Apple Store reps don't make commission.

My experience is that they are more focused on finding the right product for your needs. I've been there more than once where they happily downsell a customer.

Plenty of companies offer shareholder benefits without ripping off your rights as a shareholder.

The big cruise line companies will give shareholders on-board credit, Berkshire Hathaway has sales from their subsidiaries at the yearly meeting, Intercontinental Hotels has discounts, etc.

One of the customer service backdoors for some companies is to buy a share and contact investor relations if you are having a problem.

Taxing copyright ownership is effectively impossible.

Unless you want to figure out how to receive a tax bill for the comment you have written.

Just about any written or artistic artifact you create is subject to copyright protection. How do you begin to decide how a tweet should be taxed

In the US, you do not need to register your copyright. It is entirely optional, and you can still enforce an unregistered copyright.

Right, that's one of the terms of the Berne Convention that I am referencing.

That's how it actually works in some places (https://www.carwow.co.uk/blog/average-speed-cameras-how-do-t...). You don't need AI because we already know that distance = speed * time. We can calculate to a high degree of certainty - with high school math - that you had to have 1. been speeding or 2. bent space time if you cover the distance between them in too short of time.

Nitpick: Credit Card volume is on the order of 4-5 trillion (depending on source) in the US. Add in debit and prepaid cards on card payment rails and it is around 10 trillion.

Appreciate recent numbers. FedNow (us instant payments) has not been around long, growth will take time. My point was you don’t need Venmo or CashApp, almost any bank or credit union will do today and the volume is substantial.

I expect it to take at least 5-10 years for instant payments to replace Zelle, credit, and debit cards in the US.

Brazil’s Pix is Coming for the Card Industry - https://paymentscmi.com/insights/brazil-pix-impacts-card-ind...

> Brazil’s card industry seems to have already come to terms with the loss of market share to Pix. For 2024, Abecs sees the debit card “moving sideways,” growing only between 0.4% and 0.7% compared to the previous year. This trend is consistent globally: Visa earnings reports reveal that its debit volume has been in monthly decline since February 2024.

> The numbers around Brazil’s RTP [Pix] are indeed superlative. Central Bank data shows that over 40% of all payments in the country are currently made through Pix. The system is used by more than 90 percent of the adult population, has over 15 million businesses and moves 20% of the country’s total transactional volume.

> As it gains new features, Pix will continue to cut into banks’ interchange revenues and compete with the card industry, not only in terms of ‘stealing’ transactions from these legacy players but by allowing a new stack of solutions to be built on top of its scheme. What the Brazilian Central Bank created is a new payment rail that allows for fewer intermediaries and, therefore, for cheaper solutions.

Typically, yes.

It conveys an informality and casualness inappropriate to situation of declaring that you are about to disrupt a few thousand people's life in a massive way. Even posting it to Twitter before everyone has been notified is... a choice.

Some people won't perceive that, but plenty will, and appropriately so.

I severely doubt if the hiring teams at this company would take someone seriously if their application was sent in in this style. I severely doubt that they communicate with their clients and investors this way.

This is a financial services company, it goes with the territory that they should project careful attention to detail.

Even if this was a company in a much less serious industry, this is just not the kind of announcement that a CEO should send out without fixing all the squigly lines that helpfully tell you when you are about to come across as uneducated or unserious.

In many places, yes, US pedestrian infrastructure is worse.

In other ways - wheelchair accessibility for example - the US is miles better than many European cities.

Wheelchair users are a subset of pedestrians. If your pedestrian infra is shit, your wheelchain infra can't be much better. (Sure, only if you count whatever remains of pedestrians infra, it might look acceptable).

Sort of but not entirely. While bad pedestrian infrastructure sucks, usually I can get around it.

But I’ve been in crutches and a wheelchair many times in a life —- if the actual place is not wheelchair friendly, it is much harder to get around.

A vast majority of wheelchair users in the US are car users.

I've never been on a city bus where the driver waits for people to be seated. Hell, when I lived in Vancouver, they would start moving before everyone had even paid their fare, basically as soon as the door was closed.

And now most (all?) busses have a fare tap at the back door, so you can board anywhere. Vancouver transit is absolutely top tier, at least for NA.

That would be true if busses didn't have to accelerate, decelerate, open doors, kneel and go through the many parts of stopping that aren't strictly people getting on or off.

The counterpoint is any bus route that has an express option that runs in parallel. Every time I have taken the express route, the bus can be full to the gills, but is always faster than the non-express bus.