I work for the Internet and am an advisor to @stripe. These are my personal opinions unless otherwise noted.
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Mar 27 • 10 tweets • 3 min read
This week on Complex Systems, a continued discussion of credit card rewards, interchange, and what I believe is a persistent misconception about how society should want justice done via payments systems.
It ends with the following, which the team took the liberty of putting into a short clip. (Sound on if you like hearing my voice, but video is subtitled.)
Last week the Atlantic published an opinion piece which argues that the poor are subsidizing the rich's receipt of credit card rewards. This view has wide currency among certain advocates and among opinion writers.
It is not true.
Mar 20 • 7 tweets • 2 min read
An argument I have had with some credit card enthusiasts for a very long time, paraphrased.
Enthusiasts: I’m robbing the bank blind!
Me: Doubtful? They are probably pretty happy to have a portfolio of you.
E: Oh by carefully layering promotions and making a spreadsheet and…
Me: So checking my understanding: you spend a lot of money on credit cards.
E: Yes, that’s the whole point.
Me: And in a nation which makes it illegal to underwrite using an IQ test, you have self-constructed an IQ test.
E: Yes and I pass it obviously.
Me: Right. Tracking.
Mar 20 • 36 tweets • 8 min read
The Atlantic has an interesting piece on credit card processing. The thesis is that interchange fees redistribute money from poor to rich.
Last up at #microconf, Marcos Rivera from Pricing I/O on pricing.
"How to avoid stupid mistakes in SaaS pricing"
(I am likely to have some thoughts.)
As always, quotes are Marcos (lightly paraphrased; real time is hard), anything attributed to Marcos is a heavy paraphrase, anything unattributed is me.
Mar 10 • 5 tweets • 2 min read
This is a useful enough specific observation that I'm promoting the general observation to text:
Organizations don't make decisions. People at organizations make decisions. Very often, there is one lynchpin person who must hypercommit to an org doing something for that to be.
From this follows any number of corollaries, including:
1) If you desire change in an org, it is really useful to understand who, specifically, is the lynchpin for the change you want to see.
Mar 8 • 6 tweets • 2 min read
One of the cultural quirks of capitalists is that there are many lies that one is allowed or even encouraged to tell in society, and capitalists are members of society, but are in principle not allowed to lie about revenue.
I have jokingly phrased this as “Certain forms of writing are sacred. For example, if you write the word Balance Sheet on top of a list of numbers, those numbers become sacred to capitalists, and a lie amongst them is a sin that the gods of capitalism will punish most severely.”
Feb 23 • 7 tweets • 2 min read
There is one contractor during this home remodel who I greatly enjoy because of his continued imprecations about the general state of contracting, other subs on project, etc.
“Got something to show you Mr. McKenzie. *gestures at floor* Do you understand how a laser level works?”
Me: “I think I get the theory.”
Contractor: “I think I do, too. Of course back in my day we did this with a bubble level of maybe a piece of string and a weight. But I was concerned that perhaps the people who put this floor in might not understand how to use traditional wisdom.”
Feb 21 • 7 tweets • 1 min read
SBF has a new interview out, conducted from prison. It is... unbelievable, at points.
Highlights include:
* Strong direct statement of his innocence.
* Accusing prosecution and judge of policitized process, analogising to experience of President Trump, apparent maneuvering to secure clemancy.
* Implied rationale for prosecution: his donations to Republicans.
Feb 17 • 22 tweets • 4 min read
Me: Ah a nice relaxing Monday where I can finally get some work done.
DOGE: Have you ever heard of checks?!
Me: %{*]% it.
Me: I don’t do partisan politics.
Twitter the Sumerian bird demon: Got it.
Me: Which is why I work in a painfully boring infrastructural field.
Twitter: Oh sure.
Me: That no one hates each other over.
Twitter: Yeah.
Me: So just writing the truth won’t summon a mob.
*curse starts*
Feb 14 • 17 tweets • 3 min read
Friendly neighborhood Dangerous Professional advice:
If you are ever at a meeting taking notes, and someone at the meeting expresses umbrage that notes are being taken of the meeting, and this is routine notetaking for this genre of meeting, …
… you should absolutely want to keep physical control of those notes, and you should prioritize that over social pressure you may perceive, and you should update very aggressively against the umbrage-taker as being likely up to no good.
Feb 10 • 9 tweets • 2 min read
Since the printing press, it was injurious to reputations to have something untrue said at scale.
We should have adopted more care about this after it became habit in society to Google someone's name and Google started weighting institutions highly.
And now we're standing on the precipice of another revolution in user behavior caused by a technological substrate almost unimaginable earlier: there will be a presumptively authoritative answerer of almost every question, in almost every pocket, and many places besides.
Feb 6 • 8 tweets • 2 min read
Per CoinDesk (and thanks @Bitfinexed):
Lutnik, to Senate: “Cantor Fitzgerald is not conducting continuous diligence on Tether’s financial statements, but I believe my [much stronger endorsement] statements were accurate when made."
Was wondering when walk-back would happen.
Lutnik, who was the CEO of Cantor prior to more recent adventures, previously attempted to dispel long-time doubts about Tether's... everything by vouching for them.
At the time, the open ended nature of the vouching struck me as out of the ordinary.
PDT stands for “pattern day trading” and the PDT rules were imposed after the Dot Com bubble to decrease risk to both small-dollar retail users and the brokerages that accept their business from day trading.
Jan 27 • 30 tweets • 6 min read
Well looks like I ended up with more relatable transpacific banking influencer content.
You either know if you’re in or you’re out for the rest of this thread.
It begins with the balance of one of my Japanese accounts suddenly going to zero, and me calling the bank.
Bank CS: *We do the KYC dance.* Oh really sorry McKenzie-sama but uh this is not an issue that this office can help you out over the phone. Monday morning please call your branch.
Me: Could you hum a few bars please.
Bank CS: I regret I cannot.
Me: To put my mind at ease prior
Jan 24 • 15 tweets • 3 min read
One of the reasons why PDF files that purport to be bank statements are believed to be reliable is that all serious adults understand that if you *$#(%( with one for advantage over a counterparty, you will be prosecuted, with very high probability.
A thing you'll often read in narratives of frauds (Lying for Money has several, and it is a rich genre in the bookstore of your choice) is that the fraudsters don't start out, on day one, doing this.
If you can have a sensible conversation with an engineer about their work, capitalism says you’re eligible for forty jobs that pay better than being a recruiter.
Why does the industry keep stepping on this rake? In part because if *has tried* to get engineers / EMs to sit down with a pack of resumes or LinkedIn profiles and sift through to find the highest priority candidates.
The first day you ask you’ll get takers. The second less.
Jan 21 • 5 tweets • 1 min read
“What choices would you make in a world where the great and the good comprehensively underrate not merely the future path of AI but also realized capabilities of, say, one to two years ago.” remains a good intuition pump and source of strategies you can use.
You wouldn’t think that people would default to believing something ridiculous which can be disproved by typing into a publicly accessible computer program for twenty seconds.
Many people do not have an epistemic strategy which includes twenty seconds of experimentation.
Jan 19 • 6 tweets • 1 min read
Correspondent: *situation* So how is it that my credit card at A shows a payment has posted but by checking account at B shows it as not withdrawn yet?
Me: That’s usual behavior for U.S. bank transfers. Each is an extension of credit, with various risk controls.
And now I’ll continue this with a character.
X: But the money is in two places at once. It cannot be in two places at once.
Me: Extension of credit creates money, yes.
X: Good thing this only happens for credit cards and not for checking accounts.
Me: Built into every account.
Jan 17 • 36 tweets • 7 min read
Seems like the SEC finally got around to fining DCG for lying through their teeth repeatedly in 2022.
I think this finally lets me cash in a very old hash. Most is very old news, but there's one discussion topic that is perhaps not public yet.sec.gov/newsroom/press…
So back in November 8th, 2022 I dropped this hash on Twitter.
That is not actually a book, but let’s say there is a very rich subgenre of advice, much of it written by and for very successful people, which says what that book would say, in some cases literally by way of extended D&D metaphors it assumes the audience will grok.
Jan 16 • 18 tweets • 3 min read
I sometimes get asked "Why don't you have a tip cup? I'd like to support you, but don't want to commit to a subscription." My macroed response is that I appreciate the gesture and suggest a donation to a local charity.
I do not take donations because I sell things to businesses.
Businesses do not customarily tip or donate to professionals. When they see someone with a tip cup, they think "Not a professional."
This is not something I want a business to think about me when quoting rates.
