Posted on 11/26/2015 9:32:06 AM PST by Kaslin
The Left delights in their moral superiority about shopping on Thanksgiving and Black Friday. Progressives and Big Labor are petulant about the dirty dozen stores that will remain open on Thanksgiving Day, and mainstream media carps about the "Black Friday Creep" of businesses opening its doors earlier.
I don't shop on Black Friday, and I am home all day with my family on Thanksgiving; however, I understand too that a modern economy never really sleeps. Why should it? How can it? Frank Sinatra sang about how capitalism’s most important city New York, New York is a city that never sleeps.
"I want to wake up, in a city that doesn't sleep And find I'm king of the hill Top of the heap."
You don’t make it to the "top of the heap" by keeping your doors closed or by ignoring changing times and technologies. Entrepreneurship, innovation, disruption, and transformation are pillars of free enterprise. Sometimes this requires getting up earlier, staying open longer, welcoming modernity, and embracing new technology.
As Charles Murray has eloquently made clear, "everywhere that capitalism subsequently took hold, national wealth began to increase and poverty began to fall. Everywhere that capitalism didn't take hold, people remained impoverished. Everywhere that capitalism has been rejected since then, poverty has increased." Free enterprise is the only system in the history of humankind to lift people billions of people out of poverty.
So, for those of you celebrating capitalism this Thanksgiving or Black Friday, take a look at your credit and debit cards. I write this because just this week my bank sent me a new business card with chip technology. My bank is embracing new technology (and modernity) to help protect me from having my accounts hacked.
An astounding 48 percent of the world's credit card fraud happens in the United States. In recent years, our credit card security has fallen behind most nations, making us the target of choice for fraudsters. Being the weakling in the room is not the proper place for American Entrepreneurship. It's really kind of sad when Europe is the iPod to America's Walkman when it comes to banking technology. This must be fixed.
The immediate answer lies in the thumbnail-sized computer chip found in my new bank card an EMV chip. It stands for Europay, MasterCard, and Visa, the three companies that originally created the standard. Perhaps your bank has already issued you a new EMV chip-enabled card. These chip cards, unlike the magnetic stripe cards we're all used to, can't be counterfeited. Though not a panacea to all card-related cybercrime, they are a huge step in the right direction. EMV cards have been the standard in Europe for a decade.
While we know how to make credit cards far more secure, the urgency to embrace this technology has been lacking. Resistance to making the switch to EMV technology in the United States has, not surprisingly, come down to cost. Banks have been slow to issue new cards and retailers have been reluctant to pay for new terminals to read chip cards. For businesses that have to buy multiple terminals, sometimes hundreds, the cost is considerable. But the cost of inaction is too great. Card fraud is expected to top $10 billion in the United States this year alone.
However, we are starting to turn a corner. On October 1, we saw a shift in liability that should provide increased market incentive for banks and retailers to pick up the pace of the EMV transition. For years, a card issuer absorbed the costs associated with counterfeit fraud transactions. Now, liability for fraudulent charges rests on the weakest link in the chain. That means, in case of counterfeit fraud, retailers are responsible if they haven't upgraded to EMV-enabled terminals and banks are responsible if they haven't issued consumers new chip cards.
Unfortunately, while banks are making significant progress in issuing new cards to consumers, retailers aren't moving nearly as quickly to upgrade payment terminals. That's a shortsighted mistake. While upfront costs of upgrading terminals may be considerable, liability from a major incident of counterfeit card fraud could be crippling.
Quickly adopting EMV technology is the first, critically important step to righting the ship. More work will be needed, but ignoring modernity and technological change is the antithesis to American Entrepreneurship. We are a country of innovators and entrepreneurs, and it is past time we fix this problem.
In the spirit of modernity, maybe I will venture out this Friday to do a little shopping? While out, I'll finally replace my Walkman with one of these new-fangled iPod things. Happy Thanksgiving.
This is my kitchen phone. I still need a land-line for internet service. I LOVE it and everyone thinks it's cool. :)
If you have really good recorded tapes (Those recorded on a high quality home deck from a good source like a pristine vinyl album, NOT most “professionally produced” cassette tapes) will sound much better on a good cassette deck and analog headphones than just about any digital source and especially anything like an iPod. But, that is the nature of things when comparing analog and digital music recordings.
I agree. I’d think it’s conservatives that despise the trend more than anyone. I sure do!
I’ve been hacked ONCE; my bank was very responsive, too.
You know, I guess I should have looked more closely. I just assumed this was the RFID baloney... that’s why I cut it up
That is Kewql.
Why do you care at all?
The newer mousetrap is not always a better mousetrap. Whether that is a lo-fi digital audio device, a non-filament lightbulb, or gasohol.
You're lucky. When Barack Obama gave an ipod to the Queen of England, he loaded the thing up with speeches he'd once given. #truestory
Those pushing for CHANGE don’t permit you to question it. Go with the flow. Keep up with the Jones. Don’t be outside of the mainstream.
YOU still believe marriage is only between one man and one woman?!
YOU still believe that a person should save for his or her own retirement?!
You probably like that old style of math where people memorized basic tables rather than rounding up to 10 and then subtracting numbers...
I've had my iPod classic for close to 10 years now but finally ready to upgrade that. Turns out that with the streaming music option on iTunes, you need the new style iPods in order to store the songs locally and listen to music offline on them.
But I do miss the days of tube socks.
That is a beautiful phone. I love it!!! Wish I had one. :)
Some of us want to work on Thanksgiving. I applied to work on the holidays. No luck yet, but I'm still searching for seasonal work. The more that stores stay open, the more seasonal jobs there are available.
New-fangled iPod things? Where's this guy been for the last decade and a half? iPods were introduced on the market in 2001.
A chip card can’t stop fraud from goods and services paid for over the phone or on the internet, particularly the former. That still depends on the old methods of possibly verifying the card holder’s address, age, card verification number, etc.
We’ve had chip cards in Canada now for some 5 years or more. Where before you would have swiped and then signed (possibly electronically), with the signature using being ignored (who ever actually looks to see the signature matches the one on the back of the card?), now you would just insert the card in the chip reader and punch in your PIN. More secure mostly against duplicate cards made by duplicating the mag stripe - the chip is supposed to be secure, although I understand that its encryption has been broken.
Lately all the new cards here have “tap” RF (NFC) technology. This is typically only good up to $100, maybe $200 for gas. I don’t worry about it, because if there’s a fraudulent charge, it’s the bank’s problem, not mine.
Turns out that with the streaming music option on iTunes, you need the new style iPods in order to store the songs locally and listen to music offline on them.
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Do you have an IPod you recommend? I know next to nothing about Apple products. I just want to download music so that I can listen off line when I go running.
And the hubby wants to know when tube stocks went out of fashion? :)
If you purchase your music, then you might want to consider the iPod Classic which has an old-fashioned hard drive and stores more music (160GB)
I would say 1985 was the last year of the tube socks. I have a picture of myself playing tennis with them that year. Shortly after that, it became unfashionable for men to wear socks that reached up past their ankles (at least when we had shorts on).
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