The issue I imagine here is that calling the bank can be costly both in hold time and in phone fees. If banks were able to remove this disincentive to call by ensuring that their phone lines have zero wait time, and offering to immediately call back to avoid billed-by-the-minute phone charges (or in the case that they already offer this, by making it clear to customers), then I think there’s be a larger uptake of the idea of “hang up, look up, call back”.
As it stands, I’d be afraid of needing to wait 30 minutes in hold, and getting billed 30 minutes of call time by the phone company for the privilege. I’m not from the US, so it’s possible that your banks are doing this part better than the local ones, but that’s always the worry with the phone for me.
A citibank security call I received impressed me, they seemed to completely understand me wanting to call back and gave me instructions to get back to them through the phone menu of the corporate line (that I looked up). Iirc it included a case id that got you right back to the same security team.
On that note, I should name and shame T-Mobile USA. They called me back after my line got disconnected and proceeded to ask security questions to verify me and pretended to not understand my concern when I said how do I know you are who you say you are. They were calling me on my T-Mobile line.
While that's a real problem in general, I would think that for this particular group of people it might be less of an issue.
We are well paid, and as such majority of HN'ers should qualify for premier banking. One of the advantages in that is that you get access to quality in-house customer service, and may be able to call them directly from the banking app. (A really nice feature.) They tend to have good availability too. The plural of anecdote is not data, but I've never had to wait for longer than five minutes when I do have a problem that requires CS's involvement.
> I’m not from the US, so it’s possible that your banks are doing this part better than the local ones, but that’s always the worry with the phone for me.
Since the person is asking about what it’s like here I’m providing that perspective. In Canada banks also provide 1800 numbers so it should generally be free. I thought Canada has mostly unlimited plans but I haven’t had a Canadian phone plan in over a decade.
> The issue I imagine here is that calling the bank can be costly both in hold time
The solution to the time wastage problem is for the bank to have a better method of sending you information than random calls out of the blue. Most banks have a message center on their website, where you can see any messages waiting for you when you log in and can send messages in reply.
this is why I have a credit union with multiple locations nearby and they only have 1 phone number for customer service and I know it by heart, good luck scamming me over email or txt, at least when it comes to my bank account :)
Obviously if your bank asks you to "verify" yourself after they've called you, it is 99% chance of being a scam and you just tell them you're going to call back and if they get desperate sounding it is 100% a scam.
It immediately eliminates anyone not thinking to spoof-call GPs small credit union. Given that most of the scammy calls I receive are about accounts with places that I don't have accounts, I don't think that level of targeting is the norm.
I have absolutely been called by Bank of America, both by an automated "did you really do this?" sort of fraud detection, and by a human calling to tell me my card number was known to be stolen and make arrangements.
Heck, I'm pretty sure I've gotten sales calls from them as well, though I never stay on the line long enough with those to be sure.
Same here. I also have a BoA account for most of my day-to-day stuff.
I use credit cards (in particular, an Apple Card) for almost every transaction. In fact, I seldom carry cash, which has been a problem, from time to time.
I won’t use Venmo, or PayPal with direct bank account connection. It has earned me scorn, but you really only need to have a problem once, to learn religion. I don’t use credit cards for Venmo or PayPal for cash transactions, because cash advance fees.
I always pay my account in full, every month. It also means I get Apple Cash, for a slush fund.
I do use direct bank account connection for a few things like utility bills, but that is a fairly primitive setup process, where there is no doubt about the other end. Even so, many outfits now allow bill pay, via credit card.
I've been called by Chase and at least one other for fraud alerts. If I recall correctly, the Chase message instructed me to call back using the number on my credit card.
It is not correct that banks will never call you in the US.
However, a bank should not ask you to verify your identity when they call you. This is the missing piece. If anyone calls me, I should not give them any information they don't already have. If they are the fraud department, they already know everything.
What are they calling about? Just curious - it seems like I’m wrong. Also maybe there is opportunity to develop some service for them so they do not need to call.
> The mystery that remains is where does the money go? A share buyback just shifts the decision of reinvesting profits from the firm to the investor, so when Apple buys back shares where does that capital go?
This was my main question from the article too. After thinking it through for a bit though, I think the answer may be related to the large and increasing US trade deficit.
In short, the money goes to the actually growing economies of East Asia and other parts of the world. If not in exports, then in ownership of future cashflows from American businesses.
American workers send their money overseas in exchange for cheap goods, which foreign powers then use to purchase control of those workers' future labor via ownership of American companies.
Coming from someone who grew up in a car culture city, learned to drive at 18, bought my first car at 19, and drove most days of the week... I'm much happier without a car. I don't want to have to own one again. In hindsight, car culture feels like a jail that I didn't realize I was born into.
I moved to Tokyo 5 years ago. If I want to get somewhere, I walk to one of three train stations within a 10 minute walk, hop on the train, and am there in – usually – about 30 minutes. There's always the option to take a taxi, but they're often no faster than train. I can still drive out to the mountains if there's no train to the one I want to climb, because there are more car rental shops within walking distance than there are train stations.
Sure, there are cars in this city. They're useful tools that make a lot of sense for many people to own. But the average person chooses to live without one, because in a city designed for people instead of cars, life can actually be better that way.
I am very possibly incorrect in my assumption and if so I apologize but it does sound like you don't have kids. For me the idea of having kids and not having a car is choosing to play a first world life on hard mode. I know there are a million other issues in the world but not having a car to move my kids / pets / groceries / hardware is just a complicating factor I dont want.
With that said, more power to those people that don't want or need one, life is all about what works for the individual.
Was just thinking that we're probably due for a major release sometime now that Concurrent Mode seems to be starting to mature a little (disclaimer: it's still experimental, don't use it in production yet, etc.)
I'm sure the React team must be eager to get all the juicy changes out of the experimental branch and into the hands of developers. So it's great to see though that they're still taking their time to do it properly. Looking forward to seeing what come nexts :)
The main difference is that you can't easily substitute one piece of code for another leading to little reuse and huge demand for custom solutions. Songs on the other hand mostly substitute fine within genres, we could stop producing music entirely and people would still have more than enough music to keep them happy.
what a dismal dark musical world this invokes. I suppose this works for people who don't actually listen to music in any sort of appreciably observant fashion.
I get that some people basically just vibe along with music and don't hear the harmonic movement, the intervals, the tones of the instruments.
This point of view gives zero credence the possibility of any actually original music.
But there's a shortage of developers, and there's a big difference between building what FAANG wants you to build and what you want to build.
A better analogy is up-and-coming musicians and startups. You struggle in a garage until you're discovered, then you sign away most of your rights for bad working conditions and a three-year run.
Actually... they have built such a system! It’s long gone now, but some major cities used to have a mail delivery system built on underground pneumatic tubes.
Living in Japan where mixed-use zoning is the norm, there is often a small local bar within walking distance from where you live that can fulfill this role. This has been one of the best parts of living here for me, I can’t imagine going back to the western world where zoning and local government often makes local meeting places effectively illegal.
Something makes me wonder if this is part of the reason Japan is so safe, as well. If you’re first choice for drinking is a place where everyone knows you and lives nearby, you’ve got a much greater incentive to behave than if you need to drive to the other side of the city. Not to mention that it reduces drink driving, and combined with public transport, makes it possible to have a zero tolerance on drink driving policy.
> The founder of WeCount, a tech entrepreneur who has sold multiple companies to Google, raves to the press about the “huge emotional ROI” (return on investment) donors get from participating.
It sounds like these apps aren't designed to help the homeless in the first place. They're designed to help people with spare change feel a little better about themselves.
This seems even worse than trying to make a difference to the housing situation and failing. Along with the idea of requiring homeless people to wear a beacon around their neck to pick up scraps from the wealthy, it sounds dehumanizing. Almost like the romans and their coliseum?
I'd love to hear the perspective of any people who've used these apps from the receiving end though. Maybe it's not as bad as it sounds.
> But what else can us developing countries do? Stop developing and stay poor forever?
This is sad to see, because many of the environmentalists that I've talked to seem to expect that this is the path that the developing countries will actually take.
It's totally unfair that the developed world was able to bootstrap themselves into their current state using dirty power sources, continue to generate a lot of dirty power themselves, and now expect the developing world to somehow leap-frog them and build clean generating capacity from the start. But it just seems to be human nature – just like how the social safety net in the developed world is being pulled out from under the younger generations, now that the older generations no longer need it.
Solar panels weren't commercially viable until the mid 20th century. Nuclear power the same. Lithium-ion batteries came even later. None of this stuff even existed when first world countries were industrializing.
Now it's cheaper than coal. Look at the map and notice how many new coal plants are being built in Europe or even the US -- none. The only reason it still even exists is the existing installed base of power plants that have already sunk their capital costs, and half of those are still getting shut down because they can't compete even then. Coal is garbage. Building new coal fired power plants is nonsense even before the environmental impact is considered.
Pretending that first world countries burned coal because it was in some way better is revisionist. It was because the better alternatives we have now didn't exist yet. The path to modern power generation doesn't inherently require building a bunch of coal fired power plants and then knocking them down to replace them with something actually good. They can just skip to the end -- there isn't even any good reason not to do that.
This a) clearly isn't true, b) goes against parent's claims, and most importantly c) is contraindicated by the fact (as per parent) that 'first world nation states' are not currently building power plants that, as you put it, burn things. This is because it's economically more viable to go solar, wind, storage - than coal now (and perhaps, if not today, then clearly within a year or two, gas).
> This is because it's economically more viable to go solar, wind, storage
Sorry, but this is just ridiculous. If you need power all year long and only have say 250 sunny days and even less predictable winds, you are really looking at an order of magnitude higher price here than burning fossils. If you only use a little bit of that power able to directly satisfy a little bit of demand without storage, then it's not as expensive, but still overall significantly more expensive than burning fossils. The only reason it can even be deployed is if governments promise massive returns of investments and let investors get rich, which of course ends up hurting consumers with huge electricity prices. The rest of the non first world simply cannot afford that.
If it was economically viable, investors would just invest into solar and wind farms everywhere in the world on their own to undercut all those fossil competitors.
You're assuming that countries with no existing infrastructure would build it the same way we did.
If you're a small African village, having a couple of solar panels is way better than a coal power plant. You don't need roads and trains to continuously ship in coal or the lights go out. You can get more buildings electrified before you have a stable power grid because you have decentralized generation. You can have small/cheap storage batteries because you build infrastructure to begin with that demand shifts to during the day -- pressurize a water tank during sunlight hours so that you have running water through the night with no nighttime power consumption. Use high efficiency LED lighting to minimize how much battery you need. And so on. All of which is cheaper when you design for it from the start.
Whereas if you're at the stage of India or China with a real power grid where you have to start worrying about baseload, that's when you build nuclear. Assuming that declining storage costs don't eventually make even that unnecessary.
About the only thing fossil fuels are still good for is as an emergency battery for long periods of low generation from renewables. But then you're not building them as baseload power generation and they only get run one week out of the year. And even then it's still not coal, because you can do that with natural gas, which is currently cheaper (and cleaner and emits less carbon).
Ground up infrastructure can only recoup some of the energy storage costs and mostly for home use. It's not going to help a steel factory, for example, or help with industrial use in general which ultimately has to compete on cost globally.
When you're at early stages of development you don't have steel factories. When you reach later stages you build nuclear. To the extent that an intermediate stage even exists, it's very short, because once you have roads and ports and a stable government you get foreign investment.
To get the first aluminum smelter the first world had to invent it. To get one now you just have to build it -- or have someone else build it for you. Then you power it with a ton of cheap solar panels and only run it during daylight hours.
So why would waste money building a bunch of coal fired power plants that you won't even need in a couple of years?
And why would it be uncompetitive on cost globally if everyone else stops burning coal too?
How else can solar wind and batteries have been invented? Charcoal, coal, oil, gas were all necessary economic fuels for the past 200 years. Without those we couldn't have ever had the energy to create cleaner options. Now they're available, those cleaner options should be being deployed hugely everywhere. However, it comes down to fossil fuels not paying for climate costs and air pollution costs, thus they have seemed cheaper on the surface.
Yeah, I agree that it doesn’t make sense in the suburbs. It really depends on where you live.
In the center of a large city, you can order something in a minute, pay a couple dollars extra, and have the food at your door in 10-15 minutes. Deliveries are done by bike or scooter and there are hundreds of places to choose from that’ll deliver within half an hour.
It’s great when you’re in the flow and don’t want to deal with the distractions that walking out the door inevitably entails.
As it stands, I’d be afraid of needing to wait 30 minutes in hold, and getting billed 30 minutes of call time by the phone company for the privilege. I’m not from the US, so it’s possible that your banks are doing this part better than the local ones, but that’s always the worry with the phone for me.