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PayPal is possibly the worst offender of the 'new world order' where you can only ever speak to an algorithm.
Totally arbitrary polices, they say 'they need this' then it doesn't work, they need more, or it takes 3 weeks, but they can't tell you how long.
We need a new bit of regulation for the new era which requires companies to provide clarity on all operational aspects and timelines etc..
How do you evaluate PayPal's competition? In particular, what is anyone's experience with Stripe.
I am trying to implement payments on my site. I tried PayPal but found Stripe to be easier to deal with.
As a 'payment processor' they are somewhat different because Stripe is more for business, PayPal for individuals and small business.
PayPal is considerably more 'interventionist' with sales, and they seek to protect buyers etc so it can be a huge problem sometimes.
Stripe is more of a classical processor.
Of course Stripe does not offer a user oriented alternative to the PayPal product.
PayPal has many undocumented processes which make it very challenging to deal with.
My experience with PayPal was they would at least let you appeal when a limit was hit or you were flagged by their system.
Stripe meanwhile bricked my account after misidentifying the category of business we were in, and refused to provide anything more than a form email when I reached out with documentation as to our SIC code and business practices.
We switched to a FirstData reseller ultimately and pay $0.05 per transaction plus 0.2% over interchange now, its the least I have ever paid for card processing and the money is in my account next day. Stripe used to take a week to process payouts, often longer for bank account payments.
I am surprised to hear that about Stripe. I have never had anything but a great experience dealing with their customer support.
As far as I know Stripe is not a full competitor.
I am end user, and for me paypal usual works fine, and I don't have to worry too much about entering my CC and personal info all over net.
I like the fact, that only Paypal has to know my real name and address, and not every other website I migh want to purchase something from. I don't think there is an option for that with Stripe.
Unless you mean just credit card processing, then sure Stripe can probably do better. But at least for some like me not supporting paypal means site needs to clear higer bar for me to buy something from you.
If you think PP is bad, try their UK competitor Skrill. Can't verify KYC because it's automated. They're still scamming money from my account, last deduction was $300 for 'admin fee'. Cannot even get a reply from support. The worst part of these services is they let you deposit money THEN lock your funds for KYC, there needs to be a regulation to make these companies do KYC on registration, not after you have funds locked in.
I stopped using PayPal because they won't let me add a UK debit card to my Australian PayPal account.
Have now been using Transferwise for a couple of years and can highly attest that it's the way things should be for an international payment processor (they don't of course offer web payments without putting a card number in, but still amazing).
There need to be real consequences for this kind of nonsense for people.
Liberal estimate of missed earnings multiplied by 10 paid to the victim. Some fininte number of offences before the CEO spends a fortnight in jail. Computers are not and should not be a shield for taking full responsibility.
Perhaps if we shot everyone who wrote a bug there would no longer be any bugs.
Perhaps if we program our computers to commit crimes we should be totally beyond the reach of the law.
See, snarky comments like that are easy, not particulalry clever, amusing nor helpful and bring down the tone of discussion. Maybe make your point a little better than that here?
"Off with their heads" comments are precisely at the level of discourse where my response is adequate.
And you've outlined many good reasons in that second paragraph for that.
Financial implications as a consequences of committing theft with jail for repeat offence is actually the norm in civilized society.
It's pretty radical to suggest that we have a situation where you should avoid consequence for it.
Where on earth are you seeing "off with their heads?" Not from me.
Are you really supporting financial incentive to make and not fix errors in your own favour? Should we apply that principle to bank tellers and shop assistants too or only if a computer is involved? Does it need to be a statistical algorithm? Or is an if statement good enough to shield you?
I think maybe you're having a completely different argument with someone else?
Oh yeah, I'm not buying what you're selling. There isn't any theft here. And "in your favour"? Give me a break. Failing to complete payments is not in PayPal's favour, and I don't even mean some "in the long term no one will trust" crap. They literally make money off transactions. Transactions that cannot be completed do not make them money.
It's been my experience that paypal take the money and then sit on it as a matter of policy. That's theft. Taking money under false pretense agreeing to a contract to perform a service then wreaking havoc on a business not performing it with no ability to even discuss the non-performance. Do you prefer the word fraud for that?
In principle, imagine your government wrecking your business doing the exact same thing. Hey why not the IRS! Equality before the law.
No consequences. No restitution. The algorithm has spoken. Because your principle has been established and you have to stick to it.
Indeed, bugs will become features!
(Goodhart's law)
Manslaughter's a capital offense in some places, so yeah if your bug kills people a la 737 Max or Therac-25 maybe you do deserve to be shot.
Yeah, but it's no surprise that those places of yours didn't birth Boeing or Atomic Energy of Canada.
I sense you have a deeper issue and/or gripe. Care to elaborate?
In the sense that a bunch of people who haven't read anything around organizational dynamics making outraged comments annoys me, yeah, I've got a gripe.
All these comments are like 1960s level of conversation around safety engineering. Everyone thought back then that if you just ramped up punishments, things would get better. Turns out they didn't.
Anyway, to save you from getting it from an inferior source (me), I'll give you some good ones:
- The Field Guide to Understanding Human Error by Sidney Dekker
- The Challenger launch decision : risky technology, culture, and deviance at NASA by Diane Vaughn
You don't have to but you can also read how the FAA only pursues civil actions in severe cases. The equivalent penalty for a thing like this would be the lowest level action, either administrative action (pretty much a notice and a record on a file) or require proof of correction.
Maybe the thing we should actually issue fines for is commenting on subjects without first reading about how they're handled well. Maybe 10x the hourly wage of each person who read it. Yeah. That'll be good. Comments will probably be great then.
Again you are arguing against a case that has not been made. A straw-man.
There were consequences for the Challenger disaster - there was a full, televised enquriy. Feynman was there. That's a pretty deep and expensive consequence. Obviously NASA differs from Paypal. Beyond that I'm pretty sure those involved would feel consequence about their colleagues having died. Total sociapathy at that level is relatively rare in my experience. This is a quite different thing to make peace with to screwing some very small percentage of customers.
To apply exactly what I said to _this_ case the consequences are: Estimate the loss to this person, 10k seems like a reasonable liberal guesstimate but yes, actual data would be better to get a harder number. Paypal pay her $100k as compensation. She's happy and paypal have a cost function to optimise sesibly. That's a start on proper incentive.
Then if they do it more than N times then they're not taking the consequences seriously and they are only optimising that cost function considering breach as merely a business expense with no regard for ruining people. Someone needs to have a real, non-financial consequence for making a decision like that wittingly or unwittingly. The CEO is good because the buck stops there. It's his or her job to make sure that kind of "we'll screw over this many people because it's in our financial interests not to fix that" does not happen.
Now we can discuss what the value of N should be. Should it be 10, 100, 1000? What should constitute a breach?
Nowhere is a guillotine part of this. I can't actually see /anything/ you've argued a part of this.
I see the outraged comments as being yours. You seem utterly outraged at my holding an opinion I do not hold and did not advance.
The US still has capital punishments...
Oh, that's right. I forgot to tune in to CNN for our ceremonial shooting of the 737 Max aeronautical engineers.
Washington does not execute people and certainly not for misdemeanors.
Killing hundreds of people with shitty code is not a misdemeanor. Also most executions are carried out by state governments not "Washington".
Shooting is an obvious extreme but wouldn't you agree that there has to be some consequences to try and prevent bugs that have major financial consequences? I think it's totally fair that if your company's development process allows bugs like this to happen then it must have some consequences to discourage it from doing that in the future.
there's very harsh punishments for physicians or say biomedical or military researchers or engineers who fail to do their due diligence yet we still have those.
I think it says enough about the industry that there's so many people who are dead afraid of rigorous quality standards.
The magic here is that software engineers are some of the best engineers. We kill barely anyone in comparison to other engineers. We don't need standards because even without them, we don't kill anyone at anywhere near a few orders of magnitude near those other fields.
I don't know if this is sarcasm but that might be because most engineers don't build anything more exciting than SaaS dashboards and it's pretty difficult to kill someone with an angular component.
Given the amount of software outages on this planet, if software engineers were building planes they'd collectively fall out of the sky once per week
Ah but that's how you know we're good. If you can't do it right, don't do it. And we know when we can't do it right. Sadly aeronautics and structural engineering haven't caught up to the level of ethics that software has. They build bridges that fall down and planes that crash. But I know I would crash a plane or break a bridge, so I don't make them. Much more ethical to not go around killing people like those guys.
Killing people just because you want to build something "more exciting". Enough to make one's gorge rise.
This is nothing but a reincarnation of the Scunthorpe problem. Except this time a nation was considered a swear word due to imperialism
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Scunthorpe_problem
But "Iran" is also a substring of a fairly common Anglophone name: Miranda. Miranda is a pretty common name according to the US Census so they've got to be hitting a lot of people, unless their implementation is like: "word.contains(stopword) and not accidental_stops.contains(word)" which is just hilarious.
Haha, I'd love to hear from the engineer who wrote the feature.
“Iran” i also “they will go” or something similar in spanish.
The transaction was definitely declined but it seems unlikely that this was solely due to the username containing the sub-string "iran". The Bandcamp support engineer only speculated that this could be the cause. The user reports that they are able to use the Paypal account normally and they only get this error when attempting to pay Bandcamp however this may just be some special rules that Paypal implements when making payments to US companies from foreign accounts (it appears this user is in Uruguay).
Nah these companies definitely block transactions based on these.
How do I know? I'm Iranian and have experienced the wildest blocking systems.
I was playing around with timezone once and set my timezone to tehran. My credit card company blocked my account and I couldn't get it back until i faxed a notarized form.