61–70 of 399 posts
This shows that UPI has the potential to scale beyond India yet crypto cannot scale at all.
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I agree than tracking detailed purchase data can lead to serious discrimination and inequity especially in a dictatorship. The use case in your example, however, seems fair: * The person has a choice whether to consume fast food regularly. It’s their freedom, yes, but they should also accept the costs that come with their lifestyle choices. Similarly, if someone chooses to regularly drive at a daredevil speed, they s…
Why should I subsidize parents who choose to raise kids in carcinogenic cities?
Is the above question rhetorical or do you lean more libertarian?
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An institution like physical cash can be powerful/deeply-embedded enough to survive authoritarian governments, and I presume the same would would apply to a widely adopted electronic cash. The political cost to do away with an institution grows in proportion to how pervasive it is.
That completely side steps the question at hand. You, a citizen of an authoritarian regime, are banned from doing transactions and participating in the economy because you are a dissident or not vaccinated or whatever. Why would that ban not also include cash and crypto transactions?
Second, it is politically and generally legally easier to prohibit a class of interactions involving a subset of the population (e.g. those who refused to be vaccinated against COVID) by way of prohibiting intermediaries from interacting with them. So for instance, restaurants were prohibited from serving the unvaccinated in many jurisdictions, but the unvaccinated were not prohibited from patronizing restaurants. The authoritarian policy was easier to enforce like this, because the direct target was commercial establishments, which is a smaller group whom the population at large is less likely to defend, and a group that is already subject to greater restrictions.
Easier still to enforce restrictions on would be handful of financial intermediaries. Another example would be restrictions on investment. The SEC prohibits companies from selling stock to the public without meeting onerous registration requirements, but it does not prohibit the public from buying stock from companies without SEC approval to sell stock. The ban on the stock issuer is enough to deny the public the ability to invest in non-SEC-approved stock, and it is politically much more viable than imposing prohibitions directly on the public.
The administrative and political cost of imposing authoritarian policies increases in proportion to the size of the set of parties that need to have their actions restricted to effectively enforce the policy.
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Quite convenient for tracking people's consumption choices and discriminating based on them. Hi there! We've noticed an increase of fast food purchases in the log of your account. Therefore your medical insurance premiums have risen by 200% to accomodate the change. For lessened prices, you might want to start consuming our Healthy Food(TM) lunch packs by EvilCorp, made out of bugs for the good of the environment :)
Why could this not also be done with currently used card systems?
I assume these apps don't provide such an option.
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Quite convenient for tracking people's consumption choices and discriminating based on them. Hi there! We've noticed an increase of fast food purchases in the log of your account. Therefore your medical insurance premiums have risen by 200% to accomodate the change. For lessened prices, you might want to start consuming our Healthy Food(TM) lunch packs by EvilCorp, made out of bugs for the good of the environment :)
This is already a thing, but it works the other way around. Here in South Africa, the largest private short-term health insurer gives you up to 75% cash back for 'healthy food choices' [1] i.e. they effectively reduce your premiums if you signal that you make healthier choices than other people in the fund. The law in South Africa says that short-term health insurers can't charge different people different premiums,…
The scale of UPI payments is unprecedented. Perhaps the best payment system in the world by far. My friends who come from US are always awe struck by the pervasiveness and easy of use of UPI payments. They want it so bad in the West!
Don't confuse the check wielding Americans for the "west", for example Sweden/Norway/Finland has similar systems named Swish/Vipps/MobilePay (Phone number based with scannable QR codes,etc) that's taken over between people and smaller merchants (even young people organizing raves use Swish payments on-site despite it being potentially traceable) and the banks/companies involved in those services are now in the proces…
The scale of UPI payments is unprecedented. Perhaps the best payment system in the world by far. My friends who come from US are always awe struck by the pervasiveness and easy of use of UPI payments. They want it so bad in the West!
UPI is an impressive system, I use it often and it is quite empowering for billions of Indians. But calling it the "best payment system in the world"! And west wants it so bad sounds like blind exaggerations. United States is not the only western country. Scandinavian countries has Swish (2012), Vipps (2013), and Mobile pay (2015), Canada has Interac.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
Quite convenient for tracking people's consumption choices and discriminating based on them. Hi there! We've noticed an increase of fast food purchases in the log of your account. Therefore your medical insurance premiums have risen by 200% to accomodate the change. For lessened prices, you might want to start consuming our Healthy Food(TM) lunch packs by EvilCorp, made out of bugs for the good of the environment :)
This is already a thing, but it works the other way around. Here in South Africa, the largest private short-term health insurer gives you up to 75% cash back for 'healthy food choices' [1] i.e. they effectively reduce your premiums if you signal that you make healthier choices than other people in the fund. The law in South Africa says that short-term health insurers can't charge different people different premiums,…
absolutely nobody wants to be like us, sa or au (with brexited uk following close). those are dystopian.
also credit cards will very much NOT share your information. we have decades of privacy laws on them. that's why you have to "join" those programs. it's very much NOT the norm. and decent countries have laws against this "70% fake discount"
Earlier quoted context omitted.
Quite convenient for tracking people's consumption choices and discriminating based on them. Hi there! We've noticed an increase of fast food purchases in the log of your account. Therefore your medical insurance premiums have risen by 200% to accomodate the change. For lessened prices, you might want to start consuming our Healthy Food(TM) lunch packs by EvilCorp, made out of bugs for the good of the environment :)
I agree than tracking detailed purchase data can lead to serious discrimination and inequity especially in a dictatorship. The use case in your example, however, seems fair: * The person has a choice whether to consume fast food regularly. It’s their freedom, yes, but they should also accept the costs that come with their lifestyle choices. Similarly, if someone chooses to regularly drive at a daredevil speed, they s…
Might as well abolish it and let everyone pay for their medical bills on their own. Which would be actually more fair than paying a "unhealthy food premium" - since you're only paying for actually getting sick, not for the prediction of whatever model the insurance company is using to predict your sickness.
I fear and loathe the future in which statistical models (of sickness, crime, etc.) determine the course of my life. I'd much rather be held responsible for my own actions and accept whatever randomness of the universe throws at me, than be a puppet of some huge statistical model created to maximize megacorporations' profits.
nobody gets the scale of this data.
visa and mc see the writing on the wall. that's why they raise rates earlier this week. it's their last breath on the markets they still hold.