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really getting sick of corporate copy writers' bullshit, friends
y'know what would really improve my experience on your site, Paypal? less bullshit while you try and productize my use of your sketch-ass services.
an entire bullshit industry built around processing payment transactions between two parties that exists solely because the financial institutions that already do this work, namely banks and credit unions, continue to use the oldest, least capable systems for handling bank transfers possible while they turn around and underwrite the IPOs of these shit companies. fucking rackets everywhere. and I cannot stand tennis goddammit!
y'know how oauth lets you go to a site, say "yeah, my auth info is handled by foo dot org" and then it hands you off to foo dot org to get authed and bring back a token proving you're you that the original site can verify from their end by asking foo dot org about it?
that could be banking, but the banks don't want you to have things that easy. far too few opportunities for them to extract monies from the transactions if it's smooth sailing.
@djsundog I've actually really been wanting to see somebody make an open source distributed banking network or something. Fedibanking, so to speak. :/
@djsundog @Angle This might be a way to nationalize consumer banking: the central bank provides the actual accounting backend along with all the actual currency management, while the various “instances” just provide the UI and other services on top of it.
Actually storing balances and recording transactions is a pretty hard problem, not to mention issuing currency or storing a commodity in a trustworthy/secure manner.
@freakazoid @Angle it would seem to make sense to me that a stable financial system should be infrastructure under capitalism
@djsundog @freakazoid @Angle if you wanted to build a system that would survive, instead of one you could pump for quick profit and bail out of before it crashed, it would be. That is not an incentive in a capitalist society unfortunately, and the money you can make (often literally) by exploiting the financial system is so titanic that you can prevent reform from getting anywhere
@robotcarsley @djsundog @Angle The banks whined to the government that elderly people were losing their savings because of the banks' own bad investments, so the government created a banking cartel called the Federal Reserve and delegated its own minting power to that cartel.
What I'd like to see is a strict separation between public and private, like we have between church and state. Get rid of the FDIC and the Fed, and allow only the government to provide government-backed banking services.
@robotcarsley @djsundog @Angle It seems like the biggest problems with the American system come from the ability of powerful investors to get the government to socialize their losses while still keeping gains private. This encourages the creation of (at least apparent) systemic risk whenever possible in order to maximize the likelihood of bailouts. We need a system in which investors can have high confidence that no bailouts will be forthcoming.
@robotcarsley @djsundog @Angle Most anti-capitalists see the privatization of gains as the problem, but for some reason they seem to consider the socialization of losses to be inevitable. If we had a system in which people were always taken care of, we wouldn't have to care how much anyone lost gambling in the market, because we were already making sure they wouldn't starve, become homeless, or go without health care.
@robotcarsley @djsundog @Angle In my mind this makes a robust social safety net as much a libertarian value as a socialist one, and in fact Adam Smith himself believed in welfare. But the Randroids have perverted libertarianism with their weird hyper-individualistic religion.
@robotcarsley @djsundog @Angle I guess the better term is "classical liberalism," and we can reserve "libertarianism" for the Randroid-perverted version.
@freakazoid @djsundog @Angle I think it's a bigger issue than just banking, it's basically the same mindset of externalizing costs that underlies every environmental disaster we're facing or have faced over the past century. El problema es capitalismo, now as always
@robotcarsley @djsundog @Angle I agree that the problem is the more general issue of externalizing costs. But greed exists regardless of the economic or political system. I think we're all better off, including the wealthiest, where there is a high level of economic mobility, and healthy competition all the way up.
There are super simple tweaks we can make that will stop companies from growing so much, like (in the US) taxing capital gains the same as regular income.
@robotcarsley @djsundog @Angle It used to be that banks were allowed to fail, and they weren't so interlinked that they would take one another down. The US's quirky system made banks more unstable than necessary, because branching was quite limited, which meant their holdings weren't particularly diverse. Many states also required banks to hold a certain amount of their assets in the state's bonds, and strangely these states also tended to be the ones that defaulted the most.