Depending on the union contract UPS drivers have to pay for damages to their trucks, but the UPS drivers also get things like the ability to retire with a full pension and health insurance after 20 years. Now this just changed and they added that you had to be older than 57 to retire. I just had a conversation with a guy griping that he had to wait another 10 years to retire. He thought that was just not fair, I mean he was 45 and had 18 years. But he said it wasn't all bad, because he had 8 weeks of vacation a year.

As a merchant I deal with credit credit card chargebacks on a regular basis. All a customer has to say is that is not my charge. We have to send back documentation, such as proof of signature. If the charge happened at the credit card readers at our gasoline dispensers, we have no signature, and we eat the charge. We have even offered to provide the customer or issuing bank with the license plate number and picture of person and vehicle charging, but that means nothing. That is why in many locations you need to enter your zip code at a pay at the pump, this offers some security to the merchant, even though by rule the merchant still must eat the charge if the customer balks.

Now if the merchant goes tits up or goes bad and steals money from the customers credit cards and can't pay it back, then the merchant's processing ISO is on the hook. The processor isn't Visa/Mastercard or the issuing bank, it is someone like First Data or a myriad of other middle men. The processor gets as little as 3 to 6 cents a transaction, passing the interchange cost to the merchant. The merchant has paid anywhere from 50 cents a transaction to 3% for the convenience of letting a customer pay with credit.The issuing banks and the cartel of Visa/Mastercard are on the hook only if the processor goes under. And even then it is the issuing banks that deal with the customer directly and they are the only ones who can decide to credit or not credit the customer.

The problem with this system in the United States is that the entities that make money off of credit card transactions, i.e. the issuing banks, have absolutely no incentive to make the system more secure. They do none of the work, other than marketing their credit cards and profiting off of their card holders who use their cards and the merchants who accept their cards

They can't because of the PCI standards, you are required to have a secure system scan for crap etc now to be allowed to processor cards. Now not all processors are enforcing the standards some are just collecting a "non-compliance" fee every month. In addition, the issuing banks can correlate stolen credit card numbers with the merchant that they were last used properly at.

The saying is extended "Those who can, do. Those who can't, teach, and those who can't teach become principals"

Security Essentials even seems to be more effective than AVG

You know what - I would because it would cut down on the crazy medical malpractices awards and maybe, just maybe, make healthcare affordable.

The civil courts are NOT a venue for the rich to abuse the poor, but they are a venue for the well lawyered to abuse whomever they want.

Witness the raft of personal injury, product liability, workplace discrimination, ADA compliance, and bankruptcy cases. In every one of those cases the plaintiff is usually poorer than whom they are suing, BUT their law firm is not. Now granted that every one of those cases needs something however small to get started, but most reasonable people would agree that quite often the "damages" awarded are not at all in proportion to what was suffered. Now this goes both ways, there are tons of people who have been discriminated against or injured or whatever, who haven't gotten their due because they didn't retain the best lawyer. Nothing to do with money, because the lawyer just gets a cut of the reward, nothing from the plaintiff upfront.

From an interview on television the homeowner didn't pay the fee LAST YEAR or this year. He offered to pay the $75 once the fire started

You can, but you have to know what to say - in this case the purchased software actually did what it was supposed to do. The pcs were functional again.

Visa/Mastercard are the cartel bosses, but the credit card processing is being done by ISOs such as First Data, RBS Lynk, etc. Anyone with 20 grand or so can get registered as a merchant processor and start trying to sell merchant processing. Depending on how big a portfolio of business you write, you can get better rates from the credit card networks. Then you can go out and sell a "cost plus" deal that is alledgedly tied to interchange fees. But you can hide a percent in obtuse statements and a couple of points here and there. Then you are making an easy percent just for the privelege of connecting a merchant with a credit card network Credit Card processing actually makes the rogue antivirus software business look ethical.

If the company closes up shop and disappears then their credit card processor "eats" the chargebacks. But they also grab all the so called "legit" charges. The processor is also getting a much larger percent transaction fee, supposedly to cover the higher chance of fraud for online transactions. So if the company actually skips town the processor is the one that grabs any other transactions to pay off the chargebacks and keeps the rest of the money themselves.

Credit card processing is a dirty dirty business