The first actual credit card was The Diners Club Card in 1950. American Express arrived in 1958. How we use them today was really introduced in the 1990s though.
Take a deep breath mate, no reason to get so worked up. Pretty sure both of you guys mostly agree with each other, just getting caught up in semantics at this point. Give each other a break :)
Mastercard doesn’t give a crap about weed, and aren’t trying to control anything. They don’t want to be a part of federally illegal transactions. They want to follow the law, because they’re a big business and it’s dangerous not to. This is simple a result of the fact that weed is federally illegal - any other move on mastercard’s part would be irresponsible at this time.
Can you imagine how much damage can be done in 4 days though? Also, 4 business days is quite different from 96 hours which would still be quite long in terms of cyber attacks.
Step 1.) Add ATM in lobby. Step 2.) Tell customers they can’t use cards because of laws. Step 3.) Customer uses debit card at ATM and then purchases weed with the cash they just used their debit card to get.
Banks are kind of shitty here - if you use another bank’s ATM, your bank (or the other, or sometimes both) will charge a small fee. Usually it’s something like $3, but some smaller banks and credit unions will actually pay all of those fees back, so a lot of folks don’t even notice that it’s there.
This specific situation is weird because it’s a dispensary, though. Thanks to the vagaries of local legality and federal illegality, the dispensaries are totally good selling drugs, but the banks are very much not good openly handling the payments for those drugs. Because of this, most dispensaries will contract their debit payments through a payment processor that can register their card readers as “cashless ATMs,” and who will effectively launder all of their debit transactions. The end result of this is that while the customer can pay with a card like a normal store, they end up having to choose between paying the ATM fee at the ATM, or at the register.
The situation makes sense from the pov of the banks. They get to charge you more and get that money instantly for the same transaction.
How it should be: most customers use cash, sometimes they use a card and the dispensary sends a small amount of money (at the end of the month) to the bank for being involved in the process.
How it is: everyone uses an ATM as individuals and get charged a huge non-negotiable fee for that and the banks make money the moment you withdrawal any.
Always look at who gains from a situation to understand the situation.
It got a lot worse in 2008. The federal government shutdown about a third of the banks for not being big enough and with the drop in market competition they started slapping fees on everything.
ATM fees in the US have been a thing since ATMs have been a thing. It's not new and didn't start in the great recession.
And what do you mean by the government shutting down banks? Banks were killing themselves by doing dirty financial tricks and approving garbage loans and playing hot potato amongst each other with them.
Stress tests. Go read up on it. About 1/3 of banks, almost all midtier, were shutdown by the US government after the crisis has passed. Leaving places like Goldman (which caused the problem to begin with) with less competition. There are less baking companies in the US now then in 2007.
Yes, but the problem is that the volume of cash makes retailers a massive target. People have been killed over this, and will continue to be put in danger until customers have access to the same payment resources that all other retail businesses take for granted. This is not a trivial issue at all. There are serious real world consequences to these decisions that paint the industry in a bad light when they are a DIRECT consequence of the inaction of the federal government. We are never going back to prohibition. There is simply too much tax revenue generated, and too much public sentiment on the side of both legalization as well as ending the failed drug war policies.
Not just a massive target to criminals either. Cops are willing to pull over armored cars and take the cash when it gets transported. That money then goes through the civil asset forfeiture process, getting handed to the feds who then give some of it back to the local department through their “equitable sharing” program. Legalized theft.
This is discriminatory and it shouldn’t even need to exist, I mean, heck, you can literally buy legal weed over the internet now and get it delivered to your door, you can purchase seeds too because in 2018 selling hemp was decriminalized federally
Kinda an incendiary headline when it’s just Mastercard complying with the law. From the article: “The federal government considers cannabis sales illegal, so these purchases are not allowed on our systems,” Really the issue is that Marijuana should be legal at the federal level.
When polled, majorities are in support of legalization. If people would show up to vote more than once every 4 years we could make some actual progress on this issue. But since at least half of registered voters sit out every race, well here we are.
Worth noting that even some conservatives support legalization!
Even though it would be sweet if Joe threw on some aviators and said on national television, “420 legalize it bruh.” He can’t. It will require congress to be functional and do something that the average American supports.
And yet I bet I can buy mortgaged backed securities
AND shares in pot companies. How fucking illegal. Maybe the federal government can stop these pot companies from being traded openly considering how illegal it is.
Nah maybe the federal government can stop sucking off Goldman Sachs cock and start looking after the people who it claims to represent and who are paying taxes.
Because they, as a corporate entity, don’t want to mess around with the law over something that won’t personally affect their bottom line in a massively positive manner.
I hope people remember these companies and politicians who attempted to blockade Cannabis businesses when it is invariably made federally legal. They will more than likely never face the consequences of their stupidity while they turn a blind eye to armed robberies that are specifically caused by these policies yet get fat on the tax revenue regardless.
The idea that we need to plead fealty to these degenerates to get them to take common sense approaches to issues that the majority of the voter base has agreed on for a decade is ridiculous. No matter how anybody personally feels about Cannabis consumption it never has and never will go away. Prohibition doesn’t work, and attempting to legislate other peoples ethics is a losing gambit.
It’s not MasterCard’s fault, it’s the federal regulations against marijuana that make it illegal for MasterCard to process these payments. Blame the federal government, specifically the DEA who’ve become their own legislators and enforcers (they’ve usurped the original checks and balances of the Controlled Substances Act, it’s pretty fucked up actually).
Bottom line: War on drugs has been a catastrophic failure of epic proportions and yet we haven’t gutted and dismantled the sole agency that’s gotten fat off of it and operates with barely any oversight.
I understand your point, but MasterCard’s faults are several enough that I’ll cut them slack like I will any other financial institution squeezing fee and interest payments from the poorest among us. Credit cards are now required for all online transactions. To think one has a choice among the many available is to think one can choose which lung to breathe with.
Oh don’t get me wrong, they’re an evil company like the rest of their ilk. I was just clarifying that in this specific context, they’re not the ones at fault for once.
Comrad! Your title might not match the title of the article you linked! Could you please double check, and edit your post title if it indeed does not match? article title: “South Korean POWs abandoned for decades in North Korea” (Similairity: ~54%).
BEEP BOOP this action was performed semi-automatically by a bot (:
By making this argument you appear to be supporting those who are sending the death threats. That’s not a good look. In every conflict in history between those who used racism as a reason to do things and those who oppose them, the racist people happened to be the bad guys. Probably not a good idea to align yourself with racists…
You’re being disingenuous. Violence doesn’t have to be a physical threat to be considered violent. If colors, coughing, and arguments can be described as violent, hate mail most certainly can. Especially if it’s threatening someones life or livelihood.
US Department Of Justice:“The “crime” in hate crime is often a violent crime, such as assault, murder, arson, vandalism, or threats to commit such crimes. It may also cover conspiring or asking another person to commit such crimes, even if the crime was never carried out.”
Do you need me to post the definition of argument and denunciation too? I mean it’s right there. In the definition I posted. Maybe you personally believe words can’t be violent, but that doesn’t change that they can be.
No point debating dumbasses that try to “gotcha” about semantics. Like you said, disingenuous. Troll. Edgelord maybe. Hopefully he’s not actually this stupid.
It’s just such a myopically ignorant thing to say. According to mental health professionals the effects of verbal abuse can cause a slew of issues both mental and physical, and we know bullying can lead to suicides, swatting people is literally using your words to invoke violence. Three ways words can be violent just off the top of my head. Words can absolutely cause violence, what a shitty take.
This dude lays out how the DoD siphons money to pay for the reverse engineering, the other two give testimony of their encounters, and I have to say this is some fascinating stuff!
Time to change lines of business. “We’re a taco shop, but you can buy weed here in compliamce with local laws. Sorry if you receipt just says TACOS no matter what you buy. We’re working on that.”
What has worked in some states is the ‘gift pot’ strategy. You sell them a vastly overpriced taco and they get a gift of weed along with the snack. Generally the states get upset about this and close the loophole.
Basically what dispensaries in Washington, DC do. Everything is a “donation” or an “art purchase” and the pot is a “gift”. Total nonsense, but it mostly works, because DC intends to legalize recreational marijuana sales, and Congress isn’t letting it happen. So it seems like enforcement is just lax.
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