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Apple announces Apple Card credit card

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Re: Apple announces Apple Card credit card

#691

Post by manfredo »

noelsusman wrote: post #601
ralusek wrote: post #189

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Look no further than the recent issue where Patreon competitor Subscribestar had payment processors Stripe and PayPal stop processing their payments for _political_ disagreements with the purported beneficiaries of the donations through the platform. PayPal said that it was actually one of the underlying payment processors, and it was suspected to be MasterCard. That incident was the first time I've ever taken the ne…

SubscribeStar was composed almost entirely of people banned from Patreon for various reasons, including things like dropping n-bombs in videos and blocking search-and-rescue boats from saving migrants in the Mediterranean. It's not surprising that big, mainstream companies don't want to touch that with a ten foot pole. Patreon has also banned various leftist sites for things like doxxing and posting instructions on h…

> Patreon has also banned various leftist sites for things like doxxing and posting instructions on how to commit terrorism, but that doesn't get as much attention for some reason.

For left leaning people it takes doxxing and instructions on how to commit acts of mass violence to get banned.

For the opposite ends of the political spectrum people have been banned for months-old videos - not even on a channel that the banned person runs - in which someone uses a swear word to tell the alt-right that they "are acting like n_____s" (which I interpreted as a deliberate word choice to emphasize irony that the alt-right is behaving how they often portray and see African Americans. Sargon's explanation is roughly similar). Meanwhile there are plenty of people who use the same slur regularly, some even in the usernames of their social media profiles. There is zero doubt in my mind that Patreon decided to ban Sargon on the basis of his political views first, then searched for something to justify the ban.

These are hardly the same situations.

Re: Apple announces Apple Card credit card

#692

Post by ralusek »

pryce wrote: post #688
ralusek wrote: post #645

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Sargon of Akkad told a group of white neo-nazis they were a bunch of "n-words," ironically, in the context of accusing them of having the same poor behavior they attempt to associate with black people. If you're familiar with the entire rest of his body of work, he is a vehement liberal in opposition of any such identity politics. He said this on somebody else's channel, not only off of Patreon, but off of his YouTub…

Deciding 'whether to do business with someone or not' is one of the kinds of freedoms capitalism is supposed to protect. Outside of a standard set of specific reasons for which it is agreed to be illegal to refuse business (race, sex, orientation etc..), no business is supposed to be able to be compelled -by the government- to associate or transact with another. Instead, boycotts are used by the public themselves (ra…

Where did I say that it should become legally mandated that MasterCard associate with anybody? Not only do I not think capitalism does/should compel them to do that, I think that capitalism explicitly doesn't compel anybody to do anything.

What I'm asking is if we as a public really want our payment processors to be making these moral judgements? That doesn't mean I think they should be compelled to do anything, but I certainly think it's cause for concern, and call for an alternative that IS willing to behave as a neutral party. I don't want the noise of what is effectively a pipe to be making arbitrary political judgements when deciding what is allowed to pass through.

Now, publicly funded banks, that's a different question. I absolutely expect neutrality within what is legal from our government institutions.

Re: Apple announces Apple Card credit card

#693

Post by ratling »

throwawaysea wrote: post #172

I don't thing it is healthy to have big entities like this control fundamental services like payment processing. How long before the opaque governance of the App Store is applied to their payments offering? How long before activists start making this a new vector for deplatforming? Apple also announced a news offering ( https://www.techradar.com/news/apple-news-plus ) and I think the same concerns apply there.

This card specifically I... uh wouldn't be too worried about. It's a generic 1% card with a couple of apple specific gimmicks. My citi doublecash is 2% on everything as long as I pay the bill off each month (which you should). Chase sapphire reserve is also a better card if you travel and are willing to pay a fee.

It does look sharp as hell though.

Re: Apple announces Apple Card credit card

#694

Post by eridius »

rodgerd wrote: post #684
eridius wrote: post #472

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Apple can't extract information from your device, even under subpoena. They'd have to push an OS update that explicitly changes what they do to start sending that info to Apple, but the US legal system doesn't allow the government to compel them to make that kind of change. That said, if the data is available in your iCloud backup in a form that can be read by other devices, Apple can presumably extract that data und…

> They'd have to push an OS update that explicitly changes what they do to start sending that info to Apple, but the US legal system doesn't allow the government to compel them to make that kind of change Australia's does now.

I'm not quite sure exactly what Australia's laws actually let them do regarding Apple, but what I am sure of is if Australia tried to compel Apple to add a backdoor to iOS, Apple would stop doing business in Australia rather than comply.

Re: Apple announces Apple Card credit card

#695

Post by pryce »

ralusek wrote: post #692
pryce wrote: post #688

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Deciding 'whether to do business with someone or not' is one of the kinds of freedoms capitalism is supposed to protect. Outside of a standard set of specific reasons for which it is agreed to be illegal to refuse business (race, sex, orientation etc..), no business is supposed to be able to be compelled -by the government- to associate or transact with another. Instead, boycotts are used by the public themselves (ra…

Where did I say that it should become legally mandated that MasterCard associate with anybody? Not only do I not think capitalism does/should compel them to do that, I think that capitalism explicitly doesn't compel anybody to do anything. What I'm asking is if we as a public really want our payment processors to be making these moral judgements? That doesn't mean I think they should be compelled to do anything, but…

> What I'm asking is if we as a public really want our payment processors to be making these moral judgements?

If this action was completely unprompted, sure, but I think we're talking about payment processors choosing not to associate with people who have already been the subject of boycotts on their previous platform.

A better example would be WikiLeaks which enjoyed a fair amount of public support at the time Visa etc declined to process their payments, as we have reasons to suspect that the pressure on Visa to do this may have been from the U.S. Government.

By contrast, there have already been numerous public protests against people hosted on the SubscribeStar platform.

Re: Apple announces Apple Card credit card

#696

Post by Redoubts »

jchonphoenix wrote: post #402
microdrum wrote: post #387

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It's 2% cash back on Apple Pay, 3% cash back on Apple products, and 1% cash back on non-Apple Pay, non-Apple products. Do you know a better card that always gives 2% cash back, no cap?

The Uber card actually gives 2% cash back on online transactions, which includes Apple or Android Pay.

And 4% at Restaurants and Cafes, which is probably half my card-spend. Shame their app from Barclays is dogshit.

Re: Apple announces Apple Card credit card

#697

Post by kalleboo »

baby wrote: post #659
amluto wrote: post #376

This sounds like a mediocre credit card (2% back but only with Apple Pay — if you’re okay with cash back on only some transactions, there are much better cards) with some benefit in the form of a nice experience. I guess that, if Apple’s marketing power can sell a ton of these, there’s considerable upside for them, but it doesn’t sound like a truly impressive innovation.

This. I don’t see why you would move from Monzo or Revolut for this.

Monzo and Revolut are only available in the UK.

Apple Card is only available in the US.

Re: Apple announces Apple Card credit card

#698

Post by abalone »

atonse wrote: post #680
abalone wrote: post #640

For those of you concerned about the "antitrust" aspect here, the specter of Apple controlling everything... Keep in mind that Apple has had a partnership-based branded credit card for years : the Barclaycard Visa with Apple Rewards. There is nothing fundamentally new in Apple offering a credit card. What's new here is they're tightly integrating it with Apple Wallet and in some aspects driving a better deal (like el…

It does have a stripe. In the video you see the (very tastefully done) stripe on the top on the back.

Ok thanks, and to follow up I forgot that liability for swipes shifted to merchants a couple years ago regardless of signatures. That is, if a customer has a chip card and the merchant runs it as a swipe then they’re liable regardless of whether the signature matches.

Having said that, that doesn’t mean every issuer is going to come after merchants for this fraud... it’s typically the little mom and pops that haven’t fully migrated to EMV chip terminals. So maybe the lower rewards gives Goldman Sachs more leeway to be nice.

Re: Apple announces Apple Card credit card

#699

Post by nfoz »

lskopwol wrote: post #672
ben_w wrote: post #246

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I’ve been told political campaigns focused on MC/Visa forced a policy change on Fetlife (specifically which kinks you’re allowed to admit to being into) a few years back. I’m not into the kink which caused it (and I won’t repeat it here) but that left a bad taste in my mouth. IMO, people should be free to discuss what they’re into, even when it’s something much more harmful than the kink involved.

What's fetlife? Seems like a risky google

Curious, what does that mean "risky google"? If you're avoiding seeing some graphic images, that makes sense. If you're avoiding searching it because of implications for google's tracking profile about you and how it might then rebalance future searches, then that's a pretty upsetting reflection on google / tech status quo, and fairly on-topic here. We shouldn't be afraid to seek knowledge like from a library, because of analytics, y'know?

Re: Apple announces Apple Card credit card

#700

Post by throw03172019 »

disillusioned wrote: post #513
ben_w wrote: post #246

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I’ve been told political campaigns focused on MC/Visa forced a policy change on Fetlife (specifically which kinks you’re allowed to admit to being into) a few years back. I’m not into the kink which caused it (and I won’t repeat it here) but that left a bad taste in my mouth. IMO, people should be free to discuss what they’re into, even when it’s something much more harmful than the kink involved.

Stripe de-platformed us because their payment processor (Wells fucking Fargo, paragons of virtue) didn't like what we were selling, which was fantasy adult toys. They tried micromanaging the complaint, asking if we could remove "flesh colored" options, but we weren't going to get dragged down into that. Ridickulous.

I can only imagine how awkward it was for the Stripe employee to ask this.
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