end up with the corporate world paying for what is required in the social world.
If you tax the end users and consumers, you have a ton of collection costs, lots of moving parts, and even if everyone was good, incorrect collections. Plus the population as individuals have no power to change their taxation rules.
But they can't collude to set market prices when they are as significant to the general market as they are. It doesn't matter if they are private or not.
When people mean that a company is good at marketing, they mean the Apples, Tivos, Automakers, and Microsofts of the world. Walmart isn't in this group. Most grocery type retailers aren't. Pathmark, Kroger, SuperFresh, Walmart, Whole Foods, Aldi.... these guys don't really do what is commonly thought of as "marketing". They do general advertising. And until about 5 years ago, Walmart didn't even do that!
Have you been on top of Cherry Hill too? J/K But yeah, when I was a kid back in the early 1990s, I used to gather quarters for arcade machines from the local Pathmark parking lot... made a ton of money... should have saved it.
First, lawsuit damages always mostly go to a third party. Class action lawsuites the actual end users get pennies on the dollar.
And what Walmart is saying is that the extra costs from Visa were maintained through market collusion between competitors (which is illegal in the US). They were forced to artificially inflate their prices to their customers which resulted in reduced sales and direct damage to Walmart.
Lets say that the user's PIN was known (socially engineered), user was targeted, and that is why it was stolen.... With a credit card in the US, I have nearly zero risk. With a debit card, I have risk, but it is minimized cause I don't use it (and thus my PIN) often. While I have a CC, most times, my debit card isn't even with me. My primary bank account doesn't even have a debit card feature.
As the consumer, what benefit do I have with the PIN vs a swipe system in such a case?
Its a risk assessment and balance. Credit transactions in the rest of the world are riskier and are thus accommodated with more controls, but this causes constraints in volume. The US has a LOT more volume in credit transactions than any other country. This volume is due to the ease, flexibility, and insecurity (for the lender) of the credit system here. Volume is the entire purpose of credit cards (vs debit). If the volume (thus profits) lost are greater than the fraud prevented... then it isn't a better system. However, if the fraud is too high in the system, then you need more controls. In the rest of the world, credit fraud would be rampant if setup as the US. So they need more controls in place to lower that fraud. Although lowering volume, due to the high amount of fraud that is curtailed, it will increase profits.
Think of it like this: There are places in the world where you can put a glass jar in a church/temple and people will donate. Other places will need an armed security guard. The number of donations coming in will be higher with the glass jar. Of course when someone steals the jar, a lot is lost. But depending on the location, that loss will be less than the amount donated vs the security guard. In others it will be the other way around.
You can also think of it like opening a tab at a bar or your small town grocery store (swipe system). They do this cause it increases volume & sales (US). If people didn't pay tabs the store will certainly stop offering tabs (politically unstable countries - cash based economy). Converse, if the owner wanted your fingerprints & government ID on file, less people would open tabs (PIN & CHIP).
As for security, to over simplify, a credit card has 25 numbers on it. Pin & chip has 29. The assumption is that the last 4 aren't written anywhere and thus people think they are more secure. In general, it is kind* of true. However, for the instances where it isn't, there is a much greater burden of proof on the innocent with the PIN system than with the swipe system. Thus more risk for them.
Its not necessarily about the amount of fraud but rather the impacts of it on profits. Everyone does win when fraud goes down and doesn't negatively impact profits.
* = Social engineering will always beat tech engineering. People are usually the weakest link.
Well said. Only part that I disagree with is that it is no longer viable. Even with the recent spat of issues, they are still very very small compared to the overall economy. Individually they probably reach as high as pump&dump, madoff, and insider trading fraud. But overall, they are pennies. Reality is that the economy might miss Target if it goes bankrupt, but will recover from it within a few months if not a year.
If we go to the pin & card system, fraud _might_ get lower (depending on how you quantity it and if you take into consideration the human factor) but the utility of the system will severely drop. Today people have a lot of cards with various amounts of credit & balances on each. This is big money for the industry. If you force people to memorize pins... either they will memorize ONE or decrease their cards. Former sucks for the user, and the later is horrible for the industry.
Credit cards already have a generally negative stigma. To tell the general consumer that their credit card is the same as their debit... the industry will severely shrink!
"For online I got a small app that I got from my bank that I can generate a new card with."
We have a similar thing in the US. Not as efficient, but similar. Credit cards. If something looks off on the monthly statement, we send an email and get a new one within 2-3 business days. It does suck that we can't "instantly" get a new card, but we can live with our other 3-4 cards during that time. If a merchant has issues, the CC vendor has all the incentive to send me a written notice and a new card... well before it even hits the news.
Yes. Only reason it hasn't been deployed is because of the sunk costs and people's resistance to change. I don't think pin & chip will make it here. The former two are too heavy to move. Unless you get someone like Walmart to do it (and they won't, fraud is too small of a write off) it won't fly. Honestly, I don't understand how Target has the capital to make this investment. It would cost them far less to put in the preventative & detective controls in their current systems. Not to mention their shopping base will drop.
"...fraud is discovered... monitored by authorities."
This isn't true. Most fraud costs less than the costs in catching it after the fact. Unless the fraud causes a lot of damage, it is usually written off as "cost of doing business".
Vendors can't lock down their IN STORE card verification and collection systems. How well do you think an unregulated, distributed version of it will do?
That is a VERY foolish thing to do on the part of the consumers. You are consolidating and increasing risk. Funny part is that the risk balance shifts to the consumer away from the bank/lender. The overall risk is higher, the lender's is lower, and the consumer's is higher. What a great world.
The rest of the world isn't ahead of the US in this regard. They are behind. Because the credit risk in the world is higher, lenders want to offload more of their risk to the users. This is why the rest of the world has credit/debit + pin consolidation.
That this was about a factory? When I first read the title, I thought along the lines of "Travelling Salesman Problem" and that this was about moving the production efficiently close to the consumption. I was so upbeat and summarily crushed upon reading the first sentence. Article is still good, but wrong expectations. Its going to be one of those days....
Was it just me or did anyone else have a hard time following that summary? At first I thought it was Yitang Zhang who settled "a long-standing open question". But the first sentence is actually talking about the eight - James Maynard.
So in summary, if a pair of primes is defined by one following the other, it was theorized that we would find an infinite number of such pairs separated by 2. Various people have proven that gap to be from 70m, 60m, 4680, and now 600. Thank you James Maynard.
Its a web I will highly avoid... even to make a point. I normally ignore the "survey" pop ups that happen. If I come across these sites that use this crap... I will totally spam that survey with negative (but valid) crap to the point that they will stop having surveys (I doubt they will stop the DRM).
Every consulting company out there has multiple off the shelf, turnkey payroll options. Just that no one wants them. Most of the time, the "consultants" just customize one of the options as per the customer's unique needs. Then the customer has even more extremely special and unique needs. Some clearly poor practices and some just not feasible. About 1/2 way through the project people realize that the customer never wanted an off the shelf, turnkey solution. They want a custom built solution. But they just keep going cause its hard to stop a train; even thou they all know the wreck that is coming.
Funny thing is that if people just bit the bullet and understood the limits of a turnkey or that they wanted a custom solution, they would certainly save a lot of money. It would cost more than the original budget but it would cost a LOT less than the end result. This is why people just don't be honest up front. No one likes approving a $100k project while there is a $90k option. No matter how wrong the second is, they just spend $9.9k figuring out how make the later look good in the summary reports.
I have spent an unfortunately amount of time & cost convincing and proving to the decision makers what basically to me was 2+2 can not equal 5. It feels insulting most of the time cause they bring us in for our "expert" opinions, but don't trust said opinions. Until there is a cost that is big enough to show up as a line item in a report or some high up gets red in the face. Its sad, but just the way of the world.
Go fly to the UK, Mexico, and India to one of their international hospitals to get treatment. They aren't the "local hospital" the internationals are coming, they are international hospitals designed for international customers. Oh, many of these also accept US health insurance. And for some procedures, the insurance company will actually encourage and pay for you and one other to fly, stay, and get the procedure done in a foreign country. That kind of says it all.
See how many people go to these places vs the US. And then figure out how behind the US is in patient care.
Don't get me wrong, we got the best medical facilities, and doctors in the world bar none. But that is all we got and the price tag that goes with it and it is all very inefficient. Most others have some thing that is 95% of what we got, at 50% of the cost or better. And also, they have options, they have services that are 50% of what we offer but at 1% the cost. We only have the best of the best of the best @ $$$$... and that's it.
In this day and age, the mighty United States of America has been reduced to feeling "terror" from "twentysomethings who haven't talked to the opposite sex in five or six years."
Castration is usually done cause it makes the animals more docile and easier to manage. In rage or fright an uncastrated male will kill you, but a castrated one will feel the slap you give it and stop. But no, it is not required. Normally one is kept around uncastrated (ie strongest of the litter), it also acts to calm all the other males.
Cows, not so much. I can't think of too many situations where a cow would be best suited as a work animal.
This is far from true. Cows (assuming male and female) are one of the most useful animals ever. They are equivalent to dogs in terms of usefulness. They are a dependable transport, good at hauling load, provide major labor in the field, provide mike (a whole food), provide yogurt, provide butter, provide fertilizer, provide fuel for fire (in two ways), provide leather upon death, and make more cows. Historically they have even provided security and warmth (cause they used to live in the same house as the owner).
Horses are great for colder climates and drier terrain, but cows are better in hot, wetter, humid, and muddy terrain.
Cows were such an integral part of a family that the only time they were eaten was upon natural death. However natural death mean it usually died of old age or some sort of disease so it was considered unhealthy. Later this was adopted into religion and made sacred so that society saw this act as dishonorable and unethical.
For many of the situations that the parent is talking about, this is not true. Spreadsheets with massive business logic are extremely expensive and very inflexible, more so than DB apps. Just no central group/organization reviews, audits, and tallies these costs like they do for developed applications. Therefore, people assume the spreadsheet is cheaper. Do actual IT audits where these things fall into scope... and you quickly realize just how ridiculously risky the entire deck-of-cards-business is running.
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Corporate taxation is the most efficient form of taxation we have. On one side you have a ruthlessly efficient system that tries to pay as minimum as it can and on the other we have a system that has cataloged every tax payer & tax rules. There aren't a lot of moving parts. Both sides understand the ever changing & complex tax rules defined by a multi-sided chess game. It is a very good balance. You eventually end up with the corporate world paying for what is required in the social world.
If you tax the end users and consumers, you have a ton of collection costs, lots of moving parts, and even if everyone was good, incorrect collections. Plus the population as individuals have no power to change their taxation rules.
Not every workplace irrelevant of their association to a chain is a good place to work. I been to many Walmarts where the workers are quite happy.
But they can't collude to set market prices when they are as significant to the general market as they are. It doesn't matter if they are private or not.
When people mean that a company is good at marketing, they mean the Apples, Tivos, Automakers, and Microsofts of the world. Walmart isn't in this group. Most grocery type retailers aren't. Pathmark, Kroger, SuperFresh, Walmart, Whole Foods, Aldi.... these guys don't really do what is commonly thought of as "marketing". They do general advertising. And until about 5 years ago, Walmart didn't even do that!
Have you been on top of Cherry Hill too? J/K But yeah, when I was a kid back in the early 1990s, I used to gather quarters for arcade machines from the local Pathmark parking lot... made a ton of money... should have saved it.
First, lawsuit damages always mostly go to a third party. Class action lawsuites the actual end users get pennies on the dollar.
And what Walmart is saying is that the extra costs from Visa were maintained through market collusion between competitors (which is illegal in the US). They were forced to artificially inflate their prices to their customers which resulted in reduced sales and direct damage to Walmart.
Lets say that the user's PIN was known (socially engineered), user was targeted, and that is why it was stolen.... With a credit card in the US, I have nearly zero risk. With a debit card, I have risk, but it is minimized cause I don't use it (and thus my PIN) often. While I have a CC, most times, my debit card isn't even with me. My primary bank account doesn't even have a debit card feature.
As the consumer, what benefit do I have with the PIN vs a swipe system in such a case?
This is one of those "not always".
Its a risk assessment and balance. Credit transactions in the rest of the world are riskier and are thus accommodated with more controls, but this causes constraints in volume. The US has a LOT more volume in credit transactions than any other country. This volume is due to the ease, flexibility, and insecurity (for the lender) of the credit system here. Volume is the entire purpose of credit cards (vs debit). If the volume (thus profits) lost are greater than the fraud prevented... then it isn't a better system. However, if the fraud is too high in the system, then you need more controls. In the rest of the world, credit fraud would be rampant if setup as the US. So they need more controls in place to lower that fraud. Although lowering volume, due to the high amount of fraud that is curtailed, it will increase profits.
Think of it like this: There are places in the world where you can put a glass jar in a church/temple and people will donate. Other places will need an armed security guard. The number of donations coming in will be higher with the glass jar. Of course when someone steals the jar, a lot is lost. But depending on the location, that loss will be less than the amount donated vs the security guard. In others it will be the other way around.
You can also think of it like opening a tab at a bar or your small town grocery store (swipe system). They do this cause it increases volume & sales (US). If people didn't pay tabs the store will certainly stop offering tabs (politically unstable countries - cash based economy). Converse, if the owner wanted your fingerprints & government ID on file, less people would open tabs (PIN & CHIP).
As for security, to over simplify, a credit card has 25 numbers on it. Pin & chip has 29. The assumption is that the last 4 aren't written anywhere and thus people think they are more secure. In general, it is kind* of true. However, for the instances where it isn't, there is a much greater burden of proof on the innocent with the PIN system than with the swipe system. Thus more risk for them.
Its not necessarily about the amount of fraud but rather the impacts of it on profits. Everyone does win when fraud goes down and doesn't negatively impact profits.
* = Social engineering will always beat tech engineering. People are usually the weakest link.
A year when the legal system STILL depends on paper as more solid evidence than electronic.
Well said. Only part that I disagree with is that it is no longer viable. Even with the recent spat of issues, they are still very very small compared to the overall economy. Individually they probably reach as high as pump&dump, madoff, and insider trading fraud. But overall, they are pennies. Reality is that the economy might miss Target if it goes bankrupt, but will recover from it within a few months if not a year.
If we go to the pin & card system, fraud _might_ get lower (depending on how you quantity it and if you take into consideration the human factor) but the utility of the system will severely drop. Today people have a lot of cards with various amounts of credit & balances on each. This is big money for the industry. If you force people to memorize pins... either they will memorize ONE or decrease their cards. Former sucks for the user, and the later is horrible for the industry.
Credit cards already have a generally negative stigma. To tell the general consumer that their credit card is the same as their debit... the industry will severely shrink!
"For online I got a small app that I got from my bank that I can generate a new card with."
We have a similar thing in the US. Not as efficient, but similar. Credit cards. If something looks off on the monthly statement, we send an email and get a new one within 2-3 business days. It does suck that we can't "instantly" get a new card, but we can live with our other 3-4 cards during that time. If a merchant has issues, the CC vendor has all the incentive to send me a written notice and a new card... well before it even hits the news.
Yes. Only reason it hasn't been deployed is because of the sunk costs and people's resistance to change. I don't think pin & chip will make it here. The former two are too heavy to move. Unless you get someone like Walmart to do it (and they won't, fraud is too small of a write off) it won't fly. Honestly, I don't understand how Target has the capital to make this investment. It would cost them far less to put in the preventative & detective controls in their current systems. Not to mention their shopping base will drop.
"...fraud is discovered ... monitored by authorities."
This isn't true. Most fraud costs less than the costs in catching it after the fact. Unless the fraud causes a lot of damage, it is usually written off as "cost of doing business".
Vendors can't lock down their IN STORE card verification and collection systems. How well do you think an unregulated, distributed version of it will do?
That is a VERY foolish thing to do on the part of the consumers. You are consolidating and increasing risk. Funny part is that the risk balance shifts to the consumer away from the bank/lender. The overall risk is higher, the lender's is lower, and the consumer's is higher. What a great world.
The rest of the world isn't ahead of the US in this regard. They are behind. Because the credit risk in the world is higher, lenders want to offload more of their risk to the users. This is why the rest of the world has credit/debit + pin consolidation.
That this was about a factory? When I first read the title, I thought along the lines of "Travelling Salesman Problem" and that this was about moving the production efficiently close to the consumption. I was so upbeat and summarily crushed upon reading the first sentence. Article is still good, but wrong expectations. Its going to be one of those days....
Was it just me or did anyone else have a hard time following that summary? At first I thought it was Yitang Zhang who settled "a long-standing open question". But the first sentence is actually talking about the eight - James Maynard.
So in summary, if a pair of primes is defined by one following the other, it was theorized that we would find an infinite number of such pairs separated by 2. Various people have proven that gap to be from 70m, 60m, 4680, and now 600. Thank you James Maynard.
People don't get it. It's the end of a really long barrel. They are going to use it to shotgun Steve's ashes into space.
Its a web I will highly avoid... even to make a point. I normally ignore the "survey" pop ups that happen. If I come across these sites that use this crap... I will totally spam that survey with negative (but valid) crap to the point that they will stop having surveys (I doubt they will stop the DRM).
Every consulting company out there has multiple off the shelf, turnkey payroll options. Just that no one wants them. Most of the time, the "consultants" just customize one of the options as per the customer's unique needs. Then the customer has even more extremely special and unique needs. Some clearly poor practices and some just not feasible. About 1/2 way through the project people realize that the customer never wanted an off the shelf, turnkey solution. They want a custom built solution. But they just keep going cause its hard to stop a train; even thou they all know the wreck that is coming.
Funny thing is that if people just bit the bullet and understood the limits of a turnkey or that they wanted a custom solution, they would certainly save a lot of money. It would cost more than the original budget but it would cost a LOT less than the end result. This is why people just don't be honest up front. No one likes approving a $100k project while there is a $90k option. No matter how wrong the second is, they just spend $9.9k figuring out how make the later look good in the summary reports.
I have spent an unfortunately amount of time & cost convincing and proving to the decision makers what basically to me was 2+2 can not equal 5. It feels insulting most of the time cause they bring us in for our "expert" opinions, but don't trust said opinions. Until there is a cost that is big enough to show up as a line item in a report or some high up gets red in the face. Its sad, but just the way of the world.
Go fly to the UK, Mexico, and India to one of their international hospitals to get treatment. They aren't the "local hospital" the internationals are coming, they are international hospitals designed for international customers. Oh, many of these also accept US health insurance. And for some procedures, the insurance company will actually encourage and pay for you and one other to fly, stay, and get the procedure done in a foreign country. That kind of says it all.
See how many people go to these places vs the US. And then figure out how behind the US is in patient care.
Don't get me wrong, we got the best medical facilities, and doctors in the world bar none. But that is all we got and the price tag that goes with it and it is all very inefficient. Most others have some thing that is 95% of what we got, at 50% of the cost or better. And also, they have options, they have services that are 50% of what we offer but at 1% the cost. We only have the best of the best of the best @ $$$$... and that's it.
In this day and age, the mighty United States of America has been reduced to feeling "terror" from "twentysomethings who haven't talked to the opposite sex in five or six years."
Wasn't that a standup joke 20 years ago?
Castration is usually done cause it makes the animals more docile and easier to manage. In rage or fright an uncastrated male will kill you, but a castrated one will feel the slap you give it and stop. But no, it is not required. Normally one is kept around uncastrated (ie strongest of the litter), it also acts to calm all the other males.
Cows, not so much. I can't think of too many situations where a cow would be best suited as a work animal.
This is far from true. Cows (assuming male and female) are one of the most useful animals ever. They are equivalent to dogs in terms of usefulness. They are a dependable transport, good at hauling load, provide major labor in the field, provide mike (a whole food), provide yogurt, provide butter, provide fertilizer, provide fuel for fire (in two ways), provide leather upon death, and make more cows. Historically they have even provided security and warmth (cause they used to live in the same house as the owner).
Horses are great for colder climates and drier terrain, but cows are better in hot, wetter, humid, and muddy terrain.
Cows were such an integral part of a family that the only time they were eaten was upon natural death. However natural death mean it usually died of old age or some sort of disease so it was considered unhealthy. Later this was adopted into religion and made sacred so that society saw this act as dishonorable and unethical.
For many of the situations that the parent is talking about, this is not true. Spreadsheets with massive business logic are extremely expensive and very inflexible, more so than DB apps. Just no central group/organization reviews, audits, and tallies these costs like they do for developed applications. Therefore, people assume the spreadsheet is cheaper. Do actual IT audits where these things fall into scope... and you quickly realize just how ridiculously risky the entire deck-of-cards-business is running.