There's no such thing as "Power centers".

Money is that power.

You cannot have billionaires and them not be immensely, structurally powerful.

That's the entire point of capitalism, that resources, including labor, be directed by those with capital.

Believing you can have a single human being in control of a non-negligible percentage of all resources of a country, and they wont somehow be actually powerful or influential is moronic.

Taking the power away from billionaires literally IS taking their money.

“Money is that power.”

That’s the stupidest thing I’ve ever read. Power is power. Members of the Communist Party in the USSR were as wealthy as their subjects, their power differential was enormous.

Not all power is money, but money is power.

It's called an executive summary because that's the only thing the executive will read of your carefully put together report.

"Rich guy has an opinion" is like 85% of what gets posted here to HN. Truly frustrating.

I earnestly did not know that it wasn't "true" or was an exaggeration or anything.

Glad to learn, but, that's zero percent of the reason anyone shouldn't like the guy, zero percent of the reason he's a bad person, etc.

Who cares if someone fucks couches? Apparently that kind of stuff doesn't end your political career anymore anyway.

It's not like he shot a puppy!

The UN was designed to not bind the powerful nations. That's the point of the security council.

Granted, little weird Russia kept a seat when the USSR broke up.

Sure, they will work hard to be a real place for mediation between small countries and unimportant parties, but they will veto anything against their interests.

The industry standardized on this as "Stack ranking" like two decades ago.

This is more of the Bezos style, maybe inspired by the same idea. Appears less random and continual.

In a somewhat democratic country, it's limited by what the people vote for.

Unfortunately, right now the people voted for obscene corruption and dismantling of institutions and selling pardons and a destruction of law and order.

Republican politicians support this and do not stop Trump because stopping Trump will get them voted out.

> because stopping Trump will get them voted out

Hey, you misspelled "murdered".

The heading content and structure is the biggest tell IMO. Even shitty highschool kids don't write like that.

I don't understand where or how AI picked up that habit, because it's self evidently terrible. It makes it clear how low signal AI based writing is. The writing is like the music in shitty blockbusters; engineered to make you feel, rather than to actually structure the content or provide meaningful sections.

Compare this writeup to the Pixter writeup, where sections feel natural and not "scripted" like this.

Chargebacks don't cost a payment network anything.

They keep the payment fee, and they charge you a large chargeback fee. They don't lose or spend any money out of their own pocket on it.

If you have high fraud rates, they charge you a higher per payment fee.

Our company is both a payment network and a merchant, depending on specific product lines and such. We spend a lot of time preventing credit card fraud on our merchant lines of business, and very little on our payment line of business, because chargebacks cost us nothing there.

As designed.

I can't believe people keep perpetuating this lie, that they very obviously haven't thought critically about. It's so frustrating. It's like everyone just repeating gormlessly that the sky is actually purple when they can just look at it.

Why do you believe this?

They charge you a large fee for every chargeback. They get the full purchase price of the transaction back without any effort. It's automatic. Meanwhile your merchant fee per transaction is directly tied to how many chargebacks you produce.

Chargebacks do not cost the payment network any money at all. All cost is borne by the merchants. That's the whole point. That's why chargebacks are effective: Because the payment network is an all powerful authority in the matter and has no incentive to deny chargebacks.

Stripe has a $15 chargeback fee last time I worked on this.

If you believe $15 covers all of the human labor involved plus the cost of their management chain and employment, I wish I could be as optimistic as labor costs as you.