I’m sure most of their revenue is large enterprise customers who serve government with their products - this looks very bad
That's what hegseth says, but the law doesn't really say that AFAICT.
Readit Newsaveao commented on I am directing the Department of War to designate Anthropic a supply-chain risk twitter.com/secwar/status... · Posted by u/jacobedawson
It's a silly shibboleth, but I automatically ignore anyone who calls it the Department of War or Gulf of America. Hasn't steered me wrong yet. They're telling me they're the kind of people who only care about defending fascism.
I call it department of war, because I think it is a great self-own on their part to do such a rename.
Europe doesn’t give a shit about another American company and their employees trying to dominate their markets and import their workaholic American culture. They will tell Anthropic to go home.
This is pretty disconnected to how EU has been behaving towards both startups and AI.
aveao commented on Europe's $24T Breakup with Visa and Mastercard Has Begun europeanbusinessmagazine.... · Posted by u/NewCzech
Depends if we are talking credit or debt cards
The low fees are for debt and high for credit cards and VISA/MC won't allow you to accebt only the debt cards
The fees for those are still often comparatively lower to the US rates posted above. Credit cards are also not popular here, so while I do own one, I suspect average % of a merchant still remains low.
Amex also offers pretty good rates to low-volume merchants here to have more acceptance to my understanding.
aveao commented on Europe's $24T Breakup with Visa and Mastercard Has Begun europeanbusinessmagazine.... · Posted by u/NewCzech
The concept of a physical card is obsolete. That North Americans and western Europeans for a good part still use them is just stickiness of the infrastructure, and habits.
Developing countries have mostly leapfrogged to total contactless payments.
In South Aast Asia, you typically scan a QR code and approve a payment from your own phone. Far less fraud as a result. Nobody is able to touch your card, you don't have one.
Europe likely identified they better make the jump.
I can assure you that south east asians also still have cards, despite not making most of their payments with it. Not all ATMs support withdrawing with just a QR code from all banks, for one.
There are benefits to non-QR based payment systems, such as not wanting to pull out your phone, open an app, scan a QR and approve to make a payment that takes me 2 seconds with regular contactless payments.
Physical cards are also a nice fallback to have in cases of running out of battery, theft, etc.
aveao commented on Europe's $24T Breakup with Visa and Mastercard Has Begun europeanbusinessmagazine.... · Posted by u/NewCzech
This is what these peeps advocating for an "EU-based payment system" don't get, as they typically don't travel worldwide. VISA + Master just work. Have a debit plus credit for one each. (And no, Google / Apple pay won't do it, everyone who calls themselves a "hacker" should know that you too often can't even pay for transport using a rooted phone).
We do actually. The German Girocards were, until Maestro ceased to exist, often co-issued as Maestro + Girocard, and global acceptance was pretty good under the Mastercard network.
There are examples of other co-branded national payment systems out there (troy + Discover comes to mind).
If a European payment system (with cards, at a store) is to exist, then visa/mc will still want a piece of the pie by at least playing along to remain as a co-brand and taking their cuts from international payments.
aveao commented on Europe's $24T Breakup with Visa and Mastercard Has Begun europeanbusinessmagazine.... · Posted by u/NewCzech
Not 0.2%
Visa: 1.3% to 2.3% Mastercard: 1.5% to 2.6% Mastercard: 2.3% to 3.5%
Nothing precise as it depends on whether that's debit vs credit cards, and the type of card. Also volume related and what the bank may subsidize, or take on top.
The payment processing rates offered vary by country. It rarely goes above 1% in Germany unless you're really not shopping around or are really low volume.
A % of that also goes to the issuing bank*, not to MC/Visa, so I suspect the mentioned 0.2% is talking about what MC/Visa has as their cut.
*: That's also how banks can profitably offer things like cashback.
aveao commented on Europe's $24T Breakup with Visa and Mastercard Has Begun europeanbusinessmagazine.... · Posted by u/NewCzech
Nothing in France takes Discover, and my bank decided to go with Discover about 6 months ago. "Great" decision, thanks.
fwiw: Discover technically goes through amex network in EU, and amex acceptance varies from pretty good (e.g. germany) to pretty awful. Completely incomparable to visa and mc acceptance ofc.
aveao commented on I am happier writing code by hand abhinavomprakash.com/post... · Posted by u/lazyfolder
Maybe think of it this way: If your job is delivering mail and the only transport you have is a horse, your life would probably suck a lot. You'd barely be home and you still wouldn't cover that much distance. Now, if someone gave you a car for your job, you would not just cover a lot more distance and deliver a lot more mail (=happy employer), you would also get to sleep at home every day and not be exposed to the weather all the time (=happy employee).
This is how all industrialisation/automation works in general. A lot more stuff gets produced and people still get to have more quality of life. Code is just another product in the end. Your employer will get more product and you will get to worry about less when you're at home. Imagine you could be a 10x engineer as a normal guy without working 100 hour weeks. And the true 10x guys who still work 100 hours will be able to change the world.
Where I live we have labor rights and if your job is delivering mail and you're given a horse for it, you'd only be expected to deliver as much mail as you can in your contractual work time, which is then limited by the legal limits (8 hours/workday, up to 6 days/week). So you'd be home for most of the day, but delivering less letters per day.
(where I live a car would also be slower for delivering mail than a horse, most delivery people are given trikes, but alas)
This is how all industrialization/automation works in general: When you have a way to deliver faster/more, you're given more mail to deliver in your work time. Your pay does not go up, but any given road blockage or instance of traffic makes you fall behind quota significantly more. You're not paid by how many letters you deliver, but by the hours you work. Maybe you even make less as there's less overtime. Post will then proceed to simply employ less people over time as each employee is made to deliver more letters, then maybe you're part of the people whose jobs are cut. Or they might just reduce wages for everyone anyways, as now the job is much more accessible and there's more supply of labor than there is demand.
This is not an argument against industrialization or automation, but your perspective of what would happen if we had more industrialization is... very narrow.
We must consider the potential future where there's simply not enough work for most people to do (a realistic future now), and how we'll prevent that from going the same way it would currently go (losing income -> losing domicile -> starvation/freezing/etc).
aveao commented on 4Chan Lawyer publishes Ofcom correspondence alecmuffett.com/article/1... · Posted by u/alecmuffett