Scarlet

The scarlet beyond a crimson dream. The tallest lesbian with the fiery red hair who works on payment systems and banking.

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npub19x552n03mrr0l7st39zvga530tzmxsze753wqt7yxn0u3m86g4pqstzep2

NIP-05 Address

scarlet_at_chaos.social@momostr.pink

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nprofile1qqszn229fhca33hllg9cj3xyw6gh43dngpvl2ghq9lzrfh7ganay2ssprpmhxue69uhhyetvv9ujumt0d4hhxarj9ecxjmnthnevxy

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relay.momostr.pink

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npub19x552n03mrr0l7st39zvga530tzmxsze753wqt7yxn0u3m86g4pqstzep2

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Last Notes

2026-03-05 10:17:51 UTC

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One thing that terrifies me about AI is that it's probably going to be the final death blow for the European and American middle class. We put so much of our economy into desk jobs that have just become about $10 of LLM tokens for the average daily output of an employee at the same or better quality these days with the frontier models.
Businesses are way over-incentivised to leap at that given they've spent the last 5–10 years getting absolutely squeezed for employer tax/pension contributions.

2026-03-05 10:07:41 UTC

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Stepping back to the U shape of the economy, you can repeat these observations across so many domains.
More people qualifying for free/reduced bus travel → More government subsidy required → More taxation, but that doesn't quite cover it so the regular fares paid by commuters go up → Increased burden on the remaining middle class → Either the middle class earn more and move upwards or their spending power/disposable income degrades and they become eligible for free/reduced bus travel → Repeat.

2026-03-05 09:47:38 UTC

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People often forget that before universal basic banking, one had to be “introduced” to the bank. This was often done by an employer when starting a well-paying job. Pretty much everyone else was locked out of the system, taking home envelopes of cash (or cheques that had to be cashed somehow).

2026-03-05 09:44:32 UTC

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The agreement between most governments and banks has roughly been “Okay, we will let you continue to make a healthy profit on the middle class, but in return you have to accept these unprofitable lower segment customers”.
This saves the government money by being able to do direct depositing of benefits instead of handing out cash at the Post Office, allows companies to adopt computerised payroll which makes tax easier to collect, and customers using cards in shops reduces tax evasion at retail.

2026-03-05 09:29:12 UTC

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As a society, we shouldn't want this to happen and for people to leave the regulated banking industry. The alternative is, well, “alternative finance”, which means the lower end of the economy pays extortionate fees to what rounds to payday lenders and cheque cashing businesses with extra layers.
When money leaves the regulated banking industry, society bares the cost of increased difficulty tackling financial crime and tax evasion. This is why the UK and EU has universal basic banking.

2026-03-05 09:14:45 UTC

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The problem comes when that middle segment of the economy slowly disappears and banks have an extreme U shape in customers who are expensive to serve. That bank has to raise even more revenue out of the upper segment to pay for their obligations to serve the lower segment or worse, start squeezing the lower segment for revenue, contributing to the problem.

2026-03-05 09:12:18 UTC

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That customer in the lower end of the market has often been subsidised by the middle and upper classes, which I think is a broadly good thing. The middle class tends to be cheap to serve and brings in reasonable revenue to cover the costs of serving the lower end of the market that banks are often required by law to serve at a loss.

2026-03-05 09:07:00 UTC

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A random observation I will make here is that there are two ends of the market that are expensive to serve in banking, the very top end and the very bottom end.
At the top end, customers are expensive to serve but bring in revenue. At the bottom end, customers are expensive to serve and, despite what you might think, often don't bring in enough revenue to pay for that service.

2026-03-05 08:53:54 UTC

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Spending in the US is broadly concentrating around the top maybe 10% of consumers, who are the only ones left in the economy with disposable income. This means for a lot of merchants that higher percentages of their transaction value is coming from those higher tiers of cards, which attract higher interchange fees on the rate table. As that average interchange fee paid drifts up, acquirers increase their fees to merchants at contract renewal to compensate for that.

2026-03-05 08:50:36 UTC

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“credit card acceptance fees have gone up in the US since the pandemic” and the reason is fascinating!
It's not Visa/Mastercard being greedy, it's an arms race by banks to produce higher tier and more exclusive cards to capture more interchange revenue and fund more generous rewards programs! (See: Chase Sapphire Reserve, which got an entirely new card tier added to the interchange rate table so Chase could compete with Amex's US rewards program.)

2026-03-05 08:35:48 UTC

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The same piece confidently described interchange fees as going to the networks, which again is totally wrong. Also compared US *acquirer* fees directly to EU *interchange* fees without mentioning that the EU regulated interchange and that this is a policy choice with economic tradeoffs. 🙃

2026-03-05 08:29:07 UTC

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I guess “this is all because of the Visa/Mastercard duopoly” is easier to explain than “this is the result of a complex regulatory environment and incentives that are largely driven by government policy, which is broadly better for society at the margins than the direct alternative”.

2026-03-05 08:25:23 UTC

Heartbreaking: Trusted major news organisation confidently reports incredible misconceptions about the industry you're an expert in as fact.

2025-12-21 12:41:09 UTC

Damn, I was browsing around GitHub and this project really just has a “skill issue” label for issues.
https://assets.chaos.social/media_attachments/files/115/757/602/133/539/394/original/587a3e34a7a19de1.jpeg

2025-06-24 17:10:31 UTC

work colleague: ‘we need a transcoder’
me: ‘oh I know quite a few of those’

2025-06-24 07:40:38 UTC

she's a 10 (on the ifixit repairability scale)

2025-02-04 22:37:16 UTC

sometimes you just need to delete your entire task list and close all your open tabs

2025-01-24 09:16:41 UTC

me rn
https://assets.chaos.social/media_attachments/files/113/882/575/481/459/465/original/5a96b51044016e6f.jpeg

2024-11-19 17:56:00 UTC

gender of the day: abandoned wago 221s on the tube
https://assets.chaos.social/media_attachments/files/113/510/905/074/438/377/original/2cd56e2e62eb80c8.jpeg

2024-10-26 17:42:04 UTC

I have today discovered that if you dump a handful of of low value coins into a sainsbury's self-checkout system, you can fairly reliably get a windows ‘application not responding’ pop up and kill the POS host application from there

2024-08-30 08:35:14 UTC

💭 webex plugin that adds the british TV rolling zebra cue dot to the corner of the video feed when it's time to wrap up the meeting

2024-08-20 18:15:28 UTC

corporate sabotage idea: gift all the engineers at your competitor a copy of factorio
development will stall for months

2024-08-14 08:43:51 UTC

removing the headphone jack (and therefore the inexpensive options for private listening) is the worst thing phone makers ever did for the public space
like, please put it back and remove the speaker instead, I'm going insane listening to three different people scroll tiktok and one person doing spanish duolingo out loud around me on this train

2024-06-07 18:55:46 UTC

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uhh, we got several faxes, which one was yours?