>The optimal amount of fraud is non-zero
As long as it's in a competitor's operation and not mine, I'll do fine.
The optimal amount of fraud is non-zero (2022)
101–110 of 203 posts
Re: The optimal amount of fraud is non-zero (2022)
#102Anti-fraud departments have apparently not gotten the memo, and the whole situation has gotten obscene in the last few years. I regularly travel for work and it's impossible for me to make any purchases on major sites like Walmart, Best Buy, Target, Costco, etc. They all will accept an order, charge my card, and then randomly cancel the order some hours to days later, and refund me. Similarly when traveling internati…
> I regularly travel for work and it's impossible for me to make any purchases on major sites like Walmart, Best Buy, Target, Costco, etc. They all will accept an order, charge my card, and then randomly cancel the order some hours to days later, and refund me.
These sites are not cancelling your orders. The card-issuing bank is.
If you have persistent trouble, switch banks.
Re: The optimal amount of fraud is non-zero (2022)
#103Anti-fraud departments have apparently not gotten the memo, and the whole situation has gotten obscene in the last few years. I regularly travel for work and it's impossible for me to make any purchases on major sites like Walmart, Best Buy, Target, Costco, etc. They all will accept an order, charge my card, and then randomly cancel the order some hours to days later, and refund me. Similarly when traveling internati…
Ditto to this. My experience has been very similar to yours. The amount of incompetence involved with payment processing and banking is just mind boggling. KYC/AML is very quickly turning into bizarro big brother. But not an all-knowing AI big brother. A stupid 2005-era IP address detecting one. You do a little too much traveling? Poof. There goes a month of your life to banking jail. A simple two-factor mechanism li…
Banking regulations and poorly understood rules by lawyers transform into monstrous implementations of security for banks.
For example, my banking app requires Face ID to unlock it and to approve payments. But for certain types of payments, such as more than 3k USD, instead of using Face ID to process the payment it requires and SMS OTP entered into the app. Which tends to suck when I'm using another SIM or if the SMS does not arrive in time if I'm traveling internationally. How on earth do they think SMS is more secure than biometrics beats me.
Re: The optimal amount of fraud is non-zero (2022)
#104Anti-fraud departments have apparently not gotten the memo, and the whole situation has gotten obscene in the last few years. I regularly travel for work and it's impossible for me to make any purchases on major sites like Walmart, Best Buy, Target, Costco, etc. They all will accept an order, charge my card, and then randomly cancel the order some hours to days later, and refund me. Similarly when traveling internati…
Is this an American thing? I never get a card decline for any purchase on a credit card. Prepaid cards are another matter.
It's probably on transactions that are requested solely based on the card number, and no PIN.
I got hit by these blocks with a EU card a long time ago, as the shop was trying to pass the charge with the magnetic strip. Had to phone to the VISA center to let the charge pass through on next retry.
Nowadays I'd assume any "card in the machine" transaction done with a PIN would go through no questions asked, even if you're located in Antarctica on their database.
Re: The optimal amount of fraud is non-zero (2022)
#105Earlier quoted context omitted.
It's very unintuitive. It's come up on threads here several times, with people incredulous about the statement. It has ramifications for the kinds of discussions we have on HN, because the primary stimuli we get are news anecdotes, and anecdotes about fraud can be galling but still under some sane noise floor that organizations don't bother to stop.
I wonder if it's the phrasing rather than the actual idea that sets people off. Many readers here understand the increasing costs of pursuing higher SLI targets, but I doubt many of them would express it as "the optimal level of availability is not 100%".
It's definitely the phrasing.
Re: The optimal amount of fraud is non-zero (2022)
#106This reminds me of Matt Lakeman's "An Attempt at Explaining, Blaming, and Being Very Slightly Sympathetic Toward Enron" https://mattlakeman.org/2020/04/27/explaining-blaming-and-be... He makes the point that although Enron was clearly doing shady things, it's possible for a legitimate business to do many of the same stuff ("mark-to-market" accounting, tricky SPEs, and so on). Try to categorically eliminate Enron-styl…
You say that like everyone ubiquitously believes Google is a net-positive.
Re: The optimal amount of fraud is non-zero (2022)
#107Earlier quoted context omitted.
[flagged]
by your logic a local racist militia will improve the police. just because something is not perfect adding something obviously worse won't force the previous thing to be perfect. regulation will tho, but you cryptocoins liberals won't hear about it
> regulation will tho
If only the perfect regulation-writers and interpreters existed.
Re: The optimal amount of fraud is non-zero (2022)
#108Just like everything. The optimal amount of crime, unemployment, accidents, deaths, etc... is not zero. For example, when building a road, there is a certain chance that an accident will happen, that some people will die, and that could have been prevented. For example, by installing a guard rail, enforcing speed limits, or by taking a different path. But installing that guard rail for a one in a million chance that…
> The optimal amount of [...] deaths [...] is not zero. That's not true. It assumes that there is an objective, known price for a life. Since you can't have e.g. 0.1 deaths, there's no guarantee that the optimal amount is at least 1. It's more that it's the outcome of haggling, politics, and the willingness to turn a blind eye to the consequences of stupidity.
> Since you can't have e.g. 0.1 deaths
True, but you can have 0.1 deaths per year, by having 1 death per 10 years.
Of course, I agree there are some things that don't work well for that - nobody's going to be happy accepting "1 nuclear meltdown per 30 years" even if statistically it'd mean fewer deaths than coal.
Re: The optimal amount of fraud is non-zero (2022)
#109Earlier quoted context omitted.
> But installing that guard rail for a one in a million chance that something bad happens is money better spent elsewhere Just for clarity -- guard rails, where we choose to place them, probably cost $500k to $2M per life saved over their lifetime, while the value of a statistical life in the US is >$10M. This comparison ignores costs of non-fatal outcomes (injuries, disability). It seems like we should be deploying…
> while the value of a statistical life in the US is >$10M Take the wealthiest top 10,000 Americans out of the equation, and what’s the value of a statistical life in the US? $10M seems to be a weird number in my mind. Edit: Well that was a fascinating rabbit hole: https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Value_of_life#:~:text=In%20W... .
> Take the wealthiest top 10,000 Americans out of the equation
They are much less likely to be the recipient of all the money spent on entitlements, no? A giant bucket of money is spent on regular Americans.
Re: The optimal amount of fraud is non-zero (2022)
#110Earlier quoted context omitted.
> The optimal amount of [...] deaths [...] is not zero. That's not true. It assumes that there is an objective, known price for a life. Since you can't have e.g. 0.1 deaths, there's no guarantee that the optimal amount is at least 1. It's more that it's the outcome of haggling, politics, and the willingness to turn a blind eye to the consequences of stupidity.
There's a price for life in a given society though. Due to resources being finite and wellbeing mattering. In the UK I believe NICE uses £30k/QALY as the price.
Yep, although short term end of life years are deemed more valuable (e.g. if you have 3 months to live and we can get you another 3 months, we'll pay more for those 3 months)[0]. And the number is a bit flexible based on other factors, I think.
[0] https://www.tandfonline.com/doi/full/10.1080/14737167.2017.1...