I was part of another fiasco, a very well known business had not received deposits for payments for 4 years plus, and on the order of tens of millions of dollars. Surprisingly, this account had never been paud, the deposit informaiton was inaccurate and no one answered the requests to correct it and get paid, for all those years. Ya gotta ask, wha?

Eventually this bubbled up in an interal audit, and despite the policies beiung followed, etc., it became an issue, and contacts were expanded beyond the financial side of that business. Eventually someone realized what was being asked, we were not 'asking for money', though even that deserved an answer.

I got the task of reconciling all the charges and fees, identifying customers and such. Great fun going that far back. Processing refunds that needed to be made was complicated by so many changing accounts, closign accounts, and more than a few having died in the interim. But we figured it out.

This was an account for an entire line of business at this firm, and I've no idea how they operated without anyone realizing they had no revenue... This is accounting I guess.

The example I gave is 2022 to 2023. They do report cards in force, as most every card issuer does, even when they lose cards. When they gain cards. They're quite proud of it. Volume is another thing that they report. You may not care much about this. You may not even believe them, but they do report it to the SEC and to their investors. That's how the big boys do business. You know, it may or not be Fair, may or not be right, may even not be good. It's just how they do it.

Let's consider this... A payments issuer handles, say $1.1triilion/year. Maybe $90Bn/month, roughly. Magic, they increase their business 25% in a year. Roughly 1.36trillion/year, maybe $113Bn/month. What would it take to accommodate that increase in volume?

First, customer service. Fraud, complaints, billing questions, you know. Bear in mind, their active cards increased from almost 122 million to over 133 million, about 11 million new cards, and the customers that come with them. There are service costs. It happens.

Second, whatever you were doing the year before, you're processing about 25% more volume. It does not happen by magic. Takes bits. Those need to be kept somewhere afterwards, if only to remember what the heck happened, in case someone asked.

Third, consider that overnight this issuer reconciles accounts. They pay merchants for the charges *they authorized* earlier in the day. And then they wait for the majority of their cardholders to pay them. This capital is also not magic. And it went roughly 25% year over year. Sometimes this is not cheap.

And if you're a merchant that gets paid for these charges in 2-3 days, well, your whine is best served to your acquirer, who holds your money for, well, obvious reasons. Some to wait on the easy fraud that comes from duplicate billings (you pressed back when you should have not), or dissatisfaction over that cold pizza, or your kids are causing trouble on their phones. Or worse,

These were real world numbers up above. Some of you reading this will recognize a 25% increase in data load overnight would make your job more interesting, though you might tell your boss that growth is good, if you can keep up with it. I can haz more budget?

No, costs need not increase 25%, but knowing that typical yearly cards in force increases are 3-5%, you'll be doubling your data every, what, 12-15 years? But that's not what drives IT costs, it's technology, and it costs around $3-6 Billion to build and deploy a new payment reconciliation platform. And that doesn't include costs of reporting, statementing, fraud/risk detection and fraud prevention, customer service, blah blah blah. I'm not intentionally acting as an apologist for payment providers and their fees, but it's a more competitive market than you know, and in a way you are unaware of.

Oh, and you're not managing 10x the payment data for incremental cost increases. You outgrow the SQL tables, then the DB2 tables become unusable, and even. Hadoop, Spark? OLTP is what we're working with here. Cassandra won't perform if you let a merchant dump a million rows of payment data for end of month reporting... And then, when you go past next-day settlement and move to next-hour settlement, your small merchants will be shocked they got paid before lunch. Your reporting will get a little more crazy. You will pay to make that work.

Next thing we know, we'll be told running /. costs pretty much 0. It may look that way, but it ain't so.

Actually, most if not all fraud below around $25 is not even recovered by the card issuer. Not worth the trouble.

And then there are the fraud cases where customers defraud merchants. You can guess, being a breathing /. reader, that merchant's do not pay for that, except for the cost of defense.

Even otherwise knowlegable people do not well understand the payment industry. Discount fees may be too much, not enough, or just right, and various reward programs may or may not be worth the costs, but after you add in fraud, deposits, and the work to make sure it is all accurate, it's just not free.

Amex doesn't charge 4.9% for anything. That is BS.I'm betting their corporate purchasing programs don't even charge that.

Amex has reached parity in fees for some time now, not more than .25% different. You are making this up.
Now loyalty and rewards , yup, they do get paid somewhere. You be the judge if the cash-back, reward points, whatever, are worth it to you.

WSL2. It's close, and it works sort of. Mounting USB media isn't something Microsoft seems to want to do.

Ditto.

Inside joke there.

Certainly could do all this in PostgreSQL, which has quietly-ish been doing big jobs for decades. But truly, time to hire on a serious developer and make at least as much of an effort at managing operations as they do with their website(s). Management, and the mis-thereof.

This I've seen at my former employer, despite their denials. Posting fantastical, ludicrous jobs with unrealistic qualifications. Examples include; 'data scientist', 'full stack developer', a job that asks for PhD and 5 years experience. And does not specify a lack of visa sponsorship. Indeed, that employer rarely posts jobs at mid-level or even highly competent developer qualifications that specify no visa sponsorship. And while the salaries are competitive, these postings sure seem to be intended to fail to attract domestic candidates, giving the employer the path to pulling in H1B candidates. Who seem, sometimes, to migrate to offshore positions.

I'm pretty cynical about this, but H1B and similar visas are plainly being abused. And our Congress is unwilling to take any action. It's sad.

If you're paid $5, it's worth $5. To you. Yes, your employer will want to derive more value from your labor, of course, and your cost to them is more than your direct wages. This is all obvious, isn't it?

Just as, from time to time, you may find you require more compensation for your labor, and so seek opportunity to earn more. Or your employer may decide your labor isn't worth as much as you think it is, or even that it's no longer necessary to them. This sort of market exists in many places...

If you're paid$

Marx would be proud...

Hey, it's math. Finding another solution is called theoretical math. More winning?

Expecting to be paid $5 for $4 worth of work seems radical.

Oh, 'muh productivity'? If you can do 5 hours work in 4 hours, maybe you should do the 6 1/4 hrs worth of work in the 5 hours you were paid for? Winning?

Look, I get the attraction of being paid for 40 hours but only working 32 hours. Yes. Only, maybe, no. Maybe a 6 hour day, so I can be denied support for another 2 hours a day.