But much as there's nothing stopping the Federal government from greatly simplifying the burden and toil of tax season by issuing 90% of Americans a pre-filled-out "This is what you owe; sign this and return it or dispute it with your own filing," we won't do that because fully half of Congress is from a party that has, as a plank, that private institutions serve the public interest better than public institutions.
https://www.propublica.org/article/filing-taxes-could-be-fre...
https://www.propublica.org/article/inside-turbotax-20-year-f...
I do think ideally this could be done by NY or CA first. We should test out ideas in the states, where possible.
They built it to the specifications that NASA enforced upon them, which were paid for in blood.
And you don't have to look far in the SpaceX organization to see what risks the company is willing to take if an external authority isn't imposing regulation on them.
Think about their rocket landing program: the probability of landing a rocket on a boat in the first attempt might have been low but the risk was almost negligible because the launches that SpaceX practiced landing on had been paid for by a customer already. Now, if SpaceX had bet the company on reusability by paying for all these rockets out of their own pocket instead and hoping they manage to get it right before cash runs out, then this could have been called risky.
I'm not saying it's easy to make a global positioning system, but it's easier than processing every transaction in the United States.
GPS is harder.
disclaimer: I used to work at Visa.
Separately, I did not have to implement a GNSS system, but at the job I had immediately after Visa, I did have to work very, very closely with GNSS vendors who integrated with our AV middleware software (including having to write drivers for them), and in my current role I'm CEO of a company which produces a software platform that provides automated V&V of complex SISoS (including those integrated with and dependent on GNSS).
End to end payments systems are hard in the rats nest of legacy expectations and integration sense. End to end GPS deployment & management seems hard in the science and systems engineering sense.
Edit: Further to that and the comment pointing out where GPS was researched and developed, the Air Force still operates GPS block III and contracted these services out to Lockheed. So yeah, ultimately any success Lockheed has with GPS III is ultimately a success for the government..
Three pieces of the puzzle missing:
1) It appears there was no honest-to-God real end-to-end testing in the plan: no team to own it, no chain of responsibility if it didn't work. So cross-functional issues like total system performance were ownerless, and it is the nature of government contracting work to push blame away, not assert ownership where none is demanded by the contract.
2) Even in integration testing, responsibility was unclear when it failed. If the specification itself proved faulty, neither side of the protocol had ownership over fixing the problem; faulty specs led to pissing matches of blame-pushing instead of any party saying "Okay, the spec is now this, just fix it."
3) Since nobody had holistic ownership, no core infrastructure decisions were made. The whole project, under the hood, was a mismash of different databases, languages, messaging services, and protocols, owned by (and chosen by) each contractor with no thought paid to long-term maintenance of the app as a singular service. Each team had their own ad-hoc dashboards with no top-level view to allow anyone to understand why the end-to-end site experience was broken. There was nobody to own a concept equivalent to "Ops" or "Site reliability" who had authority to make judgement calls here; long-term maintenance was going to look like full understanding of dozens of similar systems doing similar tasks.
I'd honestly love to see something like a credit union at a large enough scale to run it's own payment processing system. Something like that could get you a nice level of independence from government control and give you an organization more incentivized to care for it's members.
Saying "look as SpaceX" isn't much of a "government failed" as much as "Boeing failed miserably and lobbied hard to cover their failures".
That said - the government can be a facilitator without being the operator, and it shouldn't be the operator in this case.
Ha, that's a good phrase to use in a performance review.
"On the whole, Bob is not uniformly ineffective ..."
I get that politicians like the psychology of people receiving a cheque or direct deposit vs a tax deduction ("it was my money all along"), but I think it is genuinely a positive step in terms of helping people at the low end of the economy who don't have the means to save receipts or jump through whatever other hoops are necessary to nickel and dime the government at tax time.
The US barely got off the ground a free option for public e-filing, and we managed to botch it up by handing it to a private company to implement, which promptly turned around and made it absolutely as impossible to access as they were allowed to by law.
It took me about 10 minutes for monthly tax filings and 30 minutes for the annual tax filing for my company and 4 employees. I did not have an accountant - I didn't need one.
It is a nightmare filing taxes in US, even paying $300 to Intuit. It takes about a week of my time... for something that is supposed to be automated. I also never manage to get the tax calculated correctly in advance, because no consumer facing tax company will bother with you before you get your annual statement(W2). I have a very variable income - RSU's and other optional income... so I get hit by underpayment fee from IRS.... and don't get me started on the fact that every state has their own tax authority...
It's not that progressives don't pay attention, it's that the Democratic machine doesn't do this. In fact it works to sabotage and disempower effective grassroots opposition to its corporatist policies.
There are always a few break outs in every cycle - like Cori Bush this year - but they're there for show, not for policy. If they get too pushy they run into opposition, and if they don't accept a compromise with the party line they're quietly removed by PACs that funnel non-grassroots special-interest money to challengers.
That it happened twice in 3 presidents is icing on the "it's rigged" cake.
All of Scandinavia does this. Has been doing it for ages.
Most people need do nothing at all. And it works really well even if you do have to make some amendments (income in a foreign country for instance that the tax authorities can't see directly).
And there's technically nothing stopping the US from sending humans to mars either.
There are many reasons that it's not done, including the most important one, which is that it's not necessary.
Simply producing or supporting a standard, and then maybe having some regulations around it would be 100x easier.
That is the plan, albeit the minimal fees involved paid for through users of the Fed’s system.
It seems to me that more people is socialistic-minded in the USA these days, to me that looks like a indicator of the decline of the country.
Payroll withholding already artificially dampens the strain that taxation imposes on everyone that earns a paycheck. Issuing a pre-filled out form is another step backwards.
Paying taxes should be burdensome and uncomfortable.
Make taxes burdensome, and you create a market for tax filers who make them easy for you. All youve done is make taxes more expensive then, without getting better government services.
E.g. https://www.fdic.gov/regulations/laws/rules/6500-2260.html https://www.creditcards.com/credit-card-news/help/card-act-1... https://blog.payjunction.com/credit-card-processing-regulato...
in the US we do not regulate interchange fees except via Durbin Amendment (only passed 10 years ago) which regulates debit interchange for large banks only. this is totally different from Europe where interchange is heavily regulated.
While it's true many merchants pay 1-3% in processing fees, many of the costs involved are real. Building the network, fraud, rewards to consumers, etc.
Visa's net income is roughly $11 billion a year[1], and they process roughly $11 trillion a year[2]. So their take is ~.1%, not 3-5%.
Note that this ignores that banks may make money off these transactions as well. May be better to look at Discover (the lender and the network) instead of Visa. But I'd think the total take from these companies is much closer to .1% than even 1%.
[1]https://finance.yahoo.com/quote/V/financials/
[2]https://usa.visa.com/dam/VCOM/download/corporate/media/visan...
That 3% is the total cost to the merchant. Visa is just a payments network. It is not the payment processor(the company that the card terminals connect to). They are not the issuer - the banks that charge as well.
Visa facilitates integration between different payment processors and issuers, they don't even handle fraud or low level stuff.
A competing banking system through the USPS is a great idea that needs to be remade, it worked well for a long time in the US [1]. It would eliminate the predatory checks cashed industry and credit through the system would be competitive to keep the private systems in check, much like the USPS does other delivery services or Federal student loan rates keep private rates in check. The same needs to happen for healthcare with a public option. When you have public systems, the private ones have to compete more, it is a win for everyone.
The network utility needs to be split, lines handled by power companies that know how to run a utility, and then the servicers on top that are competitive would also be interest aligned with the network utility users.
I have no doubt this "Google should be regulated as a utility" is being pushed by ISPs that know they are utilities but fought to remove that classification. They deserve to lose their local monopolies and right to that because they abused their position and have turned rent-seeking over capacity expansion with data caps, overloaded nodes, prioritization, dropped packets, all incentives to NOT expand the capacity which is a major problem when the market incentives are aligned against the interests of the country, products and innovation.
[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/United_States_Postal_Savings_S...
My understanding was that a good chunk of the 3% fee is given back to consumers as cash back or rewards, and that dealing with cash also had costs for businesses.
Generally cashless is cheaper for the retailer. Fewer losses to employee fraud and robbery. You don't have to pay for employees to deposit cash.
The downside is that you're liable to fraud and chargebacks.
interchange in the US is not regulated outside the Durbin Amendment for debit interchange for large banks.
Visa and MC are way too lightly regulated when they are the gate keepers to a cashless world due to what I would consider a historical accident. No reason why these networks shouldn’t be utilities in a cashless world.
Regarding such jacking up of fees, it seems that nearly every month PG&E, a regulated utility company in California, sends notices of price hikes.
I'm not sure how they manage to get away with this, but it makes me skeptical that merely regulating a company, or even nationalizing it, will be sufficient to keep rates low, since regulatory capture will continue to be a possibility.
Further, its an open secret that the very politicians who are tasked with regulating industry are often former (or future) executives in the very companies they regulate. Political office is a revolving door for industry executives, which regularly land well paid jobs in those same industries after retiring from politics.
I'm not sure how to solve this problem, but we need to look at it squarely in the face and not labor under the illusion that government and corporations are clearly separate nor diametrically opposed entities.
Granted a lot of it comes from risk management.
Nobody is making purchasing decisions based on a 1% different in price for a car, let alone day-to-day purchases.
you can’t possibly be arguing that ACH and wire transfers make sense for everyday purchases.
if the Fed’s faster payment network goes live and makes ACH instantaneous can payments can be done with a QR code or something similar then that is viable but not right now.
beyond that, almost no e-commerce store accepts ACH. It also doesn’t benefit the consumer to bother with the hassle of ACH vs card when there’s no discount...you’re just saving the merchant money. Amazon is the only one I can think of.
That said many people (myself included) also use credit cards for their convenience.
These fees are absolute, not relative to the purchase amount.
edit : I meant our PIN payments card, not iDeal. But the point is true for both.
Otherwise, vendors should gravitate to those issuers that yield acceptable service at the lowest price and customers should gravitate toward those issuers that deliver them the greatest value.
Rewards-point/miles schemes are moderately insane, but they allow the customer to express their preferences with greater precision. Want to pay a lower effective transaction fee, perhaps at the risk of higher interest rates if you carry a balance? Choose a cash-back card.
Perhaps 3-5% is actually what compliance/fraud-detection/customer-service/etc. ultimately requires? I was once a huge Bitcoin advocate; crypto transactions absolutely have a place in the world, but the true irreversibility of such transactions (at demonstrably lower costs) opens a huge door for nefarious actors.
right now we have a situation where the rich (who pay for things with expensive premium credit cards) are being subsidized by the poor (using cash or basic credit cards)
OP starts with a seemingly related pivot to the topic of how to prioritize the regulation of a company like Google with the regulation of other companies. Such a conversation would obviously involve at least few points about why Google ought not top the list. (And hopefully many points given OP says Google is "by far" not top priority.) I was certainly interested to read such a digression...
Then, like Alan Sokal's prank[1], OP leaves out any argument for that prioritization. Instead, OP moves directly to complaining about the other companies which OP has declared by fiat should take priority.
And, voila! Every single comment below OP at the time of this writing similarly avoids the ostensible discussion about Google's prioritization, instead discussing only the other companies and the efficacy of their regulation. Potential regulation of Google as a topic is completely avoided in any of the child nodes of this OP.
Whether this was intentional or not, it makes an excellent archetype for this tactic.
Threads start and branch on different topics, which are varying degrees related to the main post.
Kind of like how you have now switched the discussion to Alan Sokal. That doesn't mean you are making some tactical shift as part of a larger strategy.
I would argue for an EU type approach and instead of regulating Google or payment networks - force demonopolization and opening up markets to more competition.
If you wish I can even share the priority list in my mind, for what sectors require addressing before Google:
1. Actual local monopolies
2. Local education sectors and their organisations
3. Radio spectrum for local wireless internet and cable providers (to challenge local cable monopolies)
4. Banking and payments systems
5. Construction sector
... basically there's 99 problems and Google ain't one.
Climate change, election interference, and COVID-19 are far more pressing issues than monopolization.
However the fact that these other bigger issues exist doesn't mean we shouldn't care about or take action on the lesser. If one brings up how we should address issue 'x' and are met with "but what about issue 'y'?" it does give the impression of deflection or of whataboutism.
1. Facebook is a monopoly on social media is a false assumption. Even limiting it to the mainstream there is reddit and twitter. Tumblr a prior competitor essentially died by "suicide" after being bought up. 2. That allowing misinformation is a problem and something that "we" should do about it. That is not only contrary to the first ammendment but suffers from watching the watchmen problems. 3. To demand to be able to stop it on a technical level is absued epistemologically as asking bullets to only kill bad people or encryption to let "good guys" in. 4. Misinformation itself is contextual. "Bleach kills the Coronavirus." is true. Saying "Bleach kills the Coronavirus!" in the context of cleaning treatment equipment is still technically true but there may be implementation issues with what may be washed safely and misses nuance when it corrodes fittings. Saying "Bleach kills the Coronavirus" as a treatment itself is misinformation because it will kill the patient before it cures them in the same way a bleach embalming could eradicate infectious agents.
The only reason people are talking about forcing Facebook to impose some restrictions on communication is because Facebook has somewhat of a monopoly on some communication.
Which is to say that talk of Facebook and regulation winds up being "Facebook is big and powerful and we want the state to have that power instead, damn it". Without liking Facebook's approach all that much, I'm less of a fan of this.
> However the fact that these other bigger issues exist doesn't mean we shouldn't care about or take action on the lesser. If one brings up how we should address issue 'x' and are met with "but what about issue 'y'?" it does give the impression of deflection or of whataboutism.
The point is that we can care about more than one issue at a time.
You need to pick things that aren't directly connected if you want to deflect, or your argument comes across as being too obviously in bad faith.
Or it is merely contextualizing the debate around what should and should not be considered a public utility by contrasting the case of Google with others. This in turn helps creating consistency and improves our understanding of the matter.
This forum is not the platform where the fate of Google is decided, so "taking attention away" can't really have malicious consequences, if it helps us coming to a principled understanding.
> No, look at how bad Y and Z are! They're so bad!
this is a... Sokal? (I think it's pretty easy to read the intent here, and more generally: internet comments are hardly rigorous proofs, and that's probably a good thing.)
It seems inappropriate for regulation to step in when something happens to be popular but there are equal or better alternatives easily available, and changing to a different search engine is about the easiest change a person could make in their life.
In the case of mitigating any bad behavior by Google, there's a very easy alternative solution for the problem, which is to convince people to use other search engines. I haven't used Google as mine for over 15 years and I don't believe I've suffered at all for it. I've found DuckDuckGo to perfectly suit my needs. Google run as a public utility could potentially hurt all the other search engines that many would consider to be superior solutions already.
It's just a comment, not a 'tactic'.
And if you hold that something can be a tactic without intent, then anything and everything is a tactic to bring about its related reaction.
It’s no the ONLY mechanism. Crypto currencies solve this issue.
It’s the only mechanism for fiat currency.
It's crazy that we've given up control as a society of the only mechanisms for electronic payments in an increasingly cashless world to unregulated private entities who continue to jack up fees as often as they can get away with.
Makes everything 3-5% more expensive. Ridiculous.