The scarlet beyond a crimson dream. The tallest lesbian with the fiery red hair. Works on payments systems, plays far too many games.
Public Key
npub19x552n03mrr0l7st39zvga530tzmxsze753wqt7yxn0u3m86g4pqstzep2 Profile Code
nprofile1qqszn229fhca33hllg9cj3xyw6gh43dngpvl2ghq9lzrfh7ganay2ssprpmhxue69uhhyetvv9ujumt0d4hhxarj9ecxjmntqyt8wumn8ghj7un9d3shjtnswf5k6ctv9ehx2aqrc6hpp
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Published at
2026-01-29T08:47:20+01:00 Event JSON
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Last Notes npub19x552n03mrr0l7st39zvga530tzmxsze753wqt7yxn0u3m86g4pqstzep2 Scarlet Shop staff: “Oh, Scarlet! I didn't recognise you without your flannel shirt.” npub19x552n03mrr0l7st39zvga530tzmxsze753wqt7yxn0u3m86g4pqstzep2 Scarlet Deeply unserious country, lmao. npub19x552n03mrr0l7st39zvga530tzmxsze753wqt7yxn0u3m86g4pqstzep2 Scarlet “Why is public GitHub having so many problems lately.” npub19x552n03mrr0l7st39zvga530tzmxsze753wqt7yxn0u3m86g4pqstzep2 Scarlet One thing that terrifies me about AI is that it's probably going to be the final death blow for the European and American middle class. We put so much of our economy into desk jobs that have just become about $10 of LLM tokens for the average daily output of an employee at the same or better quality these days with the frontier models. npub19x552n03mrr0l7st39zvga530tzmxsze753wqt7yxn0u3m86g4pqstzep2 Scarlet Stepping back to the U shape of the economy, you can repeat these observations across so many domains. npub19x552n03mrr0l7st39zvga530tzmxsze753wqt7yxn0u3m86g4pqstzep2 Scarlet People often forget that before universal basic banking, one had to be “introduced” to the bank. This was often done by an employer when starting a well-paying job. Pretty much everyone else was locked out of the system, taking home envelopes of cash (or cheques that had to be cashed somehow). npub19x552n03mrr0l7st39zvga530tzmxsze753wqt7yxn0u3m86g4pqstzep2 Scarlet The agreement between most governments and banks has roughly been “Okay, we will let you continue to make a healthy profit on the middle class, but in return you have to accept these unprofitable lower segment customers”. npub19x552n03mrr0l7st39zvga530tzmxsze753wqt7yxn0u3m86g4pqstzep2 Scarlet As a society, we shouldn't want this to happen and for people to leave the regulated banking industry. The alternative is, well, “alternative finance”, which means the lower end of the economy pays extortionate fees to what rounds to payday lenders and cheque cashing businesses with extra layers. npub19x552n03mrr0l7st39zvga530tzmxsze753wqt7yxn0u3m86g4pqstzep2 Scarlet The problem comes when that middle segment of the economy slowly disappears and banks have an extreme U shape in customers who are expensive to serve. That bank has to raise even more revenue out of the upper segment to pay for their obligations to serve the lower segment or worse, start squeezing the lower segment for revenue, contributing to the problem. npub19x552n03mrr0l7st39zvga530tzmxsze753wqt7yxn0u3m86g4pqstzep2 Scarlet That customer in the lower end of the market has often been subsidised by the middle and upper classes, which I think is a broadly good thing. The middle class tends to be cheap to serve and brings in reasonable revenue to cover the costs of serving the lower end of the market that banks are often required by law to serve at a loss. npub19x552n03mrr0l7st39zvga530tzmxsze753wqt7yxn0u3m86g4pqstzep2 Scarlet A random observation I will make here is that there are two ends of the market that are expensive to serve in banking, the very top end and the very bottom end. npub19x552n03mrr0l7st39zvga530tzmxsze753wqt7yxn0u3m86g4pqstzep2 Scarlet Spending in the US is broadly concentrating around the top maybe 10% of consumers, who are the only ones left in the economy with disposable income. This means for a lot of merchants that higher percentages of their transaction value is coming from those higher tiers of cards, which attract higher interchange fees on the rate table. As that average interchange fee paid drifts up, acquirers increase their fees to merchants at contract renewal to compensate for that. npub19x552n03mrr0l7st39zvga530tzmxsze753wqt7yxn0u3m86g4pqstzep2 Scarlet “credit card acceptance fees have gone up in the US since the pandemic” and the reason is fascinating! npub19x552n03mrr0l7st39zvga530tzmxsze753wqt7yxn0u3m86g4pqstzep2 Scarlet The same piece confidently described interchange fees as going to the networks, which again is totally wrong. Also compared US *acquirer* fees directly to EU *interchange* fees without mentioning that the EU regulated interchange and that this is a policy choice with economic tradeoffs. 🙃 npub19x552n03mrr0l7st39zvga530tzmxsze753wqt7yxn0u3m86g4pqstzep2 Scarlet I guess “this is all because of the Visa/Mastercard duopoly” is easier to explain than “this is the result of a complex regulatory environment and incentives that are largely driven by government policy, which is broadly better for society at the margins than the direct alternative”. npub19x552n03mrr0l7st39zvga530tzmxsze753wqt7yxn0u3m86g4pqstzep2 Scarlet Heartbreaking: Trusted major news organisation confidently reports incredible misconceptions about the industry you're an expert in as fact. npub19x552n03mrr0l7st39zvga530tzmxsze753wqt7yxn0u3m86g4pqstzep2 Scarlet Damn, I was browsing around GitHub and this project really just has a “skill issue” label for issues. npub19x552n03mrr0l7st39zvga530tzmxsze753wqt7yxn0u3m86g4pqstzep2 Scarlet work colleague: ‘we need a transcoder’ npub19x552n03mrr0l7st39zvga530tzmxsze753wqt7yxn0u3m86g4pqstzep2 Scarlet she's a 10 (on the ifixit repairability scale) npub19x552n03mrr0l7st39zvga530tzmxsze753wqt7yxn0u3m86g4pqstzep2 Scarlet sometimes you just need to delete your entire task list and close all your open tabs npub19x552n03mrr0l7st39zvga530tzmxsze753wqt7yxn0u3m86g4pqstzep2 Scarlet me rn npub19x552n03mrr0l7st39zvga530tzmxsze753wqt7yxn0u3m86g4pqstzep2 Scarlet gender of the day: abandoned wago 221s on the tube npub19x552n03mrr0l7st39zvga530tzmxsze753wqt7yxn0u3m86g4pqstzep2 Scarlet I have today discovered that if you dump a handful of of low value coins into a sainsbury's self-checkout system, you can fairly reliably get a windows ‘application not responding’ pop up and kill the POS host application from there npub19x552n03mrr0l7st39zvga530tzmxsze753wqt7yxn0u3m86g4pqstzep2 Scarlet 💭 webex plugin that adds the british TV rolling zebra cue dot to the corner of the video feed when it's time to wrap up the meeting npub19x552n03mrr0l7st39zvga530tzmxsze753wqt7yxn0u3m86g4pqstzep2 Scarlet corporate sabotage idea: gift all the engineers at your competitor a copy of factorio npub19x552n03mrr0l7st39zvga530tzmxsze753wqt7yxn0u3m86g4pqstzep2 Scarlet removing the headphone jack (and therefore the inexpensive options for private listening) is the worst thing phone makers ever did for the public space
