Square Is Discontinuing Monthly Pricing On February 1, 2014 114
An anonymous reader writes "Mobile payment startup Square has decided to discontinue its monthly pricing option on February 1, 2014. The company says it does not plan to reinstate monthly pricing at any point. If you are currently enrolled in monthly pricing, Square will give you "a grace period" through the end of January 2014, after which the per-swipe rate will apply to transactions. On January 2, monthly pricing subscribers will be billed their last monthly fee, which will cover the rest of the month."
wut? (Score:3, Interesting)
wut?
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Re:wut? (Score:5, Funny)
I personally don't think equiangular polygons should have the right to decide pricing schemes. IMNSHO humans, and only humans, should be able to make choices like that. Otherwise what's next, a glorified calculator deciding when to fire people? It's wrong, I say, WRONG!
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It's humorous for two reasons:
1) "Square" the business name can be confused with "square" the algebraic shape;
2) Executives and beancounters are often perceived as "glorified calculators".
Mod parent up for being funny. +2 very funny, I say.
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And you made it humorous for a third:
Square
1. (n; adj) A person who is regarded as dull, rigidly conventional, and out of touch with current trends.
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Big deal. (Score:4, Informative)
It's a hit to larger companies, not smaller ones.
Switching from $275/mo flat rate to 2.75% means if you're selling more than $120,000pa, you pay more, if you're selling less, you pay less.
next story please.
Re:Big deal. (Score:5, Informative)
A small company with CC swipes of $120k / year with an assumption CCs only being half their income, and the rest cash or invoices (checks), barely supports 1 person if the net margins are very high, in the 20-40% range and tax sheltering is very good.
Glad to see how well educated the techie community is on basic finance and business concepts.
Of course, we know that with the standard margin in CC processing being 3% for many years, it was very expected by any reasonable person that Square would ditch flat rates once they had little enough competition and a large enough base.
Re:Big deal. (Score:4, Informative)
and yet you know nothing of how much a business needs to earn to pay a single person $40k a year.
Just because the company has $120,000 in revuene, doesn't mean the owner earned $120k. Now you have to take off expenses which is on that figure probably close to 95% of it.(depending on how the equipment was purchased)
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"probably close to 95% of it" is one of those ass-pulled stats.
I co-owned a small business with my partner of the time about a decade ago. Revenue was never more than $17,000/month, most of which was from reselling products to consumers. Our best seller started off with a 600% margin, yet still undercut all competitors, because we adapted a solution normally sold in bulk to a different market.
Even as others emulated us, we could achieve 50% margin years later. Why? the big boys didn't want to sell "own bran
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I agree with most of what you wrote, but hold the anchovies.
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If you're selling less than $120k, you're not a company. You're barely even in business at all. That's revenue, not profits.
Re:Big deal. (Score:4, Insightful)
Selling $120k through this single method of payment.
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Again, this is via a single method of payment.You don't have to be a large business to accept cash, cheque or invoice.
Swipe? (Score:5, Insightful)
So after many years of regulations, encryptions, standards, tamper proof systems, migrating from a magnetic strip to the chip and pin for even greater security, this company's innovation pisses all that against the wall?
Man... I would not do business with anyone who wants to swipe my credit card through an iPad.
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In just over 1 year you won't have to. At least in Canada, after 2015 debit card companies will no longer need to include a magstripe unless they really want to. I expect credit card companies will follow suit quickly. Magstripe fraud is costing both huge amounts.
At that point square's equipment will be as good as garbage. I'm sure as a backup for places that refuse to upgrade they'll still be able to take imprints, just like 50 years ago.
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I'm sure as a backup for places that refuse to upgrade they'll still be able to take imprints, just like 50 years ago.
50 years ago? It was common about 20 years ago.
Also; I made a purchase at a store that did an imprint, about 6 to 8 months ago.
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And then you made purchases at various outlets in Prague, Adelaide and Ouagadougou, about 5 to 7 months ago.
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That's BS and you know it - US CC companies have some of the best fraud detection around...
The second a charge on my CC goes through in a state I have never been or never lived in (or couldn't travel to within the time of my last legit charge), they are calling me and asking if the charge was valid.
Last time I purchased something on eBay, I received the very same phone call because it was over $1,000
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Perhaps only certain banks are doing it. Of the two cards that I got this year, both were embossed.
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My last card was like that. I just assumed it was because they printed it on-demand at the branch office, rather than having it mailed from their credit card processor. I don't know if that's an improvement in security. It still has a mag stripe on the back, and now anyone with an ID card printer ($800 with a quick google search) and a stripe encoder ($200 on Amazon) can make cards.
I was there getting my card replaced because someone hacked Harbor Freight and stole the track 2 info from cards. (CC#, exp
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Canadians love traveling to the states to get cheaper products with lower sales tax. They won't willingly sacrifice their mag stripes when they are needed to conveniently spend money in the US.
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That's Canada. Canada is a much, much smaller market than the US. The US will hang onto magstripe technology for decades, maybe more. Just look at how backwards our banking systems are here: people still use paper checks, there's no electronic funds transfer without huge fees, there's no real use of crypto, etc. Look at Europe to see what banking should be like; we in the US are at least a century away from getting that kind of technology, with the rate of change here.
Signature debit (Score:2)
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CVV2 = credit card PIN (Score:2)
Canadian debit cards work almost universally via the Interac system, which is a PIN protected EFTPOS-only network.
ATM cards likewise use PIN protected EFTPOS through the PLUS and Cirrus networks, which behave like Interac. It's just that because more shoppers demand to use an actual credit card than an "ATM card" at a retailer, U.S. merchants have by and large chosen to join the credit card networks more often than PLUS and Cirrus. Grocery chains here in the States tend to be on both the credit card networks and the EFTPOS networks.
I'm assuming a mag stripe CC does the same handshaking as Interac, except it doesn't check a PIN and relies on the laughably insecure singature instead.
The magnetic strip of a credit card has a CVV1, a number that's not printed anywhere on
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I never considered CVV1 to be that secure, because all you need is the card to commit the fraud. The signature is practically useless. The CVV2 is the same, because it's ON the card in question. That's why I like Interac so much by comparison, it always requires the PIN. (Well, OK, now it has a tap-thing where you can make small purchases without a PIN.) I have lost my Interac client car
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*So does the US. But in both places, where you can use them is quite limited. The idea that Europe is ahead on contactless payments is ludicrous.*
hong kong had the best system of places where I've been. could pay at 7/11, the metro and lots of other places. and you got the deposit back when leaving.
however.. square has little point to exist in areas where the payment service providers provide you with mobile terminals. in finland practically all cc readers in smaller shops are of the variety that uses cellp
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however.. square has little point to exist in areas where the payment service providers provide you with mobile terminals. in finland practically all cc readers in smaller shops are of the variety that uses cellphone network for connection and has a battery..
Population of Finland: Who gives a fuck? Population of the rest of the world, which doesn't have a kiosk on every corner: A lot more! I have literally never seen a chip+pin credit card, and I can count on one hand the number of times I've seen someone advertising contactless payment.
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maybe because you drink poo or something, live in a nyc basement where "drug stores" take magstripe with "signature" without anyone even looking at the card or the signature and never left anywhere where people want to do something, a little bit, to avoid cc fraud.
the most popular manufacturer of those readers in use in finland(which can read magstripes as well) is SAGEM and they don't do them just for finland.. and the reason they need connectivity while on the go is so that they can use debit cards which
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Sorry but he has a point. Square might do OK in the US for now, but wouldn't work anywhere else. Most countries (including most of Europe and east Asia, which definitely do have populations big enough to matter) have moved to chip and PIN cards and a good proportion of banks in those countries have made using the PIN compulsory.
I'm Australian but live in the US at the moment. I have three credit cards in my wallet: an Australian-issued Mastercard, an Australian-issued AMEX and a US-issued Visa. Both the Aus
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The US card has neither a chip nor contactless capabilities AFAIK - it's a plain old magnetic strip. I would have serious issues actually trying to use that card back home (or in most other countries), as plenty of places simply won't take a swipe anymore.
Chips and contactless cards have been available in the US for a long time. They just aren't universal. I had an Amex Blue card nearly 15 years ago that had a chip in it. And in 2005 they launched a contactless card. Discover also had an oddly shaped ca
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Yeah they do have an email option (and I think it's actually the standard/default option?) I take taxis a lot when travelling for business in the US and they virtually all seem to use Square. It's pretty cool actually because once you pay using Square the first time and supply your email address, every other time you pay with that card, your email address is already pre-filled. So it's just swipe the card and you're done. The receipt is waiting in my inbox a few minutes later (which I need to claim expenses
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Really? I thought Australia was one of the last to embrace chip+pin and yet I now see contactless readers absolutely everywhere. The last time I used the chip was about 2 months ago and only because the PayPass reader at the the local Thai takeaway wasn't working.
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Australia was late to the game compared to Europe, but as you say, chip and pin is pretty ubiquitous now, and contactless is catching up fast. I'm Australian but have been in the US the last six months and I've not seen a single reader that supports EITHER of those techs here.
I have seen quite a few of these Square readers from TFA though.
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Yeah but contactless really just means no need to give authorisation by touching a PIN pad. So it's limited it to £20/€25 purchases. The amount of time taken to tap 4 numbers is always dwarfed by how long it takes to authorise and take payment, print and collect receipt.
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Really? When I go to the supermarket, I just tap my Amex against the pinpad, the transaction is approved in around 200ms. The operator says "would you like a receipt?" and if I say no, I walk out. If the amount is more than $80, I have to enter a PIN, but otherwise it's pretty much instant.
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My brother runs a small booth that sells superhero t-shirts and memorabilia on the weekends. Do you think that he shouldn't take credit cards? Or that his taking of credit cards would be more "legitimate" if it didn't go through his cell phone? Utter nonsense.
And if he's wrong about the legitimacy of the transaction the company will just reverse it on him and he loses the money, not you. And that's happened all of once for $80 over a 2 year period.
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No he shouldn't. Not unless he's willing to buy/lease a proper solution from his bank which embraces the proper security protocols established by the industry. A lot of effort has been put into card readers to make them safe from tampering by the merchant themselves. Not just software either. Simply opening one of the card readers will completely brick them. Want to access the circuit board without opening by drilling into the side? Nope that'll typically trigger a trip grid around the inside of it.
The only
Re:Swipe? (Score:5, Informative)
Simply opening one of the card readers will completely brick them.
Probably not. I've repaired and/or replaced many keypads and phone jacks on CC terminals over the years. I've done this for readers made by several different companies and many levels of features, including Hypercom (the most popular brand), and terminals that have RFID readers and external pinpads. Opening them up has always been easy, and they accept my soldering iron and screwdrivers just fine. I doubt there's much in the way of tamper-proofing on the portable ones either, even though I've never worked on them, considering the lack of tamper-proofing on anything else they make.
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The Verifone models are also what quite a few stores use around here as well. I can confirm they are touchy, and "die" often (I think due to customers poking them too hard or something during debit transactions), but they also are all the models where you can swipe a normal card OR "tap" the chip-enabled cards to perform the transaction (which I guess helps our foreign tourists out, as there is only one card & card company here that offers them, so, useless to us locals).
There's been a few times where t
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The only thing that is utter nonsense is that we've pissed all advances in security against the wall by releasing a device that reads a mag stripe (I'm not sure this is actually accepted in some countries anymore), and that has only a bit of software separating a potential fraudster from a credit card.
They don't even need to swipe your card, dude. They can do it by the numbers. There is no security in credit cards whatsoever. All that technological whizbang bullshit they've put on them doesn't close the human loophole.
There's a reason chip+pin was introduced and that was to separate a merchant even more from the customer's credit card. Now there's no reason for you to hand your card over to the waitress anymore and wait while she disappears with it in the back room.
Unfortunately, most credit cards don't actually have chip+pin. I've never even seen one that does.
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Depends where you are I suspect. In the UK, all new cards over the last few years have been chip and pin.
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YMMV of course. I haven't seen a card issued in the last several years that doesn't have a chip (even in Australia which was notoriously late getting on the chip-and-PIN bandwagon compared to Europe ... I remember having issues using my Australian card in the UK in the mid-2000s because they all required a chip even a decade ago). I think it's only pretty much the US now where it's not standard.
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They don't even need to swipe your card, dude. They can do it by the numbers. There is no security in credit cards whatsoever. All that technological whizbang bullshit they've put on them doesn't close the human loophole.
That loophole only exists if someone has my card. I don't give it to anyone. The swipe machine is brought out and people say here you go, and you do the rest of the transaction yourself.
Unfortunately, most credit cards don't actually have chip+pin. I've never even seen one that does.
I haven't seen one in about 3 years that doesn't have chip+pin. I have occasionally swiped my card when I've had a mental blank and the machine beeps at me saying I need to insert the chip.
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The number of merchants (I'm in NZ) who have an ancient reader that doesn't have a card slot on the pinpad or who claim "oh that doesn't work, you have to give it to me so I can do it on this side" is staggering. Even more staggering is how many merchants persist in swiping the card before checking for a chip and inserting it (some banks actually advise that this is a fraud indicator, and you should not shop at these places).
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The square device can suffer from a MITM. The older one didn't even encrypt the data from the swipe card when it got sent to their servers. Magnetic swipe cards do not support pin numbers.
I'd be slightly more happy if they didn't use a magnetic reader, but they don't. The fear is misplaced because magnetic swipes are an ancient outdated technology with very few protections and which some countries are in the process of actively outlawing.
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Square is fully PCI compliant because IT DOESN'T STORE YOUR INFORMATION and USES SSL TO TALK TO ITS SERVER. Thats ALL the security you get ANYWHERE on the client side IN THE BEST CASE situation.
Stop spewing shit you know nothing about. 99.999% of the PCI rules are written around the fact that people STORE the credit card numbers. The instant you stop storing card information, PCI becomes ridiculously less complex.
Welcome to what Square does ... it makes all the PCI compliance issues a problem for Square
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Just because you've not seen Chip+Pin doesn't mean you should be actively supporting the continued use of your outdated technology.
I think we have a fundamental misunderstanding because you live in a country which is quite backwards on credit card security. I haven't seen a magnetic stripe reader in use in a very long time, I haven't owned a credit card without chip+pin for at least 3 years and even when I did I never used that card.
In other use the vast majority of internet traffic isn't encrypted either s
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"Simply opening one of the card readers will completely brick them."
Irrelevant if you not trying to send fraudulent transactions over the network yourself. If you are just skimming cards then you don't need a real transaction at all. You sell the info and let other people make widely dispersed fraudulent transactions.
"There's a reason chip+pin was introduced and that was to separate a merchant even more from the customer's credit card. Now there's no reason for you to hand your card over to the waitress any
Re:Swipe? (Score:5, Interesting)
Thats because you utterly fail to understand any part of the process. This isn't insightful, its just the opposite, it shows ignorance.
First off, the strip on your card, not encrypted in the first place, its just data. Encrypting it offers nothing of value as you would then just end the encrypted blob, which anyone could also copy and send. You can read it with a modified 8 track player and some software (this is essentially how square works) or any of the thousands of various card readers that hook up to a PC as if it were a keyboard.
None of the data stays on the iPad, its simply forwarded off to squares servers to do the real work.
Do you think its a better setup to do the card reading on a virus and malware infected PC instead, you know, one of those PCs that you run your card through every day at the gas station or restaurant you eat at instead of the walled garden that Apple built.
If this bothers you, it just shows you're ignorant of the actual security concerns. You should be far far more concerned with the waiter or mcdonalds employee you hand your card through that can just snap a pic of it when you're not in sight.
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No it shows you're ignorant of the direction in the industry. The world over is doing everything in its power to get rid of magnetic stripe readers for EXACTLY the reasons you specify, yet here we have a system and service that actively embraces it.
It does bother me now. It wouldn't bother me if this was a product of 10 years ago, but it's not. It's a product of 10 year old technology at a time when the entire industry is trying to move away from it *because of the security concerns*.
As for the ummmm PC con
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It is not flat (Score:4)
I can see two problems with this statement:
It is not a flat fee.
And it is not per swipe.
In fact, it is a commission or a share.
Oh, and it is of course not a benefit for the customer, as much as square is wiggling around the issue. They remove a price plan, and thereby increases prices.
in other words... (Score:3, Informative)
they're adopting the pricing scheme of every other payment processor, including paypal and intuit (both of which have a very similar device and service), google checkout (wallet) and ordinary credit card merchant accounts.
Re:It is not flat (Score:5, Informative)
The plan was $275/month or 2.75% per swipe. However, the 275 per month was limited to the first $10,000 (ie $275 in fees). After this, it defaulted to the 2.75% anyway. Therefore, if you chose monthly, and didn't use it all, you actually paid a higher price. By definition, you could always just take the 2.75%, so I don't know why anyone would ever choose the monthly plan in the first place.
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Advertisement (Score:5, Insightful)
This _might_ deserve a blurb in a payment industry trade rag, but why /.?
Are we covering all merchant fee plan changes in the that industry now?
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It may be a bit of an ad, but they are fairly well known in the mobile world as a very successful startup. They have also contributed a ton of open-source libraries https://github.com/square [github.com]
Bitcoin fees... (Score:1)
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The charges for anyone paying with hairs on my genitalia are also unchanged.
And that's a scarce resource produced at a decreasing rate, hard to counterfeit.
WHY AREN'T YOU ALL USING MY PUBES AS CURRENCY, LIBERTARIANS?
What is Square? (Score:2)
I can't keep up with all the little new web companies that come out anymore. What are they, and why is this change important? At least mention it in the summary.
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Square is a payment processor.
Their "schtick" is including a credit card magstripe reader that plugs into the headphone jack of an iPhone or iPad.
It's actually fairly useful, as it allows all sorts of businesses to take credit cards that would, otherwise, be too small to afford some form of mobile payment acceptance. It also allows the vendor to e-mail receipts to their customers if the customer so chooses.
I use them at conventions as a backup if our normal credit card readers stop working for any reason.
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And here I was... (Score:1)
...thinking that this was a post about the computer game Final Fantasy XIV or something... Turns out it's some stupid I-don't-know-what that can be easily used to steal your credit card info.
Pointless...
Was I the only one? (Score:1)
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I thought this was about FF XI finally going free-to-play.
Not a surprise, was clearly a loss-leader (Score:1)
This shouldn't be a big surprise...the flat rate plan was clearly a loss-leader meant to gain marketshare.
Most of the fee you pay to companies like Square doesn't go to them. It goes towards the "Interchange Fee" charged by Visa, MasterCard, and AMEX. These interchange fees vary based on card type (for example, fees are higher on "reward cards"...that's what funds the "reward"), and transaction type ("card not present", for example, has a higher rate). Check over the interchange fees for Visa [visa.com] and MasterC [mastercard.us]
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The confusing thing is that all these companies exist at all. Shouldn't the credit card processing networks themselves be offering these services? Why should my payment go through a shady pseudo-bank (paypal) AND a credit processing network before getting to the real bank actually disperses the money and which I have promised to pay back?
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Square was there to lose the money (Score:2)
The credit processing networks didn't offer an equivalent service because doing so would cause them to lose money.
Money losing market-niches are generally rather sparsely occupied.
Now I guess Square is established enough they are going to vacate that niche too.
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The market that's more curious to me is the "card not present" market...payment processors for websites. Stripe [stripe.com] seems to be the darling of the Slashdot crowd, but their pricing is horrible. They offer 2.9% + $0.30 per transaction, and won't offer to discount it until you're doing $1M+ per year. Contrast with Paypal's Payment Pro [paypal.com] which drops down first to 2.5%+$0.30 once you hit $3k/month, then down to 2.2%+$0.30 once you hit $10k/month. Stripe has a few features that PPP doesn't, but they would need to be real important to you to pay that much more.
But wait, there's more! An actual bank will probably charge you 2.0%+$0.30 for virtually zero volume (I'm on 2.2%+$0.50 NZD so about $0.40 USD but we're known for being more expensive). Plus, an actual bank will offer you the benefit of the 3DS liability shift (which PayPal/Stripe will not).
So why does anyone use these services again?
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What you're referring to that Stripe and Paypal offer is what's called a "Blended Rate" if you get it from a bank. Mine is blended, but I could also opt for what's called "Interchange Plus", where instead I'm charged the Interchange rate (what the issuing bank charged the acquiring bank to process the transaction) plus a margin.
Off-topic, but ... (Score:2)
Slushdot's fortune cookies need a thorough overhaul.
Just as a for-instance, I keep seeing "There's no such thing as a free lunch" attributed to Milton Friedman. Phrase finder attributes [phrases.org.uk] the original statement to journalist Paul Mellon, in a January, 1942 editorial response to a speech by then-vice-President Henry Wallace. It notes that the phrase is associated with Friedman only because he appropriated it as the title of his 1975 book - but he would have been in grade school when Mellon's editorial was firs
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krs440 noted:
Attribution can be tricky. You seem pretty sure that the original statement should be attributed to Paul Mellon, and mention it's from January, 1942. What about this? http://news.google.com/newspapers?nid=1144&dat=19380705&id=ZysbAAAAIBAJ&sjid=BE0EAAAAIBAJ&pg=1516,6094461 [google.com] It's the July 5th, 1938 edition of the Pittsburgh Post Gazette, specifically, a story entitled "Economics in Eight Words". The last line is "There ain't no such thing as free lunch". I assume that the difference of "There aint" vs "There's" and the missing "a" aren't terribly important. I have no idea if this is the first occurrence of it either.
If you read the reference I cited (pause for derisive laughter from the peanut gallery), you'll note that IT draws a distinction between the two formulations. Like Friedman with the more formal phraseology, Robert A. Heinlein is frequently credited with "There ain't no such thing as a free lunch." In fact, he DID come up with the acronym TANSTAAFL (in his 1966 novel The Moon Is a Harsh Mistress), which is now widely used, but, as you point out, he certainly didn't coin the parent observation.
So
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krs440 stated:
Sorry, you lost me. I did read your reference.
The aside was directed at the peanut gallery - not at you. (Your user number indicated that you ought to be familiar with the /. habit of responding to postings without having first read the article to which they refer. It's practically an article of faith around here. The notion that the gallery would bother to read a link posted within a comment is still less likely. Your research citation made it pretty clear that you're the exception that proves the rule.),/p>
Yes, it mentions the variation, which is what cause me to do a little searching to see the earliest documented reference I could find with minimal effort. I'm clearly not the expert you are on attribution. However, as a layperson, crediting Paul Mellon for a minimally reworded version of a phrase doesn't seem much better than crediting someone who bothered to use it for a book title.
Again, they're not the sam
'good' news (Score:1)