This is an important question- most of the costs of a credit card providers come from dealing with fraud and chargebacks. That's partially because, under US law, credit card companies have to eat fraudulent charges if they can't get the person or company that did the fraud to do so. (Funnily enough, this is one of two places where protections for average people in the US are significantly better than protections for average people in Europe).
But credit card companies can keep their costs low by making a business decision not to renew the accounts of frequent chargeback-ers or chargeback-ees (even if they never officially found those individuals at fault). If the government had to make a payment system for everyone and take on all responsibility for all fraud, that would create an incentive with massive second-order effects.
You resolve it the same way you handle in-store cash purchases of products that turn out to be faulty.
There is no reason why fraud and contract violation must be handled by unelected and unaccountable payment processor, when the government has already set up a consumer protection system for disputes related to cash payments. The payment processor is best left as a dumb pipe that does what parties and (in case of disputes) courts tell it to do.
You have to consider the interest of the involved parties rather than the efficiency of a system.
Making a purchase is (still) voluntary for the customer.
For everyday purchases at physical stores, cards are convenient. You just swipe and maybe put your PIN. But other digital payment methods or cash can be just as convenient. You're never going to chargeback a coffee, a sandwich, or your groceries.
But for distance purchases such as online shopping, hotel bookings, flight reservations and such, trust is the most important factor, not convenience. Cards have fraud protection. Other payment systems do not. These "unelected and unaccountable" people can actually help you if you've been the victim of wire fraud. Much faster and much less of a hassle than going through the courts. And if they don't help you, you haven't in any way, shape or form abstained from your right to justice through a court of law.
If customers can have that security and ease of mind, then they are much more likely to make a distance purchase. Which means that the vendor can sell their product. If the customer can't have that ease of mind, then the vendor will not make a sale.
So vendors who want to make sales will gladly accept cards. Anybody foolish enough to try to sell without making it easy for the customer to pay in their preferred way will go out of business.
Another point worth mentioning is that cards work instantly across pretty much all currencies in the world. You can go from anywhere to anywhere and pay with your card and currency exchange is done automatically. And in the past 10 years, cards have given very good exchange rates.
Customers can pay the credit card fee to get their chargeback insurance, if they choose, while others who can pay with cheaper instant payment rails can opt out. This is trivial with merchants able to surcharge credit card payments, as many merchants are starting to do (US mobile phone companies, US internet providers, Meta ad purchases, restaurants, etc).
Eh it's okay. It's just that, man, computers were already so well along by 1998, when I hear "age-old" I think like the 60s, 70s, _maybe_ 80s--but 90s?! oh well! I did a few double takes assuming my mind had flipped the 9 and 8 in 98, but no :D.
People don't hate Excel. Well - maybe programmers who don't use it hate it.
In reality, Excel is the only reason Microsoft still exists.
Excel is how they lure you in. Excel really is the best spreadsheet, its the only one every doc you are sent works with, but also the one people know inside and out. And if you are into Pivot tables, PowerQuery, etc there is just no escaping it. You are utterly stuck.
But here is how they get you: its not much more to rent the whole office suite compared to just Excel. And as long as you are into it that far, Outlook and Teams are much cheaper than GSuite + Slack. And still...okish? No, not really. But we pretend. And it wouldn't happen without Excel.
This project is funny because the outcome was so inevitable:
1. Every large corporation in the world has tried a similar "Let's get a bunch of statisticians to quantify our business and we'll manage the company by looking at the graphs" experiment at least once, and it always explodes in a combination of manipulated metrics and Goodharts's Law
2. Every centrally-planned economy in the world that makes plans based on data from individual factories has been massively impacted by a combination of falsified metrics and Goodharts's Law
But because it was destroyed in a CIA-backed revolution, we don't actually know how it would have turned out, so modern Communists can convince themselves that it would have ushered in Utopia!
Back when I read "Cybernetic Revolutionaries" I followed it up with "People's Republic of Walmart" and came away with a bit of a different conclusion to your point 1. IMO lots of US-based hyperscalars are managing what are effectively command economies, and it's allowed them to ex. scale their infrastructure so aggressively these last ~2 years.
Right. WalMart and Amazon are closer to command economies than Gosplan ever was. They're not choking on the scale of what they do; they're thriving on it. Gosplan, the USSR's central planning system, ran on monthly reporting and annual plans. WalMart at one point ran on daily reporting and weekly plans. It's probably even faster now.
The problem of getting accurate data started to be solved when bar codes and RFID tags came in. It's possible for a factory to fake "we made 431 washing machines today." It's hard to fake "we made 431 washing machines today, their serial numbers were scanned as they left the factory, scanned again as they arrived at the various distribution centers, and scanned again when they were shipped to a customer, and scanned again when the customer received them." It's not airtight, but faking it requires a sizable fakery operation which tends to be detected eventually. Much real world activity is driven by all that "where's my stuff" data, and if the data is way off, people notice.
For large classes of products and services today, there is no real price competition. There just aren't enough players to make a market. The magic number seems to be four, from an EU study. Less than four major players in direct competition, and prices don't go down.
FMCGs work very much like command economies, including specialized tooling to shift production between customers when orders fall through.
Unlike USSR they simply do it on shorter timescales, too, and with better customer feedback. Something Cybersyn actually targeted, as it's closer to Toyota Production System (as much done at lowest level in small decision loops) than centrally managed GOSPLAN or large american FMCG giants
Yeah, the economy is basically a bunch of oligarchical/dictatorial command economies, or what we like to call companies. It's funny, a lot of leftist people use them as examples of how a larger command economy could work (usually the reaction a lot of leftists I know had to People's Republic of Walmart), whereas it makes me wonder what more democratic, free market companies would be like.
> it makes me wonder what more democratic, free market companies would be like.
I was wondering the same after PRW lol. Recently I had the chance to ask a friend of mine who worked in Google Infra (years ago) if they had ever tried to 'liberalize' their infrastructure planning; something like having internal business units bid on space, power, and compute instead of distributing it top-down. He said that yes, this was actually something like their original operating model, and the outcome was that YouTube basically bought up every piece of hardware in the company and then leased them out to other verticals at a profit.
That's pretty interesting. I always found the idea of democratizing a company pretty easy to understand (can easily just mirror civilian governmental structure in some sense), but creating an internal free market system harder to wrap my head around so pretty cool to see an example of it.
> whereas it makes me wonder what more democratic, free market companies would be like.
There are a few small examples that come to mind (co-ops and communes mostly), but I can’t think of any that have been successful at scale. Running an internal market would be almost pure overhead, so if it worked it would really have to be efficient to be worthwhile.
I understand that line of thinking and honestly think it's possible you're correct. On the other hand, this is exactly historical rhetoric that was used against republicanism/democracy, with people saying the only successful examples were city states and that it was impossible to scale. Maybe we just need a corporate "America" that figures out the correct governing structure. If anything I think it's possible it might only be possible with extremely large firms while small firms stay autocratic to stay dynamic.
Internal pricing always turns out to be problematic because the various divisions have neither the incentive nor the leverage to negotiate prices in the way that "real" customers do.
In addition to your Samsung example, I know of a major tech company whose services division often buys hardware from competitors because they get a 40% discount and priority deliveries when stock runs low. If they were to buy the in-house alternative, they'd be paying list price and be at the back of the queue for deliveries.
There's also huge scope for "funny money" Hollywood accounting-style practices, where internal prices become entirely disconnected from supply, demand, or any sort of underlying value - which actually results in the organisation being even more dominated by the whims of senior leadership than they otherwise would be.
(These problems are very similar to those experienced in country-level command economies too, of course)
I imagine it might look something like a company-internal gig economy; someone puts out a request for a code review and a bunch of fellow employees bid on doing the job, and the requester provides a tip for good service at the end, etc.
Well, at the extreme end of free market, Sears CEO Eddie Lampert drew from Objectivism and had his company's divisions internally compete with one another:
I'd honestly recommend checking out the People's Republic of Walmart; it's a super short read and anything I say would be basically a warmed up rehash of whatever I remember from it.
Basic point is just that operations research/supply chain management was heavily developed by the USSR to support the central economy and now it's used by every major retailer (among others) to manage supply chains that are massively larger than anything the USSR ever got close to.
So, seems like the logical way to run a business would be to create a bunch of internal metrics but never let any of your reportees know what they are.
Or even better, "leak" that there might be metrics (that are in reality false), and then see who allocates resources towards maximizing them. Favor allocating resources to those who hit your internal metrics, favor de-allocating resources towards those that hit your "honeypot" metrics.
This all kind of depends on having direct reportees who have a great degree of latitude in how they spend their resources I suppose.
In my understanding of literature, I went through the same arc as the poster, but then I made it to the next realization- "thickness" is just your willingness to give authors credit for things they didn't write, and it can be done just as well for works that are considered "schlock" as it can for the canon of works that are considered "great".
You can read "Moby Dick" as a story about a fish, and you can read "50 shades of grey" as a treatise on existentialism and the human spirit- it's all up to you!
Your point of view seems to imply that the author's skill and intent don't matter, which I can't agree with. The reason that a reader's effort gets more out of a great work is because the author put it there, not because it exists as a function of the work in itself.
I'm sure this aesthetic relativism holds up under argument, but this is an 'anti realization' that:
-Reduces explanatory power (if Moby-Dick and 50 Shades are the same, why has one been lauded for 100 years, minted the careers of countless academics, etc.?)
One of them has existed for more than 100 years. One of them has been granted credibility by a small number of academics before becoming a safe conservative choice for subsequent ones.
I don't know, but those sounds like some plausible answers.
On the first point, explanation is inherently subjective. It reduces explanatory power purely because you're forced to acknowledge it was never universally appropriate, which tracks. The variety of explanation you're referring to in this context is one that I always found to be unsatisfactory. It's inherently stripping context (IE every component of what makes something the right place, the right time) out of the equation, which makes comparative analysis absurd.
On the second point, I vehemently disagree, and I'm curious how you think a larger, more complicated world can be argued to be less interesting? Does the fact that your hallucinations and delusions are vacuous, and that they don't sit alone in a dark void, paralyze you with fear?
I don’t think that’s true. True masters will create works that enable additional interpretations, perhaps beyond or even contradictory to those intended by the original authors. I doubt 50 Shades of Grey enables such a multitude of additional interpretations.
I strongly disagree. Sure, I can say story X is about Y, for any arbitrary Y.
But take Hamlet, for example. You can say that it's about revenge destroying the one who takes it. Or you could say it's about failing to seize the moment ultimately making you pay a much higher price. Or you could say it's about insanity, and whether sane people are insane and insane people are sane. And none of those is wrong!
You could even say it's about how tedious it is to have to listen to pompous old windbags, and you'd be at least partially right.
But if you said it was about body thetans, then no, you are objectively wrong. There is no honest reading of Hamlet that reaches that conclusion.
"Thickness" is giving authors credit for things they didn't write, but they did leave breadcrumbs for. That's different from "they didn't write it at all", and it's also different from "I didn't look for breadcrumbs, so I didn't see them".
Here's an example: The song "Welcome to the Future", by Brad Paisley, the third verse says:
I had a friend in school
Running back on the football team.
They burned a cross in his front yard
For asking out the homecoming queen.
I thought about him today
And everybody who'd seen what he'd seen
From a woman on a bus
To a man with a dream.
That verse is thick. There are breadcrumbs all over the place, trails leading to things that the author did not say. And yet he did say them, through the breadcrumbs.
This is an important question- most of the costs of a credit card providers come from dealing with fraud and chargebacks. That's partially because, under US law, credit card companies have to eat fraudulent charges if they can't get the person or company that did the fraud to do so. (Funnily enough, this is one of two places where protections for average people in the US are significantly better than protections for average people in Europe).
But credit card companies can keep their costs low by making a business decision not to renew the accounts of frequent chargeback-ers or chargeback-ees (even if they never officially found those individuals at fault). If the government had to make a payment system for everyone and take on all responsibility for all fraud, that would create an incentive with massive second-order effects.
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