[ExI] another one of my questionable ideas

[spike at rainier66.com]

-----Original Message-----
From: extropy-chat <extropy-chat-bounces at lists.extropy.org> On Behalf Of
Adrian Tymes

Subject: Re: [ExI] another one of my questionable ideas

On Sun, Oct 21, 2018 at 2:16 PM William Flynn Wallace <foozler83 at gmail.com>
wrote:
> On Sun, Oct 21, 2018 at 2:03 PM Adrian Tymes <atymes at gmail.com> wrote:
>>
>>>... Far too much incompatible infrastructure.  The secured cards could 
>> not be used, and thus would not be used, and thus would fail to fix 
>> the problem.


>>... Well they changed over tons of equipment when they put that little
doohickey on the card - insert instead of swipe.  I suppose it all depends
on how much theft they can stand - there has to be a better way.

>..Notice the new cards still have the stripe?  They work with the old
infrastructure, which is going to take a long time to fully upgrade.
It's called "backward compatibility", and unfortunately it's a practical
necessity in this case.
_______________________________________________


Fun aside on this.  I am a scout leader (surprise!)  We do a fundraisers
once a year, sell popcorn and such.  Simultaneously the Girl Scout sell
cookies but they always do better than we do even though there is way more
of us.  They have an advantage: the boys have their dads out there with
them, the girls have the moms, and oh some of those moms, hooo mercy.  And
the grandmothers.  And great grandmothers, smokin hot!  but I digress, so
where was I?  Oh, boy scouts.

Every year it seems we were hearing more people say they weren't carrying
cash, which is totally believable because I stopped carrying cash several
years ago.  There was no point: it was dying of old age in my pocket.

We were already at a huge disadvantage, trying to raise cash without the
sexy, so we convinced the troop to buy an experimental battery-powered
credit card reader, which isn't expensive at all.  Turns out that was the
best 50 bucks we ever invested.  We bought one as an experiment from
SquareUp, only works on chip cards.  That station raised waaaaay more money
than the others, way more, and we got a pile of guys who just gave small
donations and didn't even take the popcorn.  That was an important
observation: plenty of people would rather give us five bucks than buy some
useless thing they then need to carry home for eight.

So now the strategy is to get four more of those readers for the other
stations and we will by trustworthy!  Loyal!  Helpful!  Friendly courteous
kind obedient cheerful thrifty brave clean and respectful!  Until the girls
join us next year.  Then... all bets are off.

spike