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The Long Shadow of Checks

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Re: The Long Shadow of Checks

#31

Post by spelunker »

peter_l_downs wrote: post #2

> One control which we made for checks to reduce systemic risk continues to have consequences more than a century later. Most disagreements between you and a grocery store are beneath the notice of the law. If you and your grocery store have a disagreement about a check specifically, you can go to jail. The crime is sometimes called “uttering”, for charming historical reasons. patio11: you write a lot, and have taugh…

Also, is there a particular reason he uses obscure words like "infelicity"? I'm a native English speaker and I think that is the first time I've heard that word used. Is it really that hard to just use "misfortune"?

Re: The Long Shadow of Checks

#32

Post by spelunker »

clintonb wrote: post #24
sneed_chucker wrote: post #19

Honestly, I just hate how insecure and legacy everything involving banking in this country is. For example, payroll - there's literally no reason your employer needs to store your account and routing number as another piece of your personal info that they can lose when some hacker finds out their MySQL admin password is "admin" Like, the system should be that you give your employer your banks name, plus a UUID associ…

> It would be trivial to implement and make things much more secure… If it were truly trivial, this would have been implemented long ago. This isn’t a pure engineering problem as much as it’s a “convincing people to do it” problem.

I mean, credit cards do it with tokens, so at least part of the industry moved to something like that already.

Re: The Long Shadow of Checks

#33

Post by otteromkram »

e63f67dd-065b wrote: post #4

I'm continually surprised by the political influence held by the thousands of tiny banks in the country. I must applaud the people behind the Check 21 Act: it's the combination of a neat backwards compatibility trick (if you want paper, we'll print it and send it to you) and political maneuvering that I must admire it. > Since the standard U.S. bank account is a checking account, even if it cannot write checks, it is…

An alternative might be scaled NSF fees.

Instead of one standard overdraft fee, smaller miscues might amount to a few bucks or something.

Transactions in the hundreds or thousands could be proportionately larger.

Maybe a "window" should be available for reversal of NSF fees if a balance is brought up to cover the credit amount.

I can see the point of waiving the fee, but someone has to cover the cost of funds aren't available.

Should the grocer have to eat the cost of goods you purchased? How about the bank?

Arguably, no.

Re: The Long Shadow of Checks

#34

Post by reaperducer »

IshKebab wrote: post #30
reaperducer wrote: post #20

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I guess the opposite could also be asked: Why doesn't the EU use something proven, durable, redundant, and sensible like checks instead of relying on fragile computers that have thousands more points of failure?

Because cheques are unreliable, insecure, slow, inconvenient and expensive, and electronic bank transfers solve literally all of those issues. What kind of a stupid question is that? Do you think cheques are not processed by computers?

cheques are unreliable, insecure, slow, inconvenient and expensive, and electronic bank transfers solve literally all of those issues.

I'll give you "slow," but it depends on how you define slow. Checks where I am often clear in a day. Rarely longer than two days.

As for the rest, no, those problems are not solved by replacing checks with electronic transfers. They still exist, just in different forms.

And I never said checks aren't processed by computers. I stated that replacing checks with computers adds more points of failure.

Or do you somehow not notice the litany of things that go wrong with computers every single day right on the front page of HN.

Just because it's all electronic doesn't mean it's failsafe.

Re: The Long Shadow of Checks

#35

Post by Klonoar »

spelunker wrote: post #31
peter_l_downs wrote: post #2

> One control which we made for checks to reduce systemic risk continues to have consequences more than a century later. Most disagreements between you and a grocery store are beneath the notice of the law. If you and your grocery store have a disagreement about a check specifically, you can go to jail. The crime is sometimes called “uttering”, for charming historical reasons. patio11: you write a lot, and have taugh…

Also, is there a particular reason he uses obscure words like "infelicity"? I'm a native English speaker and I think that is the first time I've heard that word used. Is it really that hard to just use "misfortune"?

There are more than a few people who value what he writes but find the overall "winding path" of style to be very grating to read.

Re: The Long Shadow of Checks

#36

Post by wk_end »

spelunker wrote: post #31
peter_l_downs wrote: post #2

> One control which we made for checks to reduce systemic risk continues to have consequences more than a century later. Most disagreements between you and a grocery store are beneath the notice of the law. If you and your grocery store have a disagreement about a check specifically, you can go to jail. The crime is sometimes called “uttering”, for charming historical reasons. patio11: you write a lot, and have taugh…

Also, is there a particular reason he uses obscure words like "infelicity"? I'm a native English speaker and I think that is the first time I've heard that word used. Is it really that hard to just use "misfortune"?

If you’re the sort of writer who finds infelicitous historical reasons charming, you might find historical words like “infelicity” charming too.

Re: The Long Shadow of Checks

#37

Post by 4ndrewl »

w3ll_w3ll_w3ll wrote: post #15
reaperducer wrote: post #13

The longer you live, and the more things you do, the more you realize that checks are still alive and well. You still need checks for: Charitable donations - Many charities maximize every penny, and electronic contributions eat into that. Paying my accountant - Good accountants make every penny count, and aren't interested in tithing from their revenue to credit card companies. Tipping the paper boy Tipping the doorm…

I don't undertand why there is not a better alternative in US, like a bank transfer/wire. In the EU, these transfers are often free at most banks, or at most, they incur a fee of 1 or 2 euros.

In the UK it's highly unusual to pay for anything by cheque these days. The vast majority of banks will now charge for cheque deposits for business accounts (perhaps even personal accounts, it's probably been nearly half a decade since I've had a cheque).

Re: The Long Shadow of Checks

#38

Post by dmurray »

r2_pilot wrote: post #3
peter_l_downs wrote: post #2

> One control which we made for checks to reduce systemic risk continues to have consequences more than a century later. Most disagreements between you and a grocery store are beneath the notice of the law. If you and your grocery store have a disagreement about a check specifically, you can go to jail. The crime is sometimes called “uttering”, for charming historical reasons. patio11: you write a lot, and have taugh…

It's actually kind of boring in this case, per Wikipedia: "In law, uttering is synonymous with publication, and the distinction made between the common law offences was that forgery was the fabrication of a forged instrument (with the intent to defraud) and uttering was the publication of that instrument (with the intent to defraud)."

My passport says something like "to alter this instrument, or to utter it so altered, is an offence". This always read strangely to me - it's an offence to have a real passport, but claim it's a fake? But this definition of "utter" makes it work - it's a crime both to falsify the passport, and to attempt to travel with one that has been falsified.

Re: The Long Shadow of Checks

#39

Post by stevenjgarner »

spelunker wrote: post #31
peter_l_downs wrote: post #2

> One control which we made for checks to reduce systemic risk continues to have consequences more than a century later. Most disagreements between you and a grocery store are beneath the notice of the law. If you and your grocery store have a disagreement about a check specifically, you can go to jail. The crime is sometimes called “uttering”, for charming historical reasons. patio11: you write a lot, and have taugh…

Also, is there a particular reason he uses obscure words like "infelicity"? I'm a native English speaker and I think that is the first time I've heard that word used. Is it really that hard to just use "misfortune"?

His proclivity for sesquipedalianism, manifested in the substitution of "infelicity" for the more pedestrian "misfortune," may have been an artifice to inveigle the reader into a divergent mode of cogitation.

Re: The Long Shadow of Checks

#40

Post by paulddraper »

lmz wrote: post #26
sneed_chucker wrote: post #19

Honestly, I just hate how insecure and legacy everything involving banking in this country is. For example, payroll - there's literally no reason your employer needs to store your account and routing number as another piece of your personal info that they can lose when some hacker finds out their MySQL admin password is "admin" Like, the system should be that you give your employer your banks name, plus a UUID associ…

As a non American, the idea of a bank account number being a kind of secret that is usable to pull money out of the account is the most curious thing to me. I guess something like this can only exist in a high trust environment.

As an American, I am perplexed by the fill-now-pay-after European gas pumps.

I suppose something like that can only exist in a high trust environment.

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