751–760 of 778 posts
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From their website: Variable APRs range from 13.24% to 24.24% based on creditworthiness. Rates as of March 2019
wow, is 13.24% considered good?
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> We need a post-office bank and payment processor, which will then be legally subject to the First Amendment. Postal money orders already exists, and are exactly as expensive and inconvenient as you would expect. The actual problem is KYC laws that require payment processors to do the job of the police and refuse service to customers under purposely vague corporate policies without due process, instead of having the…
The thing is I don't expect the post office to be expensive and inconvenient. They work wonderfully in many countries for basic banking services to all residents. What is awful is that I expect it to be inconvenient and awful in the US because there is this idea that anything the government does will inevitably be bad and then there are multiple political parties that try their hardest to make that idea come true whe…
The EU in general doesn't provide government services, the UK does, France does.
When you're already the size of a state, there are basically no more economies of scale to be had by doing something at the size of a union of states. Your fixed costs are already being amortized over something like a million people or more, so the variable costs already dominate and spreading the fixed costs over even more people is past the point of diminishing returns.
But it's not past the point of expanding overhead. So suppose you want to do this in the US -- have the Post Office compete with Mastercard. You propose the bill.
The banks hate it because it's them you're competing with, they have billions of dollars, but more importantly they're a major industry in some states (e.g. New York) which have large numbers of legislators. So they not only use those votes against your bill, they trade their legislators' votes on other bills to get more votes against your bill. Moreover, their legislators are the ones who care most about things like finance, so guess who is on the finance committee.
Then you have states like Virginia where the major industry is defense. They want to destroy privacy protections, because you can't get a lucrative government contract for hoovering up and data mining financial data if you're not allowed to hoover up and data mine financial data. Guess who is on the committees related to that sort of thing. And New York is all for that -- data mining financial data for private purposes is lucrative too, and that amendment also makes it harder to pass the bill they don't like.
Then you have states where the government itself is a major employer, and what they want is more government jobs for their people. So they don't want your program to be efficient, they want it to be labor intensive, which is the opposite. But then it costs more, charges higher fees, requires the users to fill out more forms to use it etc. You may also see private companies looking for the same thing, because they then sell a solution to it, as with Intuit opposing tax simplification.
And so it goes down the line, at each stage making the program worse and harder to pass, until it either dies in committee somewhere or gets passed as some horrifying abomination that makes things worse rather than better.
This isn't some individual proposing to make the bill worse on purpose to demonstrate the ineffectiveness of government, it's a structural issue that produces that outcome systemically.
Now you expect I'm going to suggest having the individual states do it. There are some states that aren't full of big banks or spooks or government bureaucrats, all we need is for one of them to do it. Which would work if they weren't subject to the same problematic federal laws as private enterprise is, created by the same problematic process, which is the reason the market isn't already taking care of this.
In order for the states to do things better, first the feds would have to stop standing on their feet.
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Nothing, except that then their card would have 0% acceptance. Much harder sell to get people to get the card if no merchants accepts it, and harder to get merchants to take it if nobody has one. There's a reason why the credit card market is almost entirely American Express, MasterCard, and Visa. If they wanted to pay higher cashback than the standard interchange rates allow, they'd be charging merchants more than t…
At least in London I've only seen a handful of places that don't take Amex, and as of today I can think of only one a coffee shop I sometimes use.
Source: used to work as a CC payments analyst.
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> rewards illusion Maybe if you don't pay your balance every month, but the rewards are very real for me.
The rewards may be real, but so are the cost increases the merchants gradually put in place to offset them.
I never would be able to pay for as many long haul first class flights if I saved 2.2% of the transactions and used that to buy tickets
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Fidelity Visa is 2% on everything, no cap, no annual fee. Citi DoubleCash is 2% on everything, dunno if there's a cap, no annual fee. (you have to redeem into a bank account, not as statement credit, to get the full 2%) USAA Limitless is 2.5% cash back on everything, no cap. (military only, no longer available), no annual fee. If you have enough cash invested with Merrill Edge ($100,000, including IRAs) the Bank of A…
1. Fidelity Visa has international transaction fee. 2. Same for Citi DoubleCache. 3. The rest also have some annoyances (foreign fees, annual fees), so I'd say Apple card is not a bad one for an average CC user who doesn't want to spend too much time optimizing every last penny.
You have to consider, for Fidelity Visa the foreign transaction fee is 1% and the cashback is 2%. So you can say it has cash back of 1% overseas and 2% domestically; which is a better deal for the vast majority of people than 2% on ApplePay and 1% on non-ApplePay. The only person who comes out ahead with the Apple card is someone whose parents pay all their bills and they spend most of their time on overseas vacations in a country where ApplePay is widely accepted.
But even for that person, PayPal Mastercard is objectively better. USAA Limitless also doesn't charge foreign transaction fees so it is also objectively better. (assuming you already have it - its military only and closed to new signups)
Not only that but the Uber card is pretty much objectively better as well; it earns 2% on ApplePay with no foreign transaction fees or annual fees and earns more than 2% on much more than just Apple (4% at restaurants, 3% on hotels and airfare, 2% on other "online purchases", $50 statement credit on streaming services if you spend more than $5,000/year).
Fidelity also has a sign up bonus sometimes and very frequent targeted spend bonuses (it remains to be seen if Apple can compete in those areas, but they probably will just rely on their branding and loyal fanbase). I've gotten hundreds of dollars in extra cashback from Fidelity's targeted spend bonuses.
There's also no foreign transaction fee on the Bank of America Travel Rewards, though, like I said, it requires a Merrill Lynch account (including Merrill Edge) with $100,000 invested in it to earn the highest rate of 2.625% cash back.
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> But the far-left rarely insults people with racial slurs No, they prefer to use words like nazi, facist *phobe, which most likely won't get anyone banned, expect the target of those insults
True, and I do not condone these insults either. Its just that coorporations are far more scared of beeing associated with the right, than the left. Legally speaking you're not allowed to insult anyone, wether as a n-word, nor as a nazi
This is absolutely false, at least in the US where Patreon is based. Out of curiosity where did you get the idea that insults are illegal (assuming you're talking about the Unites States)?
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As someone living in Canada, I see these offers and it sincerely makes me cry. The best no-fee cards here have 0.5% cash back. For anything more than 1%, you need to pay an annual fee of at least $99.
The AMEX SimplyCash card has 1.25% cash back. Still nothing compared to U.S. cards though, and pretty much only usable online
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Do you know a better card that always gives 2% cash back, no cap? It doesn't always give 2% cash back, it only gives 2% cash back for places that offer Apple Pay. A significant portion of my CC chargers are at places that don't offer Apple Pay.
Fidelity's card has 2% on everything. They put it into your retirement account but you can give yourself "cash back" with lower contribution depending on your spending.
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I always assumed that cryptocurrencies is exactly how SubscribeStar has solved it for their audience (if you mean "people" in general, them most of them aren't wondering about anything because they don't consider it a problem to begin with, at least until something they care about gets consistently censored). So I went and looked up their payment options. And sure enough, they have a page on that. Which has the follo…
Cryptocurreny processing is expensive as hell. Not to mention very frustrating when the client finds that the crypto bought with 1000$ values $800 on the merchant /processor payment page.
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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.
Their position in China doesn't reflect that.
Altering the OS to install a backdoor is a much different beast. It's non-optional, fundamentally weakens the security of the entire OS, and affects all customers everywhere, not just Australian citizens.
Also, if Apple did withdraw from Australia, any Australian citizen who wished to use an iPhone could still acquire one from overseas (though this is admittedly a fair amount of effort) and they'd continue to have a secure computing experience.