StackOverflow as built back in the days of Web 2.0 where the idea was that user generated content formed in the days of the (relatively) altruistic web.
There isn't any clean way to do "contributor gets paid" without adding in an entire mess of "ok, where is the money coming from? Paywalls? Advertising? Subscriptions?" and then also get into the mess of international money transfers (how do you pay someone in Iran from the US?)
And then add in the "ok, now the company is holding payment information of everyone(?) ..." and data breaches and account hacking is now so much more of an issue.
Once you add money to it, the financial inceptives and gamification collide to make it simply awful.
Trying to say "give us your payment and tax information so that we can pay you $0.13 for your contributions" would be even more insulting than not paying anyone.
Doing renumeration for people in some countries could get legally challenging too.
Except it seems that it's often large companies - typically those with lots of lawyers - who seem to get away with what I can only describe as "corporate misdeads" most regularly.
"Following regulation" sounds great until it's revealed that corporate lobbyists have been helping (co-)write regulations to make sure that fair competition is quashed.
It’s interesting how people can apply thinking like “there are problems, it’s not perfect, better not to try” to government, but also be pro starting businesses
Sorry, but I'm not convinced that the EU is actually capable of reducing regulation.
There are some who talk the talk, but when it comes down to it, the behemoth that is the Brussels (and Strasbourg!) machine will never accept reducing its influence.
Re: Strasbourg, ditching the EU Parliament in Strasbourg completely would a really great first step to indicate that the EU is serious about cutting waste. However, the French have a veto, so it will never happen.
> It's none of their business what you want to do with your company
There are plenty of European member states that want the ability to control very precisely what you do with "your company". You want to call yourself "a software engineer"? Ooops...
In the EU it seems particularly the German-speaking countries are borderline obsessed with a) titles, and b) whom may use those titles. See, for instance, https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=34096464
> it seems particularly the German-speaking countries are borderline obsessed with a) titles
There is nothing borderline about that - the German cultural space (including very much the countries of former Habsburg Empire) is still completely obsessed with titles and formal positions despite many of them losing any practical importance in modern times.
I suspect the underlying problem is that the gap between legitimate use of gift cards and fraudulent use of gift cards is just not very large...
Years ago I briefly played around with "manufactured spend" (on credit cards, to earn frequent flyer miles).
There was one specific loophole, with one specific gift card provider, and it was a doozy. You could earn credit card points on spend, plus supermarket loyalty points on spend, by buying gift cards from one specific provider which could be cashed out at face value (ie no fee at all) immediately to a specific type of savings account.
So, of course, world+dog was buying these things like it was the end of the world.
As I sat in a hotel room one evening rubbing the security codes off the latest batch of cards before redeeming them one-by-one into my savings account, it dawned on me that what I was doing was basically indistinguishable from money laundering. Of course it was NOT money laundering, but it would take some time to explain exactly why not...
The loophole was closed relatively quickly, and the gift card provider gave up.
I did this ages ago to build up airline points and take a nice trip to the EU.
Back then, the trick was to get a generic Vanilla Visa or other prepaid credit card. A recent legal ruling meant they had to be run as a debit card for... reasons... I forget them.
But a lot of grocery stores would sell you a money order up to 500 bucks for under a dollar with a debit card (not a credit card).
So you'd call up the issuer and have them issue it a PIN. Then you'd run it as a debit card and buy a 500 dollar money order.
Subtract ~$5 for the GC and ~$1 for the MO and you could manufacter about 500 bucks in spend. And the best part? You could take that money order to your bank, deposit it, get the funds immediately, pay off your balance, then rebuy.
In one afternoon I earned enough points for a first class flight to a fancy European city, and eternal side eye from the grocery store clerks who were convinced I was up to something put couldn't put their finger on what.
>Back then, the trick was to get a generic Vanilla Visa or other prepaid credit card. A recent legal ruling meant they had to be run as a debit card for... reasons... I forget them.
Interchange fees, probably. Otherwise the credit card companies is taking a 2-3% cut.
>So you'd call up the issuer and have them issue it a PIN. Then you'd run it as a debit card and buy a 500 dollar money order.
I don't know how this ever could have worked considering that "cash-like transactions" are counted as cash advances, same as if you were to use your credit card at an ATM.
> considering that "cash-like transactions" are counted as cash advances, same as if you were to use your credit card at an ATM
Afaik, gift cards are more like fixed balance debit cards that happen to be runnable over a specific payment network (e.g. VISA, MC, AMEX) as credit cards
But at least a fair number of them will allow you to set a PIN, which then allows their use as normal debit cards
You're not running it as a credit card, and it's not a credit card -- you can't do a cash advance on a gift card. But they sold ones that were accepted anywhere visa or MC is accepted rather than specific stores.
> but it would take some time to explain exactly why not...
Not really:
"I'm churning credit cards for the rewards points. Here is the receipts where I use $10k from account A to purchase $10k worth of gift cards. Here is the statements where I deposit $10k of gift cards into account B. Here is the statement for the $10k wire from B to A. And here are the receipts for the next round of gift cards I purchased. Any further questions? I have $10k of gift cards to redeem."
> the gap between legitimate use of gift cards and fraudulent use of gift cards is just not very large.
And many legitimate uses of gift cards may actually have been fraudulent somewhere up the chain.
Imagine a scammer which sells their cards to real users (perhaps through one or more less-than-scrupulous intermediaries willing to buy them in crypto without asking too many questions). If the victim comes to their senses and somehow gets those cards reported and blocked as fraudulent, unsuspecting users will get into trouble.
> it dawned on me that what I was doing was basically indistinguishable from money laundering. Of course it was NOT money laundering
But it is money laundering, that's what manufacturing spend is. It's not money laundering to hide evidence of a crime, but it is money laundering for the purpose of hiding the fact that you didn't engage in commerce in the process of spending money on a credit card to earn a reward. It's indistinguishable, only because we criminalize behavior not only on its base but due to its intent.
They call it laundering because it takes "dirty" money and makes it "clean". That's not what happened here. The money was perfectly clean to begin with.
Which law do you think was being broken? I think the person is pretty clearly not defrauding the bank. Maybe the credit card company doesn't like it, but they almost certainly don't have that in writing because if they'd considered this possibility, they wouldn't have allowed it to be possible in the first place.
That's not what money laundering means. Where was the illegal activity that led to the money's existance? He just used a rewards loophole, didn't clean anything of actual "dirty" origin.
Not engaging in commerce to earn rewards isn't illegal, it's just an oversight on their part.
We criminalize behavior based on whatever we feel like, based on our cultural expectations of what is allowed. That's what "we criminalize behavior not only on its base but due to its intent" and "considering the context" is all about. That's why we have juries. We reserve the right to break the rules if public opinion allows, based on our feelings. It turns out that justice in practice is not so blind.
For example, we feel like it is fair for credit card companies to monopolize payment systems, charge fees to businesses, and use a portion of the money from this scheme to set up this bullshit reward point system.
But to undermine this system is criminal, because the system is established, but undermining it is novel and therefore disallowed. Any new way to play the game is breaking the rules, because the purpose of the system is what it does.
I wasn't trying to write a fully formed political dissertation, so I'm not really sure what you were expecting in response to this comment? My point was that the GP was describing their behavior as "indistinguishable from money laundering", because it technically is a form of money laundering (the act) even if it's not money laundering (the crime). Intent is what turns the act into a crime, specifically in the case of money laundering.
It's not illegal to buy a few beers every evening from a bar you own out of your own pocket, and then book that revenue, pay taxes on it, and then ultimately collect a distribution of the profits as the owner of the business. It is illegal to do the same thing if the money you took out of your pocket came from selling drugs.
I wish there were more open discussions about how "Journal Impact Factor" came to be so important.
It seems absurd that researchers fret about where to submit their work and are subsequently judged on the impact of said work based in large part on a metric privately controlled by Clarivate Analytics (via Web of Science/Journal Citation Reports).
It is almost unanimously agreed upon that impact factor is a flawed way of assessing scientific output, and there are a lot of ideas on how this could be done better. None of them have taken hold. Publishers are mostly a reputation cartel.
Clarivate does control it because they tend to have the best citation data, but the formula is simple and could be computed by using data freely accessible in Crossref. Crossref tends to under report forward citations though due to publishers not uniformly depositing data.
Depending on what the product is, this may still be a long way from the full "recipe" (or method) to recreate the product.
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