Things Driving Me Crazy Today:
Jan. 16th, 2023 01:56 pm![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
captainsblogMany, actually.
-The client who promised me a vital document Friday, didn't email anything until yesterday afternoon, didn't attach the most vital part of it, promised an hour ago I'd get it "shortly" so I can work on that One Damn Thing in my office on a federal holiday and STILL hasn't sent it;
-The asshat Republicans who are spending that federal holiday only honoring one sentence of the honoree's entire legacy and banning discussions of everything else he ever said;
- The sportball fans freaking out because the Bills needed four whole hours to beat an undermanned and outclassed Miami opponent on their wintry home field by not nearly enough points;
But this still is at the top of the list:
Specifically, those pieces of plastic that govern so much of our financial lives.
Despite advances in technology that are intended to introduce more security and convenience to these portals to our fortunes, they remain solidly stuck in the 20th century when it comes to being actually able to use them. I've run into this twice in the past two weeks, and neither experience was particularly fun.
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Let's start with the tech on the cards themselves. The good ol' US of A is miles behind the rest of the world that is kilometers ahead of us in plastic card security. We remain the only major nation still relying largely on magnetic-stripe technology to identify and approve transactions. The rest of the world went to "chip-and-pin" as the exclusive method of credit/debit card processing over 20 years ago, but we remain the major holdouts, as this piece from 2016 relates about a decade earlier:
I still remember the first time it occurred to me my credit card might be inferior—it was the summer of 2007, and I had just landed at Charles de Gaulle airport in Paris. When I finally made my way to the train station at the airport to buy a ticket into the city, the automated ticket machine firmly rejected my Bank of America MasterCard. As I soon discovered, it was an experience familiar to every American who has traveled to Europe: the moment when an automated payment machine (or a disdainful French shop clerk) realizes that you are trying to pay using a credit card without a microchip and that you want them to process your card’s magnetic stripe, an easily counterfeited relic of 1950s technology.
For years, when it came to credit-card security, the United States was the last major holdout in the developed world, continuing to issue cards with magnetic stripes rather than the more-secure microchip EMV cards (EMV stands for the three companies that pioneered the chip: Europay, Mastercard, and Visa). Finally, last October, retailers and banks in the United States were pressured to accept and provide EMV cards, initiating a transition that much of the world regarded as long overdue.
But despite having many other countries to use as models for how to go about updating credit-card technology, the first five months of the EMV transition in the United States have been fraught with delays, complications, and concerns about whether chip-enabled cards will really help mitigate fraud. Especially bewildering was the decision to provide chip-and-signature cards, rather than the chip-and-PIN cards (used in most of Europe) that require people to input a PIN in order to use their cards, rather than just signing for their purchases. If the whole point of the EMV transition is to bring U.S. payment technology up to speed with the rest of the world, why do most U.S.-issued cards still not allow for the more-secure PIN verification? Or, put another way, why is the United States so determined to have the least-secure credit cards in the world?
The article goes on to explain why, in minute and boring detail, that basically boils down to capitalists are cheap and consumers are dumber than boxes of rocks. The cheap part goes to the extra cost of embedding a microchip in a piece of plastic versus a magnetic strip (the banks' problem) and that of updating point-of-sale terminals to accept them (the merchants problem). Through regulation, that has mostly been solved; all the cards I now carry with a Major Credit Card logo on them, both credit and debit, have microchips. All merchants except gas stations are now required to accept the chipped cards, and even most of the latter are catching up to it. However, straight ATM cards do not have chips, and even the chipped debit cards that double as ATM cards won't work in a MoneyMatic machine if it can't read the magnetic stripe that still, in the US, retains all that same and much less secure information.
I found this part out a few weeks ago when trying to deposit a check to our joint checking account, at a MoneyMaticManyTimesRemovedFromMarineMidland, now run by Key Bank. My cardee no workee, and even depositing money is not possible without that. I tried the card in different ATMs at a second branch, and then a third, before finally giving up and stopping in to tell them this maybe two-year-old piece of plastic, still with well over a year before its expiry, would have to be replaced. They said they'd get right on it, and indeed, that new card showed up late last week. Fortunately, it has all the same Things on it: the 16 digit number on the front, and the expiration date and extra three-digit code on the back. Fortunate, because every time one expires or goes missing, they change some or all of those numbers and we have to play an endless guessing game of which subscriptions, gym memberships and other pre-authorized debits have to be changed as well.
The frustrating part is that we're still using this less secure and easier-to-damage piece of technology at all, and requiring the solution to the problem to involve the delivery of a physical card by the Postal Service. At least one bank in our lives handed out our cards to us the day we opened the account; they must have a 3D or similar printer that was able to generate them on the spot. Yet none of that even gets to the second part of the equation in the US, of why these institutions still let these pieces of plastic out into the wild to be used up to the entire credit limit, or balance in a debit account, without the user having to enter a four-digit PIN, or some other unhackable tech such as a fingerprint, to make the purchase. Our poor French traveler explains that, as well:
The disagreement over chip-and-PIN vs. chip-and-signature, then, primarily comes down to the competing interests of banks and retailers as each one tries to drive down the types of fraud that are most expensive for them. The issuing banks want to drive down counterfeit fraud—because they pay for the bulk of it—and they want to do it as cheaply as possible. And they don’t want to lose customers by making credit cards any more difficult to use. The merchants would also like to do things cheaply and without losing customers, but the cost of issuing PINs to millions of customers wouldn’t fall to them, and they have a greater interest in trying to drive down card-not-present and lost-or-stolen fraud, neither of which is impacted by the use of microchips alone.
The reason banks say they don’t want to issue PINs is that they’re worried it will add too much friction to transactions and make life difficult for their customers. “The credit-card market is pretty brutally competitive, so the first issuer who goes with PINs has to worry about whether the consumers are going to say, ‘Oh, that’s the most inconvenient card in my wallet,’’ says Allen Weinberg, the co-founder of Glenbrook Partners. “There’s this perception that maybe it’s going to be less convenient, even though some merchants would argue that PINs take less time than signatures.”
This, even though nowadays they need a PIN or print to turn on their computer or phone. How stupid do they think we are?
::remembers that more than 70 million voters in this country chose The Former Guy after he'd had nuclear code access for almost four years::
Fine. I withdraw the question.
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But I will now get to the annoying plastic thing I can't withdraw.
The New Year rang in the beginning of my penultimate year latched to the teat of private health insurance. I've been lucky, in that the premiums haven't gone up all that much, the deductible and co-pays have stayed close to where they've been in the past, and I've stayed within that deductible amount in most of the years I've had the Doctor G.W. Bush special combo of a High Deductible Plan with Health Savings Account. The latter allows us to deduct virtually all of our health care expenses- even dental, vision and over-the-counter meds-, from our annual taxable income without having to clear the 7.5 percent threshold for itemized deductions. It's this year and next before Medicare will kick in (it damn better, Republicans:P), so on January 1, my deductible reset but so did my eligibility for one little door prize that the major local private insurers, the Blues and the Redshirts, both offer.
Blue Cross calls it a Wellness Card; my Brand X plan says "Health Extras." It's a prepaid debit card you can use for any gym-related service up to $250. Before my current membership, I just put an El Cheapo $10 monthly recurrer on there and used the rest for various extra classes. Since joining Orange, it basically gets me a few free months or, this year, will largely go to replace the heart monitor I've had since 2015 and which is getting wonkier all the time.
A few years ago, I switched from Blues to Red for bigger reasons unrelated to this benefit, but this one, the Blue people did better. On January 1, they just recharged your existing card with the $250 for the year. No new number, no new card. Independent Health, though, gives its members a choice! Every January, you have to pick between renewing that $250 gym benefit OR getting a $500 "healthy eating" card, with limits on what you can buy (presumably no Cheez Wiz or beer) but, more importantly, on where. It's Tops or nuthin, and for us that means nuthin.
My gym membership used to renew toward the end of the month, so that was usually plenty of time to remember to make the choice, make it, and have them send me the new card. Because, yes, even though the last one is still in my wallet with a 1/23 expiry date, it doesn't work. This year, however, my renewal date every month is the 15th; that's because they graciously froze my membership for two weeks over the summer on account of the COVID and the hammy strain. So I made it my business to renew that sucker right on the first available date. First, you have to find where to do it on their app or website, which isn't easy. Then it spun around for a day or so and said "processing," gave me several more of "undefined," but as of late last week, voila!-
That was well over a week after the first of the year when it showed the adjustment, and they said to allow 7-10 business days. I even tried the one I had just in case; still declined. Finally, I called: we're sorry, but there's overwhelming demand for these at the start of the year so it's going to be more like 20 days. Of course, you can just shell it out yourself and apply for reimbursement.
Which, wild guess here, would likely take more time than just waiting the week or so? I sucked it up and let the renewal go through yesterday. I'll order the new monitor when it shows up and use the rest next month.
Just hope that the magnetic stripe on the thing works.
Well, Dear...
Date: 2023-01-17 11:35 am (UTC)Since I suck at gambling....
Date: 2023-01-17 01:23 pm (UTC)It brings to mind a line from the old JFK parody album by Vaughn Meader:
Reporter: What are you going to do about the medical care for the aged?
Kennedy: Try to stay young.
Well, HE died when he was 17 years younger than I am now, so looks like that WAS the plan.
Re: Since I suck at gambling....
Date: 2023-01-18 01:05 pm (UTC)Even now, with the Federal and State subsidies, my deductible is $7000, after which the policy covers at 100%. At least if I go to the hospital I won't bankrupt the hubby. But I do get some small perks before the deductible even applies to do with chiropractic and women's health--so that will save me some dough.
It's better than nothing, for sure.