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
While mask wearing has become far more common, it is far from universally accepted. Instead, whether to wear a mask or not has become a new front in America’s bitterly partisan culture wars.
In broad terms, wearing a mask has become associated with the progressive side of politics. Not wearing one has become a symbol of conservative defiance.
Americans are compelled to do this for every possible thing huh
It used to be that paragraphs like the above would make me wish for a deadly plague to kill everyone, but now we know that even a deadly plague is not enough. There is no escape from this hell.
I don’t know, from where I’m standing these days (at a Canadian customer-facing “““essential””” job where maybe 10% of customers are masked), [convincing 50% of the population to wear masks in exchange for giving up on the other 50%] vs [what we have now] seems like a genuinely difficult choice.
(especially if you can convince a half that’s disproportionately young and therefore disproportionately likely to be asymptomatic carriers…)
Though I find it a bit confusing that the people known for actually giving a shit about purity and contamination are the people *against* masks. I mean, I suppose there’s a distrust-of-hostile-authorities thing at play here, but that seriously outweighs the filth?
are masks not mandatory in your region? my area is mixed politically but last time I was at the grocery store I saw one person not wearing a mask (out of maybe 50-100 people)
God, I fucking wish.
*Overall* I think Canada has been handling this better than America (though it’s certainly no South Korea or anything), and overall the Ontario conservative government has been fairly competent (certainly relative to American conservatives), but they are not pushing masks anywhere *near* hard enough.
My last five-hour shift, I was literally the *only* person wearing a mask. I saw a co-worker (the one who made fun of me the first couple times I showed up masked, and you *bet* your ass I isolated a clip of that for when I’m no longer dependent on this place for food money and can afford to rat them all out to corporate [link]) *carrying* a surgical mask on her way out of the store, but she didn’t wear one on duty. Not one customer was masked.
A couple shifts previously a pair of (non-masked) people walked in, looked at the menu for a minute or two, and walked back out, and the franchise owner insinuated that they’d left because I’d scared them off with my mask-wearing. (Though it’s a good sign that he’s stuck to insinuations: it suggests that he doesn’t think he can get away with overtly telling me not to wear it, that he *believes* I’m in the right, even if he doesn’t like it.) (Also, the customers–actual customers, who actually bought stuff, they’re not your customers by right just because they walked into your store dude–immediately before *and* after that pair *were* masked.)
A shift or two before that a (non-masked, age maybe fifties or sixties) customer tried to *commiserate* with me over “having” to wear a mask and gloves at work: I told her that while the *gloves* were mandatory (they always have been), “masks are not mandatory, but they didn’t *stop* me”, and she made some backtracking noises about “whatever makes you feel safer”. (You know what would make me feel safer? If *you* were wearing a mask. Surgical masks have saved my bacon–including against pathogens–too many times for me to ever believe the claims that they’re *useless* for the wearer, but I’ll absolutely believe the claims that it’s far *more* effective to convince your *interlocutor* to wear one. Also I’ve since had to switch to cloth masks for work, rationing my few remaining surgical masks for the fortnightly Errand Days where I’m probably coming into contact with more people.)
The last three or so fortnights I’ve finally started seeing other grocery shoppers with masks. Uptake is somewhat higher there, probably because even non-assholes need groceries, but I’d guess it’s only maybe 30%.
—
Maybe New York has had the seriousness of this beaten into them more by having so many cases? I was gonna say “official stats are that about one out of every thousand people in my regional municipality† has had COVID-19 (though tests are rationed enough that who knows what the real stats are)”, but apparently even with our growth being more linear than exponential it’s up to 1/550 now. Although it’s majority nursing-home residents and staff, so I suppose if you don’t have contact with nursing homes you should re-weight your probabilities accordingly. (OTOH, how *much* of it being majority nursing-home people is that nursing-home people are high priority in the test triaging?)
—
†Like a county, but with more of the government operating at county-level rather than town-level.
rustingbridges replied:
regional municipality sounds sort of like unincorporated areas of counties, maybe? I don’t know the procedures for your area but official stats of 1/550 probably implies pretty high actual rates… shit sucks
I agree mask wearing probably has better uptake in NY than anywhere comparable in the US since we’ve had such a large volume of cases it’s got to be enough to convince almost anyone it’s serious
Tags:
#(update: I saw an article in the local paper recently complaining) #(that tests in our area are getting rationed even harder than in the rest of the province) #conversational aglets #replies #our home and cherished land #home of the brave #politics cw #illness tw #covid19 #in which Brin has a job #discourse cw? #(oh also some good news: coworker-who-made-fun-of-me seems to be expressing interest in getting a cloth mask like mine) #(if I see her wearing one on multiple occasions I’ll remove the clip from my dirt file: sometimes people improve)
While mask wearing has become far more common, it is far from universally accepted. Instead, whether to wear a mask or not has become a new front in America’s bitterly partisan culture wars.
In broad terms, wearing a mask has become associated with the progressive side of politics. Not wearing one has become a symbol of conservative defiance.
Americans are compelled to do this for every possible thing huh
It used to be that paragraphs like the above would make me wish for a deadly plague to kill everyone, but now we know that even a deadly plague is not enough. There is no escape from this hell.
I don’t know, from where I’m standing these days (at a Canadian customer-facing “““essential””” job where maybe 10% of customers are masked), [convincing 50% of the population to wear masks in exchange for giving up on the other 50%] vs [what we have now] seems like a genuinely difficult choice.
(especially if you can convince a half that’s disproportionately young and therefore disproportionately likely to be asymptomatic carriers…)
Though I find it a bit confusing that the people known for actually giving a shit about purity and contamination are the people *against* masks. I mean, I suppose there’s a distrust-of-hostile-authorities thing at play here, but that seriously outweighs the filth?
are masks not mandatory in your region? my area is mixed politically but last time I was at the grocery store I saw one person not wearing a mask (out of maybe 50-100 people)
God, I fucking wish.
*Overall* I think Canada has been handling this better than America (though it’s certainly no South Korea or anything), and overall the Ontario conservative government has been fairly competent (certainly relative to American conservatives), but they are not pushing masks anywhere *near* hard enough.
My last five-hour shift, I was literally the *only* person wearing a mask. I saw a co-worker (the one who made fun of me the first couple times I showed up masked, and you *bet* your ass I isolated a clip of that for when I’m no longer dependent on this place for food money and can afford to rat them all out to corporate [link]) *carrying* a surgical mask on her way out of the store, but she didn’t wear one on duty. Not one customer was masked.
A couple shifts previously a pair of (non-masked) people walked in, looked at the menu for a minute or two, and walked back out, and the franchise owner insinuated that they’d left because I’d scared them off with my mask-wearing. (Though it’s a good sign that he’s stuck to insinuations: it suggests that he doesn’t think he can get away with overtly telling me not to wear it, that he *believes* I’m in the right, even if he doesn’t like it.) (Also, the customers–actual customers, who actually bought stuff, they’re not your customers by right just because they walked into your store dude–immediately before *and* after that pair *were* masked.)
A shift or two before that a (non-masked, age maybe fifties or sixties) customer tried to *commiserate* with me over “having” to wear a mask and gloves at work: I told her that while the *gloves* were mandatory (they always have been), “masks are not mandatory, but they didn’t *stop* me”, and she made some backtracking noises about “whatever makes you feel safer”. (You know what would make me feel safer? If *you* were wearing a mask. Surgical masks have saved my bacon–including against pathogens–too many times for me to ever believe the claims that they’re *useless* for the wearer, but I’ll absolutely believe the claims that it’s far *more* effective to convince your *interlocutor* to wear one. Also I’ve since had to switch to cloth masks for work, rationing my few remaining surgical masks for the fortnightly Errand Days where I’m probably coming into contact with more people.)
The last three or so fortnights I’ve finally started seeing other grocery shoppers with masks. Uptake is somewhat higher there, probably because even non-assholes need groceries, but I’d guess it’s only maybe 30%.
—
Maybe New York has had the seriousness of this beaten into them more by having so many cases? I was gonna say “official stats are that about one out of every thousand people in my regional municipality† has had COVID-19 (though tests are rationed enough that who knows what the real stats are)”, but apparently even with our growth being more linear than exponential it’s up to 1/550 now. Although it’s majority nursing-home residents and staff, so I suppose if you don’t have contact with nursing homes you should re-weight your probabilities accordingly. (OTOH, how *much* of it being majority nursing-home people is that nursing-home people are high priority in the test triaging?)
—
†Like a county, but with more of the government operating at county-level rather than town-level.
Tags:
#I’ve been thinking about this so much that it’s hard to keep track of #which of these things I’ve said publicly and which I’ve said privately and which I haven’t said at all #I hope I’ve included the correct amount of context‚ let me know if I haven’t #replies #rustingbridges #our home and cherished land #home of the brave #politics cw #illness tw #covid19 #in which Brin has a job #discourse cw? #rants
This is your daily reminder that you are valid, except in the province of Québec.
Tags:
#Quebeckers never get to have any fun #our home and cherished land #our roads may be golden or broken or lost #the humour of my people #(in multiple senses of the term)
#oh my god #Hamilton #our home and cherished land #anything that makes me laugh this much deserves a reblog #(I don’t think I’ve been there myself) #(but I’ve heard Hamilton described as ”like everything bad about Kitchener with none of the good parts”)
I see that we’ve reached the “open every door in your house at least twice a day or else you’ll be trapped forever” portion of the season.
Tags:
#what the fuck are you talking about #what the shit goes *on* up in Saskatchewan #*looks up weather report* #… #…remind me never to move there #(god no wonder people acted like we were moving to Siberia when we said we were going to Canada) #((Dad eventually started telling our American friends and family that we were moving to a place ”between Michigan and New York”)) #(((note for those of you reading this later who can’t go look at the weather report:))) #(((Regina is around -25C for the next few days with windchills around -35))) #(((meanwhile Kitchener is like))) #(((freezing +- 5))) #our home and cherished land #weather
Yeah, it’s only “Canadian Thanksgiving” in contexts where the default assumption is American. Likewise, “American Thanksgiving” in contexts where the default assumption is Canadian.
Mom has been known to call the American one “Pilgrim Thanksgiving”, but I think she’s been doing that less lately.
(We celebrate both, in honor of our American heritage. I don’t know how Canadian-only people are supposed to cope with the fact that one can of pumpkin makes two pies: we get to just make both Thanksgivings’ pumpkin pies at once, keeping the second one in the freezer until it’s time.)
…in my experience one can of pumpkin makes one pie. I don’t know if your cans are larger, your pies smaller, or your recipes more padded with non-pumpkin ingredients, but now I’m curious.
1. Our spare can of pumpkin is 796mL. According to a grocery-store online catalogue you can also get “pumpkin pie filling” in 540mL cans, but we only buy that by accident.
2. The pie in our freezer is 9 inches in diameter and maybe an inch and a half deep.
3. The can says:
“Pumpkin pie recipe on reverse. Requires: eggs, brown sugar, ground cinnamon, ground nutmeg, ground ginger, salt, 175 mL evaporated milk (1 pie) and an unbaked pie shell.
1 can makes 2 pies.”
When I asked Mom for confirmation that we do in fact use the recipe on the can, she said yes, then asked for context (which I gave). She thinks the main difference is the can size, with a side of having to add more ingredients to the plain pumpkin.
“The solution for Americans is we eat 2 pumpkin pies.”
Come to think of it I suppose that *would* work pretty well for groups with more than 2 – 3 pie-eating members (edit: or maybe even just people who aren’t also making chocolate cream pie). Maybe the canned-pumpkin manufacturers size their cans assuming you’re going to invite people over.
Same recipe, same size pie, about twice as large of a can. Interesting. The cans of pumpkin I recall from my childhood, which made one pie each and had that same recipe (with the addition of allspice) on the back, were somewhere between 440mL and 475mL.
Yeah, it’s only “Canadian Thanksgiving” in contexts where the default assumption is American. Likewise, “American Thanksgiving” in contexts where the default assumption is Canadian.
Mom has been known to call the American one “Pilgrim Thanksgiving”, but I think she’s been doing that less lately.
(We celebrate both, in honor of our American heritage. I don’t know how Canadian-only people are supposed to cope with the fact that one can of pumpkin makes two pies: we get to just make both Thanksgivings’ pumpkin pies at once, keeping the second one in the freezer until it’s time.)
…in my experience one can of pumpkin makes one pie. I don’t know if your cans are larger, your pies smaller, or your recipes more padded with non-pumpkin ingredients, but now I’m curious.
I’ll go look that up.
1. Our spare can of pumpkin is 796mL. According to a grocery-store online catalogue you can also get “pumpkin pie filling” in 540mL cans, but we only buy that by accident.
2. The pie in our freezer is 9 inches in diameter and maybe an inch and a half deep.
3. The can says:
“Pumpkin pie recipe on reverse. Requires: eggs, brown sugar, ground cinnamon, ground nutmeg, ground ginger, salt, 175 mL evaporated milk (1 pie) and an unbaked pie shell.
1 can makes 2 pies.”
When I asked Mom for confirmation that we do in fact use the recipe on the can, she said yes, then asked for context (which I gave). She thinks the main difference is the can size, with a side of having to add more ingredients to the plain pumpkin.
“The solution for Americans is we eat 2 pumpkin pies.”
Come to think of it I suppose that *would* work pretty well for groups with more than 2 – 3 pie-eating members (edit: or maybe even just people who aren’t also making chocolate cream pie). Maybe the canned-pumpkin manufacturers size their cans assuming you’re going to invite people over.
Tags:
#food #Thanksgiving #our home and cherished land #home of the brave #reply via reblog
Yeah, it’s only “Canadian Thanksgiving” in contexts where the default assumption is American. Likewise, “American Thanksgiving” in contexts where the default assumption is Canadian.
Mom has been known to call the American one “Pilgrim Thanksgiving”, but I think she’s been doing that less lately.
(We celebrate both, in honor of our American heritage. I don’t know how Canadian-only people are supposed to cope with the fact that one can of pumpkin makes two pies: we get to just make both Thanksgivings’ pumpkin pies at once, keeping the second one in the freezer until it’s time.)
Tags:
#Thanksgiving #our home and cherished land #home of the brave #language #reply via reblog #food
a quick step by step guide on what to do if you come back to your apartment and find yourself locked out because your front door is frozen shut
kick the bottom of the door for 10 minutes
text your landlord
remember your landlord is on vacation and also in her mid 50′s so it takes about 36 hours to receive a response
briefly wonder why the fuck you moved the canada
remember that college tuition is significantly cheaper here than in the united states
look up and notice your cat is at the window, staring at you. he paws at the window lightly and meows. it’s devastating. his eyes are so big and imploring. decide that you have to get inside your apartment at all costs. not even god himself can stop you from feeding your cat his chicken wet food dinner. frida kahlo herself could descend from the heavens and ask “hey you wanna bang?” and you’d say “hell yeah but first let me open this door so i can feed my cat his dinner”
remember there is a starbucks 3 blocks down the street from you
enter. the barista gives you a weird look for entering a starbucks at 7pm on a tuesday
order a venti cup of hot water. you order in french because the barista just said “bonjour” instead of “bonjour, hi.” you have a strong american accent. you hit the r in merci a little too hard to compensate. you embarrass yourself.
exit the starbucks clutching the massive cup of hot water in your hands. it’s burning your fingers.
return. methodically pour the starbucks cup of water all over the the door frame. it begins moving a little but still wont open
back up
ensure your doc martens are properly gripping the sheet of ice covering the ground. many people have told you to stop wearing doc martens in the winter, despite your protests that theyre actually the ideal winter boot. also, you’re a lesbian and punk’s not dead
release a pterodactyl screech and sprint towards the door, slamming the full force of your pathetically tiny 5′2″ 110lb body into it
you dont know any of your neighbors so you dont care about maintaining your pride anyways
the door swings open
run up the stairs
open the actual door to your apartment and yell MOMMY’S HOME MY LITTLE BITCHASS BABY BOY DONT WORRY at your cat
cat flings his body to the ground and starts purring like he does every time you come home
write tumblr post
Tags:
#storytime #our home and cherished land #anything that makes me laugh this much deserves a reblog #embarrassment squick? #weight cw? #and this one isn’t *quite* right but close enough that I’m going to include it: #fun with loopholes
Brinens and Things - Tumblr Mirror 