Anti-fraud may been the reason on that day, but who knows what will be the reason tomorrow (eg Capital Controls as it happened in Greece). The main point is that I still had to get permission. It's kind of like when I was a kid, I wasn't allowed to go outside the house unless I informed my parents, which was like getting permission implicitly.
When using cash, you do not have to inform the bank anything.
For me, it’s always been cheapest to use an ATM at my destination, and let my bank do the currency conversion instead of using the rate offered by the ATM. My bank charges me something like max(5€, 1%), which is usually substantially cheaper than all the other options. I think this is more or less the same (or cheaper) for all German banks.
Almost all UK banks charge 2.75% above the visa/mc wholesale rate for overseas transactions. Plus they usually charge 1%-1.5% for overseas ATM transactions.
This is so prevalent that it's common for new banks (or existing banks doing a push for their new current account) to offer commission-free overseas spending. But many of them have pulled the 'perk' after they've gained a large enough customer base. If I recall correctly, at least Halifax, Nationwide and Metro Bank have in the past offered accounts with no commission on overseas card transactions, and then changed the terms to the standard (2.25%-2.75%) after 1-3 years.
Anti-fraud is done for the bank's benefit, with little incentive to prevent false positives. In my own experience, 100% of my blocked transactions have been false over the last few years (since I moved out of the US, where fraud is more rampant). It's extremely annoying - it's my money, but I can't use it because the bank is being overly conservative.
100% of fraudulent transactions have gone through silently on my card. Despite the fact that many times my bank has sent me an SMS querying whether something was kosher. Doubly perplexing because they were OS hotel and airline charges, I had a stream of local transactions (fuel, supermarket), I very rarely pay hotels directly, and the bank makes it easy to tell them you are going OS.
After much drama they refunded me. The hotel didn't seem to even care -- presumably they were not getting a huge charge back. IDK if it was a 'card not present' or what. They couldn't even tell me the name of the person using my card -- privacy rules.
Maybe switch banks? My experience is I've had my account blocked exactly once - and that turned out to be actual identity theft. In the end, I didn't permanently lose any money thanks to the system working as intended. On one other occasion, I received a phone call from my bank inquiring about an unusual charge. I confirmed that this time it was a legitimate transaction I made and neither the account nor transaction were blocked.
In my experience, informing the bank of travel makes no difference. They block regardless even when I inform and even for foreign charges that appear with regular frequency.
That whole "inform your bank thing" is no longer a thing, at least here. We went to Namibia/Zimbabwe last year and I tried to give them a heads up to not have my cc blocked. The hotline person said there is nothing they can do. If the software blocks it, it blocks it. No way for them to prevent that.
Like the peer comment, my experience is that informing about travel may or may not work and I’ve had really random rejections. These days I travel with backup cards including from totally different bank and network.
Pretty much. I travel with multiple cards from different banks. Recent trip where I notified the banks ahead of time I'd be travelling. Results as follows:
Bank 1 : no issues at all with them. Used that card in 6 countries within 40 hours.
Bank 2 : they killed the card on first use in foreign country (the one I listed as visiting). When I got back it took a week of calls to halfway sort out the mess and then I just cancelled the account in disgust.
Bank 3: they flagged the card. I was notified via app. I called them. They unlocked the account / transaction all was good from then on. Further transactions were fine.
If a Robinhood user thinks they are getting the wrong prices when they buy or sell, then they should seriously contact the SEC because that is illegal (as far as I know the prices aren't wrong).
The reason guaranteed small-scale trade orders are valuable is because they are a way to avoid 'salami tactics' which involve slowly building up to a large order. By the end of a larger order the price will have moved, and the earlier 'sliced' traders will be disappointed.
Well, they’re making a product choice to bias to aiming at one direction. That’s just a product choice that’s a useful differentiator when the most recent successful dating apps have been hookup apps.
Interesting scheme. You corner a scarce resource and then sell it. I wonder what new permit schemes we’re going to see and how we can capitalize on this.
Those are government agencies you voted for. American citizens want leaders who bomb countries. Go vote a non-interventionist or isolationist if you want someone else.
Face the truth. If you want no killing, Your enemy isn’t Google, it’s your neighbour.
> Face the truth. If you want no killing, Your enemy isn’t Google, it’s your neighbour.
> it's not Google's fault either.
Starting from a false truth, you can come to any conclusion. Google is responsible for choosing to enable immoral acts and pretending there are no fault actors is one of your faults.
yes, but you cannot deny paying these taxes because you live at the wims of the tyranny of the majority.
You could ofcourse proclaim not wanting to take part in said nation anymore and not pay the taxes, but then you would also loose out of well, the rest of society basically.
Eh? This comment makes no sense. Wesley Chan is American, dude. He’s amazed at what people are doing in China. If anything he’s bringing the cultural habits of a 9-5 job from the US to China and being surprised by it, hence ‘we’ and not ‘they are lazy in the US’.
The skill barrier is low. It’s all turnkey now with cloud platforms. Literally just a web tutorial away. The hard part is the audience and the fact that video hosting is expensive for individuals.
But depending on which "cloud platform" you're using, you're drifting back towards centralisation again.
Possibly the most important change that my previous post alluded to was that everyone's ISP used to bundle some basic web space in the same way that they bundled a basic email account and ran their own Usenet server. You automatically had a web site if you just ticked the "on" box, and you could upload your content with a simple FTP transfer. Many ISPs provided some "my first web site" level instructions to get you started on building things yourself, even with the inevitable "under construction" graphic.
Sadly, those days are mostly gone. With the rise of centralised hosting (sorry, "cloud") services, ISPs seem to have backed away from including those kinds of secondary facilities in their typical plans, except for maybe email addresses. And so now, it is mostly only larger organisations and the geeks and enthusiasts who self-host in any meaningful sense, and everyone else is hosting their basic business site on Facebook, their blog on Medium or WP, their geek-friendly site on GitHub, their vlog on YouTube, etc.
It’s a pretty clever business niche and a way to run tax-free. The end result is a cultural machine that may well have changed the nature of Christian worship. Interesting, no?
I would argue that all religious tax-dodges are scams if you're an atheist. My businesses and lack of faith don't get a free-ride, but I have to subsidize that of somebody else's?
By this logic, it's a cool business hack to run a megachurch and buy your own 737 without paying taxes, not a scam?
You aren't really subsidising it, unless you're making the argument that if organisations - such as Hillsong - paid taxes the overall tax rate would be lowered for all? Ideally this might be true but the cynic in me suggests it wouldn't... well, that and the fact that their income within a given country is relatively insignificant as compared to GDP within that country.
Moreover:
1) Hillsong runs substantially on donations and purchases of their merchandise (including music). Most of the people who give or buy their merchandise are taxpayers themselves.
2) Anyone paid as an employee by Hillsong will pay taxes, just like everyone else. I don't know much about the lifestyles of their senior employees/leaders - maybe it's a televangelist-style Gulfstream-and-champagne-fest, maybe not.
3) We know Hillsong earn a lot of money but we don't know that they keep very much of it[1]. If they're anything like HTB, they quite likely don't[2]: the vast majority will be spent on staffing, ministry, along with a chunk given to support other organisations and causes. Ministry means everything from what you see on a Sunday and special events through to social initiatives such as food banks, homeless shelters, childrens' work, soup kitchens, and educational initiatives (and more) that many churches either support or run.
Point (3) is important because it's the point that makes a church a net good within society (or not, in the absence of it). If they're not a net good then I'd be more inclined to agree that, yes, they should be taxed as businesses rather than not taxed as though they're charities. Quantifying that is obviously non-trivial.
[1] It's possible they do but I don't have any information to hand on this.
[2] At a pure numbers level this is something that distinguishes a charity from a (healthy) business: one does not generate a profit (which is not to say the money shouldn't be used carefully and beneficially: clearly it should), whilst the other does.
> I don't know much about the lifestyles of their senior employees/leaders - maybe it's a televangelist-style Gulfstream-and-champagne-fest, maybe not.
Well, it most certainly is, isn’t it? You get an additional double digit percentage. That’s going to help your margins.
They aren’t scammers, though, because most people want this. Of course it is unfair to you, but most countries have their laws originate in their dominant religious culture and consequently favour that culture.
For instance, the San Francisco MTA legalized parking along the median on the street for church services. It’s just the way that people want it to be, and in democracies, they will inevitably get their way so it’s best to take advantage of the laws they make. Being upset is less profitable than playing the game.
Can you please tell me whose abortion you've actually paying for lately? The laws around Planned Parenthood's funding are quite clear, and government money does not pay for abortions, which is misfortunate. Planned Parenthood is audited more frequently than any other organization in the United States.
What do your tax dollars pay for in regards to Planned Parenthood? Things that Medicare should be paying for, but fails at, specifically, reproductive care for women, including obstetrics, which should go well with your pro-birth agenda (I'm not going to dignify it with the phrase "pro-life" because once the baby comes out, the "pro-lifers" seem to run for cover)
Meanwhile, when it comes to giving my tax dollars as welfare to your religion, your conservative agenda infringes upon my constitutional rights established under the 1st amendment to our constitution (in case of the USA).
