And you're paying a lot to Visa for this service. Visa/MC announced in fact that they are increasing credit card processing fees to deal with fraud: https://www.bloomberg.com/news...

You're paying far more in credit card processing fees than makes sense for the service and the insurance against fraud provided.

This is not true. The Bundesbank did a report on this in 2019.

(https://www.bundesbank.de/resource/blob/800766/0462923c3587a2d98f2c2db5b71047ae/mL/2019-06-kosten-zahlungsmittel-data.pdf)

The report found that transactions under €50 were cheapest to process with cash. Transactions over €50 were cheapest to do with Girocard, a German interbanking payment system. At no point were MC/Visa cheaper.

>Which has been true since the first person ever sat for a passport or drivers license photo.

Yeah but those were done with very different technology.

For instance, my state added the photo to the driver's license but, by law, didn't authorize or intend to create a central catalog of photos. The law merely said the state could add a photo to the license. Years later when they went to digital licenses, the state just adopted the central database. And as time has gone on, they have increased the quality of the photos captured so they can be used for biometric matching. Several generations of technology improvements have occurred and yet the state still never got authority to keep a central photo archive. Taking a mile from an inch.

In the same way, the passport has you send in two pictures. But there is a world of difference between operating a central passport photo database with facial recognition, and having a paper file somewhere with the 2nd picture sitting in it, which can only be referenced manually by a human.

>Having been present when a company fired 88% of their IT staff, (and came to *really* regret it later)

Would you mind telling this story?

It must have happened in reverse. The vanity plate was already in use, it was the legislative plate that was added later on.

And by jove they weren't going to deny the legislator his plate.

The article says they got 13 million users in a year. I feel like the company would have come out with an Android version faster than that...maybe like 2-3 million users.

"You mean those fuckers are going to require that they have my picture just so I can get a drivers license?

In case you cared, most states started to add photos to licenses in the late 60s and early 70s, finishing up in the early to mid 80s. It appears that heavy lobbying from Polaroid, which had introduced color instant photography in the mid 60s is what lead states to adopt photo licenses.

Having said that, some people were pretty pissed about the photo requirement, but I think we were less sophisticated in terms of privacy and security than we are today. Had they tried to introduce photo licenses in the 90s I think they would have had a much more difficult battle.

Your post is true and I agree with it, with the amendment that there are times in which the president does have power, but it's unpredictable and contextual. Sometimes he has administrative power given to him by a previous Congress, and a current Congress would be too deadlocked to change his decision, or that it isn't worth the political capital used. In other situations, he may make compromises with Congress tit for tat which allows him discretion and power.

Some powers are available at some times in some situations.

>Consider when inflation is high (that is: when the growth in the gold supply exceeds growth of the population)

That is however the least likely scenario. Most of the time the problem with a gold standard is that the supply of gold struggles to keep up with population growth+productivity improvements and acts as an artificial tamper on the economy.

Law typically requires that all the candidates for a race be viewable on the same page.

The FAA required a few tests specific to the 787 and its structure. I seem to recall a test where they took a fuselage and dropped it from a particular height to see how well it would deal with such a drop.

My recollection is that the FAA said that the test was passed. Not much information is available on it since they wanted to keep the information a trade secret.

What do you do if you have eight choices? (That's the current Ohio ballot--7 choices plus a write-in.)

Dayton was at its time a mini-Silicon Valley: a hotspot for innovation, bringing us people like the Wrights, Charles Kettering and John Patterson.

North Carolina is just windy.

I think the Swedish experience is that its national ID number doesn't do anything all that significant (none of the purposes you noted here would be severely inconvenienced or affected if you just used another number.)

In short, stealing someone's Swedish number doesn't achieve much.

The US uses the SSN as a gateway to the person's financial history.

It's not dependent on the visa. People from visa waiver nations (such as the UK, Germany, Japan, etc) will still get enrolled into US-VISIT (the photograph/fingerprinting system.)

Canadians have a special exemption.