Nah I think the tweet is gone, I can't see it from a browser.
(edit, weirdly I tried again and it worked. Definitely errored with a strange error the first time)
At the very least with european SEPA transfers and their predecessors, but I would have assumed pretty much all bank transfers where you send money support some way to put a message - how else would you map incoming transactions from previously unknown senders to what they're for?
In the US, AFAIK the only metadata you get with a direct / ACH deposit is the sender's "name", usually the company name. I assume that you can't easily change this per transaction.
US banking infrastructure is decades behind the rest of the world in many areas.
I wonder if you could write a personal check and deposit it to the person's bank account -- write something in the "memo" line and hope that the person checks the scanned images of the cancelled checks. Of course, then that person would also have your bank account number.
For regular bills, when adding a bill pay account online, the bank will ask for your account number... so there must be some way to specify that with an ACH transaction. I've noticed that the custom input memo field visible to the end user goes away on ACH transactions though, at least at my bank. Perhaps it's just used by the account number automatically?
For bills that don't accept ACH bill pay (i.e. most smaller companies and utilities), banks will often print and mail payments via check for free (it just says "signature on file" on the printed check). Like I said, decades behind.
I pay our childminder by bank transfer. Its almost instant to do from my phone, free, and I just put the invoice number in the reference field. The idea that banks would print and post cheques is like something from the era of telegrams. So weirdly anachronistic.
Yep. While Faster Payments is brilliant, BACS' overnight processing and the direct debit system is total sufficient for the vast majority of cases, certainly things like bill payments.
This says I have to pay a fee, and then wait 2-3 days to send somebody money. That's not caused by "infrastructure" that's caused by greed in the absence of effective government to tell them to get their shit together.
Even better it tells me the size of that fee is included in a "Fee Guide" the link for which is a 404. Excellent work.
In the Netherlands, for at least the last 35 years, transaction forms have a field "Description" where you can enter arbitrary text. Originally on paper, now electronically.
>In the US, you pay $16 to send a wire and $16 to receive a wire. So, wires are not as common as in Europe.
If we're talking about SWIFT transfers, it's probably the same in Europe. The only difference is that in Europe there's SEPA, which is readily accessible by consumers, fast and cheap.
They are not prohibited (I pay for them on my business account). They just need to price domestic transactions the same as EU-internal ones – which often results in free transfers.
$16 to pay someone? How do you do something like transfer your friend some money? Or pay someone who did some work for you?
Here in New Zealand you'd tend to get their bank account number and send them a (free) direct deposit through your bank's Internet banking service. Until very recently that was also the main payment method for our eBay auction site equivalent TradeMe (they've now started a sort of PayPal clone called Ping so that they can skim a little extra from each auction).
But I've heard people can potentially withdraw money from your account if they have your account number in the US?
NZ expat here :) Venmo doesn't charge for sending or receiving money like this to or from people. They make money through other means; from the top of my head one is paying by credit card - they take 3% if you use credit card. Another way they make money (1% per transfer) is by doing an "instant transfer" directly from your Venmo account to your bank (the other option is ACH transfer which is usually next-day delivery.) I tried this on a Sunday night which was also part of a long weekend and the money instantly appeared in my US bank account and I got a push notification from my bank that a deposit was just made. It was awesome and makes NZ look out of date.
Venmo is amazing. It's so fast and practically everyone has it. It's the Google of payments. I wish New Zealand had something like that. Sending money to friends in NZ is slow and painful - not terribly so, but compared to Venmo they really are.
in practice, no one uses the banks directly to send money like that: we use apps like Venmo / CashApp that take your debit card/bank info and act as an intermediary for sending/receiving money.
> Cheques are safer and more portable than give me your bank account because you choose where to deposit.
Maybe it's different in the US, but I have a different account number for each of my bank accounts. So I can still choose where I want to deposit someone's money when I give them my account number, by choosing which account number I give to them. And no-one has to go to a bank.
That's true you can give out different account numbers. You can't change that once you give it out though a cheque allows you to decide at the very last moment.
Is it really that hard to receive the money then transfer it to the right account?
Yes, it's an extra step, but you're already doing way more steps to cash a cheque than use a transfer service where you only give an account number and suddenly the money is there.
IMO, this sounds like a solution looking for a problem to me.
Wire transfers also take 2-3 days to clear because the Fed likes to sit on the float. They totally suck in the US.
This is one of the reasons Paypay got so big so fast. There was a huge pent up demand for a wire transfer service that didn't suck. But then Paypal started to suck and people had to find something new.
>In the US, you pay $16 to send a wire and $16 to receive a wire.
This isn't true, each bank sets their own fees. It's true it's usually stupid expensive to send one, but none of my main banks charge to receive a wire.
I don't think any (major, credible) bank charges to receive a wire because like text messages, you have no control on getting wire transfers, and it would likely cost more to set up such a system than to just accept wires from anyone to any account.
With SEPA, they now have both the free-style "description" box, as well as a (shorter) "Reference" field that has a standardised format including parity bits to prevent typos and the trouble they can cause.
American banking infrastructure is weirdly antiquated.
For a long time I was confused by Americans raving about things like venmo or bitcoin talking about it making it cheap and easy to transfer money. Then I learnt more about the US banking system and it all made a lot more sense.
Planet Money did an episode all about it, featuring someone from the UK talking about our Faster Payments system, who is basically instant.
"Reference", "memo", "note" - some referrer or reminder about the transaction in question. Invoice number, PO number, 'movie tickets' ... it's just a free-form text field.
Same with Venmo in the US. There is literally a whole website that polls the front-page API for Venmo, scans for some keywords that could indicate a "spicy" transaction description, and displays them.[0]
P.S. I have zero affiliation with the website or the owners/developers, I just thought it was entertaining.
You have to be careful with "naughty" words, like if your description includes the name of a company on the Dept of Treasury's shitlist[1]
Some of them are fairly generic terms. I remember when this was posted[2] on HN (payment troubles caused by writing "Blue Sky" on the memo field in a check, because a company called "Blue Sky Industries" was caught doing business with Iran).
Supposedly Venmo will also flag your payment if you put "ISIS" or something like that in the description
When you pay someone, how do you let them know what it's for without adding a customer number, or a note saying 'thanks for dinner' or something? That's a reference.
this might actually be a decent idea for an instagram competitor. Sounds dystopian, but I'm sure a good marketing department could make it seem normal.
If I had deep pockets I'd actually work on this idea. One issue I find is the processing cost of such nanopayments. Cryptocoins didn't live up to the promise of enabling this use case :(
I would not think twice about a cent, but people would definitely think twice about spamming a mailing list or sending newsletters to people that you know don't want them.
This is neat! I once found someone’s debit card on the street (in the US). It had a small face shot on it, so I found them on Facebook and sent them a message. Of course, Facebook had already started doing the “messages from non-friends are really hard to find lol” UI dark pattern, so like two years later the woman responds thanking me, but also saying she just canceled the card. Which is what I would’ve done, but I at least wanted to provide some peace of mind or closure that it wasn’t stolen or anything.
This is a legitimate concern, but the way to combat isn't to silently hide messages behind unfamiliar UI. For a contrast, consider email junk filters, which generally serve a similar purpose but are accessible enough to easily scan through in case of legitimate messages being lost.
I've come across a type of scam where someone on a dating app like tinder will pose as an attractive person with the intention of trying to convince the victim to engage in sexually explicit texts or snapchats. Once they do, the scammer then looks up the friends of friends of the facebook profile associated with the number and then tries to blackmail the victim with threats of sending embarrassing texts to their closest friends. There are now TV commercials warning about it too. The best thing you can do is beg the scammer to post the texts, it really confuses the hell out of them and thanks to this facebook feature, the threat is greatly minimized.
Actually, the best thing you could do would be to not send someone pictures of yourself you wouldn't like shared. Also, the scammer could just add them as friends first.
Yes that would be the best thing but sometimes kids aren’t wise enough. Yes they could add all your friends, but the idea is to kill their incentive. After all they’re banking on you being ashamed for their blackmail to get money from you. Those that matter don't mind and those that do don’t matter.
They would still probably send nudes to your mother out of sadistic pleasure. Sometimes people get themselves into a situation where they have no good choices to make.
So what if they do? You can't let other people dictate your emotions or they will take advantage of you any way possible. That feeling of shame and embarrassment comes from within, not from the scammer, and therefore you have power over it, not them. There's no sadistic pleasure to be had if the victim doesn't care. If the victim doesn't care, why should the scammer waste their time? But just in case they do, good thing there's that facebook feature that hides messages from obscure users. By the time someone ever finds the message, you can just say it was a deepfake.
Just because it comes from within doesn't mean it's realistic to control it. People feel shame for complicated reasons, and to stop feeling shame about something would likely change parts of someone's personality. Maybe he or she thinks that only special people should see them nude? You can't just will that away. Plus, the perpetrator might be satisfied in knowing something like "now all her friends will know what a slut she is" or whatever those people tell themselves.
Not everyone is as "tough" as you. Learn to have empathy. Having your naked body sent to people you love is a grossly embarrassing proposition for most people.
I do, and most of them are gross (I’ve read a lot about what women deal with, and my women friends have told me as much). But I don’t know if the current solution is the best one. If I were a cynic I would say that Facebook does this intentionally because they want you to befriend someone to chat with them.
However, FB should have filters for those instead of grouping everyone in there.
It makes no sense that the person living in the same town as me with a genuine profile is in the same interface as accounts written in foreign languages with 1 friend and a creation date of two days ago.
Yup. It’s admittedly a bit unsettling, but people make their info public and I was trying to be helpful. Might as well try to use social media for some good, ya know?
We had a woman visit a group I belong to from out of town, and I gave her and someone else a ride to a meeting. A couple hours later I found her debit card in my back seat.
I hate having to cancel cards. I'm still dealing with the echos of losing mine back in February[1] (right before moving!) and so I'm calling everyone in the group trying to get her contact info.
Turned out she hadn't even noticed it was gone yet.
[1] AT&T keeps silently cancelling my auto-pay on the new card and nobody can figure out why.
A few years ago, I found a wallet at a New York subway station. The wallet had some documents (including driver's license), weed and a note saying "You are fool". I found the guy on Facebook. He didn't know anything about the note, but we figured it was written by someone who found the wallet before me. He or she took all the cash and left a note, lol. I threw out weed and mailed the owner all of his documents. He was the happiest man in the world on that day.
"Giving" the weed to the owner of the wallet seems like it would be fraught with legal peril, even if the kind wallet returner were to try and do it as a "dead drop".
> “messages from non-friends are really hard to find lol” UI dark pattern
You think you would do something different here? And you have considered all the possible ramifications of doing so? No doubt you've considered the impact on the number of spammy/scammy interactions that everyone experiences, the number of harassing messages that people around the world receive and you've made an informed trade-off between that and meaningful social interactions people have with the folks who find their wallet.
Seems like a pretty strong statement to call it a dark pattern, implying malice, when it could just be a good thing.
FB's solution to unsolicited messages and spam was basically to make messages from non-friends totally invisible. I wouldn't really call it a dark pattern, but they have broken the ability to send messages to anyone who is not your friend. It's pretty much a spam filter with with one binary parameter. It's just lazy.
Interesting point, I wonder if they can apply some logic into it, like if the sender is male and he's written to many female non-friends, give him a higher "probably junk" score. But if he's gotten good response rates his message is probably worth delivering.
FB probably already has data to know how much of a pervert someone is... if they linger on those beach pictures for too long, for example.
If email worked this way, the whole thing would collapse, because much of the time, you really do want to receive messages from new people. How would contacting a business work if their email system auto-rejected all messages from people not already known?
Sure, spam is a big problem, and that's why we've invented spam filters. Google was able to do that and it works well. Granted, Google is a huge company with lots of resources, but so is Facebook, so why can't they be bothered?
>Don't use it to message strangers, it's very explicitly not what the platform is designed for.
Wrong, it's designed to help people get in contact with each other. This doesn't mean everyone wants to be friends first before exchanging some messages.
Tools don't exist in a vacuum. When a tool is a closed platform driven by a business, that business is going to heavy-handidly steer how the tool is used.
It isn’t always socially appropriate to friend request people, which is why I rarely do it (because I have no idea what the other person’s expectations are). If I’ve been introduced to a total stranger via Messenger, I don’t necessarily want to (nor should I have to) be their “friend” just to have them see my messages.
> If email worked this way, the whole thing would collapse, because much of the time, you really do want to receive messages from new people.
Of course. But Facebook isn't e-mail. A closed system that thrives on heavily weighted social graphs is just nothing like an open standard for arbitrary message exchange.
> Wrong, it's designed to help people get in contact with each other.
Based on what? Have you used Facebook? Everything they do is about building and establishing communities, that's their business and they know it. They do almost nothing to help strangers communicate one-off. We are literally in the middle of a discussion about how Facebook gives low priority to messages from strangers, which is evidence that they have this mentality.
Nine hundred miles from home I spotted a driver's license in the snow from a chairlift on Snowmass Mountain. It was still there when I skiied back down. Imagine my surprise when it was for a neighbor who lived two blocks from me! It was only surpassed by my neighbor's surprise when I knocked on her door and handed her her son's driver's license.
I've found quite a few things over the years. Phones. Car keys. Cards. Wallets. I've run after people who left purses, bags, chargers, and even a guy who straight-up forgot his laptop on a table. The vast majority of the time, these things happen in some establishment with a lost-and-found I can turn items over to.
I have, though, found a half dozen credit/debit cards in the past two years outside of any good place to leave them (parking lots/garages, streets, sidewalks...). I guess I'm a good-samaritan with a healthy dose of paranoia/skepticism/cynicism. When there's no obvious place that I think the owner will know to look, I tell someone I know that I found it, and promptly cut the card up into fine pieces, mix them, split the pieces into a few groups, and dispose of them in a 4+ trashcans in different locations (this is probably excessive, but my goal is to dispose of the card with as much caution as I would get rid of my own card if I knew it could still be charged to.)
I have weighed trying to return them, but I ended up triangulating against the chances I'll: waste time tracking down someone who has already canceled the card anyways, send the card to the wrong person, completely creep someone out by tracking them down, or get caught with a card that has been reported stolen and have a hard time proving I didn't steal it.
I imagine the bigger concern is that it's pretty easy to social engineer your way into most online accounts with an email and the info from a drivers license.
I stick my email-address on all valuables I could conceivably lose. Just last month the police sent me a message about a camera found in the road with my address on it. I'd been wondering for weeks where I misplaced it. It must have fallen off when I passed there with my bicycle.
The poor thing must have seen at least one bout of rain and a lot of sun judging by the ablated jacket. And it still works perfectly!
Even better - put a photo or even a drawing of your face on the note as well, to try and evoke some empathy from the finder, increasing the chances it'll be returned to you.
Mine allows about an original tweet in length, but forces a line break in the middle, and it disallows dangerous characters. Just the usual suspects that always break everything and cause database tables to be dropped or commands to be injected. Exclamation marks are super dangerous.
Honestly, I can understand stripping characters at a large organization like a bank. It shouldn't ever be necessary, but it protects against that brainfart/junior dev/marketing analytics software, with little cost.
The bank might be suspicious that it's part of some kind of scam. Like they might trust the info more because it's coming from their bank's official number.
No. People come in to banks with lost wallets and cards they found all the time. But you should do it at an office. You can't just call and have them send messages to users.
Every so often my pessimistic tendencies get a healthy slap across the face by the actions of someone who took the high road when they easily could have chosen otherwise.
It's a couple summers ago, at the height of the summer tourist season and I'm cycling up 4th ave SW in DC. Somewhere between the NASA HQ and the National Mall my camera bag - packed full with a fairly new DSLR, a few lenses, and a secondary cell phone - came unbuckled from my messenger bag and tumbled to the sidewalk. Probably a few thousand dollars of gear, not counting the considerable hassle of resetting 2fa and credentials for every possible account that could be tied to my phone (it was password-locked but I have no idea how well that would survive a determined attack).
I was booking it pretty hard trying to catch a metro, so I didn't notice the loss for a couple more blocks. After the only genuinely involuntary (and painful!) facepalm I've ever given myself, I hurried back home (lived in town close by) and immediately started cancelling every account when my main cell phone rang. The bag was waiting for me, all contents undisturbed and intact, in a hotel lobby a couple blocks away. An anonymous samaritan had picked it up, brought it in and gave it to the concierge without a word, then walked away. Concierge called me using my contact info in a business card that was also in the bag.
In one instant, some unsung karmic superhero single-handedly erased the work of several hundred asshole double parking jobs.
Is it actually legal? In France, a bag in a public place is deemed to be a bomb and the military has to come, secure the area and destroy it. Happens on a routine basis, not even worth the newspapers. You don’t have such laws in Washington DC?
It's certainly not illegal to inspect unattended items in the UK. An assessment is typically made of whether or not it should be deemed a threat.
If the item is not hidden, not obviously suspicious, and is typical of the environment in which it was found, then it's unlikely to be a threat and can be inspected further.
Unattended bags are found all the time. There's no need for the military to be called in for all (or even most) of them. And even then, that's mostly the responsibility of the police than the armed forces.
France experienced a high amount of bomb attacks in the 70s and 80s, eventually tapering off in the 90s [1]. The aggressive reaction to unattended bags stems from these events.
Don't forget metros/subways.
You see a lot of luggage pass through without inspection (unlike airports or stadiums) but the potential for a terrorist attack is real and they've been used for exactly this.
So transit police in US respond very quickly to unattended packages or luggage and treat them as dangerous by default.
(https://wjla.com/news/crime/suspicious-packages-in-d-c-unpac...)
Funny you should ask. A few years back my wife and I were stuck in Reagan (an airport in D. C.) for a super-long layover. As I'm watching my first ever episode of Archer, I notice the family a row over gets up and walks down the concourse, leaving their bags. Now, I've heard a bit of their conversations as I've sat there, and I gather they're American and probably self-centered and clueless. Or maybe that's what the terrorists that just walked away from their explosives want me to think. Regardless, we're sitting at the gate and there's a gate agent right there, so I put this in the "not my job anymore" bucket.
It's been a few years, but I'll bet it was at least ten minutes before the agent called security. It was long enough that I was about to get up and ask, "ya know, I'm not the super-paranoid type, but don't you think you ought to give the dog a little practice sniffing bags?" The dog and an agent or two show up, give the bags a sniff, and wait for the owners to return. I was disappointed that there wasn't at least a little ass-chewing. I mean, what U. S. resident doesn't know not to do that? And if they don't, how about driving that lesson home?
But anyway, we don't get too worked up about a random bag lying around. Because in the U. S., thus far it hasn't been shown that it stands much of a chance of blowing up. My sympathy to countries that have not been so lucky.
What items? Drugs and bombs that someone managed to sneak past security already? In that case isn't the real problem improper inspection? What if the proposed mad bomber, after having successfully managed to sneak all these explosives past security, and hoping to transfer the explosives from his own suitcase to that of a stranger on a specific flight who went to the bathroom, in plain view in front of everybody sitting there waiting for that flight to board, finds that no one has gone to the bathroom without their luggage on that day? Wouldn't that ruin his plan? Not a great plan to be relying on someone on a specific flight going to the bathroom and a whole room full of people somehow not noticing a guy openly transferring an entire suitcase full of explosives from one suitcase to another. Wouldn't one of the other passengers waiting for the same plane at this point say hey wait a minute, this dude here is transferring a bunch of explosives from one suitcase to another! Maybe I should say something!
Yeah that's the argument. Someone's gonna plant the explosives while I'm in the bathroom.
You know what? That's never going to happen, it's never happened, and it's a crazy thing to imagine would ever happen. It's just hysterical paranoia and fearmongering to go on about someone planting a suitcase full of explosives in another suitcase in plain view of everyone during a few minutes when some guy is in the bathroom.
This fear and paranoia is actively harming society. Parents won't let their children walk to school or a friends house or play in the yard because they are convinced the children will be abducted by a mad kidnapper. So their kids become waddling obese paranoid kids fixed on their screens, depressed, miserable, high blood pressure, having been raised in a culture of fear, years shaved off their lives from the stress.
All these irrational things, none based on facts or reasonable threat assessment, are actively harming society, and the people pushing this fear are doing it intentionally. But to what aim?
Deciding I might be a terrorist because I went to the bathroom?
No, because you left a container large enough to hold a fair amount of explosives, a container that has been used in other parts of the world at airports to detonate explosives, and you just walked away from it. Tell me what you believe to be the sane response. But if you just want to go take a shit, by all means, do so.
And I'm with sibling comment: I don't let my bags out of my sight.
I think the GP comment had a point, before you get to a gate you are scanned/x-rayed, searched and pass by chemical sensors. This is not to mention other technologies that are baked into the surveillance system.
I think fretting over a bag past that point is a little much. Frankly, the crowded snaking lines leading up to the TSA are where one should be concerned.
> United Airlines Flight 629, registration N37559, was a Douglas DC-6B aircraft also known as "Mainliner Denver", which was blown up with a dynamite bomb placed in the checked luggage on November 1, 1955.
- https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/United_Airlines_Flight_629
> An explosion at the New Tokyo International Airport (later renamed Narita International Airport) occurred on Sunday, 23 June 1985 at 06:19 UTC, killed two baggage handlers, and injured four. The bomb was intended for Air India Flight 301, with 177 passengers and crew on board, bound for Don Mueang International Airport in Bangkok, Thailand.
- https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/1985_Narita_International_Ai...
Those are both checked luggage. Not briefly unattended luggage by someone who is in the bathroom. Where's the articles about unattended luggage?
Also you got 1955 and 1985. 64 and 34 years ago. Checked luggage wasn't even inspected back then. It is now. Still stuff gets through.
Are you arguing here that we shouldn't have checked luggage? Those are your examples. Checked luggage. Not unattended luggage, which almost certainly has already been inspected anyway when going through security. What now? Do we ban checked luggage and carry on luggage even after both have been inspected?
I love all the downvotes from the haters and the crazy supposed examples that prove my point for me. Facts and reality are not important. What's important is hysteria and fearmongering, and to shut up anyone that talks rational sense or is interested in a reality based approach to threat management.
dunno man: all i see here is that you failed to take proactive action to defeat the possible threat that you had imagined in your mind, and instead shed responsibility onto some other human.
what i would have liked to have read is something like "while uber low probability, i figured it'd be best to deal with this immediately" or "i knew the probability that this is a bomb was so low as to be statistically impossible, so i just ignored it", not the weird hedged middle road
In my BS mental model of how brains work, I imagine that we estimate the probability of a risk not through some analytical method, but instead with a sampling-based approach where we observe how much time our brain spends worrying about different outcomes. The mental narrative that accompanies inaction probably looks like an inconsistent mess, not a principled calculation that the probability is low.
I was in Shanghai Pudong airport waiting in line to check in. There was a small suitcase sitting there unattended for quite a while. What was funny is that all of us in lined seemed to be very studiously ignoring it, looking away. I think we all knew that if anybody said anything, the security theater would start and we'd never get on our flights.
What is illegal? To inspect a bag you find in public? To inspect a bag you see someone dropped? Would really be interested in a reference to a specific law.
> In France, a bag in a public place is deemed to be a bomb and the military has to come, secure the area and destroy it.
That's obviously not true. If it was the case, the Paris subway would forever be stopped.
What is true is that in France when someone reports an abandoned bag in a public place in the main cities, it will systematically be considered as suspect. It means that someone will first go visually inspect it. If it is deemed to present a risk, a detection dog will be brought. Then, if the detection dog smells something, it will be safely handled by the police bomb disposal unit. Thankfully - it turns a half an hour top operation into a significantly longer one - it is very rare to need to destroy a bag.
Also it is absolutely not illegal to check a lost wallet (or a lost bag actually) in France.
>In France, a bag in a public place is deemed to be a bomb and the military has to come, secure the area and destroy it.
After the 2015 attacks one would guess. For a millenium at least, and well up into the early 21st century, a bag in public place in France it was just a bag -- and people could return it.
I'm pretty sure that's the case now too -- it's only "deemed to be a bomb" if it looks suspicious and somebody calls the cops. I'm sure people lose/forget bags with the same frequency in France as elsewhere, and the military/cops are not involved in the majority of cases...
Sometimes it happens, and sometimes not. I lost my wallet 4 times in total, 3 in Brazil (which is $HOME), 1 in Germany. Got it back 3 out of 4 times. Guess where.
In Germany you likely visited a tourist area and in Brazil you likely were in your local area where you live or work.
That has nothing to do with the country. In my hometown in Germany nobody would steal anything, but in São Paolo I saw lots of pickpockets in the tourist destinations I visited.
> Sometimes it happens, and sometimes not. I lost my wallet 4 times in total, 3 in Brazil (which is $HOME), 1 in Germany. Got it back 3 out of 4 times. Guess where.
That's highly depends on exactly _where_ in Brazil you are, time of day, your looks, general luck and many other factors. In may places you are likely to 'forcefully' lose your wallet, cellphone, car and if you are very lucky, that's all you'll lose. You can be encouraged to make a trip to the nearest ATM or even your house. Hopefully you will be alone and there won't be anyone else that can be used as leverage.
Source: have been robbed at gunpoint on several occasions. In one of them, they were discussing whether or not I should be shot. After smashing the driver's side window, while I was at a stop light. Thankfully I only had to clean up a small amount of blood from my car. On another, I was at a police station, was asked to go to a site of a police shooting to try to identify the crooks that had been shot (and were now deceased). Turns out that there was a separate event, not even 15 minutes apart a few blocks away, also two guys on a motorcycle. Those were not the crooks I was looking for, those got... caught.
That was all in a state capital, not in the middle of nowhere. Population equivalent to almost 3 San Franciscos added together.
Or maybe they don't want to support Chinese oppression.
I've been to HK, it's ok to visit, living there though is a different matter entirely, sure I may not get robbed at gunpoint but between China and air pollution I will find somewhere else thanks.
I visited a sketchy part of Parramatta for work and it really wasn’t that bad. I walked around in the streets every night for a month to get dinner. But I can understand how it could easily be assumed (in my opinion) the most likely place in Australia to get robbed.
Australia is a really safe place by comparison to nearly anywhere else.
I go to Oktoberfest (Munich) every year, and for a beer festival with hundreds of thousands drunk people in crowded tents and all-cash transactions, it is an amazingly safe place.
In the Philippines, my companion and I went to an atm to withdraw our monthly support (something of a stipend as missionaries) and my companion was unfortunate enough to hold his in his hands just a little too long before putting it away and it was snatched by some kid who vanished into a sea of people.
This is why modern parenting guidance tends away from a blanket stranger danger policy toward something a bit more nuanced like "beware of a grownup who approaches you or initiates a conversations with you, but if you are in trouble, almost any grownup who looks safe to you is probably someone you can ask for help."
You can add a few more layers like seeking out someone in a uniform or who has a stroller, but generally speaking most people minding their own business are perfectly safe.
Honest grown-ups will be annoyed that a lost child refuses to come with them to the obvious "lost children" place, but they'll put up with it while somebody tries to figure out where the people responsible for that child are. Somebody with nefarious motives will probably need to take the child somewhere else though - by refusing to go they're protected.
Wow, that site is awfully bad. I had to go through 3 pages + one excruciatingly slow video all of which just told me how amazing their organization is, but I still didn't know what "Clever Never Goes" means.
tl;dr for the rest: it means: "Never go anywhere unless it was planned beforehand".
My son was always hyper social. (I have no idea where he got that from.) Would walk up to any one, everyone and start a convo.
While it's fantastic that my son was so open, trusting, there is still a risk. A little girl two grades ahead of him was abducted and then found dead on a beach. (Oak Harbor WA, should any one want to dox me.)
In Hungary, I have been conditioned that if somebody approaches me on the street 95% of the time is a homeless person begging for money or somebody trying to sell me drugs or sex. The other people just not interacting with each other.
When I moved to New Zealand it was the opposite. There is more interaction with "regular" people. They are helping me or asking for help.
Maybe I'm missing something here, but if you say "Excuse me sir! You dropped your wallet" while holding up their wallet clear to see, people think "Oh no! A mugger! And they must have already robbed me, let's run for it" ?
I left a MacBook Pro behind in the bin at a security checkpoint at Miami International Airport a few years back. I realized it when I got home, looked up the airport's lost & found number, called them, and they had it. I was shocked. They held it for my dad to pick up.
I left an iPad in a men's room at Tokyo SkyTree. Went back 20 minutes later and some random guy (regular guy, no uniform or anything) came out of the men's room and handed it to me. I guess I had that "just lost my iPad" look on my face.
I’ve grabbed the wrong Air out the airport scanner. It even had a dent in a similar place. I opened it to check on it as I walked off and the saw it was wrong. The other laptop was just leaving in someone else’s hands. Close call.
I was checking in at a hotel in Amsterdam with my suitcase 2ft behind me with a duffel bag on top and my backpack inside containing my laptop.
In the 30s it took me from the point where I took my wallet out to the point I was done paying somebody had opened up my duffel bag and stolen my backpack. I just bought that MBP 2 weeks earlier and just finished the hassle of setting it up.
TBH, whoever took it deserved it, it was the smoothest thing ever. I had friends with me all standing around and nobody saw it get taken.
I turned in more than one lost wallet or debit card to a librarian (or similar) while homeless.
I didn't want to call them myself or whatever because I was homeless and I knew I was automatically suspect as a thief because of it. So I wanted someone the world would trust/believe to deal with it.
Well before I was homeless, attempts to return wallets or found ID cards or whatever were consistently met with suspicion. One woman tried to run from me and my husband on the assumption that we were up to no good for trying to catch her because we happened to see her drop her wallet just before she got in her car. But, obviously, we must have been muggers or something. No other explanation was possible in her mind.
I've found 2 and lost 1 in 49 years. But you'd need more than a couple data points to suggest anything. Let's at least require p<0.05 before suggesting something is "odd".
Ive both once lost and found a debit card in an ATM.
The one I found was left in a drive thru on a Saturday morning. The branch was open, so I walked in and dropped it off. I have no idea what the bank did after that.
I once left mine at an ATM, the bank cancelled the card and issued a new one before I even realized I'd left it behind.
Some do (that happened to mine when I forgot it once, bank called me). Others do not. The best ones require that you take your card before they do the thing you wanted it to do (as a measure to ensure you don't forget your card).
This drove me mad when moving to Canada. In Germany all the ATMs require you to take the card to get the cash, in Canada it was the opposite. I lost my card twice that way. Design is so important.
It’s like this in the US as well, and I didn’t know the possible difference in order of operations before you brought it up. I would think stuff like this would be written down in a best practice / licensing document somewhere in order to even sell ATMs.
Sadly no, there's very often tricks to correctly designing routine things in life that not everybody responsible has thought about and this can have dire consequences. Every "push" door with prominent "pull" handles is a miniature example.
Modern railway trains use electronically controlled doors. Rather than needing a team of people to run along checking every door on the train is closed and locked, or just hoping nobody falls out of a moving train, the doors are powered and when instructed will close and lock. The doors can't close instantly of course and so the procedure will be that the guard or driver presses a button, there's a brief warning period and then doors try to close and lock, once all doors are successfully closed and locked you're clear to drive the train away.
In the UK it turns out that there were two ways to implement this functionality, some train manufacturers used one, some the other. One way goes like this, when the button is pressed:
1. "Door Open" buttons for passengers are disabled
2. All open doors sound an alarm (typically fast bleeping)
3. Wait a few seconds
4. All doors that are still open try to close
The other way goes like this:
1. All open doors sound an alarm
2. Wait a few seconds
3. "Door Open" disabled
4. Try to close any open doors
This second order feels pretty similar, it's likely only a few geeks even noticed it was different and nobody made a big fuss about it. Until there was an accident and then the accident investigators discovered it.
A passenger realised very late that they were at their destination, unknown to them when they pressed "Door Open" in fact the train's crew had just told the system to close all doors for departure and it was in that waiting period. On their train, the "Open" buttons were not disabled during that period. Now the passenger's door was open, but it had missed that "alarm" phase, so there was no warning anything was amiss. The passenger tried to step through the door, but at that moment the timer expired and the door closed on them, trapping IIRC an article of clothing and resulting in a dragging accident when the train departed.
All affected trains needed revised firmware to enforce the correct order of events now that it was apparent to everybody that there even _was_ a correct order of events.
This is why I recommend all software engineers to read The Design of Everyday things. These basic design principles are helpful in designing UIs, APIs and architecture.
The thing with doors for me is that I feel “trapped” when I have a door with no place for my hands besides a panel that lies flat (does not extend outward) from the door. The first time I saw one I was very confused: it seemed to me that I was against a wall that was painted as a door, but had no handles. It was surprising to me that specific example it was brought up as an example of good user interface design in my university UI class.
Your account of the train incident is heart-breaking, but further solidifies my desire to have mandatory best practices that are evidence-based and have sufficient consensus for user interfaces that have harmful failure modes. On top of these best practices, there also needs to be a ramp plan from the any status quo interface that is nonconformant to the final version through as many intermediate designs as necessary to deal with ingrained user behaviour and ingrained user expectations.
I can't remember which places do it which way, but I have walked off with my card and without the cash I withdrew when I used an ATM that gave the card back first (I was used to the other way round).
I live in Germany, where ATMs always require you to take out the card before giving you money. The reason I've heard for this is to avoid a particular scam that goes like this:
1. Eve spies on Alice as she enters her PIN into the ATM.
2. As Alice takes her money, Eve taps her on the shoulder and gives her a 10$ bill, explaining that it fell down to the floor when Alice didn't notice.
3. Mallory uses the distraction to swipe Alice's card from the ATM without her noticing. Now Mallory and Eve have both the card and the PIN and can empty the account.
Yes, ATMs nowadays wait for you to remove the card (start beeping if you don't) and won't produce the cash unless you've done so. But there could be ATMs on less-prone banks or just by other companies that just "sell cash" (and charge a fee) that are not so caring.
Long ago, I worked in a record store, and David Byrne came in to the store to shop. He was wearing a red plastic hard hat, yet gave a disparaging look to everyone who seemed to "notice" him. When he left, I discovered he had forgotten to take his credit card from the counter. I called him (we also had a video store with contact info) and he was incredibly rude and told me just to cut it up because he couldn't be bothered to stop back in. This story has no real point, but it did make me less of a Talking Heads fan, and perhaps relates to the idea that being a good Samaritan isn't always rewarding. That said, I once had my bag stolen at a nightclub, and a few months later someone found my wallet in some bushes and mailed it to me, which was a pleasant surprise. When I've had things stolen, I've always maintained a hope that there will end up being a happy ending, even if that hasn't been the case every time.
I flew back from Palermo to Zurich on Monday. Exceptionally in business class (essentially same price).
A pretty well known German performer was also on the flight with his companion and - I assume - his favorite microphone.
The gentleman was meticulously polite, including the fact that he queued up at the gate instead of jumping the queue with about a dozen economy passengers in the queue.
Whether you're talking about rich or poor, famous or not, educated or not - there are good and bad people.
Our instinct is to make assumptions like 'rich so asshole', and there may be correlations between some of those categories and rate of occurrence of good and bad, but the differences are small compared to the normal panoply of personality types.
Even prominent people can have a bad day or have other momentary hassles to deal with that might make them behave less than gracious on occasion. Trying to be generous here.
I saw Ryan Gosling at a grocery store in Los Angeles yesterday. I told him how cool it was to meet him in person, but I didn’t want to be a douche and bother him and ask him for photos or anything.
He said, “Oh, like you’re doing now?”
I was taken aback, and all I could say was “Huh?” but he kept cutting me off and going “huh? huh? huh?” and closing his hand shut in front of my face. I walked away and continued with my shopping, and I heard him chuckle as I walked off. When I came to pay for my stuff up front I saw him trying to walk out the doors with like fifteen Milky Ways in his hands without paying.
The girl at the counter was very nice about it and professional, and was like “Sir, you need to pay for those first.” At first he kept pretending to be tired and not hear her, but eventually turned back around and brought them to the counter.
When she took one of the bars and started scanning it multiple times, he stopped her and told her to scan them each individually “to prevent any electrical infetterence,” and then turned around and winked at me. I don’t even think that’s a word. After she scanned each bar and put them in a bag and started to say the price, he kept interrupting her by yawning really loudly.
As per someone else's comment, everyone can have a bad day. I try not to judge people I don't know (unless there are repeat stories, then it's hard not to).
The problem with a forgotten credit card is that you can't be sure if it was stolen and can be cloned, so is better to dismiss it and get a new one. Maybe he had a bad morning talking with his bank about it yet so the card was useless at this time.
> One woman tried to run from me and my husband on the assumption that we were up to no good for trying to catch her because we happened to see her drop her wallet just before she got in her car. But, obviously, we must have been muggers or something. No other explanation was possible in her mind.
When I was a little kid, I was on Crete with my mother, and at some point she asked me to watch her bag while she bought did something for a few minutes, probably buying food. So I was sitting there, with my knee on the bag, not actively watching it, I rather took in the surroundings. Some older Greek farmer type guy started to point at the bag, trying to get my attention, and I thought he wanted to remind me to really "watch" the bag, being a patronizing adult. No other explanation was possible in my mind. So without really looking at him or the bag, I was like "I know, it's fine, I got this, leave me alone". He did after a short while.
When my mother returned, she noticed the pomegranate the man had placed on the bag.. which is what he had pointed at. I was so ashamed.
In some Landmark course, many years ago, our homework included giving $1 to one random person every day, and recording what happened. As I recall, maybe 50% of people wouldn't take it, at least at first.
This was, of course, mainly an exercise in sharing Landmark.
In major cities, I've been burned so many times with people trying to grab my attention for some agenda or other, usually to sell me something or peddle some wierd conspiracy, or both. I'm afraid I'd be one of the people who wouldn't take your dollar.
That's the problem with cities. Such high population density, so many people fighting for your attention. You have to ignore the people around you to some degree to get anything done. It's far too easy to just completely switch off after a while
Back in '96 or '97 i found a pager dropped on the ground (they were pretty expensive back then), it was at night so i took it and called the lost and found number on the back. I was on the phone for about an hour and finally got to someone who gave me an address to mail it back to. I was in college and literally eating ramen noodles, i told them i was not getting a box and paying to mail it back. The person on the phone was rude and agreed to send a prepaid box to mail it back in.
That was over an hour of my life wasted and the company didn't seem to be grateful, hopefully the owner was...I will return things if found, just a bit more jaded about it.
I've tried to return stuff via my police precinct. Couldn't be bothered.
I once returned a wallet via a "I Saw You" style personal ad in our local arts paper. (One of his frat brothers saw the ad and posted it on his door. Result!)
I've returned a few phones. Because they've been locked, I had to wait until someone calls (answer) or texts it (quickly write down number, then use my own phone to call back).
Phones need a "I found this lost phone" feature on the lock screen.
While I was in college, there was a summer I couldn't find any tech work and ended up doing property claims for a tour company. It paid minimum wage, but it was pretty fun. What really surprised me was how many valuable items (camera bags full of lenses and an expensive-looking camera, CPAP machines, etc.) we would find with absolutely no identifying information whatsoever. We were able to track down some of the owners, but not all of them. If you're traveling, you should definitely have your name and contact information not just on, but inside your bags. It could come in handy someday.
Not too long ago after a series of unfortunate events I spent the night on the floor of the international terminal of the Atlanta airport. The next morning I (exhausted) was riding the tram back to my departing flight's terminal and noticed a kid left a little dinosaur action figure on the tram. I didn't notice until the next stop. I grabbed the toy, hopped off the tram, sped-walked back to the last stop, and walked through a handful of gates looking for the kid.
In the end I didn't find him and left the toy on a counter, hoping he'd find it. The whole thing bummed me out. My own kid's lost a few toys and I know how devastating it can be. Granted I was sleep deprived and emotional, but it put a damper on my day nonetheless.
Everyone I know who's worked in restaurants or as a delivery driver tips very well. In my limited experience, teachers make some of the best parents when it comes to student interaction and parent participation.
I'd bet whoever found the wallet had lost their own at some point. Empathy is a powerful, powerful thing. I wish that more people would recognize that and work to instill it in their children.
I live in Sweden. Lost my wallet during my bike to work time in the morning. Not sure why it fell from my pocket, but it might because of the bumpy road due to some construction.
As most of the things inside the wallet can be replaced in a couple of days (bank card, and some ID's), I did not worry that much. But, a nice guy from the neighboring office took the high road by calling the contact point of my office, which ended up in my boss hand.
my daughter lost her SL card (Stockholm public transport) that had a phone number written on, and on another occasion forget her debit card at the business.
Someone called her with her SL card (worth around 100$), and the business kept her card and verified her identity when she called.
Clothing items are constantly being lost and left in-place mostly during winter, some might be relatively expensive
When I lived in Germany, I would sometimes notice items placed up on fences, stone walls, the side of a fountain, etc. Things like keys, or a small child's toy, or a hat, for example.
I asked a couple different friends about this, and they said that often when people see something that looks like it was lost, they will place it up somewhere more conspicuous right be where they found it, so that hopefully whomever lost it can more easily find it.
I always thought that was a little bit of a nice touch of humanity, even if it doesn't take a lot of extra effort to do.
Another reason why people are doing this is to protect it from getting "even more lost". An item sitting on the road might be picked up by dogs, kicked away by mistake, or get dirty from people stepping on it. Putting it on the nearest fence puts it out of harm's way.
Similar thing happened to me. I lost my wallet biking in Amsterdam a few months ago. Replacing all cards would have cost a few hundred euros. Plus a guaranteed "please step aside" passing through the passport check at the airport (it's apparently a serious matter to lose your residence permit due to possible fraud).
Luckily for me, a kind stranger found the wallet and sent me an email and I had my wallet the next day.
A few weeks ago, my partner and I, together with our 1-month-old baby, were rushing to a courthouse as she needed to do some paperwork for a case she's involved in. We were under high pressure as the courthouse would close in like half an hour, but our son was especially hungry that day and we had to stop several times to feed him, etc.
In one of these stops, probably due to the stress and rush, we left her handbag behind. We noticed when we got to the courthouse (with around twenty minutes left until it closed). This not only implied losing her credit cards, house keys, healthcare card, some money and her phone, but also her ID card which was needed for the paperwork in court. The deadline for the procedure was the next day so we might still have a chance by going to the police and asking for a temporary ID or something, but I'm not even totally sure it would be possible, and in any case it would have been an absolute mess and we would have spent the next morning running here and there.
One or two minutes after we realized the handbag was missing and we were feeling like crap and powerless to do anything, my phone rings. Someone had used my partner's phone [1] to call her mother (because "Mama" is usually a reliable contact, I guess) and she told them to call me. I met the finders in a nearby square five minutes later. They returned everything, and refused any compensation. We completed the paperwork in time that day.
They will probably never know how big a favor they did to us (of course returning cards, phone, money, ID, etc. is always a big favor, but in this case it was even more important than normal due to the court issue, having very little time due to a newborn baby, etc.) and how grateful we are.
[1] In case you are wondering, indeed she didn't have her phone locked with a PIN number, pattern or similar... I know, this goes against every security recommendation. It's just laziness. In this case, it probably helped by accelerating the return, though.
On a current Android (presumably iPhones are similar) you can set information and a list of contacts, when somebody picks up a locked phone they can pick emergency and then either:
Make whatever the local emergency phone call is (112 or 911 whatever) which will work if the phone can figure out any way to make that call (e.g. it works if you have no credit on a PAYG phone or the "right" network isn't available)
OR
Display the information and list of contacts, then make calls to any of the contacts just as if the phone wasn't locked by its owner.
I wouldn't expect a random person to necessarily know this will work, but I expect police lost+found departments know it exists and maybe other types of emergency responder would know or at least won't be scared of pressing "emergency" on somebody's phone.
Mine gives my first name, and contacts for some close friends.
I hate it when my cynicism alarm goes off, but this feel-good tweet about hacking payment transfers for good is written by a guy who's twitter bio says he's a PM at Transferwise ("We’re building the best way to move money around the world.")
All the replies are people contrasting shitty experiences they've had with their own wallets and money transfer services.
His top pinned tweet is:
> Reasons to work at @TransferWise:
> 1. Irreversibly change the world of finance to be fairer
Where is there a "deep-dive engagement into the intricacies of how hack-ey the current money transfer system is" at the link? I see a tweet with a fun story that's about no negative part of banking and bunch of replies about how this is cool or how the commenter also has a story about lost property. If it's deeper I didn't scroll far enough down, and I doubt very many of those interacting with the tweet did either.
Isn't this a success story of a regular bank account though? I would find this super far-fetched as some sort of weird promotion, especially where OP's company is never mentioned and not actually posed as better than a regular bank account (or a regular bank account as bad).
Let's just enjoy nice stories that we come across.
Marketing is not a banner ad or billboard anymore.
A viral tweet like this could land him 5 minute segments on any number of local-news stations that need a feel-good piece. He'll then have the opportunity to talk about his company.
And followers. As this tweet makes it's rounds through the media, he'll get more. He can then use that following to promote his business.
It opened the door for people to openly bash their existing bank or financial provider, and he (and his company) didn't have to say ANYTHING - their followers did it for them.
AND... a bank card without a name on it of any kind? A wallet without any identifiable information? No license, no other credit cards, no shopper cards, not a business card???? Nothing?
Most cards have a business name or person's name. Taking the card to the police or the bank would get a call directly to them.
Who would think, I'm going to start a chain of 1 penny transaction to contact this person at this bank account, and hope they get them before they cancel their bank account because they lost their wallet.
And is this a wallet with cash and a single card with no identifiable information on it? NOTHING else?
EDIT: Because I can't reply below: because they have access to that bank account now. Pretty simple. The card in question is said to have their banking info right on the card, so you close that account and start a new one.
Why would you cancel a bank account over a lost wallet?
reply to your edit: (btw, you can click on the timestamp of a comment and reply directly, always) … That's not how it works. If you loose a card, you let the bank deactivate the specific card. The account itself is not permanently compromised by a card. Someone else knowing your "banking info" (= account number) doesn't mean much and is not a reason to close an account.
A bank card has the sort code and account number of the account on. Those let you transfer money into the account. They don't let you take over the account. They're like an area code and phone number, which don't let you take over someone's house.
A lot of HN regulars come from America, where knowing the equivalent information does often make it possible to steal money from someone's bank account and where you can only make payments like this using third-party companies or paper checks. I think a lot of the misunderstandings in the comments might stem from people not realising that UK banking is different.
Hi, I’m the guy who lost his wallet! I agree it’s a convenient overlap and understand your cynicism but I assure you that it’s genuine. I can even provide you with the receipt from me riding a jump bike around for an hour looking for my wallet! :)
EDIT: spelling + I did pin the tweet about transferwise after it blew up, and I also changed my bio to share my small side project: Podmast.com - check it out :)
I'm not all that cynical about it. I don't think that people (micro-)blogging made up stories (which this may or may not be) means there's something terribly wrong with them. It's a white lie told repeatedly with a straight face. It's worse than a white lie told once, but not as bad as a more directly harmful lie like faking an illness and collecting money from strangers on GoFundMe.
Anyone can conveniently lose a wallet, but one with a bank card with no identifying info in it anywhere? A finder who went to bizarre lengths to make Faster transactions to your bank account to send you a message? Absolutely no other identifying information in the wallet? A plan to ride a jump bike around to prove you looked for it with receipts?
Before sending someone pennies with context in the transactions, hoping that person would get them before they canceled all their bank accounts because they lost their wallet, I would just take the card to the bank and have them call the owner, or take it to the police and they'd do the same.
Uhg, sorry, "I ensure you" and "jump bike receipts" is not enough to convince me.
EDIT: Removed the quotes from Faster, my point seemed to get lost because of that.
IIRC the limit according to the standard is £100,000/day but most banks impose their own arbitrary limit. Assuming things haven't changed in 5 years, this[1] lists the limits for a lot of banks. I can also add to the list that Monzo's is £10,000/day.
BACS is generally cheaper at volume. In addition, BACS Bureau allows a payroll company to transfer money directly from your employer's account to yours without the money ever reaching their account.
All fixable, but payroll companies are generally chosen on price, not innovation.
Anyone can say anything they want on the internet! The variables here are conveniently precisely aligned where real world chances of this happening are null. I also call BS. But a noteworthy mention to the marketing idea. With all due respect.
Faster Payments is the standard, free way of making payments to bank accounts in the UK. Everyone with online banking here has easy access to it regardless of what bank they use. Also, our debit cards generally have enough information to send someone a payment that way for some reason.
Um, this is how banking works in the UK. Nobody cancels their bank account if they lose their card, they just cancel their card. And given someone else's card I could send them 1p within a minute (even if it's cancelled). Now I've seen this approach, it's what I'll do next time. And it doesn't involve the poster's company in any way, transferring thousands of pounds instantly within the EU is trivial.
Also in a lot of cases these days you don't even have to cancel the card.
If you're like "Oops, that's gone" and it fell into a waterfall or something then, sure, you cancel it and have a replacement sent, but say you just got back from the store and it isn't in your wallet. You call a modern bank. "Hi, I think I lost my card maybe?" Good chance they say - "OK, we'll freeze the card, call us if you find it or if you give up and we'll send a new one".
In the UK the details needed to transfer money into an account are on most bank cards (Account Number and Sort Code), so that's enough identifying info.
That would also mean someone can send you money if your card is blocked or cancelled. Account number and sort code don't change when you get a new card.
Also, "Faster Payments" is the name of the normal system to transfer money between accounts in the UK. It doesn't cost the sender anything other than the money they send. It's called "faster" because the old system was a lot slower (because it was based on paper I think?).
I'm curious about this. I've always banked with NatWest so I'm only really familiar with their cards, but my bank account number is definitely not printed on the card (the sort code is).
Do some other UK banks really print the account numbers on their cards? Or is there some way to send a Faster payment to a debit card number?
I'm with Starling Bank, and along with the usual Mastercard numbers (card number, expiry, CVV etc.) it has the account number... though not the sort code, strangely. I guess you could look it up if you wanted to, but you'd need to know this 8-digit number with no label was the account number. Weird.
I think Natwest is the outlier in this case. I've always had my account number and sort code on all my cards with other banks (Barclays, Lloyds, Halifax).
Edit: Maybe also Monzo, no account number on that one.
The old system (BACS) has been electronic since 1983, or possibly even 1968 when it was introduced. (Wikipedia is unclear, it seems transactions were recorded on magnetic tape for the first 15 years, before using phone lines.) It slowly replaces the paper based system: cheques.
The 2-3 days got the old system will have been a limitation of batch based computer processing from that time, and maybe moving the magnetic tapes around.
Thanks for dropping in. Sorry if that actually happened to you. The sad thing is when much of tech is dedicated to churning attention capital into financial capital in an ever-more-clever cat-and-mouse game, one stops being able to trust anything that grabs one's attention. Or, at least every social interaction starts to feel purely transactional. It's a shitty social dystopia we're building for ourselves.
Whichever way your story went, thanks for the neat tale of what can be done with bank transfers! Glad it worked out.
For what it is worth, I saw this story and thought "Oh, I love this; creative use of metadata in the payments system", principally because I am professionally involved with payments. All the "coincidences" here are explainable by "people who geek out on X will tend to see a lot more X in their daily lives than civilians and will become focal points for other people who geek out on X, who see a lot more X in their daily lives than civilians." You can trivially reproduce "OMG banks!" on any social media feed you control; just kvetch in public about a banking story.
Also, there are people on HN who do marketing for a living (checks business cards including me?), and to the extent that you model someone as going into their planning meeting with "OK guys I have this great idea for how to hit our Q4 numbers: lets do stealthmarketing on our personal Twitter accounts", you should know that that would not receive the reply "Genius Bob, why do we employ teams of expensive professionals to do this when you come up with such pearls of wisdom for free."
Mentioning this half because excessive cynicism is a failure mode for geeks and half because many people on HN will, at some point in their life, actually have to get good at causing people to adopt a product or service, and HNers should correct the mental model that would suggest that this is in any way aimed at or effective at causing adoption of a product or service.
Reflexive cynicism is a simple, easy way of asserting intellectual superiority over others without directly insulting them. Super common in internet comments, including, arguably, this one.
It's vastly less complicated to just assume and assert that everything is bullshit everywhere, all the time, than to actually try to discern where cynicism and optimism are each warranted.
>Reflexive cynicism is a simple, easy way of asserting intellectual superiority over others without directly insulting them. Super common in internet comments, including, arguably, this one.
Or maybe it's a natural adaptation to a world where almost everybody seems to have some ulterior motive.
floatrock is pointing out the fact that there is a motive for this to be a PR stunt.
I'm not sure that's reflexive cynicism.
I've seen that type of cynicism and it is ugly. It's also ugly to assume there are never ulterior motives, or to disparage someone for questioning something.
I've found that just as there is reflexive cynicism designed to feel superior, there's also reflexive anger to people who go against the current.
floatrock provided evidence and reasoning as to why he questions the validity of this event. He never put blanked statements and didn't even accuse the event of being fake. He merely pointed out it might be.
Your comment is something I'd think of as reflexive anger toward cynicism. There wasn't any real weighing of evidence or deep consideration. Just a general dislike toward cynicism.
BTW: I understand the word reflexive to mean: without thought and consideration, automatic and many times pre-programmed (i.e. prejudicial either toward cynicism or against it)
> He never put blanket statements and didn’t even accuse the event of being fake. He merely pointed out it might be.
I feel like this is a debate-team style nuance that doesn’t really have merit in actual conversations.
If somebody tells me a story about their day, and I respond “well, it’s possible that you made all that up, and this is all a ruse to trick me”, I’ve not accused them of making it up, I’ve just pointed out it’s possible. But I’ve implied an accusation, otherwise I’d not have gone out of my way to announce this “possibility”.
And, as noted in your comment, you then do directly accuse the reply of being “reflexive anger towards cynicism”, with the implication that the audience is required to provide “deep consideration” when responding to the possibility. If the original comment is just pointing out something that could potentially be true, without any accusation, why are the rest of us required to give it deep consideration?
Can’t I just respond “well it’s possible you’re fake!”? To which the original commenter could retort “no, you’re fake!” And then we go back and forth forever, secure in the knowledge that it’s impossible to totally prove the voracity of any story. That would lead to a lot of comments back and forth, but it seems unlikely any of them would lead to meaningful/productive discussion.
> If somebody tells me a story about their day, and I respond “well, it’s possible that you made all that up, and this is all a ruse to trick me”, I’ve not accused them of making it up, I’ve just pointed out it’s possible. But I’ve implied an accusation, otherwise I’d not have gone out of my way to announce this “possibility”.
Except your example is not very compatible.
First, by making it a direct accusation, instead of 2 third parties discussing someone else. If I said it directly to you, you'd be correct in the accusation bit. Situations will make the same words have very different interpretations.
Second, and most importantly, your example has no reason. It's just doubt for doubts sake. That's the definition of reflexive. floatrock isn't just saying 'it's possible you made it up'. But, 'hey look, climate deniers are funded by big oil, maybe they are biased/not honest'. Conflict of interest is a REASON for doubting.
floatrock did provide reason for his doubt in the form of the exposure of a conflict of interest. Which is why I felt his comment was good. He even showed the doubt in a conscientious, non aggressive way. I actually don't agree that it was a PR stunt. But putting out relevant information, like conflicts of interest, should be relevant to all thinking people.
Next, you are welcome to provide a REASON for why it isn't a PR stunt. Personally, I think such a PR stunt would have marginal benefits toward the KPIs for transfer wise. Their small team would probably be better served on other things than this PR thing, if it was that. So I personally don't think it was a PR stunt. But that's beside the point. The point I was making: Reflexive statements suck, whether reflexively cynical, or reflexively sheepish, and I felt the person making the 'reflexive' accusation was unintentionally ironic.
The fact that you are ignoring the 'reasoning' element, makes the word 'reflexive' not seem relevant, when it is.
You can't prove anything definitively, but you can provide evidence to further an idea or not.
Evidence, reasoning... that's where the in-depth comes from. I would hope that's required on both sides.
Be all that as it may, in a world where people use their Wi-Fi SSIDs to say nasty things to their neighbours, I totally buy that this story is plausible.
Just want to chime in to tell any prospective new Transferwise customer that my experience with the company has been dreadful. They can for no reason deactivate your account with funds still remaining. That’s not the problem though, it is that their appeals teams takes over 2 weeks to respond per message. Yep, waited 3 weeks to get an answer for deactivation. Another 3 weeks to convince them it was an error. Now it has been a month since I sent in my supporting documents and no reply yet. Think I might have to file a formal complaint at this point.
There's a softer version of this intuition: a guy who works for Transferwise would be more likely to write a blog post about something like this when it happened to him.
It's not noteworthy all of itself, things get unproportional amounts of attention all the time on the internet, but I find it interesting that this story then ended up on the very top of HN
To be a bit more cynical, every time I see those generic "change the world" and cheeky "office dogs" things listed as a reason to work there, I can't help think; "you really couldn't come up with any meaningful reasons to work there?"
Maybe I've already gone through enough shitty startups to not fall for it anymore, or maybe I'm just a cynical guy in general.
I understand the cynicism, but at this point, Transferwise isn't a scrappy startup and I can't see any reason why they'd want to pull off such a PR stunt. They're valued at $3.5B. $3.5B companies don't "fake lose" their wallets to get to the top of HN
Did not know this. Good to know. Given relative wealth and my own anecdotal experience in poorer countries I would think the opposite. Clearly, I am wrong.
A while ago, there was a fashion of making lost wallet studies around the world. It looks like every factor is more relevant than country (time of day, wallet stile, place, phone number being available, anything), except for those countries where people absolutely do not let things out of place and those where people think everything is a bomb.
Can you tell me how this constitutes as flame-bait? From my anecdotal experience I feel my comment is true. The comments in response to mine offer enlightening information to the contrary. I didn't post it to flame anything only to generate interesting responses.
I'll try to stop doing what I think you want but note that from my perspective, I just have a different perspective on certain things and I find it only worth saying things that are different or controversial rather than saying things everybody already agrees with. It's not necessarily purposely flame-baiting though differing opinions do tend to look that way as a side effect. I will admit I use sarcasm to illustrate some points, but I can stop that. Just note, that I'm not purposely flame-baiting anyone. I am literally just saying an opinion that I have that many people disagree with.
Not that my view holds any moderation weight, but for me (and as far as my up/down vote goes) that might've been fine if you'd expanded on it more, exactly what is 'only in rich countries' and how something's specifically different in not-rich countries, i.e. sharing some insight and adding something less low effort to the discussion.
'only in rich countries' on its own just reads like a Reddit-esque meme/jokey dismissal.
That's legitimate. I can agree with that and the downvote. But you realize that I was accused of flame baiting meaning I was accused of making up a statement purely for the purposes of inducing anger.
I would argue that clearly from the evidence in the responses, such a statement (while it did attract downvotes) did not attract flame and therefore was not "flame bait."
Since we're sharing, I lost my wallet in the park on the day before I had to hand in my thesis. When I realized it was gone, I just blocked my bank card, but otherwise I put it out of my mind because I was focused on last-minute changes. An hour later or so, the police called and told me that someone had handed it in and that I could pick it up at the station. I told them that I would do that the next day because my thesis deadline was more important. So they sent two officers to my address and and brought me my wallet. Talk about service!
Coincidentally, I was able to return four peoples' IDs and other cards just this afternoon. Yesterday I was walking in East Oakland and found a pile of credit cards, debit cards, and IDs. Oakland Police Department wouldn't take them so I brought them home and started googling names and addresses.
Of the four IDs I found three belonged to adults; the third was a state ID for a minor related to one of the adults. I was able to find a contact number for all three, via relatives, and had reached them all by afternoon.
I learned that the person who'd dumped the cards had committed a series of car break-ins in San Jose yesterday morning and had fled to Oakland. They stole purses, laptops, and an iPhone. I wish OPD had taken an interest in the theft or at least in returning the stolen property.
Why should the OPD bother chasing down purse thieves? How are they going to make money for the city by doing that, when they can go after people for speeding and parking violations instead and make lots of money?
I don't know why the guy is getting downvoted. It's a known city for having rather unpleasant police. Most of my friends who live in Oakland have really unpleasant experiences with their officers.
Fines are how many cities stay solvent. The job of police in America, therefore, is not to keep the peace and provide justice, it's to be tax collectors for the city.
Speeding tickets make sense. They're putting people's lives in danger by speeding. Driving is the most dangerous thing most people do regularly. Having a set of predictable behaviors saves a lot of lives. People who think that think they're "great drivers" or "everyone else is doing it" violate those norms and create risk.
> Speeding tickets make sense. They're putting people's lives in danger by speeding. Driving is the most dangerous thing most people do regularly. Having a set of predictable behaviors saves a lot of lives. People who think that think they're "great drivers" or "everyone else is doing it" violate those norms and create risk.
Speed at which you drive has very little to do with your predictability. "Oh, no, Betty is driving 5 mph faster than me. I'll never know what she'll do next!"
Even if you try to give an example of someone coming up on your left at a 50+mph difference, it's not an issue if you signal and look in your rear view mirror to make sure it's clear. Most people just don't do either.
"Even if you try to give an example of someone coming up on your left at a 50+mph difference"
70 mph in a school zone? Not an issue if you just look both ways before crossing the street!
Seriously (not that you sound very serious) every morning, I make a left turn out of my development onto a nominally 30 mph road where people go 40-45, and it's impossible to see very far to the left before pulling out. Given normal speeds, it is possible to make the turn before the oncoming car if they are just out of sight.
So if anyone is ever going 80 there at the wrong moment, it will be impossible to avoid them and probably lethal to one or both of us.
My example was mainly on a straight road because it's easy to understand. It applies to curvy roads where you won't see ahead too though. As someone driving, you should never drive faster than what you can see ahead and be able to stop in time. I kind of imagine what I'd like to call a "meteor" incident. Would I be able to stop in time if a meteor randomly crashed just outside of my vision ahead in a turn? If not - probably going too fast. (It's not uncommon to meet a "meteor" in the form of a car) One could call that "speeding" but that's not what it is colloquially. (Speeding to most is going 1+mph over the posted limit)
If the visibility is good, there's nothing wrong with going faster. Aggressive speed limits make more sense to be followed when there's very limited visibility, high chance of stops, people crossing the road, intersections, etc.
But if visibility is good, I don't see it making a difference much in what speed you're going.
"As someone driving, you should never drive faster than what you can see ahead and be able to stop in time. I kind of imagine what I'd like to call a "meteor" incident. Would I be able to stop in time if a meteor randomly crashed just outside of my vision ahead in a turn? If not - probably going too fast."
Seems like you've ignored what I just wrote in the previous comment. If I make a turn just as a car is barely out of sight, then at 40 mph there is just enough time to go before it hits me, assuming my car doesn't stall or something. If it is going much faster, say 80, then there would not be enough time. If I have no model of other drivers, and assume anything can happen outside my vision, which is what you seem to be expressing by the word "meteor" then there is no way I can make a turn in either direction safely at all, ever. The only way a person can deal with everyday situations is to assume roughly "normal" behavior (both in a social sense and in terms of physical law) and act accordingly.
In this case, you're the meteor and the other person is at fault. They turned a corner (I don't see how else they couldn't see the intersection - if it's a straight then they can see the intersection - thus my cornering talk) and went into an intersection where another car was already. It's no different than someone romping over a very steep hill (very prevalent in SF) and assuming the intersection they're running into is "clear". (It usually isn't!) It's not a thing they can do and they shouldn't do it.
Either way - sounds like a bad intersection and they should design it differently. (Turn on left with left arrow only, etc.)
"In this case, you're the meteor and the other person is at fault."
Ah, but I'm not. There's a lot of people who live in the same place I do, and they all have to come out of that road in the morning. It's very predictable, not like being hit by a meteor which billions of people have no experience with.
People can and should plan for people turning out of side streets.
A "meteor" would be a car making a turn and stalling right at that moment. Wanting to eliminate that sort of risk is probably related to the problems people are having developing software for self-driving cars.
> But if visibility is good, I don't see it making a difference much in what speed you're going.
Problem is, the speed limit is usually set with local factors in mind. I.e. if the speed limit doesn't make sense to you then the people who set the limit likely knew something you didn't.
Try driving in Finland, Sweden or Norway at dusk in the fall. That kind of attitude will often result in a white-tail or a moose through the front window. :D
I signalled and looked over my shoulder before changing lanes today, only to see an unexpected car right behind me when I looked back into my rear-view mirror. I'm still not sure whether they changed lanes into my lane, or if they were going so fast that they weren't in my field of vision until I turned back around. They braked in time, though.
Speeders, generally, don't care about their absolute speed. They only care about their speed relative to the people around them. They form packs which bunch up and then rotate positions and lanes while they overtake each other and occasionally people driving legally. All this massively increases the risk of crashes at deadly speeds. If they'd just go the posted limit there'd be far fewer bunches and far fewer lane changes.
Been there, in a different city, a few times. Police are somehow in collusion with the crime syndicate.
Don't trust police. Ever. All police are corrupt and can not be trusted. Are there exceptions? Only to the extent they don't actively commit crimes but stay silent and refuse to go against their criminal "brothers in blue". Which makes them complicit as well. As I just said, all police are corrupt. Including anyone replying to this to tell me they are the one exception.
The context is American police. Difference between American and foreign police is American police will shoot you for sport. Foreign police just want a bribe.
"Eschew flamebait. Don't introduce flamewar topics unless you have something genuinely new to say. Avoid unrelated controversies and generic tangents."
After OPD refused the IDs/cards I contacted a handful of local news outlets and explained the situation. One of them, ABC 7, began reaching out, possibly incessantly, to the media relations office at OPD.
By 4:30 PM today I had a text from one of the ABC 7 producers telling me the OPD media relations officer wanted to get in touch and including her desk phone number. When I spoke with her she apologized, acknowledged that procedure had not been followed, and told me they were in touch with SJPD regarding the break-ins. She also told me she would follow up with OPD leadership.
Not sure how applicable this strategy would be in other communities/countries but it appears to have worked for me. I'll also note that I reached out to the mayor's office before contacting news orgs and got no response.
Follow-up stupid American question - what's "bank cards"? Is it like a business cards with your banking information on it that you give to someone so they can send you money?
...it's a card that you use to pay for things in store, taking money from your bank and giving it to the store, and to get money from ATMs, taking money from your bank and giving it to you in cash.
I know for a fact you have them in the US. A 'debit card' maybe?
It uses the Visa or Mastercard payment networks, supports chip, contactless, swipe, or you can enter the numbers online, and also has useful information like your bank account number and routing number on. If you give other people that information they can pay you money even though you're not a store. Which is what happened here.
Yes it's like a debit card, and ATM card, and helpful reminder of your bank account details, all in one. And it's supported by Mastercard and Visa, so you can use it anywhere you can use a creditcard, even though it's not a creditcard.
That makes sense, the debit card will be EMV compatible so it'll need a number that's about 16 digits long, because that number needs to be unique compared to all the world's payment cards.
However most such (debit) cards in the UK have the associated account number and "sort code" in smaller type on them too. Certainly all the ones I've ever had are like this.
The bank account number is written on the card. European bank accounts make a lot more sense than in the US, your account number is a public number that can be used to receive money only and there is a transfer number for making payments.
> European bank accounts make a lot more sense than in the US, your account number is a public number that can be used to receive money only and there is a transfer number for making payments.
For the benefit of the non-US folk (including myself): it wouldn't be a good idea to reveal one's bank account number in the US because people can just pull money out from it with an account number?
In Czech Republic, during presidential elections, one of the participants (winner, Milos Zeman) opened a transparent as part of their marketing. That meant that every transaction was visible along with donor, amount and a short message.
Because Zeman is controversial person, it turned out badly. People started spamming it with lowest amount possible (about 0.01 CZK) and wrote funny messages. There were people selling their bike or computer, sending messages to their mother from a trip. Two people even played boats there [1]. Even ASCII Pikachu picture appeared there apparently [2].
Wouldn't it be much easier for the finder to just get in touch with the bank and ask them to notify the owner?
I once got a call/mail from my bank giving me the contact details of someone who had found my lost keys that had an RSA SecureID token generator thing on them and the finder called the hotline imprinted on it.
I don't remember much details around it since it happend in the mid 2000s.
No it wouldn't. Sending three or four transfers from mobile banking app is for sure faster than finding bank number, calling them, listening to the info that the conversation will be recorded, listening to the menu, then listening to music interrupted with "we will be with you shortly" etc. I guess I could send 20 transfers at least during this time.
A few weeks ago I found a working iPhone X on the side on the sidewalk. I thought about using siri to call a recent contact and try to get it back to the owner, but I found the language was set to Chinese (which I cannot read or speak) and I gave up and put it back on the sidewalk in case the owner came back.
In retrospect, I don't think I could have done anything even if the language was English apart from wait for the owner to call their phone. That said, I'm curious if anyone has any suggestions about how I could have been a better Samaritan.
You could have given it to some near by store saying someone dropped it and maybe he or she may come looking for it..
Long time ago, I came out from Denny's during lunch and just after walking on the right edge of the parking lot, found a bundle of 100 dollar bills. There were several restaurants in the same location. I walked into the same Dennys and gave it to the cashier saying I found it in the parking lot and probably belongs to someone who might have visited here and then left. Next day I get a call from Dennys saying the owner of the cash wants to thank you and reward you. I said thanks but not needed.
The "official" way of dealing with lost property in the UK is to take it to your local police station. If no-one claims it within 6 weeks, you might be able to keep the item. I certainly remember doing this a few times when younger. Not so sure many people know this nowadays.
Anyway, my mother lost her purse a few months back in the small town in Scotland where she lives. Someone suggested she try her local police station (actually not so local any more thanks to the current government having closed over 600 police stations[0]) and lo and behold someone had handed it in there!
Seems like the practice came to an end last year in England and Wales: "From 1 October, anyone who contacts the police about something they have lost will be redirected to private websites"[0].
I've found bank cards a few times and have called the bank in question, they've just thanked me, made a note of it, and asked me to destroy the card myself.
On the flip side, I knew a woman who started being stalked by her ex after they broke up. Even though he was blocked on everything he was sending her e-transfer requests with abusive stuff in the comments field.
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[ 3.4 ms ] story [ 314 ms ] thread> 403 Forbidden: The server understood the request, but is refusing to fulfill it.
Genuinely curious. Is this a UK thing or available everywhere?
US banking infrastructure is decades behind the rest of the world in many areas.
You can include a memo on a paper check though.
For bills that don't accept ACH bill pay (i.e. most smaller companies and utilities), banks will often print and mail payments via check for free (it just says "signature on file" on the printed check). Like I said, decades behind.
I pay our childminder by bank transfer. Its almost instant to do from my phone, free, and I just put the invoice number in the reference field. The idea that banks would print and post cheques is like something from the era of telegrams. So weirdly anachronistic.
The predecessor to this UK system was introduced in 1968.
(Usage by individuals to send money didn't really happen until online banking was introduced around 2000.)
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/BACS
https://www.usbank.com/online-mobile-banking/transfer-money....
This says I have to pay a fee, and then wait 2-3 days to send somebody money. That's not caused by "infrastructure" that's caused by greed in the absence of effective government to tell them to get their shit together.
Even better it tells me the size of that fee is included in a "Fee Guide" the link for which is a 404. Excellent work.
Is that in any way remarkable?!
On the other hand, ordering your bank to print a paper check, and send it through postal mail is free of charge.
If we're talking about SWIFT transfers, it's probably the same in Europe. The only difference is that in Europe there's SEPA, which is readily accessible by consumers, fast and cheap.
I don't do many though, other payment options are easier (e.g. authorize companies to just take recurring payments from my account).
Here in New Zealand you'd tend to get their bank account number and send them a (free) direct deposit through your bank's Internet banking service. Until very recently that was also the main payment method for our eBay auction site equivalent TradeMe (they've now started a sort of PayPal clone called Ping so that they can skim a little extra from each auction).
But I've heard people can potentially withdraw money from your account if they have your account number in the US?
Venmo mostly.
Venmo is amazing. It's so fast and practically everyone has it. It's the Google of payments. I wish New Zealand had something like that. Sending money to friends in NZ is slow and painful - not terribly so, but compared to Venmo they really are.
Banking still uses cheques, so you have Paypal, Venmo, CashApp and so on.
Public transport is bad or even non existent which is why Uber and Lift exist.
The programm of over-the-air TV sucks and you get Netflix, HBO, Hulu and so on.
Uber exists because taxis suck.
Cheques are safer and more portable than give me your bank account because you choose where to deposit.
Paypal is for websites no stores accept it and doesn't replace a cheque
Maybe it's different in the US, but I have a different account number for each of my bank accounts. So I can still choose where I want to deposit someone's money when I give them my account number, by choosing which account number I give to them. And no-one has to go to a bank.
Yes, it's an extra step, but you're already doing way more steps to cash a cheque than use a transfer service where you only give an account number and suddenly the money is there.
IMO, this sounds like a solution looking for a problem to me.
This is one of the reasons Paypay got so big so fast. There was a huge pent up demand for a wire transfer service that didn't suck. But then Paypal started to suck and people had to find something new.
This isn't true, each bank sets their own fees. It's true it's usually stupid expensive to send one, but none of my main banks charge to receive a wire.
For a long time I was confused by Americans raving about things like venmo or bitcoin talking about it making it cheap and easy to transfer money. Then I learnt more about the US banking system and it all made a lot more sense.
Planet Money did an episode all about it, featuring someone from the UK talking about our Faster Payments system, who is basically instant.
P.S. I have zero affiliation with the website or the owners/developers, I just thought it was entertaining.
0. http://www.vicemo.com/
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=BWFLztKBrLY
Some of them are fairly generic terms. I remember when this was posted[2] on HN (payment troubles caused by writing "Blue Sky" on the memo field in a check, because a company called "Blue Sky Industries" was caught doing business with Iran).
Supposedly Venmo will also flag your payment if you put "ISIS" or something like that in the description
[1]: https://www.treasury.gov/ofac/downloads/sdnlist.txt
[2]: http://anildash.com/2014/02/21/here_is_a_thing_that_happened...
Edit: actually the sibling comment’s suggestion (bill monthly) is probably better
I would not think twice about a cent, but people would definitely think twice about spamming a mailing list or sending newsletters to people that you know don't want them.
However, FB should have filters for those instead of grouping everyone in there.
It makes no sense that the person living in the same town as me with a genuine profile is in the same interface as accounts written in foreign languages with 1 friend and a creation date of two days ago.
I hate having to cancel cards. I'm still dealing with the echos of losing mine back in February[1] (right before moving!) and so I'm calling everyone in the group trying to get her contact info.
Turned out she hadn't even noticed it was gone yet.
[1] AT&T keeps silently cancelling my auto-pay on the new card and nobody can figure out why.
https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html
You think you would do something different here? And you have considered all the possible ramifications of doing so? No doubt you've considered the impact on the number of spammy/scammy interactions that everyone experiences, the number of harassing messages that people around the world receive and you've made an informed trade-off between that and meaningful social interactions people have with the folks who find their wallet.
Seems like a pretty strong statement to call it a dark pattern, implying malice, when it could just be a good thing.
FB probably already has data to know how much of a pervert someone is... if they linger on those beach pictures for too long, for example.
It _is_ a dark pattern. It prevents you from _knowing_ someone has messaged you. In 99,9% of cases you want to know someone sent you a message.
Facebook is a friend platform, not a stranger platform. Don't use it to message strangers, it's very explicitly not what the platform is designed for.
Sure, spam is a big problem, and that's why we've invented spam filters. Google was able to do that and it works well. Granted, Google is a huge company with lots of resources, but so is Facebook, so why can't they be bothered?
>Don't use it to message strangers, it's very explicitly not what the platform is designed for.
Wrong, it's designed to help people get in contact with each other. This doesn't mean everyone wants to be friends first before exchanging some messages.
I don't want unsolicited messages from people. It's bad enough for me on LinkedIn, where that's the whole point.
Not everyone uses the tool the same way you do.
If I don't want them to be Facebook friends, then I'll give them my email.
Of course. But Facebook isn't e-mail. A closed system that thrives on heavily weighted social graphs is just nothing like an open standard for arbitrary message exchange.
> Wrong, it's designed to help people get in contact with each other.
Based on what? Have you used Facebook? Everything they do is about building and establishing communities, that's their business and they know it. They do almost nothing to help strangers communicate one-off. We are literally in the middle of a discussion about how Facebook gives low priority to messages from strangers, which is evidence that they have this mentality.
Booting off the spammers seems like a much better idea to me.
I have, though, found a half dozen credit/debit cards in the past two years outside of any good place to leave them (parking lots/garages, streets, sidewalks...). I guess I'm a good-samaritan with a healthy dose of paranoia/skepticism/cynicism. When there's no obvious place that I think the owner will know to look, I tell someone I know that I found it, and promptly cut the card up into fine pieces, mix them, split the pieces into a few groups, and dispose of them in a 4+ trashcans in different locations (this is probably excessive, but my goal is to dispose of the card with as much caution as I would get rid of my own card if I knew it could still be charged to.)
I have weighed trying to return them, but I ended up triangulating against the chances I'll: waste time tracking down someone who has already canceled the card anyways, send the card to the wrong person, completely creep someone out by tracking them down, or get caught with a card that has been reported stolen and have a hard time proving I didn't steal it.
Keep a note with your email address in your wallet - clearly marked "wallet owner's email".
Paranoid version of the life lesson:
Keep a note with an anonymized email address, with forwarding set up for the message to go to your actual mailbox, in your wallet.
This! You never know.
The poor thing must have seen at least one bout of rain and a lot of sun judging by the ablated jacket. And it still works perfectly!
Why is that? What am I even supposed to do with 12 characters?
I never understood this.
It's a couple summers ago, at the height of the summer tourist season and I'm cycling up 4th ave SW in DC. Somewhere between the NASA HQ and the National Mall my camera bag - packed full with a fairly new DSLR, a few lenses, and a secondary cell phone - came unbuckled from my messenger bag and tumbled to the sidewalk. Probably a few thousand dollars of gear, not counting the considerable hassle of resetting 2fa and credentials for every possible account that could be tied to my phone (it was password-locked but I have no idea how well that would survive a determined attack).
I was booking it pretty hard trying to catch a metro, so I didn't notice the loss for a couple more blocks. After the only genuinely involuntary (and painful!) facepalm I've ever given myself, I hurried back home (lived in town close by) and immediately started cancelling every account when my main cell phone rang. The bag was waiting for me, all contents undisturbed and intact, in a hotel lobby a couple blocks away. An anonymous samaritan had picked it up, brought it in and gave it to the concierge without a word, then walked away. Concierge called me using my contact info in a business card that was also in the bag.
In one instant, some unsung karmic superhero single-handedly erased the work of several hundred asshole double parking jobs.
Perfect balance. Yin and yang.
It's possible the person who recovered it saw it fall, but they didn't explain their actions or even identify themselves.
If the item is not hidden, not obviously suspicious, and is typical of the environment in which it was found, then it's unlikely to be a threat and can be inspected further.
Unattended bags are found all the time. There's no need for the military to be called in for all (or even most) of them. And even then, that's mostly the responsibility of the police than the armed forces.
How often do the bags turn out to be bombs? never?
1: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_terrorist_incidents_in...
There may be a handful of other places with ‘unattended baggage’ policies, but there is definitely nothing illegal about dropping your bag.
Funny you should ask. A few years back my wife and I were stuck in Reagan (an airport in D. C.) for a super-long layover. As I'm watching my first ever episode of Archer, I notice the family a row over gets up and walks down the concourse, leaving their bags. Now, I've heard a bit of their conversations as I've sat there, and I gather they're American and probably self-centered and clueless. Or maybe that's what the terrorists that just walked away from their explosives want me to think. Regardless, we're sitting at the gate and there's a gate agent right there, so I put this in the "not my job anymore" bucket.
It's been a few years, but I'll bet it was at least ten minutes before the agent called security. It was long enough that I was about to get up and ask, "ya know, I'm not the super-paranoid type, but don't you think you ought to give the dog a little practice sniffing bags?" The dog and an agent or two show up, give the bags a sniff, and wait for the owners to return. I was disappointed that there wasn't at least a little ass-chewing. I mean, what U. S. resident doesn't know not to do that? And if they don't, how about driving that lesson home?
But anyway, we don't get too worked up about a random bag lying around. Because in the U. S., thus far it hasn't been shown that it stands much of a chance of blowing up. My sympathy to countries that have not been so lucky.
Deciding I might be a terrorist because I went to the bathroom? That's what is absolutely batshit insane.
Yeah that's the argument. Someone's gonna plant the explosives while I'm in the bathroom.
You know what? That's never going to happen, it's never happened, and it's a crazy thing to imagine would ever happen. It's just hysterical paranoia and fearmongering to go on about someone planting a suitcase full of explosives in another suitcase in plain view of everyone during a few minutes when some guy is in the bathroom.
This fear and paranoia is actively harming society. Parents won't let their children walk to school or a friends house or play in the yard because they are convinced the children will be abducted by a mad kidnapper. So their kids become waddling obese paranoid kids fixed on their screens, depressed, miserable, high blood pressure, having been raised in a culture of fear, years shaved off their lives from the stress.
All these irrational things, none based on facts or reasonable threat assessment, are actively harming society, and the people pushing this fear are doing it intentionally. But to what aim?
No, because you left a container large enough to hold a fair amount of explosives, a container that has been used in other parts of the world at airports to detonate explosives, and you just walked away from it. Tell me what you believe to be the sane response. But if you just want to go take a shit, by all means, do so.
And I'm with sibling comment: I don't let my bags out of my sight.
I think fretting over a bag past that point is a little much. Frankly, the crowded snaking lines leading up to the TSA are where one should be concerned.
Those suitcases full of explosives you are hallucinating about? Has NEVER HAPPENED.
> United Airlines Flight 629, registration N37559, was a Douglas DC-6B aircraft also known as "Mainliner Denver", which was blown up with a dynamite bomb placed in the checked luggage on November 1, 1955. - https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/United_Airlines_Flight_629
> An explosion at the New Tokyo International Airport (later renamed Narita International Airport) occurred on Sunday, 23 June 1985 at 06:19 UTC, killed two baggage handlers, and injured four. The bomb was intended for Air India Flight 301, with 177 passengers and crew on board, bound for Don Mueang International Airport in Bangkok, Thailand. - https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/1985_Narita_International_Ai...
Not recent, but not “NEVER”.
Also you got 1955 and 1985. 64 and 34 years ago. Checked luggage wasn't even inspected back then. It is now. Still stuff gets through.
Are you arguing here that we shouldn't have checked luggage? Those are your examples. Checked luggage. Not unattended luggage, which almost certainly has already been inspected anyway when going through security. What now? Do we ban checked luggage and carry on luggage even after both have been inspected?
I love all the downvotes from the haters and the crazy supposed examples that prove my point for me. Facts and reality are not important. What's important is hysteria and fearmongering, and to shut up anyone that talks rational sense or is interested in a reality based approach to threat management.
what i would have liked to have read is something like "while uber low probability, i figured it'd be best to deal with this immediately" or "i knew the probability that this is a bomb was so low as to be statistically impossible, so i just ignored it", not the weird hedged middle road
That's obviously not true. If it was the case, the Paris subway would forever be stopped.
What is true is that in France when someone reports an abandoned bag in a public place in the main cities, it will systematically be considered as suspect. It means that someone will first go visually inspect it. If it is deemed to present a risk, a detection dog will be brought. Then, if the detection dog smells something, it will be safely handled by the police bomb disposal unit. Thankfully - it turns a half an hour top operation into a significantly longer one - it is very rare to need to destroy a bag.
Also it is absolutely not illegal to check a lost wallet (or a lost bag actually) in France.
https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html
After the 2015 attacks one would guess. For a millenium at least, and well up into the early 21st century, a bag in public place in France it was just a bag -- and people could return it.
I'm pretty sure that's the case now too -- it's only "deemed to be a bomb" if it looks suspicious and somebody calls the cops. I'm sure people lose/forget bags with the same frequency in France as elsewhere, and the military/cops are not involved in the majority of cases...
That has nothing to do with the country. In my hometown in Germany nobody would steal anything, but in São Paolo I saw lots of pickpockets in the tourist destinations I visited.
That's highly depends on exactly _where_ in Brazil you are, time of day, your looks, general luck and many other factors. In may places you are likely to 'forcefully' lose your wallet, cellphone, car and if you are very lucky, that's all you'll lose. You can be encouraged to make a trip to the nearest ATM or even your house. Hopefully you will be alone and there won't be anyone else that can be used as leverage.
Source: have been robbed at gunpoint on several occasions. In one of them, they were discussing whether or not I should be shot. After smashing the driver's side window, while I was at a stop light. Thankfully I only had to clean up a small amount of blood from my car. On another, I was at a police station, was asked to go to a site of a police shooting to try to identify the crooks that had been shot (and were now deceased). Turns out that there was a separate event, not even 15 minutes apart a few blocks away, also two guys on a motorcycle. Those were not the crooks I was looking for, those got... caught.
That was all in a state capital, not in the middle of nowhere. Population equivalent to almost 3 San Franciscos added together.
You should be thankful of your luck.
I left Australia 🇦🇺
Guess where this will never happen? Hong Kong where I live now but where people are now afraid to visit because they think it's Syria.
I've been to HK, it's ok to visit, living there though is a different matter entirely, sure I may not get robbed at gunpoint but between China and air pollution I will find somewhere else thanks.
Australia is a really safe place by comparison to nearly anywhere else.
1) If someone on the street approaches you, they are probably up to something.
2) If you randomly select someone on the street you have probably picked a moral and upstanding person who would love to do you a good turn.
Because of (1) people tend to be a lot more defensive than they need to be when assessing what the average stranger is likely to do.
I am nervous with one other person in my subway car.
I feel completely safe with 5+ unrelated people in my subway car.
You can add a few more layers like seeking out someone in a uniform or who has a stroller, but generally speaking most people minding their own business are perfectly safe.
http://clevernevergoes.org/
Honest grown-ups will be annoyed that a lost child refuses to come with them to the obvious "lost children" place, but they'll put up with it while somebody tries to figure out where the people responsible for that child are. Somebody with nefarious motives will probably need to take the child somewhere else though - by refusing to go they're protected.
tl;dr for the rest: it means: "Never go anywhere unless it was planned beforehand".
My son was always hyper social. (I have no idea where he got that from.) Would walk up to any one, everyone and start a convo.
While it's fantastic that my son was so open, trusting, there is still a risk. A little girl two grades ahead of him was abducted and then found dead on a beach. (Oak Harbor WA, should any one want to dox me.)
When I moved to New Zealand it was the opposite. There is more interaction with "regular" people. They are helping me or asking for help.
TBH, whoever took it deserved it, it was the smoothest thing ever. I had friends with me all standing around and nobody saw it get taken.
I didn't want to call them myself or whatever because I was homeless and I knew I was automatically suspect as a thief because of it. So I wanted someone the world would trust/believe to deal with it.
Well before I was homeless, attempts to return wallets or found ID cards or whatever were consistently met with suspicion. One woman tried to run from me and my husband on the assumption that we were up to no good for trying to catch her because we happened to see her drop her wallet just before she got in her car. But, obviously, we must have been muggers or something. No other explanation was possible in her mind.
The one I found was left in a drive thru on a Saturday morning. The branch was open, so I walked in and dropped it off. I have no idea what the bank did after that.
I once left mine at an ATM, the bank cancelled the card and issued a new one before I even realized I'd left it behind.
Edited: Added “up” after “brought it”.
Modern railway trains use electronically controlled doors. Rather than needing a team of people to run along checking every door on the train is closed and locked, or just hoping nobody falls out of a moving train, the doors are powered and when instructed will close and lock. The doors can't close instantly of course and so the procedure will be that the guard or driver presses a button, there's a brief warning period and then doors try to close and lock, once all doors are successfully closed and locked you're clear to drive the train away.
In the UK it turns out that there were two ways to implement this functionality, some train manufacturers used one, some the other. One way goes like this, when the button is pressed:
1. "Door Open" buttons for passengers are disabled 2. All open doors sound an alarm (typically fast bleeping) 3. Wait a few seconds 4. All doors that are still open try to close
The other way goes like this:
1. All open doors sound an alarm 2. Wait a few seconds 3. "Door Open" disabled 4. Try to close any open doors
This second order feels pretty similar, it's likely only a few geeks even noticed it was different and nobody made a big fuss about it. Until there was an accident and then the accident investigators discovered it.
A passenger realised very late that they were at their destination, unknown to them when they pressed "Door Open" in fact the train's crew had just told the system to close all doors for departure and it was in that waiting period. On their train, the "Open" buttons were not disabled during that period. Now the passenger's door was open, but it had missed that "alarm" phase, so there was no warning anything was amiss. The passenger tried to step through the door, but at that moment the timer expired and the door closed on them, trapping IIRC an article of clothing and resulting in a dragging accident when the train departed.
All affected trains needed revised firmware to enforce the correct order of events now that it was apparent to everybody that there even _was_ a correct order of events.
Your account of the train incident is heart-breaking, but further solidifies my desire to have mandatory best practices that are evidence-based and have sufficient consensus for user interfaces that have harmful failure modes. On top of these best practices, there also needs to be a ramp plan from the any status quo interface that is nonconformant to the final version through as many intermediate designs as necessary to deal with ingrained user behaviour and ingrained user expectations.
1. Eve spies on Alice as she enters her PIN into the ATM.
2. As Alice takes her money, Eve taps her on the shoulder and gives her a 10$ bill, explaining that it fell down to the floor when Alice didn't notice.
3. Mallory uses the distraction to swipe Alice's card from the ATM without her noticing. Now Mallory and Eve have both the card and the PIN and can empty the account.
Dropped a credit card at TSA checkin a year ago, had it pointed out by the person behind me.
Found an out-of-state drivers' license a couple of years ago while running, got in touch through LinkedIn, handed it off at a Starbucks the next day.
Found a wallet at a Starbucks within the last year, called the guy at the business card number, left it at the front desk of my building.
But then I have the advantage of you by eight years...
A pretty well known German performer was also on the flight with his companion and - I assume - his favorite microphone.
The gentleman was meticulously polite, including the fact that he queued up at the gate instead of jumping the queue with about a dozen economy passengers in the queue.
Not every prominent person is an asshole.
Our instinct is to make assumptions like 'rich so asshole', and there may be correlations between some of those categories and rate of occurrence of good and bad, but the differences are small compared to the normal panoply of personality types.
He said, “Oh, like you’re doing now?”
I was taken aback, and all I could say was “Huh?” but he kept cutting me off and going “huh? huh? huh?” and closing his hand shut in front of my face. I walked away and continued with my shopping, and I heard him chuckle as I walked off. When I came to pay for my stuff up front I saw him trying to walk out the doors with like fifteen Milky Ways in his hands without paying.
The girl at the counter was very nice about it and professional, and was like “Sir, you need to pay for those first.” At first he kept pretending to be tired and not hear her, but eventually turned back around and brought them to the counter.
When she took one of the bars and started scanning it multiple times, he stopped her and told her to scan them each individually “to prevent any electrical infetterence,” and then turned around and winked at me. I don’t even think that’s a word. After she scanned each bar and put them in a bag and started to say the price, he kept interrupting her by yawning really loudly.
Oh, and never read about your heroes!
Edit: just -> judge. Damn auto-correct!
When I was a little kid, I was on Crete with my mother, and at some point she asked me to watch her bag while she bought did something for a few minutes, probably buying food. So I was sitting there, with my knee on the bag, not actively watching it, I rather took in the surroundings. Some older Greek farmer type guy started to point at the bag, trying to get my attention, and I thought he wanted to remind me to really "watch" the bag, being a patronizing adult. No other explanation was possible in my mind. So without really looking at him or the bag, I was like "I know, it's fine, I got this, leave me alone". He did after a short while.
When my mother returned, she noticed the pomegranate the man had placed on the bag.. which is what he had pointed at. I was so ashamed.
This was, of course, mainly an exercise in sharing Landmark.
Out in the country, I'd likely be more receptive.
That was over an hour of my life wasted and the company didn't seem to be grateful, hopefully the owner was...I will return things if found, just a bit more jaded about it.
I've tried to return stuff via my police precinct. Couldn't be bothered.
I once returned a wallet via a "I Saw You" style personal ad in our local arts paper. (One of his frat brothers saw the ad and posted it on his door. Result!)
I've returned a few phones. Because they've been locked, I had to wait until someone calls (answer) or texts it (quickly write down number, then use my own phone to call back).
Phones need a "I found this lost phone" feature on the lock screen.
In the end I didn't find him and left the toy on a counter, hoping he'd find it. The whole thing bummed me out. My own kid's lost a few toys and I know how devastating it can be. Granted I was sleep deprived and emotional, but it put a damper on my day nonetheless.
Everyone I know who's worked in restaurants or as a delivery driver tips very well. In my limited experience, teachers make some of the best parents when it comes to student interaction and parent participation.
I'd bet whoever found the wallet had lost their own at some point. Empathy is a powerful, powerful thing. I wish that more people would recognize that and work to instill it in their children.
As most of the things inside the wallet can be replaced in a couple of days (bank card, and some ID's), I did not worry that much. But, a nice guy from the neighboring office took the high road by calling the contact point of my office, which ended up in my boss hand.
faith in humanity restored. :-)
Someone called her with her SL card (worth around 100$), and the business kept her card and verified her identity when she called.
Clothing items are constantly being lost and left in-place mostly during winter, some might be relatively expensive
I asked a couple different friends about this, and they said that often when people see something that looks like it was lost, they will place it up somewhere more conspicuous right be where they found it, so that hopefully whomever lost it can more easily find it.
I always thought that was a little bit of a nice touch of humanity, even if it doesn't take a lot of extra effort to do.
Luckily for me, a kind stranger found the wallet and sent me an email and I had my wallet the next day.
In one of these stops, probably due to the stress and rush, we left her handbag behind. We noticed when we got to the courthouse (with around twenty minutes left until it closed). This not only implied losing her credit cards, house keys, healthcare card, some money and her phone, but also her ID card which was needed for the paperwork in court. The deadline for the procedure was the next day so we might still have a chance by going to the police and asking for a temporary ID or something, but I'm not even totally sure it would be possible, and in any case it would have been an absolute mess and we would have spent the next morning running here and there.
One or two minutes after we realized the handbag was missing and we were feeling like crap and powerless to do anything, my phone rings. Someone had used my partner's phone [1] to call her mother (because "Mama" is usually a reliable contact, I guess) and she told them to call me. I met the finders in a nearby square five minutes later. They returned everything, and refused any compensation. We completed the paperwork in time that day.
They will probably never know how big a favor they did to us (of course returning cards, phone, money, ID, etc. is always a big favor, but in this case it was even more important than normal due to the court issue, having very little time due to a newborn baby, etc.) and how grateful we are.
[1] In case you are wondering, indeed she didn't have her phone locked with a PIN number, pattern or similar... I know, this goes against every security recommendation. It's just laziness. In this case, it probably helped by accelerating the return, though.
Make whatever the local emergency phone call is (112 or 911 whatever) which will work if the phone can figure out any way to make that call (e.g. it works if you have no credit on a PAYG phone or the "right" network isn't available)
OR
Display the information and list of contacts, then make calls to any of the contacts just as if the phone wasn't locked by its owner.
I wouldn't expect a random person to necessarily know this will work, but I expect police lost+found departments know it exists and maybe other types of emergency responder would know or at least won't be scared of pressing "emergency" on somebody's phone.
Mine gives my first name, and contacts for some close friends.
All the replies are people contrasting shitty experiences they've had with their own wallets and money transfer services.
His top pinned tweet is:
> Reasons to work at @TransferWise:
> 1. Irreversibly change the world of finance to be fairer
> 2. Excellent office dogs [video of cute dogs running around]
I mean, I'd love this to be true, but the coincidences are uncanny.
Some percentage of those people who deal with this stuff on a weekly or monthly basis will say "yeah, this is f'd, there must be a better way..."
But this may be more commonly known 'hack' in the UK with their banking system than it appears.
Marketing for what?
Let's just enjoy nice stories that we come across.
A viral tweet like this could land him 5 minute segments on any number of local-news stations that need a feel-good piece. He'll then have the opportunity to talk about his company.
And followers. As this tweet makes it's rounds through the media, he'll get more. He can then use that following to promote his business.
It opened the door for people to openly bash their existing bank or financial provider, and he (and his company) didn't have to say ANYTHING - their followers did it for them.
AND... a bank card without a name on it of any kind? A wallet without any identifiable information? No license, no other credit cards, no shopper cards, not a business card???? Nothing?
Who would think, I'm going to start a chain of 1 penny transaction to contact this person at this bank account, and hope they get them before they cancel their bank account because they lost their wallet.
And is this a wallet with cash and a single card with no identifiable information on it? NOTHING else?
EDIT: Because I can't reply below: because they have access to that bank account now. Pretty simple. The card in question is said to have their banking info right on the card, so you close that account and start a new one.
reply to your edit: (btw, you can click on the timestamp of a comment and reply directly, always) … That's not how it works. If you loose a card, you let the bank deactivate the specific card. The account itself is not permanently compromised by a card. Someone else knowing your "banking info" (= account number) doesn't mean much and is not a reason to close an account.
Option 2: Work out where my nearest police station is, and what time it's open, go to it, wait, fill out whatever crap they make me fill out.
Option 3: Work out where the nearest branch is to me, what time its open, go along, queue up, explain the situation, hope they can do something.
Have you ever considered that most countries don't have banking systems as ass-backwards as the US does?
EDIT: spelling + I did pin the tweet about transferwise after it blew up, and I also changed my bio to share my small side project: Podmast.com - check it out :)
I'm not saying I think it's fake, but I think it might be. Extraordinary claims require extraordinary evidence, and posting a defense isn't evidence.
Edit: I wondered if I got this slogan right, and it turns out to have a name - The Sagan Standard! https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sagan_standard
Speaking of cynicism, this argument is known as an Ad Hominem Circumstantial:
https://www.logicallyfallacious.com/tools/lp/Bo/LogicalFalla...
Anyone can conveniently lose a wallet, but one with a bank card with no identifying info in it anywhere? A finder who went to bizarre lengths to make Faster transactions to your bank account to send you a message? Absolutely no other identifying information in the wallet? A plan to ride a jump bike around to prove you looked for it with receipts?
Before sending someone pennies with context in the transactions, hoping that person would get them before they canceled all their bank accounts because they lost their wallet, I would just take the card to the bank and have them call the owner, or take it to the police and they'd do the same.
Uhg, sorry, "I ensure you" and "jump bike receipts" is not enough to convince me.
EDIT: Removed the quotes from Faster, my point seemed to get lost because of that.
1. https://www.moneysavingexpert.com/news/2014/11/customers-bei...
All fixable, but payroll companies are generally chosen on price, not innovation.
If you're like "Oops, that's gone" and it fell into a waterfall or something then, sure, you cancel it and have a replacement sent, but say you just got back from the store and it isn't in your wallet. You call a modern bank. "Hi, I think I lost my card maybe?" Good chance they say - "OK, we'll freeze the card, call us if you find it or if you give up and we'll send a new one".
I'd suggest calling or sending it to the bank instead. I'm sure they can find its owner with a lot less hassle than this.
That would also mean someone can send you money if your card is blocked or cancelled. Account number and sort code don't change when you get a new card.
Also, "Faster Payments" is the name of the normal system to transfer money between accounts in the UK. It doesn't cost the sender anything other than the money they send. It's called "faster" because the old system was a lot slower (because it was based on paper I think?).
Do some other UK banks really print the account numbers on their cards? Or is there some way to send a Faster payment to a debit card number?
Edit: Maybe also Monzo, no account number on that one.
The 2-3 days got the old system will have been a limitation of batch based computer processing from that time, and maybe moving the magnetic tapes around.
The cost of getting this wrong is much higher than the benefit of getting it right, and in our experience the probability is higher too.
https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html
Whichever way your story went, thanks for the neat tale of what can be done with bank transfers! Glad it worked out.
Also, there are people on HN who do marketing for a living (checks business cards including me?), and to the extent that you model someone as going into their planning meeting with "OK guys I have this great idea for how to hit our Q4 numbers: lets do stealthmarketing on our personal Twitter accounts", you should know that that would not receive the reply "Genius Bob, why do we employ teams of expensive professionals to do this when you come up with such pearls of wisdom for free."
Mentioning this half because excessive cynicism is a failure mode for geeks and half because many people on HN will, at some point in their life, actually have to get good at causing people to adopt a product or service, and HNers should correct the mental model that would suggest that this is in any way aimed at or effective at causing adoption of a product or service.
It's vastly less complicated to just assume and assert that everything is bullshit everywhere, all the time, than to actually try to discern where cynicism and optimism are each warranted.
Or maybe it's a natural adaptation to a world where almost everybody seems to have some ulterior motive.
Edit: a word
I think you mean ulterior motive :)
I'm not sure that's reflexive cynicism.
I've seen that type of cynicism and it is ugly. It's also ugly to assume there are never ulterior motives, or to disparage someone for questioning something.
I've found that just as there is reflexive cynicism designed to feel superior, there's also reflexive anger to people who go against the current.
floatrock provided evidence and reasoning as to why he questions the validity of this event. He never put blanked statements and didn't even accuse the event of being fake. He merely pointed out it might be.
Your comment is something I'd think of as reflexive anger toward cynicism. There wasn't any real weighing of evidence or deep consideration. Just a general dislike toward cynicism.
BTW: I understand the word reflexive to mean: without thought and consideration, automatic and many times pre-programmed (i.e. prejudicial either toward cynicism or against it)
I feel like this is a debate-team style nuance that doesn’t really have merit in actual conversations.
If somebody tells me a story about their day, and I respond “well, it’s possible that you made all that up, and this is all a ruse to trick me”, I’ve not accused them of making it up, I’ve just pointed out it’s possible. But I’ve implied an accusation, otherwise I’d not have gone out of my way to announce this “possibility”.
And, as noted in your comment, you then do directly accuse the reply of being “reflexive anger towards cynicism”, with the implication that the audience is required to provide “deep consideration” when responding to the possibility. If the original comment is just pointing out something that could potentially be true, without any accusation, why are the rest of us required to give it deep consideration?
Can’t I just respond “well it’s possible you’re fake!”? To which the original commenter could retort “no, you’re fake!” And then we go back and forth forever, secure in the knowledge that it’s impossible to totally prove the voracity of any story. That would lead to a lot of comments back and forth, but it seems unlikely any of them would lead to meaningful/productive discussion.
Except your example is not very compatible.
First, by making it a direct accusation, instead of 2 third parties discussing someone else. If I said it directly to you, you'd be correct in the accusation bit. Situations will make the same words have very different interpretations.
Second, and most importantly, your example has no reason. It's just doubt for doubts sake. That's the definition of reflexive. floatrock isn't just saying 'it's possible you made it up'. But, 'hey look, climate deniers are funded by big oil, maybe they are biased/not honest'. Conflict of interest is a REASON for doubting.
floatrock did provide reason for his doubt in the form of the exposure of a conflict of interest. Which is why I felt his comment was good. He even showed the doubt in a conscientious, non aggressive way. I actually don't agree that it was a PR stunt. But putting out relevant information, like conflicts of interest, should be relevant to all thinking people.
Next, you are welcome to provide a REASON for why it isn't a PR stunt. Personally, I think such a PR stunt would have marginal benefits toward the KPIs for transfer wise. Their small team would probably be better served on other things than this PR thing, if it was that. So I personally don't think it was a PR stunt. But that's beside the point. The point I was making: Reflexive statements suck, whether reflexively cynical, or reflexively sheepish, and I felt the person making the 'reflexive' accusation was unintentionally ironic.
The fact that you are ignoring the 'reasoning' element, makes the word 'reflexive' not seem relevant, when it is.
You can't prove anything definitively, but you can provide evidence to further an idea or not.
Evidence, reasoning... that's where the in-depth comes from. I would hope that's required on both sides.
Maybe I've already gone through enough shitty startups to not fall for it anymore, or maybe I'm just a cynical guy in general.
https://www.npr.org/2019/06/20/734141432/what-dropping-17-00...
We detached this subthread from https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=21263246 and marked it off-topic.
I'll try to stop doing what I think you want but note that from my perspective, I just have a different perspective on certain things and I find it only worth saying things that are different or controversial rather than saying things everybody already agrees with. It's not necessarily purposely flame-baiting though differing opinions do tend to look that way as a side effect. I will admit I use sarcasm to illustrate some points, but I can stop that. Just note, that I'm not purposely flame-baiting anyone. I am literally just saying an opinion that I have that many people disagree with.
'only in rich countries' on its own just reads like a Reddit-esque meme/jokey dismissal.
I would argue that clearly from the evidence in the responses, such a statement (while it did attract downvotes) did not attract flame and therefore was not "flame bait."
"You have a collect call from 'GAME IS OVER PICK ME UP MOM THANKS'. Would you accept the call?"
https://youtu.be/jWPlfWwgFKI
Of the four IDs I found three belonged to adults; the third was a state ID for a minor related to one of the adults. I was able to find a contact number for all three, via relatives, and had reached them all by afternoon.
I learned that the person who'd dumped the cards had committed a series of car break-ins in San Jose yesterday morning and had fled to Oakland. They stole purses, laptops, and an iPhone. I wish OPD had taken an interest in the theft or at least in returning the stolen property.
Sadly, in California most theft is merely a misdemeanor, and busy PDs do not have time to chase down criminals to give them a ticket.
But they sure do like camping out all the time to give people speeding and parking tickets. Priorities!
https://www.ktvu.com/news/oakland-police-average-30-million-...
I tell them: At least it's not Vallejo. https://www.theguardian.com/us-news/2019/jun/12/willie-mccoy...
Fines are how many cities stay solvent. The job of police in America, therefore, is not to keep the peace and provide justice, it's to be tax collectors for the city.
Speed at which you drive has very little to do with your predictability. "Oh, no, Betty is driving 5 mph faster than me. I'll never know what she'll do next!"
Even if you try to give an example of someone coming up on your left at a 50+mph difference, it's not an issue if you signal and look in your rear view mirror to make sure it's clear. Most people just don't do either.
70 mph in a school zone? Not an issue if you just look both ways before crossing the street!
Seriously (not that you sound very serious) every morning, I make a left turn out of my development onto a nominally 30 mph road where people go 40-45, and it's impossible to see very far to the left before pulling out. Given normal speeds, it is possible to make the turn before the oncoming car if they are just out of sight.
So if anyone is ever going 80 there at the wrong moment, it will be impossible to avoid them and probably lethal to one or both of us.
If the visibility is good, there's nothing wrong with going faster. Aggressive speed limits make more sense to be followed when there's very limited visibility, high chance of stops, people crossing the road, intersections, etc.
But if visibility is good, I don't see it making a difference much in what speed you're going.
Seems like you've ignored what I just wrote in the previous comment. If I make a turn just as a car is barely out of sight, then at 40 mph there is just enough time to go before it hits me, assuming my car doesn't stall or something. If it is going much faster, say 80, then there would not be enough time. If I have no model of other drivers, and assume anything can happen outside my vision, which is what you seem to be expressing by the word "meteor" then there is no way I can make a turn in either direction safely at all, ever. The only way a person can deal with everyday situations is to assume roughly "normal" behavior (both in a social sense and in terms of physical law) and act accordingly.
Either way - sounds like a bad intersection and they should design it differently. (Turn on left with left arrow only, etc.)
Ah, but I'm not. There's a lot of people who live in the same place I do, and they all have to come out of that road in the morning. It's very predictable, not like being hit by a meteor which billions of people have no experience with.
People can and should plan for people turning out of side streets.
A "meteor" would be a car making a turn and stalling right at that moment. Wanting to eliminate that sort of risk is probably related to the problems people are having developing software for self-driving cars.
Problem is, the speed limit is usually set with local factors in mind. I.e. if the speed limit doesn't make sense to you then the people who set the limit likely knew something you didn't.
Try driving in Finland, Sweden or Norway at dusk in the fall. That kind of attitude will often result in a white-tail or a moose through the front window. :D
See:
> But if visibility is good, I don't see it making a difference much in what speed you're going.
Been there, in a different city, a few times. Police are somehow in collusion with the crime syndicate.
Don't trust police. Ever. All police are corrupt and can not be trusted. Are there exceptions? Only to the extent they don't actively commit crimes but stay silent and refuse to go against their criminal "brothers in blue". Which makes them complicit as well. As I just said, all police are corrupt. Including anyone replying to this to tell me they are the one exception.
https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html
After OPD refused the IDs/cards I contacted a handful of local news outlets and explained the situation. One of them, ABC 7, began reaching out, possibly incessantly, to the media relations office at OPD.
By 4:30 PM today I had a text from one of the ABC 7 producers telling me the OPD media relations officer wanted to get in touch and including her desk phone number. When I spoke with her she apologized, acknowledged that procedure had not been followed, and told me they were in touch with SJPD regarding the break-ins. She also told me she would follow up with OPD leadership.
Not sure how applicable this strategy would be in other communities/countries but it appears to have worked for me. I'll also note that I reached out to the mayor's office before contacting news orgs and got no response.
I know for a fact you have them in the US. A 'debit card' maybe?
It uses the Visa or Mastercard payment networks, supports chip, contactless, swipe, or you can enter the numbers online, and also has useful information like your bank account number and routing number on. If you give other people that information they can pay you money even though you're not a store. Which is what happened here.
I didn't know that bank account number was writen on it in Europe, thanks for the info.
However most such (debit) cards in the UK have the associated account number and "sort code" in smaller type on them too. Certainly all the ones I've ever had are like this.
For the benefit of the non-US folk (including myself): it wouldn't be a good idea to reveal one's bank account number in the US because people can just pull money out from it with an account number?
Because Zeman is controversial person, it turned out badly. People started spamming it with lowest amount possible (about 0.01 CZK) and wrote funny messages. There were people selling their bike or computer, sending messages to their mother from a trip. Two people even played boats there [1]. Even ASCII Pikachu picture appeared there apparently [2].
[1]: https://1gr.cz/fotky/bulvar/19/041/anime/KIT7a6caf_imgbauer_... [2]: https://1gr.cz/fotky/bulvar/19/041/anime/KIT7a6caf_imgbauer_...
EDIT: Transparent account was apparently mandatory for every candidate by law.
I once got a call/mail from my bank giving me the contact details of someone who had found my lost keys that had an RSA SecureID token generator thing on them and the finder called the hotline imprinted on it.
I don't remember much details around it since it happend in the mid 2000s.
In retrospect, I don't think I could have done anything even if the language was English apart from wait for the owner to call their phone. That said, I'm curious if anyone has any suggestions about how I could have been a better Samaritan.
Then what?
(It's the Chinese greeting when picking up the phone)
Long time ago, I came out from Denny's during lunch and just after walking on the right edge of the parking lot, found a bundle of 100 dollar bills. There were several restaurants in the same location. I walked into the same Dennys and gave it to the cashier saying I found it in the parking lot and probably belongs to someone who might have visited here and then left. Next day I get a call from Dennys saying the owner of the cash wants to thank you and reward you. I said thanks but not needed.
The "official" way of dealing with lost property in the UK is to take it to your local police station. If no-one claims it within 6 weeks, you might be able to keep the item. I certainly remember doing this a few times when younger. Not so sure many people know this nowadays.
Anyway, my mother lost her purse a few months back in the small town in Scotland where she lives. Someone suggested she try her local police station (actually not so local any more thanks to the current government having closed over 600 police stations[0]) and lo and behold someone had handed it in there!
[0] https://www.thetimes.co.uk/article/600-police-stations-shut-...
I think my father managed to find the owner from the wallet's contents in the end.
[0] https://news.sky.com/story/43-police-forces-in-england-and-w...
Yeah, whatever. But I apparently also need a cookie or something to see what this is about, so no thank you.