Willing to look stupid == not caring what other people think of you.
Most humans spend terrible amount of time thinking what others think of you. It's normal, but and good to some extent.
Nordics have really poor laws around this. We have these payday loan companies that work under the same principle. Klarna just found a way to conveniently do the same. It is easier to capture buyers at the counter rather than before the counter. Effectively Klarna is a payday loan company in the Nordics and has nothing to do with easy checkout. In fact, they used to offer kickbacks to merchants, so every time someone chose Klarna invoice they would pay the merchant instead of charging for it, because they get so good profit from the individuals due to poor laws.
It is called open banking. Banks are 'anti-competitive' so some people managed to lobby in a directive that forces banks to provide apis for companies like Klarna to access their bank accounts. All you have to do is accept tos.
Is breast milk unhealthy for babies? It contains both cholesterol and saturated fats.
Cholesterol and saturated fats are only a problem if your diet is unbalanced.
Anyways, you can eat chemicals to supplement your deficits by all means. But that does not make a 100% vegan diet healthy for every other human on the planet.
One thing I don't understand is the absolutism around diets. Either people eat meat on every meal or none at all. Neither is healthy. Why the general discourse is dominated by these ultimates?
I eat meat once or twice per week. Works really well.
Soy is a great crop with many use casers. The chart in the article which shows different use cases is really cool. We can't say that about many other crops!
I definitely agree. I'm actually thinking that the microservices architecture punishes team earlier for creating a mess, which is a good thing. It forces you to adapt good patterns, because otherwise nothing will work.
I'm not sure, but I feel that with monoliths the teams get punished later and thus create a bigger mess. But I guess it's more like 60/40 rather than 99/1.
In my opinion it will become unusable and unmaintainable faster with microservice spaghetti. With monolith you can get by with bad design longer. But anyways, everything boils down to good structure as you said.
I guess it all boils down to building software with modular structure rather than mixing business logic all around. I personally think that it is easier to isolate business logic with microservice structure, but you can also make a huge mess. You can also make really good modular monolith, where business logic and state is where it belongs and not spread everywhere.
Oh yes. I agree, there is probably ton of waste in the entire banking sector. I just wanted to clarify why each transaction most likely costs more in blockchain compared to one transaction in the traditional network.
I wonder how much energy we would consume if bitcoin would replace the whole banking sector? Back-of-an-envelope calculation: If it would be powering billion transactions per day, it would need 400 nuclear power plants to provide required energy.
I don't know if we should ban bitcoin or not. I don't have any strong sentiment towards it. But if the numbers here are right, I don't think it is a viable main stream currency.
None of the things you listed are on the same scale if that 621KWh is true. What you should say is: "crusading against people who leave their a/c on for 2 months when they are away, people who drive 2500 miles for fun every day, people who run their clothes drier for a month non-stop even though it's empty".
Regardless, I would be sceptical about that 621 KWh. Does not sound realistic...
Traditional banks pay their electricity bill, so they naturally need to account for that. On the other hand, bitcoin network pays for that collectively. No single entity pays the bill. If a single entity had to pay for 621KWh for every transaction, I don't think that bitcoin could exists. That is the main difference here: multiple parties are doing small contribution to the energy consumption, instead of a single entity. That is the reason why bitcoin networks ecological footprint is huge compared to traditional banking per transaction.
This is my personal opinion, but even if we had perfect global tax laws, people would still find a way to abuse the system. I see the issue being too much power concentrating into too few hands. If you have too much power humans naturally use it. Rich get richer and poor become poorer. How do you see better tax code and UBI will fix this? How do you prevent abusing power?
Economies or scale... How about just power? These companies have too many people in their pocket. When you have enough power you can get away with this. These companies, even if not paying taxes directly, are huge contributors of economy. You threaten them, and they threaten you back. Do you want them to take their 10,000 jobs somewhere else? It's not tax laws and enforcing them, just rather just too much power on too few people's hands.
Have you considered that you might also be living in denial? As far as I know your brains are full of chemical reactions that make your little princess seem perfect. I'm a father as well and it is sometimes hard to distinguish "I love my kid and she's perfect" from "my kid is actually very kind". I hope the latter is true for you!
Not really. There is a huge difference as you can buy goods that serve the same purpose from thousands of other shops and online stores.
Google and apple effectively have a 30% tax on all mobile software business. They are killing all apetite on developing new mobile software, as less and less developers want to be involved with their shady practices of stealing features and locking apps out.
It would be the same if there were only 2 stores where you can buy clothes in the US and they tax every manufacturer 30% to sell any goods there, while also selling their own goods without commission. On top of that, occasionally stealing good concepts, copying those, and selling as their own products. And of course, locking out annoying partners at their will without having to explain why one manufacturer can no longer engage in business with their customers.
Does it allow to save values with floating point imprecision such as 1.000000001? I don't think the issue is never in the database but the service that uses the API to send values. If such value is allowed, it will cause headache and errors when the consumers of the API make mistakes. I think the general practice is to store them in integers, just for the sake of being foolproof.
This is the standard heuristic parents use so you are not alone. Interestingly it seems to cause names to go in cycles. Every generation has their own popular names. You end up picking a name that is not common in your parents or in your own generation, because there is always a dickhead with the common ones. If I remember right first names go in around 60-year cycles.
I have some issues with the mobile FF with typing (filling form elements on some sites). I still use it for browsing as having the addons gives a superior experience. I'd be happy if I could switch 100%, but I have not been able to figure what is causing this issue. Does anyone else have issues with Firefox entering the words "twice" when they try to type?
Sure, they have plenty of collaboration with both major card schemas. AFAIK, they do both acquiring and issuing. I don't think collaboration means that you can't compete with each other? Their most successful products in the EU are not using card tracks.
That's correct only in NA, where Klarna issues virtual credit cards and transactions happen via card tracks. In EU, or at least the Nordics, the transactions are bank-to-bank and there is no virtual card. That means they are a direct competitor.
Yes this is a good point! Same story with Finland.
It's interesting that it uses card tracks to move the money, but the identification and recipient is not based on card numbers, so the card stays anynomous for the recipient.
Mastercard and visa have recently been very open to this kind of methods, and also issuing virtual one-time-use cards. These new use cases for their network are quite healthy to the payments ecosystem.
Hmm well, fair point. The society is moving also away from cash and many places don't accept it anymore. You are left with credit card... Which is also a spying device. So no payments without data collection for you!
I don't think that is essentially a bad thing. Forcing a digital signature for every transaction makes criminal activity difficult. Modern AML works much better because there is always a digital fingerprint for every transaction.
But I think that these are two distinct issues? Some crypto -things could somewhere in the future solve the privacy issue... But no society wants that, because real privacy makes criminal activity and money laundering possible. But that has nothing to do with credit card duopoly?
That's what most people said 10 years ago about the mobile payments (mobile bank to bank transfers, not related apple or Google pay) in the Nordics, but no one is doubting it anymore.
There is also a huge difference in b2b payments. Cards account a very small percentage of B2B payments in Europe. I don't know how it is in the US, but I've understood that a much higher share of B2B payments go the card-track?
Of course Visa and Mastercard still have a big role, especially in the brick & mortar. But when looking at e-commerce, the share of card payments is 40%. I don't think it is very relevant to discuss "duopoly" and say that they have the power to censor user content - because they don't. If they ban you, you still have many other options. AFAIK the point in the article was that we should break the credit card duopoly because they have too much power. I don't think that is the case here.
Do you think that the credit card companies having too much power is a big problem in the Nordics?
This is a very us centric view. Most of the europe is so much ahead of US in payments that it is funny. There are dozens of alternative payment methods in the Europe. Especially in the Nordics card payments are on a big decline. There are basically two "tracks" to move money - card networks and bank to bank. Most new payment methods use bank transfer as the method of moving money. In the Nordics, every country has a mobile payments system where your bank account is attached to your phone number, any anyone can issue a payment to your phone number and you receive it to your bank account. You can use this also in brick and mortar stores etc. Not to talk about all the bill-payment based companies like Klarna... And how about China? They don't use cards either, just look at Alipay.