In America, €120 million could buy half of Congress.

I can’t comment on the situation in other countries, but in the US, in the majority of cases, it’s cheaper for businesses to take cash. In the US, the first few thousand dollars of cash deposits are typically free every month. Beyond that, pricing varies. My bank charges 0.35% on cash deposits, which is considered quite high, though it works out to only $42 per week in my example above. The credit union I have my personal accounts with charges 0.15%, which would be $18 a week.

The cost of labour has already been factored in and it still results in savings. The cost of security is comparatively negligible. A $300 safe is a one-off purchase that pays for itself in a fortnight.

A card which is subject to central bank regulations regarding the interchange fees which they are allowed to charge. According to the Dodd-Frank Wall Street Reform & Consumer Protection Act 2011, the Federal Reserve has the power to limit debit card interchange fees for debit cards issued by large banks with over $10 billion in assets. A “regulated debit card” issued by a bank subject to the regulation is therefore tariffed at the maximum rate allowed by the regulation, which is 0.05% plus 22 cents.

If questioned by police they can say “I made it up for Internet clout. I didn’t actually steal anything”.

It is definitely not true that Discover interchange rates are significantly higher than Visa or Mastercard.

I’ve put below a list of the actual interchange rates for various personal Visa, Mastercard, and Discover cards types.

Debit:

• Visa Debit Regulated: 0.05% + 22¢
• Discover Debit Regulated: 0.05% + 22¢
• Mastercard Debit Regulated: 0.05% + 22¢
• Visa Debit: 0.8% + 15¢
• Mastercard Debit: 1.05% + 15¢
• Discover Debit: 1.1% + 16¢
• Visa Debit Prepaid: 1.15% + 15¢
• Mastercard Debit Prepaid: 1.15% + 15¢

Base credit tiers:

• Visa CPS Retail: 1.51% + 10¢
• Discover Consumer: 1.56% +10¢
• Mastercard Consumer: 1.65% + 10¢
• Mastercard Enhanced: 1.8% + 10¢

Rewards cards:

• Visa Rewards Traditional: 1.65% + 10¢
• Visa Rewards Signature: 1.65% + 10¢
• Discover Rewards: 1.71% + 10¢
• Discover Rewards Premium: 1.71% + 10¢
• Mastercard World: 1.9% + 10¢

Premium cards:

• Visa Rewards Signature Preferred: 2.1% + 10¢
• Discover Rewards Premium Plus: 2.15% + 10¢
• Mastercard World Elite: 2.3% + 10¢

You can plainly see that Discover tends to be more expensive than Visa but is cheaper than Mastercard. The only reason I could see that someone might refuse Discover is because Discover cards are all rewards credit cards that go into the higher tiers, whereas many Visa and Mastercard cards are debit cards which go into the lowest tier.

Amex isn’t exclusive at all. Anyone can go apply for one and get one. It’s not special at all

I literally cannot think of any places that don’t take Discover.

Some American states (not mine) have banned surcharging for credit cards in response to consumer backlash. But what’s not banned is marking up everything by 3% and then offering a 3% cash discount.

Surprisingly not in the US. If you make 100 sales a day of $20 each, then over a six-day week, you’d pay roughly $360 in credit card transaction fees (assuming 2.5% + 10¢ per transaction which is average). If you instead spent half an hour a day counting cash in the till and then half an hour at the end of the week to go to the bank, that’s about $98 in labour cost (assuming a labour cost of $28 per hour, which is roughly $25 per hour in wages and $3 per hour in tax), so the savings are $262 per week, which is not insignificant.

When I buy from a small business that I want to support, I will use cash. When I’m buying anything from a large company, I will always use the fanciest credit cards in my wallet.

In the United States, credit card processing fees are more expensive for fancy rewards credit cards and obviously there’s no fee for cash.

Everything is 4011. If I’m feeling generous, it might even be 94011!

I don’t think this is at all a valid counter-argument as all of these powers can equally be given to civil unions, if they aren’t already. In my eyes, if you propose to someone and “get married” and want to give your spouse the legal powers associated with what was previously marriage, you would register a civil union.

No civil marriage doesn’t mean that people can’t connect themselves legally; it just means that you have to register a civil union to do so. All of the points you raise are easily defeated by just defining civil unions to replace marriage in all respects. The system is already very close to how I describe. You can “get married” at a church or wherever else and in most countries that does not mean anything until you have registered it with a local registrar. I’m just saying that the thing that happens in a church is “marriage”, and the thing that happens with the legal paperwork at the registrar’s office is called “civil union” regardless of the genders or sexualities of the parties involved.

Honestly I don’t know why the state is still in the business of giving out marriages. Who gives a shit what other people want to call marriage. The state should not even have the authority to perform marriages at all. It should be left as a cultural or religious institution. It has no right to legislate what is and is not marriage. The only thing that should be available is civil unions, being defined as a financial and legal union of two or more consenting adults.

That way, anyone can “get married” at their local church, at a secular ceremony, or piss-drunk in a pub by a barmaid. It would be legally vacuous and has only the meaning that the parties ascribe to it, or that is given to it by the religious authority they choose to follow. But if they want to be legally joined together then they would go register a civil union at the local registrar’s office.

If you’re a bigot and don’t consider two men in civil union to be married, cool, whatever, the law should not care about your opinion. You can privately think “those two are not married” all day, and be right in your mind. The only people whose opinions matter are those who want to call themselves married. There is no institution of “marriage” to defend, because you’ve already won. You can consider marriage to be anything you want and be right. Now you can leave other people alone.

These are not the same thing. At least in America, these terms are only superficially similar in the sense that they are “people who say they love their country”.

When someone points out a country’s shortcomings and how it could be fixed, a patriot listens and makes plans, while a nationalist denies those shortcomings exist or blames them on external factors.

When someone says we should learn from our history and avoid repeating the mistakes of the past, a patriot pulls out the history books, while a nationalist instead goes through them with a black highlighter.

When someone burns the country’s flag as a protest, a patriot asks why, while a nationalist will say they should be thrown in prison.

When abuses of power happen by the police or government agents, a patriot will demand an investigation and accountability, while a nationalist will say that actually, they deserved it.

Linux Mint is great for my 80-year-old grandfather. No Microsoft account BS, and the interface is simple enough for him to learn. He only uses the computer to look at his investments online using Microsoft Edge and play Minesweeper (GNOME Mines seems to be an acceptable replacement for him), and look at old family photos. It runs great on his 6-year-old computer.

It’s hard to argue that Windows 10 isn’t way better than Windows 7 in terms of user interface, workflow patterns, security, and feature support. Despite the fact that Windows 10 comes with a lot of useless junk. Hell, even the junk it came with (Microsoft Edge, Cortana, OneDrive) is more useful than the junk Windows 7 also came with.

And similarly, while people have a lot of nostalgia for Windows XP, from an absolute standpoint, Windows XP is complete ass as an operating system. It was only good in comparison to Windows 2000, ME, and 98/95.

Delicious edible icecream

If I had to guess this guy (or girl) is a Bitcoin millionaire or something. But that’s just based on the vibes of his speech with no concrete basis.

Question: how does this site differ in function to the Internet Archive’s Wayback Machine?

According to the article, they’re selling it for ¥97 billion but will lease it back, so they will post a ¥73.9 billion gain from the sale. But in the first half of 2025, they posted a loss of ¥221.9 billion. So selling their HQ will offset about two months’ worth of losses.