I thought HN crowd is smarter than average crowd, but surprised to see so many folks supporting this fraud. If they sold just "note taking service" then it does not matter what they do behind the scene or how they scale up the service, manual or automated. But if they sold "AI-enabled" note taking service, then it's a clear fraud. Nothing different from Trevor Milton rolling the trucks from hills.
if merchants pay anywhere between 2% to 3%, how is the bank able to pay 3.5% for purchases to your corp card customers? Simple math says the bank would lose money on this which of course won't be true. What am I missing?
Merchants pay what they’re charged on a transaction by transaction basis. That is unless they have some agreement with Stripe or similar that provides a fixed percentage.
If you get a full merchant account as a business, with IC+ billing or similar, your statement will itemize IC charges on every transaction and it’s based on the type of card the customer used.
If it’s Amex / Discover it might be 5% or more. This is why a lot of merchants are Visa and Mastercard only. If your customer has a cash back card, it will maybe be 4%. If your customer uses a no frills visa bank card, it might be 1.5%.
Across a large population of transactions it usually averages 2-3%. But if you have a B2B where all your transactions are from companies like mine, you’ll likely find it averages above 3%.
Businesses like stripe are betting that 2.9% is above the average they see across a very large population of transactions.
This is sad. I have worked with many federal agencies including EPA and have seen firsthand how large corporations try to influence or circumvent the law without regard for people or the environment. The EPA isn’t as bloated as people think. Contrary to public perception, there are many talented and hardworking federal employees. The real culprits are the large federal contracting companies that deliver subpar results and hide behind federal procurement bureaucracy. I wish DOGE would focus on that.
Trickle down theory is so old and boring. Instead, you can try this:
If you tax the rich, they would lose sleep. If they lose sleep, they would be tired all the day and won't be able to work at optimal level. And if the rich do not work well, then the whole economy goes downhill. So, give them tax breaks and a good night sleep. It's good for the economy.
On one hand, your idea has merit. But it is not without subtle risks. These could be mitigates by doing proper mitigation measures. But again, you cannot be sure how this will work out. May be the rich have some assets that they can sell off to meet the increased tax burden. This means that they don't have to manage those assets, which can contribute to reduced stress, which could lead to a better nights sleep. This will in turn cause them to wake up and exploit the worker class with increased vigor. But they could also use their now superfluous attention to engage in reddit or hackernews or watch youtube reels, and start zombifing and eventually end up being a d-crat..So who knows how it will work out.
In my experience, team efficiency does not improve linearly with head count. A 100-person team may be 2 or 3 times more productive than a 10-person team. Collaboration efforts (process, bureaucracy, calls, meetings, mails, chats) increase exponentially with larger teams. AI can help with coding but not much with this collaboration process, at least not yet. Now, AI can make a small team much more productive because their collaboration overhead stays the same. But AI cannot help with a 100 person team because their collective collaboration overhead cannot be solved by AI. I guess the trend will move towards smaller sized teams that can effectively use AI.
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