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UK Government's Payment Infrastructure Is Now Open Source

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Re: UK Government's Payment Infrastructure Is Now Open Source

#71

Post by toomanybeersies »

Reason077 wrote: post #62
catwell wrote: post #45

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I lived in England for about a year in 2009 - 2010 and I never had a bank account there. I was willing to open one, but a law (which probably existed to prevent fraud and laundering) made it very hard to do so without proof of permanent residence in the UK, which I did not have. Eventually I decided it was easier for me to upgrade my French Mastercard to the Gold level, where I had no extra fees when withdrawing or p…

As a French national you would only need 2 things to open a UK bank account: your French passport and some kind of document that shows you have a UK address. Proof of address used to be easy as any utility bill would do, but now days it's trickier because so much is done online and paper bills don't get sent out much any more! And, of course, it's a problem if the bills at your house are in someone else's name. (They…

Not accepting printouts is ridiculous. It's trivial to fake a letter.

I had a similar issue when I was opening a bank account a while ago. I didn't actually get any bills in the mail, so I printed off my ISP bill, which was a pdf of what they send you in the mail. Obviously, the printer didn't fold it to fit in an envelope.

The person at the bank asked if it was a printout or actually from the mail since it didn't have any creases in it, they said they could only accept it if it was from the mail.

I told them I would just walk outside, fold it up, and walk back in, it was exactly the same as what you'd get in the mail. They ended up accepting it, even though technically they weren't meant to.

It's ridiculous, I don't actually physically receive mail from anything. All my bills etc. are done electronically, I even sign contracts electronically.

Re: UK Government's Payment Infrastructure Is Now Open Source

#73

Post by lanestp »

Angostura wrote: post #20
duncan_bayne wrote: post #19

Earlier quoted context omitted.

sigh ... do we really have to trot out the Somalia straw man every time someone criticises either compulsory taxation or socialism? Yes, taxation is necessary for a civilised society. No, it doesn't have to be compulsory, and no, it doesn't have to fund socialism.

> Yes, taxation is necessary for a civilised society. No, it doesn't have to be compulsory I think you may have to explain that to me

The lottery is the best known/most common voluntary taxation. The early United States used the lottery to fund the government.

Re: UK Government's Payment Infrastructure Is Now Open Source

#74

Post by toomanybeersies »

duncan_bayne wrote: post #65
Cozumel wrote: post #26

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Yeah, what did the Romans ever do for us?

13 million dead: All Punic Wars: 1.0M Gladiators: 1.0M Slave Wars (Servile Wars): 1.0M Cimbri-Teutoni War: 0.3M Social War: 0.3M Mithridatic Wars: ca. 0.5M Gallic War: 1.0M Juleo-Claudian Paranoia: 0.028M Jewish Wars: 0.4M Boudica's Revolt: 0.15M Decline and Fall: 7.0M TOTAL: over 13.0M Source: http://necrometrics.com/romestat.htm

To be fair, that is over almost 1000 years. 13,000 per year is less than how many die each year in Mexico due to drug violence, and much less than the Syrian Civil war.

Re: UK Government's Payment Infrastructure Is Now Open Source

#75

Post by duncan_bayne »

arethuza wrote: post #70
duncan_bayne wrote: post #64

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Voluntary taxation is a fringe theory with some fairly serious flaws... the primary one in my opinion being that it erodes democracy by pushing even more influence over government into the hands of people with deep enough pockets to pay more (but only when they're happy). The incentives in that kind of system would be all wrong. It's a side issue to the one we're discussing, but ... that's what we have right now, a…

So how would you go about acquiring evidence that this approach actually works?

Meta-question: do you believe that ethical decisions in politics must only proceed once someone can point to that decisions having been made in the past? That it is insufficient to point to the _wrong_ inherent to compulsion and say "let's stop this?". Would you make the same argument to abolitionists prior to the Civil War?

Leaving the issue of evidence aside, I'd generalise from the countless vital goods and services that are produced and paid for by voluntary interaction. I'd reason that since those systems work pretty well, it's reasonable to assume that Government would as well.

Then I'd spend many years heavily involved in Libertarian politics, trying to convince others to abandon the use of force against each other, only to quit in disgust when I realised that it was a waste of my time and effort, and that Tiberius' criticism of his Senate ("men fit to be slaves") rings as true today.

Re: UK Government's Payment Infrastructure Is Now Open Source

#76

Post by [deleted] »

duncan_bayne wrote: post #60
orf wrote: post #30

Earlier quoted context omitted.

How about you just try and reconcile both contradictory points as best you can. I bet it will be some ideological Libertarian fantasy, but please do have a go.

I imagine it'd be the same as every other vital service that's paid for voluntarily. Food, water, medicine, transport... none of which I think are figments of an elaborate Libertarian fantasy ;) Perhaps you could explain why you believe the provision of Government services is an exception that requires compulsion?

[deleted]

Re: UK Government's Payment Infrastructure Is Now Open Source

#77

Post by TheCoelacanth »

duncan_bayne wrote: post #64
richmarr wrote: post #32

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> ...or a Statist asking for a defence of voluntary taxation Calling the vast majority of people "statist" seems to imply a (false) equivalence between voluntary and compulsorary taxation as competing theories. Voluntary taxation is a fringe theory with some fairly serious flaws... the primary one in my opinion being that it erodes democracy by pushing even more influence over government into the hands of people with…

> Voluntary taxation is a fringe theory with some fairly serious flaws... the primary one in my opinion being that it erodes democracy by pushing even more influence over government into the hands of people with deep enough pockets to pay more (but only when they're happy). The incentives in that kind of system would be all wrong. It's a side issue to the one we're discussing, but ... that's what we have right now, a…

> It's morally wrong to initiate force.

Then you would agree that private property rights are immoral because they don't exist without the threat of force.

Re: UK Government's Payment Infrastructure Is Now Open Source

#79

Post by hellbanner »

robin_reala wrote: post #11
Nursie wrote: post #8

Still got Google Analytics on the page. I do not feel that reporting every online interaction I have with my government in the UK, back to a huge corporate in the US, is in any way appropriate. But I can't even get anyone to engage on the issue. When I tried to raise it I got directed to a helpdesk ticket on a site run by an SV helpdesk-as-a-service company. I appreciate that gov.uk have done some great stuff getting…

GDS’s GA Premium account contractually prevents Google from investigating the data, and Google self-anonymises with a flag in their API[1]. If you don’t trust them then that’s fine, but for functionality vs cost it seems to be the best option. For what it’s worth, for extremely sensitive projects like GOV.UK Verify other options are fine; Verify uses a local Piwik instance. You’re also welcome to block that specific…

That's all good; but most users aren't aware of blocking Javascript on specific domains.

Privacy is opt-in, not opt-out.

Re: UK Government's Payment Infrastructure Is Now Open Source

#80

Post by richardknop »

yomly wrote: post #66
robin_reala wrote: post #11

Earlier quoted context omitted.

GDS’s GA Premium account contractually prevents Google from investigating the data, and Google self-anonymises with a flag in their API[1]. If you don’t trust them then that’s fine, but for functionality vs cost it seems to be the best option. For what it’s worth, for extremely sensitive projects like GOV.UK Verify other options are fine; Verify uses a local Piwik instance. You’re also welcome to block that specific…

Are you at GDS? Please can you tell your friends at HMRC that the login system is the most janky UX I've ever experienced and is prone to social engineering due to how complex it is.

Totally agreed. After I lost my login details to sign into HMRC portal to do my self assessment, it was almost impossible to recover my credentials.

Impossible over the phone as they wanted to send a paper letter to my address and I was just moving to a new place (and doing some travel before that) so I had no more access to the address HMRC had on file.

I finally gave up and just asked my accountant to do it on my behalf. He somehow managed to sort this out with HMRC.

There is no flow to recover your username and password (or generate new one) with your email address which is maddening.

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