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dangerwill commented on OpenAI is Visa – Buttering up the government to retain a monopoly sherwood.news/tech/openai... · Posted by u/gpi
dangerwill commented on OpenAI is Visa – Buttering up the government to retain a monopoly sherwood.news/tech/openai... · Posted by u/gpi
I don’t understand this line of argument at all… Costco has competitors, you do NOT have to go to Costco. I choose not to go to many places because I disagree with their business practices or politics or whatever I feel like - it is my right. I do not understand this at all - especially in America. You don’t want my MasterCard or Discover or WhateverNewPaymentThingy? Great, imma head over to XYZ and spend my money there. Going to Costco (or any other business) and saying “you must accept XYZQ form of payment or else…” feels China-ish at best. And excusing Amex - why is that?! Fees alone? So we’d be cool if Visa just said “whatever you have to pay MC/Discover we’ll do it for one penny less”? At Costco’s scale that’d still be a boatload of money
If you want a healthy market, your standard cannot simply be: As long as there is more than one retailer in the space, retailers can place whatever restrictions they want on how you pay for their services. Businesses in one sector being able to directly affect consumer choices across sectors is how you end up with cross sector monopolies.
It is bizarre to bring up China here, this isn't about the state dictating the payment system but maintaining a healthy market. It's like a garden, you don't dictate exactly how the plants grow, but you prune them once they encroach onto other plants to maintain a healthy balance.
I brought up Amex because it is common for merchants to not accept it, due to it being a significantly worse deal for the merchants. I am fine with the argument for an even more expansive version of my argument, but I'm making a more narrow argument due to discover, visa, mastercard being so close in how they function that it is not a burden on merchants to accept one vs the others.
dangerwill commented on OpenAI is Visa – Buttering up the government to retain a monopoly sherwood.news/tech/openai... · Posted by u/gpi
> No one should have to open an account with visa just to shop at a retailer.
You know you have to pay just to enter Costco right? What's the difference if they want to force customers to use cash or Visa. Do you feel the same way about businesses that reject Discover?
I really don't understand the outrage.
> Ahhh, fearmongering about KYC. Know your customer is an obviously good regulation for banks to know the type of business they are partnering with for both risk assessment and anti fraud protections. So, what scams are you in favor of allowing by removing KYC regulations?
KYC and AML measures have a limited impact on stopping fraud and terrorism financing. Current efforts intercept only an estimated 0.1 to 0.2 percent of laundered money. A 2018 study suggested that the overall impact of AML policy intervention on criminal finances is less than 0.1 percent, which is considered negligible. This aligns with a 2011 UNODC report indicating that "much less than one percent (probably around 0.2 percent)" of the proceeds of crime laundered via the global financial system are seized and frozen.
Regulations should not be judged by intentions but rather results
https://www.gisreportsonline.com/r/why-anti-money-laundering...
> What's the difference if they want to force customers to use cash or Visa.
I'll leave the cash option aside because the provider of cash is the US treasury. But yes, I do think it is wrong for a merchant to only allow mastercard or visa or discover. I understand merchants not taking Amex because their fees are significantly higher on the merchant side, but discover, mastercard, and visa are all similar for the merchant. I work in payment processing for a multi billion dollar company and we gladly accept all of these card types. My issue is with visa providing Costco with a kickback, so that Costco then pressures you to have an account with visa. It should be totally fine if someone just happens to have only mastercard cards and wants to shop at costco. I'm against kickback schemes.
As for the AML/KYC ineffectiveness argument, I'm reading through that 2018 study now.
dangerwill commented on OpenAI is Visa – Buttering up the government to retain a monopoly sherwood.news/tech/openai... · Posted by u/gpi
> What Visa did in response recently got it sued by the Justice Department, which accused Visa of using aggressive tactics with companies like CostcoCOST $956.14 (-0.29%) and AppleAAPL $258.99 (0.35%) to guarantee that a competitive payment network would not develop, The Wall Street Journal reported.
I don't buy the reasoning as to how Visa built a moat. From the WSJ article linked in the article:
>> Visa offered to pay Costco $150 million. One condition of the deal: Costco would not do a credit-card deal with a bank that had its own network, according to the people familiar with the matter and the court filings. That shut out Chase. Visa also offered Costco an exclusive discount on the interchange fees the store pays when someone makes purchases with Visa credit cards.
So basically Visa offered Costco a discount if it allowed their cards exclusively. The thing with credit cards is that you can have more than one. I have a Visa and a Mastercard and when I shop at Costco I use Visa. I don't see this reason stopping someone wanting to compete as though if they can't get the Costco dollars, they have no product.
That's not to say that Visa doesn't use lobbying and legal system to erect barriers to entry. But that really has to do with ridiculous regulations and things like KYC, but we're not ready to have that conversation yet.
> thing with credit cards is that you can have more than one. I have a Visa and a Mastercard and when I shop at Costco I use Visa. I don't see this reason stopping someone wanting to compete as though if they can't get the Costco dollars, they have no product.
I'm sorry, are we really saying that it's acceptable for the market to begin preferring one completely compatible payment network vs another? This is clearly an undue influence in the market due to monopolistic power being used as leverage. No one should have to open an account with visa just to shop at a retailer. Anti competitive and anti consumer to the core.
> But that really has to do with ridiculous regulations and things like KYC, but we're not ready to have that conversation yet.
Ahhh, fearmongering about KYC. Know your customer is an obviously good regulation for banks to know the type of business they are partnering with for both risk assessment and anti fraud protections. So, what scams are you in favor of allowing by removing KYC regulations?
dangerwill commented on Includeable minimal operating system for C++ includeos.org/... · Posted by u/we-do-not-sow
Oh this is wildly cool! Do cloud providers like aws allow you to upload a custom system image to run as a vm?
dangerwill commented on European Ambition: The Old Meek Culture Must Change thegeneralist.substack.co... · Posted by u/jbredeche
Great Britain, where London is located, is in Europe. As such, it remains European.
It is no part of the European Union but other countries in the continent are also not, without having ceased to be European.
America existed before the USA became a country and all countries within it haven't ceased to be in America or American either.
We're talking about industry here so political boundaries matter not the geographic definition of Europe. Trade restrictions are in place between the UK and the EU, and thus place a wedge between the two.
dangerwill commented on European Ambition: The Old Meek Culture Must Change thegeneralist.substack.co... · Posted by u/jbredeche
All this talk about culture and the author doesn't talk about the fundamental issue: The EU created a European identity yes, but the amount of decentralization and universal consensus required to create the EU means it will never be a functioning state in and of itself. So there isn't a European tech industry, there are highly interconnected but distinct tech industries in Germany, France, Netherlands, Finland, Estonia, Ireland, Sweden. Only very recently has the EU began to try to consolidate pools of capital to facilitate large scale VC funding. There is a bright future I think, as America continues to rapidly decline, but this needs to be addressed. The ultimate irony? The author is English and moved back to London which is emphatically not European now. Going to be hard to cheerlead for the EU from the wreckage of brexit
Add a -ai to the end of your Google search query. There are also browser extensions that stop the AI content from displaying. I use the one for Chrome called "Remove Google Search Generative AI".
Great tip! But it only remove's Google's terrible AI summary, not AI generated content from showing up in searches, which is what the OP wishes for. A combination of -ai and before:2022-01-01 is probably the closest we can get to that
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