On the other hand, if your card got refused at that grocery line - would you go back? Likely not.

I doubt many such businesses would risk the customer ire by refusing some cards.

What I DO forsee as happening is some businesses that aren't time sensitive but routinely deal in high $$$ transactions not accepting some such cards. IE, (ironically) - airlines. If you're buying several thousand dollars worth of airline tickets the rewards (and in turn, the merchant fees) can add up quite a bit.

Maybe they're in another country? Here in the US a guy selling tomatoes beside the road is likely to whip out a Square reader attached to a phone and take credit cards.

I live in a small town and I can't think of a single business that DOESN'T accept cards. The last holdout (an old diner thats been there for decades) gave in about 7 or 8 years ago and got a reader.

As a direct result, no, but as a net result, yes, they will. Large companies like Walmart have razor thin profit margins. They just make insane profits because of the volume of product that they move. Those margins will always be just a small amount above whatever their net costs require, and credit card fees are part of those net costs.

You might not like them as companies, but there's a reason why Wal-mart and Amazon are almost always the cheapest place to buy something.

Most airlines aren't even setup to make a profit from ticket sales anymore. They at best break even there, and then make their profit off of agreements with credit card companies for CC miles/points.

Its a very weird system that we've gotten ourselves into.

The real solution would be a citation system.

Something like LexisNexus has every court case that happens in the country.

So... why not have an official version of that, tied in with the official court transcripts and when you cite a case, you need to give that citation number from the official database. If you're citing only a few lines, you link to those few lines.

You wouldn't be able to cite a non-existent case, at best the case you cite wouldn't match what you claim it does, and with individual statement citations (HTML literally does it already), you could prove in one click that that series of words actually appears in that cited case.

You want to stop this? Then open-source the law instead of hiding it behind stupendously expensive private commercial services like LexisNexus.

I've got tapes from the 80s I can still read - 9-track and QIC - so I doubt it's as bad as that.

BZZZT!

I was talking about commercial space, not residential. The residential space tends to get rented.

Given the current state of the art, there's not even a guarantee that the real harm won't show up in the 2nd or even 3rd generation. Not all state of the art modifications prove to be stable.

If something goes wrong and the child needs expensive lifelong medical care for an unanticipated problem, guess who will be first to shout "NOT IT!"

Most of the second guessing of the pilot seems to assume the pilot could press pause and work out the alternatives on a chalkboard for an hour or two and then resume real-time with a solution in hand.

The fact is, it all happened in a handful of seconds. I doubt the pilot even had time to fully assess the problem before hitting the ground.

The problem is in the solution. Rationally, those Herdsmen need to hash out an agreementfor the fair use of that land to keep it just below it's carrying capacity.

But what really happens that some 'nobleman' declares the entire commons to belong to him and sends a goon squad to wipe out any herdsman who disagrees. He then 'allows' the herdsmen to use the land in exchange for a painfully large share of their productivity. For some reason he expects gratitude for that arrangement.

Alas, we've moved beyond even that. Now the 'nobleman', seeing that the herdsmen are making do with a smaller commons over the hill but unable to grab control of it sends his goons to salt the earth overnight so the herdsmen will have to 'rent' land from him.

But even that isn't enough for some. They want more 'rent' than any herdsman can pay while still making a living. So they leave the field fallow while trying to grab even more land. For some reason they think they can squeeze blood from a turnip.

If you find that unbelievable as an analogy, explain why there are entire blocks in NYC that haven't seen any space rented in over 10 years, yet the asking price hasn't budged even as the neighborhood has been given over to rats and junkies.

I can't say I would blame them.

And further tilt the balance towards on-prem.

I'll be sure to tell my very real clients their infrastructure doesn't exist.

At the rate the shutdown is going, perhaps we should take a cue from the billionaires and just stop paying.