can’t believe paypal continues to be like it is. how is this not considered fraudulent
anyway paypal is fine if you want to send another american us dollars, but you should more or less never accept payment through paypal. you will regret it
paypal is extremely opaque about the fees that it charges. and once they’ve charged a fee, there’s more or less no way to undo it. if you immediately ‘refund’ such a transaction, it actually means you’re giving back the money you received *and* paying the fee paypal charged.
they have two payment options – one of which is free and offers no ‘protection’ and the other of which is not and offers their ‘purchase protection’. you can instruct someone to send via the free option but there’s no guarantee they’re going to listen, or that they’re going to parse the options correctly even if they do, at which point there’s already money down the drain in the form of a fee and it’s just a question of who eats it.
this is what the page to pick looks like (gotta love that mobile first design):
here it says you might be eligible for purchase protection, and the ‘seller’ is going to pay a fee, but it doesn’t really explain what any of that means, or how much it will be.
this is bad, because a lot of people will decide they might as well be protected, right? since it’s free. but the program is relatively picky and a lot of the times people use it it does not actually apply. but it gets worse. let’s say I’m sending $150 by paypal to my business partner:
it says right there BigNuts is going to get $150. he’s not. maybe in paypal’s accounting he gets the full amount and then pays the fee, but in practice he is never going to see the full amount. if Mr. McLug is in the US, he’s going to lose $4.35 on this.
but it gets worse if he’s international, as the fee gets jacked up – he’s going to lose $6.60 plus some change in whatever currency it’s going into. and the messaging gets much more confusing!
paypal still pretends there’s no fee for a goods & services transaction, but if you send via the lower cost option, it shows you the currency conversion charge up front.
if you’re sending $1000, the currency conversion charge is $5. if you’re sending goods and services, it’s $44 but to the sender it looks like $0.
so paypal is basically conning people into creating these fees in exchange for what is often a nonexistent guarantee. ok, what else?
well, paypal tries to bill itself as a ‘safe’ way to receive money over the internet, but it’s not actually better than anything else. it’s still part of the financial system.
if someone pays you via paypal, you still need to do all the work of verifying that they’re a real person and not scamming you, because there is no protection. if the payment paypal received gets revoked or marked as fraudulent, guess who’s covering it. you!
this is a pretty common move for scammers, because I guess people trust paypal and think they can actually trust payments they receive by it. but if you want to take money from someone you don’t trust, you basically need to do cash or bitcoin or something like that.
now, payment processors are famous for this sort of shit. and if you’re a merchant, you might write it off as the cost of doing business. the frauds will be amortized to an acceptable cost over your whole volume of transactions.
but if you’re just some person doing a one off transaction, this is much less true. and paypal makes this deliberately more confusing instead of being transparent.
This, and also:
Did you know there’s an arms race going on between [Canadian freelancers who get paid in USD] and Paypal, where Canadians try to withdraw into USD-denominated bank accounts (to avoid Paypal’s terrible exchange rates, and perhaps use the USD directly) and Paypal tries to stop them?
Last I heard, Paypal was winning. (edit: apparently the Canadians have struck back, but the method they’re using these days costs $4/month, so even if you can get it working it’s only worth it for sufficiently high volumes. [link])
—
(And God help you if you want to *send* an American money: even if you have the USD lying around because you weren’t allowed to withdraw it at a reasonable exchange rate, a USD$3 flat fee is huge when you’re only dealing with a few dollars at a time.)
Tags:
#adventures in human capitalism #reply via reblog #PSA #our home and cherished land #home of the brave
i would never work as a gothic heroine which is a shame because i’ve got the looks for it but the firm presence of mind to gtfo from anything unpleasant
ruined aristocrat who has a dark reputation spoken about only in whispers: May we speak alone for a moment?
me, Aware of things: No thank you, we’ve only just met. My aunt is my chaperone and a lovely conversationalist. Please do come and discuss her seventeen dogs
he keeps trying to grab my waist but everytime he leans over me my enormous hat knocks him right in the jaw
he keeps struggling to pull me up but he steps on my dress every two seconds
he lifts my arms over my head and tries to jiggle me into sitting up on my knees but i just looked like a squashed horse stuffed into a dress like :p
he tries to take me by my leg but i just flop back down and my petticoats are silk and therefore very slippery
eventually he gets fed up and calls a stableboy over and the stableboy tries to take me up by my head, yanking at me at the neck, and then my passionate possessive lover is like “no you little idiot! here take one of her feet” and dashes over to take me by the arms but as he leans over my enormous hat knocks him in the jaw
they’re trying to slowly drag me over to his carriage but all of the townspeople have stepped out of their houses and shops
people are slowly looking out of their carriages like “what the fuck?”
meanwhile the stableboy has his grip on my leg and the passionate possessive lover is carrying me by my arms like a ragdoll with his head thrown back so he doesn’t get knocked in the jaw again by my enormous hat and my derrière is skidding against the dirt making a lady-shaped line from one end of the street to the next
“This is not very elegant,” my possessive ex-lover pants. With his head tilted back, I can’t see his face, but I can see the bead of sweat rolling its way down his jaw.
“If you sweat on me,” I say. pointing my toe so that my foot runs the risk of slipping out of the shoe the stable boy is clinging to, “I’ll use the hat.”
My possessive ex-lover swears and digs his nails into my arm when my derriere catches on a cobblestone. “Aren’t you already using the hat?”
A boy standing just outside his front door, close enough to have heard my threat, whoops. “She says she’s going to use the hat!”
The ensuing cheer from our onlookers puts the first hint of unease in my ex-lover’s eyes.
The crowd begins to chant. “Use the hat!” they cry in unison, “use the hat!” I grin wickedly, looking my possessive ex-lover dead in the eyes. “Whatever the people want.” His eyes are huge with panic now. I only grin wider, glare more fiercely. I am going to use the hat. This is a grand spectacle now, and he will not see the finale.
Concept: immortal vampire scion of a dying royal line going to increasingly desperate lengths to get their various relations married off in a way that keeps themselves as far from the line of succession as possible, because the peculiar interaction between holy symbols and the vampiric condition means that if they ever actually inherit the divine right of kings, they’ll immediately explode.
So just… A really old guy forcing all of his grandkids to marry each other?
Precisely the opposite. Keeping it all in the family (so to speak) is a strategy for minimising competing claims to the succession; our hypothetical vampire wants there to be as many competing claims as possible, so that if one cadet branch dies out or gets delegitimised, there will be others to take up the slack.
If they’re the scion, they’ll have to go to some lengths to avoid it… depending on where they fall in the lineage. But, if it’s the English monarchy, they can just profess Roman Catholicism. Immediate disqualification.
I was about to propose some complicated metaphysical reason why that option isn’t on the table; upon consideration, however, it’s much funnier if there’s no reason it wouldn’t work, but the vampire would literally rather die than become Catholic.
Tags:
#vampires #story ideas I will never write #incest cw #death tw
You can tell the people who hacked twitter were normies because they didn’t use Obama’s account to post about the chaos emeralds.
Or worse, posting about how someone stole his shoelaces and he can’t find them
Fuck that would have been the best
Tags:
#anything that makes me laugh this much deserves a reblog #high context jokes #(I’ll admit I don’t get the chaos-emerald one but I do get the shoelace one) #Twitter
An intriguing new twist, I think – it appears that if someone comments on a post and their tumblr is marked “contains sensitive content”, the comment doesn’t show up in your activity page. I noticed I wasn’t seeing all the comments to a post and went to the tumblrs of the people I wasn’t seeing, and both of them were marked for sensitive content.
Not sure if this is consistent or a bug or just coincidence or what, but folks may want to be aware it’s apparently going on.
Tags:
#I can kind of see why they’d do that but also #*long sigh* #PSA #Tumblr: a User’s Guide
Brinens and Things 
