Chargebacks and fraud protection are largely needed in the credit/debit card system because you go around handing people the key to your safe to merchants and ask them to take whatever they want. And pinky promise not to share the key with anyone else.
Once you have sane system like pix or upi, there is far less need for chargebacks and frauds.
Fraud protection in this case doesn't mean protection against having your card copied, it means protection when you've made a purchase and didn't receive the product you were promised.
Which payment method would you prefer to use for an online purchase: One where you have no chance of getting your money back if it turned out to be a scam, or one where you have protection against this?
UPI has a government controlled chargeback mechanisms [1]. Why would any system of payment not have a chargeback mechanism if someone stole from you? You can even chargeback cash by going through the legal system. Obviously, the better system for online transactions is an escrow system.
In any case, my politics demands not depending on the bureaucracy of a big corporation for legal redress.
That's great, and something which all other payment systems should also adapt. As it stands now, no payment method offers any fraud protection mechanism except for Visa and Mastercard - and also UPI as you mention. Not even old school bank transfers have fraud protections.
> Why would any system of payment not have a chargeback mechanism if someone stole from you?
I couldn't agree more.
I only notice one problematic thing there in your link: Wrong recipient. And it says you cannot get your money back without the cooperation of the recipient. With card payments you never risk paying to the wrong recipient by typing a number wrong or such.
> I only notice one problematic thing there in your link: Wrong recipient.
There is a trade-off. Many systems do offer the ability to get your money back without the cooperation of the recipient. But those systems are also filled with the scam, where you send someone money, then convince them to send the money back manually, and finally reverse the original transaction.
You can counter this by more policing of these types of scams, but usually the amounts in each individual case are small, so police have very little incentive to do anything about it.
I would say it's released in the spirit of open source. "Peer review" in the narrow sense exists primarily to assign prestige in academia; but there's nothing stopping anyone from "peer reviewing" the GitHub repository.
So they could also dump a 100 quadrillion line proof in Bourbaki notation and call it a day?
The proof was released in the spirit of being first at all costs without any attempt to clean it up. I doubt that OpenAI mathematicians could give a coherent talk about it, certainly not using a blackboard.
What kind of prestige? Peer review is anonymous unpaid work.
A good review does not merely check the correctness of logical arguments, it gives suggestions for the exposition, citing the correct references, putting everything in the right context, etc.
All of the reasons you listed for peer review are valid. The broader point is that peer review can happen outside of academic journals, and nobody has an incentive to submit to them who isn't trying to play the academic prestige game. For a significant example, see the history of Perelman's proof of the Poincaré conjecture.
> journals are not the arbiter of truth and getting published in them is something only academics have an incentive to do
Good, I just wanted to point out that peer review isn't primarily an arbitrage of truth, it is also to make sure the exposition is nice to read. When you get a reviewer who actually cares, you receive lots of feedback that isn't related to the correctness of Lemma 3.14.15 and stuff like that.
This is an equivalent of a company producing security software, open sourcing their code, and then claiming that since no one has found any serious bugs, their software is secure.
No. The way to build confidence that your software is well made, you do a proper external security audit and obtain the requisite certificate from a proper auditing firm.
It's also incorrect to think peer review in mathematics is low quality (like it is in some other fields). Certainly, when major results are in place, editors ensure that high quality peer reviewers are recruited and do their job properly. Like all human processes this fails sometimes, but not enough to not do it.
>then claiming that since no one has found any serious bugs, their software is secure.
which specific openai statements does this part of your analogy map to?
in the "sharing ai progress in mathematics" blog, openai simply says "results", and never once claims that all of them are unquestionably true. instead, they state they want to evaluate the results. their github states that the results are "different stages of verification" and also says "Some of the unformalized results could have issues"
that is the opposite of "claiming [...] their software is secure", to use your analogy.
I didn't say peer review is low quality; just that it's not necessary or sufficient to determine the truth. Ultimately the OpenAI proof stands or falls on things that have been audited externally, namely the formalization of the problem in Lean and the correctness of the Lean software. There's no incentive for OpenAI to submit to a peer-reviewed journal when they don't need to play the academic prestige game. TFA is an example of peer review in action: they're analyzing the proof and finding points to criticize.
this happens in approximately every scientific field. ive never heard it described as "idea that they are beyond peer review".
openai themselves specifically call out that there may be issues with their results. journalists and laypeople just happen to skip that part, like they do with ~all physics, health, astronomy, etc results.
Because they want to release everything on github so everyone can peer review it themselves
This is far more efficient and they’re telling the academic industry to grow up
Sister comments are saying that academics dont like the Lean programming language and see a lack of human language described proof. Doesn’t sound like something I should care about but I’m watching for a better human language description of the problem as this discussion evolves
My understanding from glancing at the hopefully correct sanctions statement [1] is that they are secondary in nature (see for example Sec 3). So the insurance company will face all the same sanctions that the ICC judge is facing if they serve them. They banks will cutoff the insurance company as well, because the banks themselves use US infrastructure.
The only solution would be similar to what China exercised. The EU passes an order telling all EU entities to not comply with US sanctions or face legal problems. Then it comes down to how the US responds and whether EU can take that hit.
The only solution would be similar to what China exercised. The EU passes an order telling all EU entities to not comply with US sanctions or face legal problems.
There are strong calls from the EP now for the EC to prepare the blocking statute:
There's another possible outcome as well: commerce moves to the black market, which eventually inverts the traditional national sovereignty relationship such that people learn that if they want to get anything done safely, they do it over encrypted communication channels with cryptocurrencies, and eventually the rump states of "official" governments are seen as cosplayers fighting over a pageant that people pay lip service to but don't rely on anymore.
The effect of these transitive sanctions is to create trading blocks. If you want to do business with the U.S, you don't do business with sanctioned entities. If other world powers (like China or the EU) want to negate the power of U.S. sanctions, they pass laws that people in their countries must not comply with U.S. sanctions or risk being sanctioned themselves. Now firms are stuck: if they comply with one set of sanctions they are in violation of another, and vice versa, and so it becomes impossible to comply with all of them. Their two options are: 1) comply with their local, national trading bloc and forego the benefits of globalization and trade or 2) become an outlaw, get the benefits of trade, but risk the ire of national authorities.
#2 seems rather unthinkable right now, coming off the Pax Americana, but it was actually quite common during historical periods like the one we're headed into. That's the choice made by pirates during the 1600s; by American colonists in the 1770s; oftentimes by frontier settlers in ~1860s America; and by numerous non-state nations like Jews or Gypsies throughout history. Plus, the Internet and cryptocurrencies and VPNs and Tor and residential proxies all exist. The technology is there for a market state that crosses national boundaries, and the social conditions are building.
Notice I said "outcome" rather than "solution", as I think people can see many things wrong with this. You'll kinda get whatever emerges, which probably is not an improvement on what we had from 1990-2020.
> The only solution would be similar to what China exercised. The EU passes an order telling all EU entities to not comply with US sanctions or face legal problems
Unfortunately, the fact that they haven't done this just makes the EU look like a paper tiger.
The EU does not work like Trump, resolving issues through diplomacy is always the preferred first option. Trump also backed down from his Greenland threats after the EU messaged that it might employ the trade bazooka and some EU countries sent some army personnel to Greenland.
They could have immediately activated the trade bazooka when Trump was threatening Greenland, but the slower diplomatic approach also worked and led to far less damage on both sides.
Maybe for most things but the EU and Trump are both fully aligned on their Israel policy, which is what the ICC sanctions are about. You will not see the EU disagree with him here.
You can choose the type of questions you want to get asked about in StreetComplete. If you want to only enter store names and timings, then go into Settings and pick those.
Whenever you analyze a dynamic system, the primary question you ask is, which direction will it evolve in, and will it hit some steady state?
If you apply this thinking to the economic system practiced in most countries, the answer is that the system forces have been set up in a way that the capital owners need to be paid back on an exponential schedule, and there are barely any counter-forces to this. Hence, the system will never hit a real steady state. People will continue to creatively design more and more immoral methods of extracting monetary value from a finite system that cannot indefinitely and continuously grow exponentially. There is no other way to pay back the capitalists. There is no counter-force.
Most people on a budget (i.e. the vast majority of people) are constantly using exact or approximate multiplication while shopping. And they are rarely whipping out their calculator for this purpose.
Why not just use the calculator app on your smart phone? That's what I do. (School made me all too aware of how easy it is for me to get the wrong answer when trying to do calculations mentally)
Depends on the calculation and context, it is definitely advisable to use tools for complex or high-risk situations, dividing the dinner bill by 2 or 3, that should not require a calculator or one of the thousands of bill splitting apps, perhaps it is a bit harder when you want divide bill by items, but not a high risk situation.
practice makes perfect, exercise your brain like your body
I have a family member working for a Canadian company that steps in after a mine has stopped operating. It cleans up and remediates the surrounding land and water to minimize environmental impact. This is usually a thorough process that takes a long time. Many months or years.
You are missing the entire point of the oral defense while almost stating it. The existence of the oral defense is what extrinsically motivates the supervisor to do their job well. If the student fails, the supervisor loses faces in front of their peers, which obviously they try to avoid. Removing the oral defense would massively reduce the quality of PhDs because supervisors will not do their job.
Also in my observational experience in physics, a fair number of students (probably like 10%) get some sort of major corrections to their thesis. After writing this, I did a search, and in the UK, the number across all fields is 16% [1].
The system is highly non-linear and has a lot of flippable components. For example, average temperature increase will cause the AMOC to collapse which will make parts of Europe cooler (while also increasing extreme weather events).
Similar things could happen with whichever glacier you are looking at.
The underlying problem is that the whole concept of cards is insane. Basically, you go around telling every shopkeeper the code for your safe, and ask them to take however much cash you owe them out of the safe.
Sane ways to organize payments:
- Merchant gives you a bill-id. You input it into your bank website - where you see the bill amount being charged. You accept, and bank pays merchant.
- You give merchant your card number (that's the only information - no expiry, no ccv, no name). A notification pops up on your bank website asking if you want to pay what the merchant is requesting. You accept.
- You go to your bank website and obtain a random number, either allowing a single transaction or a recurring transaction. You give the merchant the number. After merchant charges it, no other merchant can charge the same number.
This would also solve a major annoyance I have with card payments, which is no way to link a particular purchase back to a transaction.
With checks, you write a check and can write down the check number with a note about what the payment was for. When the payment posts, the check number is part of the transaction. With a card payment, they charge your card and, sometimes days later, there's a pre-authorization with some obscure transaction description. So many scary transaction descriptions that make me think "wait is this fraud".
With this method, the approval flow would also allow people to add a blurb for what the transaction is for.
> You go to your bank website and obtain a random number, either allowing a single transaction or a recurring transaction. You give the merchant the number. After merchant charges it, no other merchant can charge the same number.
That's basically how Blik works in Poland. With the exception being that the number is random 6 digits randomly generated when you open the app, that is active for ~2 minutes. So you don't deal with the issue of very long and error prone numbers to copy.
Cards have supported strong, positive cardholder authentication at the POS (chip and PIN) and online (3DS) since the 90s.
It’s entirely the US credit card industry and its regulating bodies’ fault that it has made neither mandatory in the way that e.g. the EU did, and is in fact fighting any attempt to do so tooth and nail (please think of the conversion rate!!)
Can you guys still write a check at the supermarket checkout? No pin credit cards are small potatoes next to personal checks in terms of weirdness. But I wish we had that trust culture everywhere.
Once you have sane system like pix or upi, there is far less need for chargebacks and frauds.
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