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Fintech Comes to America at Last
- ahelwer 6y agoAnecdotally, whenever I give money to unhoused people asking for it on the street these days they all prefer cashapp. Or perhaps that's just because there are a whooooooole lot of newly-unhoused people who still have smartphones with a data plan...
- meepmorp 6y agoIs unhoused the next step on the euphemism treadmill for the word homeless, or does it refer to “normal” people who suddenly became homeless?
- ahelwer 6y agoThe intention is to emphasize that the state of being unhoused is not some internal/inherent characteristic of the person, within the wider effort of adopting people-first language. The phrase "people experiencing houselessness" is sometimes used but it's fairly clunky so unhoused is often used instead. Plus, you know, they do have homes usually. Their tent on the side of the street. Not housed, though.
- carmen_sandiego 6y agoTrust me, unhoused is also clunky. This is not how English works. Who thinks it does? If I'm shirtless, is that an innate property of me as an individual? Should I refer to myself as person without shirt just so people don't get confused?
- ahelwer 6y agoThere is a distinction between home and house. Nomadland is a good film, if you're interested in seeing a form of houselessness one step above a tent on the side of the street. You'd be surprised how many of the "regular looking" people you interact with day-to-day are unhoused and live in their cars. Regarding your point about shirtlessness if there were an entire media cottage industry dedicated to depicting shirtless people as barely-sentient zombies spreading their infection to all you hold dear, then yeah maybe you'd want to reinforce that people should still view you as a full person. I think English is quite versatile and escapes your desire to circumscribe it.
- carmen_sandiego 6y ago'Shirtless' people are often described in the context of being some drunken yob or party goer. Or in some sexual direction. The connotation is typically negative. And yet it somehow doesn't destroy my ability to reason about how transitive the state is. The distinction isn't relevant to the discussion we're having, and that makes it feel inelegant and forced. Though I appreciate the patronizing recommendation of a multi-mainstream-award winning niche movie to help me understand it all.
- ahelwer 6y agoI had assumed I wouldn't have to enumerate the many differences between not having a shirt and not being housed. I'm sure you're a capable person and can think about it yourself instead of continuing to carry this nonsensical comparison.
- carmen_sandiego 6y agoYes, the parallel is a rhetorical device. I don't think being shirtless is equivalent to being homeless. But I do think it's a difference of degree rather than type, and hence similar reasoning can be applied.
- shalmanese 6y agoWe use the words "jobless" and "unemployed" in roughly the same grammatical formulation and to the same effect. Jobless focuses on the individual, unemployment focuses on structural factors.
- carmen_sandiego 6y agoThe target of both 'jobless' and 'unemployed' is the individual, so I'm not sure how you arrive at your assertion that one doesn't focus on the individual.
- meepmorp 6y agoJoblessness is used as a synonym for unemployment in lots of news sources, as are adjectival forms like jobless claims, jobless rate, jobless benefits, etc. I understand the point you want to make, but you're not making it.
- umanwizard 6y ago> Jobless focuses on the individual, unemployment focuses on structural factors. Why?
- deleted 6y ago[deleted]
- NamTaf 6y agoI'd suggest that anyone who understands the stigma associated with certain terms understands that there's more nuance to this than you're suggesting. See also: the UK's use of 'sleeping rough'.
- carmen_sandiego 6y agoSleeping rough is a term used by people straining to find the right PC phrase, not by the average person in conversation.
- kgwgk 6y agoOr person experiencing shirtlessness, maybe. But the all-encompassing, non-derogatory term would be "differently-clothed".
- umanwizard 6y agoWhy does “unhoused” connote a temporary state and “homeless” an intrinsic one? Why is it any more people-first? Both are combinations of two roots that are respectively synonyms - “house” and “home” have essentially the same meaning in this context, as do “un-” and “-less”. I think the far more likely explanation is the typical euphemism treadmill: “homeless”, a neutral description, is perceived as a slur precisely because the people it describes are social outcasts, and so people wanted to stop saying it. Then stretched justifications for why “unhoused” is inherently less offensive were come up with after the fact.
- shalmanese 6y agoHomeless is saying they don't have a home and it's their fault they couldn't manage to acquire a home. Unhoused is saying we failed to provide them with a home and we should figure out how to provide them with homes.
- cosmodisk 6y ago5 years on and homeless will be called ' negative housing situation impact target or NEHOSIT'.
- ahelwer 6y agoThis joke is so tired. Nobody has even once done a good "socially conscious euphemism brought to an extreme" joke, and they've been trying for at least half a century. Get new material.
- arch-ninja 6y agohttps://www.youtube.com/watch?v=hSp8IyaKCs0 https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=hSp8IyaKCs0 you're welcome.
- ahelwer 6y agoMy mistake, George Carlin is the only exception. He did it, everyone else can go home.
- DanBC 6y agoNo. Homeless is a term that includes rough sleepers, people in hostels, people who are sofa surfing, people in emergency accommodation, and in some places people who are vulnerably housed. Unhoused is more specific than homeless. https://www.paloaltoonline.com/weekly/morgue/2005/2005_08_24.homesidea.shtml https://www.paloaltoonline.com/weekly/morgue/2005/2005_08_24...
- umanwizard 6y agoWhat country?
- ahelwer 6y agoUSA, as in the article.
- carmen_sandiego 6y agoWell, they're using an awkward euphemism to refer to homeless people, so I would bet somewhere in the US.
- aerique 6y agoOh man, I wish I could upvote you twice. Thanks for the laugh!
- Jonnax 6y ago>Until 2018 card purchases required hand signatures, 15 years after Europe switched to chip-and-pin. Wow. That's really surprising. I haven't had to sign for a purchase in years. In fact the last time I did it, the idea of a squiggle being any kind of verification felt dodgy. I can't read the rest of the article but they mention the duopoly of Visa and MasterCard (and I guess Amex is the only other issuer?) causing a stagnation. Is that changing?
- hnlmorg 6y agoIt's so much worse than that. Restaurants and bars are allowed to pre-authorise your card so that they can deduct payment after you've left. The rational is that they can calculate tips but frankly tipping has never been an issue in Europe and we are present when the card is deducted. I feel so uneasy using my card when eating out in America vs Europe.
- prussian 6y agoas you should. I know my mom was accidentally overcharged due to exactly what you described. I recommend everyone get some kind of charge alert and react to them appropriately, or at least look over the statement.
- lucideer 6y agoI worked for a while in a restaurant in the US while I was a student on an exchange VISA and I found this system absolutely wild. As a zero-experience teenager new to a very temporary job I felt I was given way too much arbitrary power over people's payment cards. (everyone signing for card payments did also seemed weird at the time as, while there was no contactless back then, we'd been 100% chip-and-pin in Europe for some time, but I think that was a more well-known oddity of the US)
- umanwizard 6y agoI haven’t been to Europe for a few years so my memory is vague, but at least in Canada, you can enter a tip on the point-of-sale machine (and waiters/bartenders will get very aggressive if you don’t leave enough, despite the stereotype that “tipping is only a thing in the US culture”). Other than that parenthetical, does it work the same way in Europe? For those who don’t know, in the US it works like this: a paper receipt is brought, which you write a tip amount on in pen and then sign. The total is then manually entered into the computer later on. Absolutely medieval technology.
- 1cvmask 6y agoFintech has been in America for a long time. Anywhere from Paypal (with all its faults) to Simple (acquired by BBVA Compass) to Stripe to Square and it has been around for a while. What is missing is the standalone challenger banks and that is because of the onerous banking regulations, and the litany of KYC and AML regulations that box out poor people (they are unprofitable due to the heavy regulations) from the financial ecosystem. If we lowered or removed the regulatory burdens (especially at the federal level) then innovation would blossom and VCs would fund every challenger to the incumbents.
- skeletal88 6y agoSo you are saying that in Europe the fintech firms are successful because we somehow have less regulations? Here we don't need anything like CashApp or Venmo or Paypal, because our bank transfers are already fast enough and cheap for everyone. One final thing that would be nice, if we somehow could get rid of the requirement for credit cards when online shopping. Here in Estonia we have our own bank link, where the shop sends the shopper with an encrypted link to his bank, where he can approve the transfer with prefilled fields. I know the Netherlands have their iDEAL that works in a similar way and other countries have their own systems, but there is nothing that is globally accepted. Using some data printed on a card is some stone age technology when compared to the other systems we are using to do online banking.
- bluecalm 6y agoWe have Blik in Poland which is becoming more and more popular. Most of my local online purchases are by Blik already. All major banks have it integrated and it's just very convenient and fast to use.
- danaris 6y agoCompletely off-topic, but that's an amusingly unfortunate name to English-speakers—"bilk" means "to cheat someone".
- humanlion87 6y ago
- elzbardico 6y agoMeanwhile in brazil you had an national clearinghouse system that allowed transfers between any accounts from any bank in a matter of minutes and since the last version of it last year's in seconds and you can now transfer money even after business hours or at weekends.
- xtracto 6y agoWe have had that in Mexico for about 10 years. It's called SPEI here. Pretty convenient !
- known 6y agohttps://archive.is/jToyZ https://archive.is/jToyZ
- roenxi 6y agoAccording to traditional stereotypes, a nimble and competitive banking system should be one of the US's key strengths. Taking risks and powering good investments, style of thing. A combination of bailouts, regulatory capture and greed have really worn that edge down. I note the "Square charges 2.6% on the average transaction; Stripe’s fee nears 3%. By contrast, China’s big fintech firms charge below 0.5%". Any difference is 100% regulatory. In terms of raw economics, payment processing should be one of the most competitive markets bar none. Little details like that are reminders of decades of banks leeching productivity out of the real economy in the States. I expect people have been angry about that for so long they've lost any passion for it.
- blaser-waffle 6y agoThey were angry about it. Occupy Wall Street happened. Elizabeth Warren has been harping on it for years, and made financial reforms a key part of her platform.
- Mordisquitos 6y agoAnecdotally, as a European, I have always been confused by people advocating the advantages of cryptocurrency by saying that ordinary bank transfers can take 3—5+ days to reach their destination, or that bank transfer fees are $25 or more. It always sounded strange to me, as I can make a free next-business-day (or even same–day if I do it early) bank transfer in euros to any bank account within the Single Euro Payments Area (~= EU+EFTA), and the fee is €0.00.
- rory 6y agoYeah US banks generally can't (or won't) move money that quickly, so Paypal/Venmo/CashApp fill the niche. I've only seen the $25 fee when sending money from a US bank to a UK bank though-- I think it was because it required a wire transfer.
- Mordisquitos 6y agoYes, it's possible that I may have misunderstood the quoted fees, or that what I read was exaggerating intentionally.
- calciphus 6y agoExcept that major banks now can and do. The "Zelle" network contains thousands of member banks and moves money instantly between accounts. The limits on amounts sent vary (my Wells Fargo account can send to my friend's Bank of America up to $2500 a day, no fees). The claimed advantage of crypto is that there's no oversight or limits on the amount you can send, whereas banks report any transaction over $10k (or something like that) to the IRS.
- rory 6y agoOh yeah-- I've seen this in my online bank account but ignored it. I guess because it's superfluous to my social network who already use Venmo as the default option. I talked to someone who runs an investment fund about crypto and he said they bought some because maybe people will use it to buy "planes and stuff" one day. Seems dubious.
- xtiansimon 6y agoWhat about chargebacks? Card Not Present is still incontestable for merchants. My post from 2019 Ask HN: Innovations in merchant online online credit card processing? https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=20182897 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=20182897
- bokohut 6y agoAs an American entrepreneur who has been architecting and managing FinTech for more than two decades the face value of this title is incorrect. As far as the contents of the article suggests it too is incorrect as many businesses, "undiscovered" of course, have had such functionality for years and it is just now that attention is being brought to these techniques since the start of this FinTech craze. Fun times none the less for those with the experience and a proven solution during this FINsanity!