Interesting Links for 17-09-2019

[andrewducker]

Hunger leads people to make short-term decisions rather than long-term ones

(tags:hunger psychology )

We can't recreate medieval paint without medieval urine

(tags:history urine painting )

RNLI donations surge after Tories criticise them for saving children's lives

(tags:children Ocean life charity GoodNews )

Pennywise the Clown: D&D bad guy

(tags:dungeonsanddragons roleplaying stephen_king movies )

Boris Johnson cancels press conference in Luxembourg due to booing crowds

(tags:UK Europe BorisJohnson OhForFucksSake )

The Suicide Squad cast looks good!

(tags:movies dc )

Hungarian minister grilled by EU about threats to rule of law

(tags:hungary Europe rights law )

Summarising the prorogation case at the Supreme Court and the arguments on both sides

(tags:law politics uk )

How To Cope Under Pressure, According To Psychology

(tags:psychology pressure stress advice )

How do all those shops selling crappy 🇬🇧 souvenirs in London manage to stay profitable?(they probably don't, they're money-launderers)

(tags:money fraud crime uk afghanistan )

Justice Secretary Robert Buckland declining opportunity to rule out Government proroguing Parliament again in October

(tags:conservatives OhForFucksSake politics uk )

New Zealand: Man brings clown to redundancy meeting

(tags:newzealand funny redundancy jobs )

Comments

[claudeb]

Interesting article about D&D boss fights!

How do all those shops selling crappy souvenirs in London manage to stay profitable?(they p

[doug]

Like lots of techie people (though manifestly not all), I learned in the 90s that when a business is doing something that obviously can't make money, although one possibility is that it pivots to something profitable, it may well be that it never makes money and goes bust. It is salutary to remember that another possibility is that it was never supposed to make money.

I think but am not sure that this may also be one factor driving small retail businesses away from cash. Not only does cash cost more to process, and take up lots of staff time, and create risks, if you're doing a brisk trade your cash deposits can attract unwanted attention from the enforcement organs of the state in a way a highly-auditable trail of card purchases wouldn't. This is also true from the bank side, which may well be a factor in the lower merchant fees for card-only businesses.

I suspect competition has much to do with the fees asymmetry too: the barriers to entry as a card-only merchant processor are large, but those for being a cash merchant processor are even larger.

But as someone who used to work in retail, I can see how very, very attractive it would be as a trader to transform the daily grind of cashing up at the end of the day into a simple matter of a few clicks or taps, rather than a tiresome process of counting and adding and then doing it all again because the tills don't balance, and then splitting out the float for tomorrow and what you're paying in, bagging it all up according to the strict rules, then doing the paying in slip, then putting it in the night safe bag, then physically going to the bank to drop it off before you can go home.