I’ve been cut off my money enough that I don’t trust credit anymore. Instead I have two months rent and outgoings in a cash ISA and at least one month in my current account to cover most situations. I wouldn’t go as far as to say it’s wrong though.
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You are absolutely correct. That doesn’t stop me from paying in in non sequential ten dollar bills in a manilla envelope while wearing a trench coat.
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Yeah, I’ve heard nothing but great things about Oregon, except that it’s really white.
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It is reeeeeeally white. But here is the good thing… nobody notices it. Really, it is. I am not denying racism in any way… But you are more likely to get mocked for not being blue, or riding a unicycle than your race.
Entrenched problems still exist, but much of Oregon is, how do I say it, infantile?
We don’t see black or Hispanic slums cause we don’t have those. We just have slums.
It is so strange, living in California and Arizona half my life. I could write a novella. But basically after the timber crash we all got realistic about life. This is what drove Portlandia, and Bend, and Prineville, and the UOf O Ducks.
This is harsh and racist-ish:
1990 the question was, can you work and make me money? Hispanic hop pickers and day laborers, Corvallis and Aloha are yours! Black sales people for Intel? You may kill your quota, buy go live I. San Jose.
ETA
On sober re-reading this makes very little sense. Thoughts will be reformulated on a later date. Please move along.
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It’s mostly because the longer the transaction takes, the better the chances for replays, MITM, birthday attacks etc. But yes, there’s also the point that the PCI network almost always uses ancient copper lease-lines that are just garbage. It’s all done over TCP using hacked-together encryption schema that don’t follow national standards.
The other half of the problem is that we don’t have a modern EFT system in the US at least for debit and credit. What we have is what’s called “automated cheque clearinghouse”, which is a system where transactions are recorded by all the credit unions and banks, then once a week the transaction data is sent in a batch to the ACH central mainframes in West Virginia. These mainframes are about 35 years old, run on Fortran, and are used basically the same way the bitcoin blockchain is. It’s the authoritative record of financial transactions. Everyone’s software is designed to use this system, and the system itself is crumbling and built in a way that’s very difficult and expensive to replace. Some protocols even depend on known CPU timings.
Worst case scenario: We figure out a way of doing a software emulation of the entire ACH mainframe system, and run it on more stable hardware. There will be no speed increases, but capacity can be increased.
Best case scenario, we do something smart, spend a huge amount of money to deploy the same system that is used in the UK, where EFT costs less than a penny, and the final clearing of the transaction is complete in a second or two.
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Yep, racism AND classicism. Side point: Is contributor Heather J
applying herself to getting off public assistance?
"At nearly 40, I’ve decided to learn the guitar. I’ve been at it for about a year, and recently found my way to Travis picking, a style of fingerpicking named after Merle Travis.
Knowing that I have a while before I get in my 10,000 hours, I like to watch videos of Merle performing the style that he made famous. Also: I want to smack the guy on his right when he says, “That’s all you have to do”.
Guitar lessons, data plan, frequent Boing-Boing commentary… . FOCUS!
I am not on public assistance. READ!
Mod note: @milliefink and @AcerPlatanoides You’re conversation was derailing the thread. Work it out in private or agree to disagree and move on.
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I don’t have handy access to a blue book for used car prices, but I think that there was a long stretch of time in which the quality of GM cars all across the line fell because GM thought that they were too big to fail. So, yeah, I think that Cadillacs probably depreciated quickly. Plus, of course, the person driving may not be the person applying for assistance.
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Or the car can be borrowed from a family member or friend, too.
It drives me crazy when people make the same comment about phones or flat screens or computers, or whatever consumer good folks have. You have no clue how people got that… It’s like people expect the poor to stop being a human being living in a consumer society, since they are poor. They should all become monks, living an aesthetic life because they are poor. Like consumer durables are only there for the benefit of the rich, not for society as a whole. Other wise, they are “not worthy” having public assistance, which they’ve likely paid into at one point or another in their lives, regardless of their current situation. There is little options of living outside of the society we have set up, and everyone deserves to live with some dignity.
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This what I read:
"As I went to pay, I took out my card and entered my PIN.
Declined."
If you’re saying the above doesn’t refer to some PA style food stamp
card–perhaps a regular debit card, then your whole post is HS.
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I think you missed the point. Her and the two women in front of her, paid with cards. The first two women were declined using DEBIT cards that are issued BY THE STATE, but the woman at the register dismissed them as just putting in a wrong PIN. When she did the same with her debit card (presumably attached to a bank account), and had the same thing happen, she was paid attention to. The woman at the register made comments that many of us are construing as racist.
EBT cards function as debit cards, and are (surprise, surprise) provided by an private corporation:
In that case, they function in exactly the same manner as your debit card issued by your bank.
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So her point, “racism at the register,” is weak at best. If the order of
the cards and presenters of cards had been reversed, with the white lady
(Heather) first presenting the “food stamp” card and the black lady,
following, presenting the bank debit card, the comments could likely have
been the same, but based on animus against those on public assistance, not
race. Not saying it’s right, but it isn’t racist.
So let’s see, a person who lacked basic reading comprehension and acted like a complete asshole, wanting to police others lives, now wants to lecture us on what really is and isn’t racism…
How about… no?
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My peeve: the card machine that lets a user choose “credit”, but then routes the user to the debit PIN input anyway. My card works as both debit/credit, but using the debit option results in my getting a nominal banks-are-shitheads withdrawal fee in addition to the insecurity you mention.
The point was that the woman working the register didn’t believe it was the equipment at fault until she (using a bank issued credit card, and who was white) said that it was a problem. Given the history attached to our discussions in the American public around welfare, and how this has rhetorically attached to poor blacks as opposed to poor whites, there is something to the racism argument.
I think that you can certainly argue with the motivation of the woman at the register, as people here have done - some agree it was a racist motivation, others that it was class. But saying that because there were two different kinds of cards makes her whole point moot is kind of missing the point… Which is precisely what you did.
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“I don’t mean to be X, but Y.” too often means “I’m going to be X, but I don’t want you to criticize or think less of me. Y.”
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