• 2 Posts
  • 33 Comments
Joined 2 years ago
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Cake day: June 27th, 2023

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  • Processing transactions with credit cards incurs fees from middlemen and unnecessarily complicates the merchant-buyer relationship. The merchant ends up paying these fees and ultimately passes this cost to the consumer in the form of a 3-5% or more markup of goods. In some cases, even cash customers are paying the hidden markup as well.

    With FedNow, this has the potential to bypass all of this messiness and severely undercut debit and credit card processing networks. Thus slowly bleeding them out of market share.

    I can definitely see a new market segment of payment processing which disrupts the existing status quo. Could very easily cover expenses of running the operation on a shoe string budget, charge 1-2 cents per transaction, and become profitable in just under a year (assuming high adoption).

    In the end, smaller merchants are able to compete or in some cases undercut bigger stores since they are saving money on CC fees. Consumer has the benefit of more competition in the market and getting that better price. Overall decreased cost of living.





  • Been using the Apple Watch for the past 3 years (currently on the Ultra) and have been loving it. I’m not a serious athlete but use it to track my daily walks/runs. It keeps me honest and active.

    Plus I have a data line for my watch so I can ditch my phone and still talk, text, and check emails as needed. I hate to admit it but I have completed many meetings with just my Apple Watch + AirPods while on a run/walk.

    Also, it acts as a wallet replacement for the most part. ~8 out of 10 times I can tap and pay with my watch. I only keep 1 physical card and my state ID on me.





  • Kind of cool if your production infrastructure can match. But for most companies (ie, Fortune 500 and some medium companies) implementing this would need a force majeure.

    Decades of software rot, change in management, change in architecture, waxing and waning of software and hardware trends, half assed implementations, and good ole bottom tier software consultation/contractors brought into the mix make such things impossible to implement at scale.

    Once worked at a company where their onprem infra was a mix of mainframe, ibm / dell proprietary crap, Oracle vendor locked, and some rhel/centos servers. Of course some servers were on different versions of the OS. So it was impossible to setup a development environment to replicate issues.

    For the most part, that’s why I still use docker for most jobs. Much easier to pull in the right image, configure app deployment declaratively, and reproduce the bug(s). I would say 90% of the time it was reproducible. Before docker/containerization it was much less than that and we had to reproduce in some non production environment that was shared amongst team.