Forget Google, time to end the Visa-MasterCard duopoly - <AUTHOR> https://medium.com/@CM30/the-unknown-duopoly-that-needs-breaking-up-more-than-google-f7b2c8876ea7 <comment><USER2> I am reading so much incorrect information in this thread it's maddening.

The card network (Visa, Mastercard, etc) do NOT make money on Interchange.

It's hard to have a healthy dialogue on this topic if folks don't understand the basics of how the card networks generate revenue.

Below is a decent primer.

[https://www.investopedia.com/articles/markets/032615/how- mas...](https://www.investopedia.com/articles/markets/032615/how-mastercard- makes-its-money-ma.asp)

<comment><USER3> I mean, technically no they don't. But that's just being pedantic. They charge the bank based on gross dollar volume, and the bank gets the money to pay for that from... interchange fees. The more volume the bank does, the more they pay and the more they get from interchange fees.

Interchange fee pricing is set based on how much mastercard charges the banks, so while technically true, the interchange fees are basically set by mastercard's pricing.

<comment><USER4> Interchange fee pricing is set based on how much MasterCard charges the bank

That's not true though, or at least is a massive oversimplification. In the US, interchange fees are extremely inflated to allow banks to recuperate the rewards they give out to distinguish their card offerings from one another. The 2% cashback has to come from somewhere.

<comment><USER5> "The 2% cashback has to come from somewhere."

Yes, but in reality, the program comes from an upside down approach to overcoming the obviously anti-competitive practices that VISA/MC use to forbid retailers from offering discounts for _not_ using VISA etc..

You can't say "Get 2% if you use cash instead of VISA". (Notice that nobody ever advertises that?) Because VISA doesn't allow it.

You also can't say "$1.99 + 20 cents processing charge" \- no, the price must be listed including charges. (Notice that nobody every does this?)

But you _can_ possibly find ways to give points, or 'cash-back'.

Until now ... [1]

VISA is now saying that even such 'cash back' rewards programs are a violation of its rules.

Have a look at the press release - it's positively Orwellian:

"In order to maintain a level playing field" -> "In order to avoid all transparency and maintain our hidden monopoly" we require that nobody can take steps which highlight the how our transaction fees are embedded in the price.

These are pretty blatant anti-competitive practices and taking them on is tantamount to taking on the entire banking system. It's not going to happen.

There would need to be an 'outside disruptor' like the Word Processor to the Typewriter kind of thing.

[1] [https://www.pymnts.com/visa/2018/non-compliant-cash- discount...](https://www.pymnts.com/visa/2018/non-compliant-cash-discount- card-fees/)

<comment><USER6> > You can't say "Get 2% if you use cash instead of VISA". (Notice that nobody > ever advertises that?) Because VISA doesn't allow it.

> You also can't say "$1.99 + 20 cents processing charge" \- no, the price > must be listed including charges. (Notice that nobody every does this?)

We see these a lot in Australia. I wish they'd enforce the same pricing here for cash and card — I don't like to carry cash around, and I hate it that I have to pay a surcharge when paying by card.

<comment><USER7> > I don't like to carry cash around, and I hate it that I have to pay a > surcharge when paying by card.

So you think your use of a credit card should be subsidized by people who pay in cash?

<comment><USER8> People who pay in cash are subsidizing the store's costs to handle cash. Paying employees to count the cash (usually after closing), putting it in the safe, distributing the cash to cash registers, refilling when they run out of change, paying for the security service (Brinks etc) to deliver cash to/from the bank, insurance against robbery...

Cash is not free for a store to handle. Stores pay transaction fees on credit cards, sure, but they save on all the costs of cash. A hypothetical store that takes credit cards only would not have any of these costs and their vulnerability to robbery/theft would be limited to merchandise and capital only, saving the cost of insurance against theft of cash. For some types of businesses (services rather than retailers), this makes their office a pretty unattractive target for burglars and eliminates employee theft of cash.

<comment><USER9> This is an interesting argument, but it is not backed up by actual store behavior.

Stores generally try to give extra charges for using credit cards, not the other way around.

It seems like the fair thing to do, should be to allow a store to do whatever it wants, and make these credit card requirements illegal.

So, it would be allowed for stored to charge extra for either cash or credit, whatever they choose, and the credit card companies would be forbidden from stopping this.

<comment><USER10> That seems to be what we have in The Netherlands.

It's common for online stores to charge a few percent extra for credit card payment (the base price usually applies for the most common form of online payment, iDEAL, which is cheaper, I guess because the banks cut out Visa/MC).

On the other end of the spectrum, there are some physical stores and restaurants (usually chains) that don't accept cash. They're allowed to do that, given that they state so very clearly upfront.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER11> I don't get it -- Amex and Discover are still providing healthy competition, so the "duopoly" the author complains about seems to be largely irrelevant. Competition between cards is _thriving_ and consumers benefit -- witness the miniscule transaction fee the credit card companies keep after paying your rewards back of 2% to 5%, when you pay your bill on time.

The article's main point is that such large companies are a cybersecurity risk, and that the government should regulate/nationalize/globalize payment infrastructure.

Unfortunately, experience tends to show that governments would be far _worse_ at providing secure, low-cost payment services. Also, credit cards already _are_ highly regulated when it comes to consumer protections.

So, this article is just not making a lot of sense to me.

<comment><USER12> CC rewards seem like a indirect regressive tax. Wealthier consumers who can afford to pay on time and have better credit ratings are subsidized by poor consumers who actually use the "credit" part of "credit card".

<comment><USER13> If people didn't spend money they don't have the problem you describe dissolves. No one has to use credit cards and being financially literate is an individual responsibility.

<comment><USER14> > financially literate is an individual responsibility.

Is being able to read and write an "individual responsibility?" How about the ability to communicate in a language at all? What about any other basic core skill that would make a person capable of learning more things to make them "productive?"

"Individual responsibility" as it pertains to these topics is at best a misnomer, if it even names an existent thing at all.

Surely you don't think it's ok for, say, a Company Town to exist? Can you extrapolate from there why it's not ok for credit card companies to bamboozle less educated Americans for money?

<comment><USER13> I would encourage you to frame your disagreement with statements and facts. Asking questions expecting the reader to draw the same conclusion as you isn't a useful discussion mechanism. Especially when the reader doesn't agree with you.

<comment><USER14> I'm not sure what the relevant facts would be around an extremely value based argument of who is responsible for educating a society.

I guess we could look at the general fact that education is one of the better investments to increase a nation's GDP, bit I'm more concerned with the ethics than the money.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER15> Having worked in fintech, they're essentially the gatekeepers of any new technology. Have a great idea for a value add in the payment processing gateway? They will not let you on any platform for 4 years while they launch a (poor) competitor at scale.

<comment><USER16> Sometimes the turn around is quicker, because rather than building their poor competitor they just buy one.

</comment></comment><comment><USER17> You can't talk about credit cards in isolation without considering the rest of the consumer finance sector in the US.

A big part of the reasons credit cards rose to such prominence is that the banking and payment rails are so incredibly stupidly designed. The check system and ACH which is the highest volume way that money is sent between people with different banks requires you to give out the secret key every time you make a payment. Plus it takes at least 1-2 days to clear which makes fraud more difficult to deal with.

Interestingly the credit card system also suffers from the first part, your number is printed right there on your card. But they've managed to find and/or strong arm ways to reduce fraud on their network, and as a consumer I'm not liable for paying it which is a huge benefit.

The author really lost me at the end though, I don't see how regulation magically solves everything and they didn't explain it at all. There is already a ton of regulation in the payment industry. And this comically flimsy underlying system could easily be improved by existing regulators, how about starting with small steps and seeing how that goes? Instead of advocating for throwing out the entire payment system all at once under the very flimsy assumption that the government will do it better.

<comment><USER18> "not liable for paying it," but you're still paying it at the end of the day via fees and increased merchant prices

<comment><USER19> if the merchant doesn't charge a creditcard surcharge, and using a credit card is worth 1€ to me, and costs 1.01€/transaction to the merchant. but only 90% of transactions are by credit card. well, then i am better off paying by credit card, since 10% of transactions are subsidising my 1€.

(strangely, in australia, card surcharges became normalised just before cash payments fell off a cliff. credit card transactions have also declined; it's visa/mc debit that have skyrocketed.)

<comment><USER20> A credit card costs about 3% not 1%. A credit card is a prisoner's dilemma problem where once anyone uses it, the others are pressured to use it also to cut their losses.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER21> I'd love to see some action here but I'm skeptical. It seems like attacking payment processors is the main avenue that the thought-crime-police use to attack alt-tech sites that don't play ball with censoring. If there was any mass protest movement to push change here, the media would absolutely flood the public with scare stories about (insert evil monsters here) using payment networks to finance (evil activity here) and undermine the protest movement. It doesn't help that so many politicians are old lawyers and activists who generally don't have the technical knowledge to wade through the BS.

<comment><USER22> I feel like it'd be fine if every single payment processor were individually part of the surveillance-industrial complex, as long as there were _enough_ players in the space that one could get running a service by hopping around between them. For grey-market businesses to succeed, they don't really need air-tight legal protection; they just need their actions to be _illegible_.

This is basically the situation VPN service providers are in. Yes, in theory, any given provider could be beholden to the state. However, when a new VPN provider can spring up so easily (spin up some DigitalOcean instances, stand up a WordPress/Shopify e-commerce frontend), it's unlikely that any given _new_ player in the space has been _gotten to yet_ by the state (unless, of course, it's a new marque of an existing company, set up specifically to serve as a honeypot for switchers.)

</comment></comment><comment><USER23> This is a very us centric view. Most of the europe is so much ahead of US in payments that it is funny. There are dozens of alternative payment methods in the Europe. Especially in the Nordics card payments are on a big decline. There are basically two "tracks" to move money - card networks and bank to bank. Most new payment methods use bank transfer as the method of moving money. In the Nordics, every country has a mobile payments system where your bank account is attached to your phone number, any anyone can issue a payment to your phone number and you receive it to your bank account. You can use this also in brick and mortar stores etc. Not to talk about all the bill-payment based companies like Klarna... And how about China? They don't use cards either, just look at Alipay.

<comment><USER24> Just to clarify, the Danish mobile payment system (cleverly named: MobilePay) is based on debit cards, not bank to bank transfer.

The system that was designed to do bank to bank, without the card systems being involved failed horribly. It was late to market and the launch has horrible mismanaged and covered in unnecessary secrecy. MobilePay had already launched and crabbed a large share of the market, the secrecy was completely pointless and I believe it was partly to blame for the massive failure of the solution.

<comment><USER25> > Just to clarify, the Danish mobile payment system (cleverly named: > MobilePay) is based on debit cards, not bank to bank transfer.

This is incorrect. MobilePay _started out_ as a layer on top of Dankort (Danish debit card), but after gaining sufficient volume they made a deal with all Danish banks to enable direct bank-to-bank transfers (without using the Dankort infrastructure).

The only difference between Swipp and MobilePay is that Swipp _started out_ only supporting bank-to-bank transfers (thus only supporting a few banks) while MobilePay started out using Dankort (thus supporting _all_ banks). And, as soon as MobilePay had sufficient volume, all banks were interested in circumventing the Dankort network.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER26> Would be happy to buy a usable cryptocoin card. I was thinking about interest- free crypto-loans where the debtor would speculate on the value of the currency at the time it will paid off (like options trading). If you loan 100btc you would loan with the speculation that for example it would be 10% more valuable in a year. If in a year your speculation is correct, you break even, if the price is 10% lower, the debtee still has to pay using your speculated valuation, if the price is 10% higher you lost potential money you coulf have gained had you hold onto it. Either way, you have insurance against loss the debtee takes on risk but they don't get endlessly canibalized by interest payment. Escrow or credit rating is something I have not figured out.

Regardless, an acual card and a payment processing network would cost billions to deploy.

<comment><USER27> That seems extremely risky.

<comment><USER26> You will still have credit checks and collaterals as usual. The person taking on the loan absorbs all risk in exchange for not having a interest accumulate. Think of it this way, with APR loan, how much you pay at the end depends on how the interrst rate is adjusted and how long it takes you to pay off. With my approach you might end up owing a lot of money but it will never depend on how fast you can pay it off. It will not canibalize your cash flow like an interest debt. The debtor gets free loss insurance and debtee gets freedom from interest and the total cost depends on the currency value at the time of first payment. Also,the total cost will not be a surprise to anyone, the person taking on the loan knows how much they have to pay back. Ideally if you don't have credit, you will need to place in escrow some amount of the base loan and take on more risk in terms of paying at a higher valuation should the currency value be higher at the time of payment(which all goes away with collateral or good credit score)

Anyway, I was just thinking out loud my idea. I hate interest and mandatory insurance alike.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER28> Coincidentally I just read a post from a business that's finding ordinary bank transfers getting more traction from customers than they expected:

[https://www.revk.uk/2020/06/beyond-credit-cards-is-this- way-...](https://www.revk.uk/2020/06/beyond-credit-cards-is-this-way- forward.html?m=1)

<comment><USER29> This is good news on the competition front.

The traditional problem with bank-to-bank transfers in a retail, or point-of- sale, setting has been speed. Cheque was about the fastest that could be mustered.

But with developments like UK Faster Payments (which is mentioned in your link) bank-to-bank transfers are getting faster, in some cases instant. And so usability at the point-of-sale is now on par with cards.

In Holland, iDEAL is used a lot for retail purchases. It's an instant bank-to- bank payment option that competes with the card networks.

The equivalent in Sweden is Swish. It too is moving into point-of-sale payments.

As for the US, I suspect that at some point Zelle will pivot into retail point-of-sale payments. At which point the card networks will have a big competitor.

All of this is good news if you are worried about the card oligopolies!

<comment><USER30> I can't really see bank transfers taking of at the point of sale in the UK. Making a payment with most banking apps is very clunky - especially for the first time with 2FA.

As a consumer, a credit or debit card gives me a lot of protection. I wouldn't give that up for anything (oh, and the cashback I get too).

<comment><USER31> But I thought debit card = bank transfer? There is no protection?

<comment><USER30> You can still do a chargeback with a debit card in the UK.

If you have a basic consumer dispute about something (such as a retailer not giving a repair/refund for a faulty item), you should be able to file a chargeback with the card issuer and get a refund.

In the UK, a credit card is much better though, as for any purchase over £100, the card issuer is joinly liable with the retailer for any issues.

[https://www.which.co.uk/consumer- rights/regulation/section-7...](https://www.which.co.uk/consumer- rights/regulation/section-75-of-the-consumer-credit-act)

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment> ur-whale There is something that I've never managed to put my finger on: most companies as huge as Google / Apple / FB etc... or even more traditional ones (banks, oil, etc ...) are sort of "well known" in the sense that they do PR, they have well known figureheads, etc ...

VISA has always struck me as a very nebulous entity, whose structure, governance, is not very well know by the general public.

I wonder how they managed to grow so large while managing to keep such a conspicuously low profile.

edit: and to answer my own question, the wikipedia page is quite informative : [https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Visa_Inc](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Visa_Inc).

<comment><USER32> If you make $10B/year on revenue of $20B/year (great margin at that scale) you keep quiet I think for good reason :)

</comment></comment><comment><USER33> While I agree with the sentiment, things have certainly opened up lately quite a bit with the mainstream-ization of the crypto currencies. One could conceivably avoid Visa / MC in a way that just wouldn't have been possible before.

Visa / MC remind me a bit of Ticketmaster in that they've got parties on both sides defending them because of kickbacks. You charge the merchant the "interchange fee" plus some amount and that fee goes back to the "card issuing" bank, so they like the system.

The merchant passes on the cost (generally) to the consumer, so they don't really notice, and the ease of moving the money in 99% of cases means everyone is happy.

<comment><USER34> I'm not seeing a "mainstream-ization of the crypto currencies". A few years ago, quite a few local businesses were experimenting with accepting cryptocurrency payments, and I could buy all kinds of stuff and services using bitcoin. I could order a pizza with bitcoin, I could buy electronics at a major retailer, I could buy plane tickets, I could pay for lunch in a local cafe.

That's not the case any more, by now all these local companies have stopped accepting bitcoin, because after the first hype, the volume simply was not there to make it worth their while. Some people (often the same people!) bought some stuff initially to try it out, but that was it, there was no sustainable mainstream business. It's still usable for some online services targeting the tech crowd, especially where anonymity might be a feature, but for everyday use of paying for physical goods and in-person services there has been the opposite of "mainstream-ization" in my experience; by now the mainstream businesses have tried crypto and found it not useful. There's enough well developed infrastructure and service providers so that mainstream businesses _could_ easily accept cryptocurrencies if they wanted, but they don't, because there's no significant customer demand outside specific niche markets.

<comment><USER35> Crpyto isn't mainstreaming but you are having a mainstream-ization of non-CC digital payments.

Venmo is the thing in the US, but China has Alipay/Wepay, SE asia has various digital payment apps, Japan has had a huge "cashless" push in the past 12 months....

If I were running a retail shop in the US I definitely would accept payment by Venmo if I could.

<comment><USER36> Apple Pay is the thing. And it makes peer to peer money moving simple while not violating privacy like Venmo. You can use Apple Cash or a payment card. It's all pretty easy — and private. Venmo is a privacy nightmare. You can use Apple Pay without even having a debit or credit card.

<comment><USER37> Apple Pay doesn't solve anything on the merchant's side. There's just nothing in the US with the simplicity and affordability as the various payment apps in Asian countries.

For instance, in China WeChat Pay only charges 0.1% above 10,000 RMB (from what various articles say). Square is not even in the same category, charging 2.6% + 10¢. And you don't need to buy any equipment to use WeChat Pay; you just need to pull up a QR code on your phone.

<comment><USER38> This is all possible because China has standardized bank to bank transactions across all banks in the country. It sets the tone for secure P2P transactions at fractions of the cost of a regular Credit Card payment.

This allows people to on-board to WeChat Pay easily through online banking. They also have way less KYC hurdles, so people can go from signing up to sending money in minutes.

US online banking is eons behind China, and almost any other country. So many online banking systems in the US are prone to unauthorized access, which makes on-boarding and security highly inefficient.

<comment><USER34> It's my impression that pretty much all functional countries (e.g. perhaps not Somalia or during a civil war, but including most less developed countries) have "standardized bank to bank transactions across all banks in the country".

The big difference is how fast and cheap these standardized bank-to-bank transactions are; with USA lagging behind in this area somewhat. In USA a wire transfer is more expensive than a credit card payment, in China, EU, Russia, etc it's cheaper than a credit card payment.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER39> It will probably happen, but will take a while. My bet is that this is what Apple is working on. They will launch a version of Apple Card that is free of MasterCard.

So far it's been a really long-haul play where Apple has spent a lot of time establishing deals with banks manually, in order to get a tiny fee, which they can due to the increased security of their system. This hard work is necessary in order to create a payment network that can work for everyone.

Eventually, Apple will be in a position to launch their own network, while increasing fees for themselves and lowering fees for merchants.

As someone who's been a merchant I'm very happy to see this happening, although it's like watching a tree grow (paint drying would be exciting in comparison). It's likely Google will follow suit, and depending on Apple's choice of implementation, we could hope that it will be backed by a stable cryptocurrency - but that's just a shot in the dark.

</comment><comment><USER40> Unpopular opinion here (from my experience), but crypto / blockchain is ever so slowly and deliberately destroying the moat around payments and the artificial barriers constructed. Probably 5 more years for some very serious mainstream business movements into it, and 10 more for non-technical consumers, but I believe with the rise of stablecoins (USDC) and Ethereum scaling via proof of stake (ETH2) their days are numbered.

<comment><USER41> And one year after that we will get self driving cars. And the next one will definitely be the year of Linux on the desktop :)

Sure, it could happen somewhere down the line but saying that blockchain is "destroying the moat" today is a big stretch. Blockchain barely just started to realize that the moat is actually much larger than previously thought. And that parts of the moat exist for a reason. It's barely starting to understand the moat, still far from attacking it, let alone destroying it.

Hopefully it will but I'm not holding my breath nor my bitcoins.

</comment></comment><comment><USER42> This has been a problem for a long time and unfortunately the outrage around the duopoly died out the last time we confronted it, which was in 2010 when Visa/Mastercard blocked Wikileaks ([https://www.forbes.com/sites/andygreenberg/2010/12/07/visa-m...](https://www.forbes.com/sites/andygreenberg/2010/12/07/visa- mastercard-move-to-choke-wikileaks/#187180132cad)).

It is still a problem in 2020. Gab was recently impacted by Visa blacklisting them ([https://news.gab.com/2020/06/19/gab-blacklisted-by- visa/](https://news.gab.com/2020/06/19/gab-blacklisted-by-visa/)) and also drew parallels to the realities of the "social credit score" system used in China ([https://news.gab.com/2020/06/26/social-credit-score-is-in- am...](https://news.gab.com/2020/06/26/social-credit-score-is-in-america-visa- blacklisted-my-business-and-my-family-for-building-gab/)). The vagueness of Visa's allegations stood out to me as problematic, given the lack of viable alternatives.

Ultimately, the lack of a provider who acts neutrally is a threat to freedom of speech and expression for all practical intents and purposes.

<comment><USER43> It's trickled into other mainstream/downstream services as well like Patreon. Patreon bans certain creators because they have a "policy" on acceptable content that is backstopped by visa/mc policies.

</comment></comment><comment><USER44> Let's end the duopoly, but _please_ don't forget Google (or Facebook, Apple, Amazon,...)

<comment> seph-reed "Both" is word that will not make the Newspeak cut.

<comment><USER45> Calm down. Evoking HN's favorite specter of 1984 about _payment processors_ is a bit much, don't you think?

<comment> seph-reed I was feeling quite calm.

I'm not talking about payment processors so much as the degree to which people feel "either" when they could feel "both."

Divisiveness is quite rampant, and I think the language we use (or don't use) has an effect.

ie "Forget Google" -> why not both?

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER46> Visa is now a publicly traded company, but it used to be a chaord, owned by the banks that used it. It's a data network and a standards organization. It doesn't issue cards or handle the money, it just passes transactions from one bank to another. The banks settle up separately.

<comment><USER47> [https://www.forbes.com/sites/andygreenberg/2010/12/07/visa-m...](https://www.forbes.com/sites/andygreenberg/2010/12/07/visa- mastercard-move-to-choke-wikileaks)

Note that this was a policy decision based on whim and a politician lobbying. No hearing, no evidence, no recourse, no rights and no meaningful alternative. Also a decision not taken by the banks nor, I believe, were they consulted.

The upopular person's (Wikileaks here) rights are your rights and my rights. If you think the've done the wrong thing, you're entitled to that opion and establishing that is literally what courts are for. Much the same way we might want law and courts involved for suspension of a driving license and not simply because a politician doesn't like you and lobbies a bit. "Nobody who drives for UPS can drive on the roads because they love Putin" \--not as ridiculous a fabricated politician's quote as it should be.

But going back to it being a data network and standards organisation that describes the classic long-run decreasing average total cost curve of the natural monopoly which makes privatising it for profit a pure "rent-seeking" play.

So we can see how egregious the monopoly is two ways there. Practically with an example and according to classic and relatively uncontroversial micoreconomic theory.

So what about the classic monopolists' defence, which will come up again here. Define the market to be bigger and claim it's a small fraction of that bigger market. Can we just dismiss that as total B.S.? ie "You can also use cash to buy things." Try running a business or calculate the additional cost of buying the things you need without using the visa/mastercard network.

Unless you have multiple networks with very low switching costs it's a disaster. Disclosure: Ajit Pai disagrees with all that totally.

</comment></comment><comment><USER48> Could Stripe swoop in and make a play to become a third major CC option? I feel like they have the core infrastructure in place and are still nimble enough to make it happen if they wanted.

<comment><USER49> I feel like if they tried anything, MC/Visa would try to squeeze them until it becomes unviable. They would still need to support MC/Visa until they get enough market share to not totally hinder their existing business.

</comment></comment><comment><USER50> I feel like card competition is actually pretty steep. MasterCard and Visa may have the majority of the market, but there are still Discover and AmEx. I have been using things like NerdWallet to figure out what is the best card to go with, it is usually a healthy balance. I think the main thing is that most Debit cards are Visa or MasterCard...and you are locked in by your bank. Where as credit & charge cards are a free for all.

When it comes to advertising online though, you have only 2 choices...Google or Facebook. As a business I can't not go with those two or I'll lose immense business. I can go with a Visa, Mastercard, Discover, Amex...and it really has no effect on me outside of the benefits the card gives me. The fees charged to the banks, etc are essentially the same. So it's really no comparison as to which is worse for the market itself.

<comment><USER51> You're talking about different things. When you shop credit card offers, you are comparing issuers (eg Chase vs Capital One). That's not the same as the payment processor aka card network (Visa vs MasterCard).

Of course it's endlessly more complicated then that but it's important to make the distinction.

</comment></comment><comment><USER52> Near the entire economy paying a % rent to these couple companies is unfair. Cryptocurrency can remove these middlemen, however, they're missing some important features. 1. Dispute resolution. 2. Recurring billing. When you see how expensive it is to do #1, credit cards start to look like a wonderful deal.

Someone is going to say: Micropayments (it's never worked.) Pre-auth'd lower amounts retailers can pull from you (might work.) Crypto-escrow (Any place that used to do it has gone out of business I beleive.) Too volatile: (Peer to Peer stable coins, or "trusted" stable coins protected by laws instead of code address this.)

Thus, peer to peer open source value transfer is the minimum amount of middlemen possible, but is crippled by regulatory overhead at the end points, giving the incumbents entrenched advantage. Caveat: I founded a cryptocurrency.

</comment><comment><USER53> I would rather see Visa, MasterCard, and other big banks regulated and require them to accept all legal businesses. Fraud can still be blocked but on an individualised, reasoned level.

No more denying legal pornography businesses, no more denying legal fireworks stores, etc.

<comment><USER54> One option would be for people to start paying each other in gold.

</comment></comment><comment><USER55> Cards still account for less than 18% of US payments (source [https://go.plaid.com/rs/495-WRE-561/images/Plaid-Modern- guid...](https://go.plaid.com/rs/495-WRE-561/images/Plaid-Modern-guide-to- ACH.pdf)).

<comment><USER56> From your source "More than 82 percent of the value of all U.S. payments goes through ACH"

Note that it's value, and not number of transactions.

Personally, I have only 4 things pay out of my checking account. Mortgage, HOA dues, and power are all bills that require checking account transactions for auto-payment to avoid credit card fees. These are very large transactions which will greatly skew any measurement by value.

The final thing paid out of my checking account is interesting: the credit card payment. Since any money I spend with my card necessarily is repaid from my checking account, that also greatly skews measurement by value.

If I spent 50% on housing, and spent all of the rest of my money on things with my credit card, then my personal ACH value percentage would be 66%. (1 unit house payment, 1 unit credit card transactions, 1 unit paying credit card bill)

This isn't even starting with business to business transactions. I'm unsure if the source is counting it in that metric, but it would further skew any value measurement. No factory is going to use credit card when buying $100,000 worth of parts from a supplier.

All those things considered, 82% seems about right, even if you assume something like 90% of consumer transactions use credit card.

<comment><USER57> > No factory is going to use credit card when buying $100,000 worth of parts > from a supplier.

I have a business who uses a credit card every month to buy more than $100,000 worth of materials from a supplier.

On the consumption end the card programs are wonderful, great purchase protection negotiated, delay on actual payment for additional working capital, and rewards. We basically never have to use cash for employee travel expenses, all via points.

There is no benefit for me paying my suppliers via ACH, wire, or check.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER38> A major issue here is that payment processors literally choose which industries, and which players will succeed. If your industry is deemed high risk by payment processors, you are fighting a brutal battle to accept customer payments. If you can't process payments, you don't have a business. Conversions will drop off a cliff if you try to switch them to niche payment methods like crypto currency, or even something like Skrill.

Even worse, the payment processors do not apply their own ToS unilaterally. You'll find some websites will retain processing, while you lose it, even though the reason is that your business model is high risk. PayPal is notorious for this. Their ToS will only be enforced in certain countries, leaving companies in places like China with PayPal processing while your company is permanently banned from the platform.

It becomes impossible to compete if you are banned from Stripe & PayPal while your competitors are not. If their own rules are not applied equally across your industry, they effectively pick the winners. Their platform also favors long-standing merchants in many ways.

First by providing them an account manager, second by essentially grandfathering in certain accounts. You'll find it very difficult to process payments in certain industries on PayPal, likely not even being successful in on-boarding, while sites operating in the exact same business have functioning PayPal accounts.

It's incredibly anti-competitive. These processors run such a large scale monopoly; there are so few comparable alternatives, I've seen so many people go out of business purely by losing their PayPal.

</comment><comment><USER58> India figured this out years ago. Launched a domestic government Visa alternative called RuPay and also launched BHIM - an interface where everyone gets an email address like payment address and can send/receive directly. Both have traction.

Sidenote: A bunch of the payment gateways began integrating BHIM and charging merchants a cut of the sale for what they pay 0 for. Can't see that lasting if people move off V/M completely.

</comment><comment><USER59> The experience of receiving credit card payments for a SaaS subscription sucks badly, even if you disregard the inflated payment processing fee. Banks can allow the charge to happen the first five months, then on the sixth charge, randomly turn on a penny and reject the charge with a completely opaque do_not_honor code, which probably translates to 'our fraud detection algorithm felt extra paranoid today'. There's a whole industry of companies who help other companies "poke" their customers when their payments randomly fail, to prevent churn. This seems ripe for disruption. My dream tool for receiving payments:

\- Isn't tied to a piece of plastic that expires

\- Front loads the fraud prevention by requiring 2FA to make sure up front that the buyer actually wants to pay for this.

\- Opt-in, per-transaction chargeback/escrow service (intended for shipment of physical goods) that you don't pay for if you don't activate. Transactions are clearly marked whether they include this during checkout. Otherwise transactions are final

\- For subscriptions, allows you to specify the conditions under which future charges should also be accepted, and when they should be held and you get contacted to approve them instead.

\- Basically anywhere the current system can fail/reverse a charge, the improved system would verify this up ahead, so the payment processor can be sure the buyer really wants to pay, and the merchant can be sure charges don't fail unless the buyer runs out of money in their account or actively cancels the subscription.

\- Charge a much more reasonable processing fee, due to not needing to wade into disputes and fraud recovery all the time.

<comment><USER60> The whole system seems to be designed in such a bad way and relies on a bunch of heuristics and insurance to make up for easy fraud.

Why is it that to pay for something you give the seller the keys to your account and they go in and withdraw the money they want instead of the seller sending you a request and you accepting to send the requested money..

Another plus side of your suggestion is it now becomes trivial to cancel any subscriptions since you can simply stop allowing the payment to go through rather than getting the seller to stop taking your money.

<comment><USER61> I'm still wondering why there is no electronic SEPA mandate. When you want to authorize e.g. for your landlord to be allowed to withdraw rent payments from your account the landlord has to physically mail you a SEPA mandate which you have to sign and mail to your bank.

This may sound like a slightly obsolete but otherwise well thought out system until you notice that revoking the SEPA mandate requires you to contact the vendor first which is kind of silly.

<comment><USER62> > I'm still wondering why there is no electronic SEPA mandate.

There is! Nothing forces vendors to collect a paper form and signature. I know some countries still love paper trails (hello Germany) but even there, you'll find some businesses that don't do it. When I lived in Berlin and signed up for my broadband with 1&1, I just had to copy/paste my IBAN into their online form.

> physically mail you a SEPA mandate which you have to sign and mail to your > bank.

Nope. The bank is not involved at this stage. Banks authorize direct debits by default, they don't need to know about the mandate beforehand.

> revoking the SEPA mandate requires you to contact the vendor first which is > kind of silly.

It's not. It leaves the responsibility with the contracting parties, and keep banks as a neutral medium. That said, as a customer, you can revert a direct debit with a single click, and permanently reject further direct debits. It doesn't have any effect on your contract (and the vendor will send it to debt collection if it believes you're in the wrong), but you keep full control.

By the way, you can build a fully digitized billing system on top of that (there's SEPAmail in France for instance), and more and more banks support instant payments, which I assume can be used to improve the scheme.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER63> It always fascinated me that the process went to a semi regulated user pays cost recovery competition model, not to a regulated utility model.

At this point, the innovation stream has just about dried up. We're left with a need for micropayments that don't cost more to process than the value of the transaction, and almost all innovation has taken place to one side of card services.

If we fixed international funds transfer we'd probably get some incremental benefit. KYC is only part of the problem here, I recently did some IBAN transactions to the UK government from Australia and the expectations of fixed-field width (send this 15+ char reference string, but the input side has 12 chars for the reference field) were bizarre.

Huge amount of excess profit in TT.

Cheques? dead except for the USA.

Coins are dying of covid.

Remittence processes and the Islamic banking tradition is waiting to be somewhat unlocked. (trust is not transitive, unless you are a migrant worker from S.E.Asia and you have to get money back to mom and dad efficiently, without having any formal ID in the host country because your boss took your passport)

<comment><USER64> > We're left with a need for micropayments that don't cost more to process > than the value of the transaction.

I disagree completely.

There's no technical or business reason why we couldn't have micropayments tomorrow. It's been tried many times already. The thing about micropayments is nobody actually wants them. Each time you make a payment of any magnitude, your brain has to process a 'purchase' which carries a large mental burden, and eventually you get decision fatigue.

Micropayments are one of those ideas that people think we want, but in practice, nobody does.

As a thought exercise, why do you pay Netflix $13/month and deal with sporadic content disappearances, when you could pay Apple $1.99 for a perpetual license to whatever piece of content you could ever want? Nobody wants to make that purchasing decision each and every time they want something. They'd rather pay for an all you can eat buffet even if it's objectively worse _and_ more expensive over time.

> If we fixed international funds transfer we'd probably get some incremental > benefit.

Check out TransferWise! They've done a _ton_ to solve this problem. They even have a currency agnostic bank account with local banking details in 6+ regions and supports 50+ currencies. [1] IMO they've largely solved remittences for the average joe.

If you've got a ton of money to move you can use InteractiveBrokers to exchange currencies at market rates for $20 per million (!!) in commission.

[1] [https://transferwise.com/us/borderless/](https://transferwise.com/us/borderless/)

</comment></comment><comment><USER65> FTA:

> And it could potentially have been even worse. Had their few competitors > also gone down, literally all electronic payments would have broken at once.

This... is not true. As noted by another comment here, a vast majority of the value transferred (82%) is ACH in the US.

</comment><comment><USER66> Visa recently banned gab.com from accepting payment over dubious 'hate' speech.

</comment><comment><USER41> How come we haven't had big privacy scandals from Visa/ Mastercard?

Big companies, a rent-like business, no pressure to do things well, own lots of very sensitive personal data, clients giving the data away without realizing it, little regulatory oversight on the data front, etc.

I would expect them to sell or leak poorly anonymised personal data, leading to huge privacy issues.

Why hasn't this happened?

<comment><USER67> Because they know they have a golden goose and are not willing to risk it all pushing boundaries like the FANG companies are. They also have literally 50 years of experience with their data mining and the only think more powerful that incompetence is 50 years of bureaucracy....

</comment></comment><comment><USER68> There is literally direct competition with Amex. Sure not everywhere takes amex but the majority do, and you can speak with your dollars (and still hold Visa / MC in case amex fails you). Consumers derive huge benefit from the safety, consistency and reliability of the networks Visa and MasterCard have built out, and yes the consolidation is a certain price to pay for that. These companies invest billions into anti-fraud technology.

But they are at their core public companies that want to maintain their image. They are reactive to public pressure and political headwinds, and will cover their bases by running away from thorny messy situations. This crosses the aisle in every imaginable way - whether its stifling whistleblowers or stifling supposed hate speech. The reaction to public pressure is not going to be avoidable with any conceivable system, privately owned or otherwise.

The best defense is competition, and despite this post's assertions, there is competition in this space.

<comment><USER69> American Express is not the answer. Let's not replace bad for worse.

<comment><USER70> I use my Amex regularly. Can you explain how it's worse?

<comment><USER34> The problem with VISA-MasterCard duopoly is that in many markets the intermediaries (banks plus VISA/MC) skim off 2.5% off of the transaction between the mercant and the customer.

Amex takes much more (~4%?), so the problem is even worse there. Of course, they can and do bribe the customer with part of that fee so that it seems attractive, but from the wider perspective it's a _huge_ overhead for no good reason, and if _every_ transaction was like this (i.e. if Visa-MC was replaced by Amex) then that would be a big drain on the economy.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER71> Well one of the reasons why they (MasterCard and Visa) backed Libra is because they were after the potential of cryptocurrencies, but in a controlled fashion, which Libra was perfect for them, Unlike other alternatives until they themselves left Libra.

Anything this duopoly can't control is a big no-no to them which is why they detest Bitcoin and the other alternative cryptocurrencies. Some online services are beginning to accept cryptocurrencies, which is a start. Cryptocurrency ATMs are a thing to cash out money, thus one could say that you might have bypassed them.

A side note, for those offended by master/slave terminology perhaps now you can ask Mastercard to change their name. Since, its pretty much has somehow offended somebody out there. /s

<comment><USER72> The terminology issue just shows us that people have got way too much spare time during the pandemic.

<comment><USER73> Terms like master and slave would probably be fine with everybody if we actually properly addressed the history of slavery and genocide that set our countries up so comfortably for some of us. I don't think anyone really cares about a word, they care about a casual flippant reference to something they care deeply about, an unfair society in which some of us are beneficiaries of brutality that is not entirely in the past.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER74> The worst part is, that the fee for a card payment is shared between Visa/MasterCard and your bank.

Bank transfers within a country are often free of charge, but are quite uncomfortable to make (typing numbers) and usually are not sent immediately (so that you can not pay this way in a grocery store).

Banks have no interest in making bank transfers easier or faster, or opening up to cheaper competitors of Visa/MasterCard. Meanwhile, people happily keep their money in a bank, seeing that all bank services are free and that it "can not get any better".

I think, if anyone is to replace Visa/MasterCard, they should also make their own bank (a place where people keep money in a long-term).

<comment><USER75> We have instant transfers between banks here in the Netherlands. It is coming for the whole EER.

Some payment terminals now can also generate a QR code that you can use to pay, in addition to the normal debit/credit card payments.

</comment></comment><comment><USER76> there's a Futurama gag about a 3rd option that's just as apropos as when it aired:

> Fry: $30? I can't afford that. Unless... Do you take Visa?

> Salesman: Visa hasn't existed for 500 years.

> Fry: American Express?

> Salesman: 600 years.

> Fry: Discover card?

> Salesman: Sorry we don't take Discover.

the good news is that Amex seems to have stepped up while partnering with Walmart for their BlueBird cards - while not perfect, at least helping to add more options. and with walmart in the mix it seems to help get a 3rd (Amex) option accepted more places.

maybe not the perfect solution, but at least a step in the right direction.

</comment><comment><USER77> Ending the duopoly is easy: create a payment processing system that charges nothing. However, you start peeling the onion on that and you wonder if it's just easier to create a new search engine.

</comment><comment><USER78> The author clearly has little knowledge on the subject of payments. He's likely a consumer.

Getting this "duopoly" right is very hard. Payments has a number of actors, and the label is there to ensure fair play between acquirer and card issuer.

While mastercard and visa controls the market, it's not like there isn't competition: Amex, discovery, etc., are all labels that compete with the so- called duopoly.

</comment><comment><USER79> Speaking of monopolies: what about the handful guys (there are only 3!) who manage ALL of our credit scores.. Experian ,TransUnion and Equifax.

</comment><comment><USER80> I don't understand Hacker News. Tim Bray's post on Break Up Google was buried and not visible on HN's front page. The next day this on Visa-MasterCard post shows up on the top with a "forget Google" comment. Why?

Is this a result from the community or the algorithm?

HN seems to have changed a lot in the last few years.

</comment><comment><USER81> It is kind of crazy that anyone can buy my purchase history... Are there any way around this besides using cash?

</comment><comment><USER82> Aren't they just networks for transmitting credit issuance messages, and a set of processes for handling disputes?

Anyone familiar with the intricacies of these operations know how amenable they are to being debundled into discrete components and provided via an Ethereum-like protocol?

</comment><comment> dao- > Like almost complete control over what can be sold online. Ever wonder why > certain things are difficult to buy via PayPal or other similar systems?

So, why? The article doesn't seem to answer that question. What prevents shops from supporting alternative payment systems?

</comment><comment><USER83> What is extremely important here: we will not forget Google (Facebook, Amazon,...) but just add Visa and Mastercard to the same list. But still concentrate on Google (...) as large technological corporation have potential to end up worse.

</comment><comment><USER84> Nicely put. The problem of duopolies isn't limited to the debit-cards space. Every single industry with a strong US footprint regresses to duopology structure. The root cause of this phenomenon needs to be identified and addressed.

</comment><comment><USER85> Is the timing of this by chance related to this [https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=23671933](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=23671933)? (visa denylisting builder of Gab)

</comment><comment><USER86> > time to end the Visa-MasterCard duopoly

Why? Because monopolies are bad, and we don't like them, no matter if they provide value to people, if they are not built around government regulations that stop competition from happening.

<comment><USER87> They would have to provide more value for less money, were there some competition. I don't see a way in which one can compete with those two (without resorting to aggression) on a global level though.

</comment></comment><comment><USER88> Immediate wire transfer could exchange it if people wouldn't be so used to the card. What would be the motivation to do a wire transfer from you account directly to the merchant instead of tapping your Paypass card...

</comment><comment><USER89> Already India start doing it, its UPI system enable us to avoid cards for all type of payments with processing fee. Also Rupay backed by GOI enable us to use those cards in abroad using vast connection.

<comment><USER90> UPI is godsent. Probably the only good thing to come out of demonetization. I use it everyday, from buying groceries at roadside stalls to paying for my life insurance.

I have pretty much stopped using cash altogether and use cards mainly in those outlets which don't have upi.

</comment></comment><comment><USER91> The fastest way to do that is through phone-based payments.

Those protocols are substantially more open than Visa/MasterCard, and introducing a competition shouldn't require hardware changes for the POS.

</comment><comment><USER92> We shouldn't forget about google. It also needs to be regulated.

This is addressed in the article but the title doesn't reflect this accurately.

TLDR; Clickbait title :sad face:

</comment><comment><USER93> Let's tackle both. Harmful anti-trust violations are rampant.

</comment><comment><USER94> > _Forget Google, time to end the Visa-MasterCard duopoly_

It's bad idea to forget "issue 1" and focusing on "issue 2".

Both issues are major.

</comment><comment><USER95> So instead of sometimes one of the two not being accepted, you want me to carry 50 different ones and have 2/3 rejected?

No, thank you.

<comment><USER16> No... You have the option of any of 50, and they can all be accepted everywhere; rather than the option of only two if you want a chance of being accepted. I believe this is already law in the EU anyway, but there are few competitors to the big two.

<comment><USER96> What's law? That you have to accept all types of payment? Nope.

If everything has to be accepted everywhere, then there's no differentiation

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER97> Amex/Discover, plus PayPal and a host of lessor money transfer apps/companies, like Venmo and Zelle.

<comment><USER98> Venmo is owned by Paypal. Zelle is owned by all of the big banks collectively (Bank of America, Capital One, Wells Fargo et al.). The closest thing to a "small" player is the Cash app, owned by Square.

No commentary on the larger picture here or Amex/Discover, just pointing out your other examples don't exactly fit your point fully.

<comment><USER97> Good points. Thanks for pointing out.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER99> ...can't we go after every monopoly and power abusers and not 'forget' any of them?

</comment><comment><USER18> OP needs to read about Bitcoin, it solves most of the problems discussed in the article

</comment><comment><USER100> Amex/Discover cards exist too, you should use them!

<comment><USER3> I used to carry an Amex, but I also had to carry a Visa for all the times the merchant wouldn't take my Amex. Life got a lot easier when I got a Visa with all the same rewards as my Amex.

</comment></comment><comment><USER101> So, how does one build a card network?

<comment><USER102> It's easy, you just convince a plurality of banks to honor your IOUs.

</comment></comment><comment><USER103> Well whatever, but the mastercard name is so uncool right now I'm amazed they haven't changed their brand to primarycard.

</comment><comment><USER104> was all on board until the conclusion was "regulation"

</comment><comment><USER105> What was on NP2 that it's been censored by Mastercard? A quick search online suggested it was right wing politics but I suspect it must have had some content cross some legal line in order for it to be blacklist.

</comment><comment><USER106> blockchain can change that with stablecoins.

</comment><comment><USER107> Bitcoin Cash

</comment><comment><USER108> Forget finance and tech, medical is under the tight grip of Physicians.

Every medical service requires paying a physician. And it's no trivial amount, its a huge expense. Further, any numbers on physicians salaries are horribly skewed because they don't consider specialists "physicians".

</comment><comment><USER109> Giving everyone access to payment processing means giving platform to unworthy people like misogynists, white supremacists and conservatives as well.

Maybe we are better off with VISA.

<comment><USER110> Can't tell if satire or not

</comment></comment><comment><USER111> Let's tackle Google first then we will have a look at the other complaints. Not going to "forget" Google. Sorry.

</comment><comment><USER112> Why not nationalize credit and banking? The industry has shown its gross incompetence time and time again, notably in 2008 and now with COVID they're yet again settled with bad debt, this time corporate instead of housing. The nation already subsidizes their risks and failures, so why not the upside. Establish a clear hierarchy of accountability rather than the free for all smash and grab we've been seeing for decades.

</comment><comment><USER113> > _Forget Google_

How about NO! How about we go after all three of them? Google should not be left off the hook. This is just whataboutism by Google's PR.

Anyway, Google's employees are all over this thread.</comment>


Ask HN: I want to go from 0 to iOS Developer - <AUTHOR>

Hi guys, I am currently a self-employed graphic designer / video editor / marketer consulting for various companies.  I have been doing this for years.
So, if I have what I think is a great app idea (I have several actually) but don't really know much about coding except what I learned in QBasic when I was in high school a long time ago, where would y'all suggest I start learning how to make apps for iOS? (I don't have an android or know much at all about it)
I've heard of treehouse and codeacademy to start from nothing, but I'm wondering if you guys could suggest something better? <comment><USER2> Write code. Write code. Write code.

Then write some more code.

That's how you learn to program.

Don't waste your time debating the "best" resource. Pick up OReilly book and learn everything in it. Follow an on-line tutorial. Complete treehouse projects.

DO something. Anything. Starting now, for 8 hours a day.

Anything else is just procrastination.

<comment><AUTHOR> What is OReilly book?

<comment><USER3> [http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/O'Reilly_Media#Animal_books](http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/O'Reilly_Media#Animal_books)

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER3> I started iOS development 2 years ago with a good understanding of programming but no objective c experience. After picking up a copy of IOS Programming: The Big Nerd Ranch Guide I was able to get my first app into the App Store within 3 months.

If you are looking for video courses I've done the Lynda.com iOS development course and highly recommend it.</comment>


Study: Artificial sweeteners toxic to digestive gut bacteria - <AUTHOR> https://www.cnbc.com/2018/10/03/artificial-sweeteners-are-toxic-to-digestive-gut-bacteria-study.html <comment><USER2> The underlying research article ([https://www.mdpi.com/1420-3049/23/10/2454](https://www.mdpi.com/1420-3049/23/10/2454)) is set up as a "no-fail" experiment since it infers toxicity with the slightest change (inhibition or induction) in a very sensitive reporter (luciferase). They are NOT measuring change in growth rate of the bacterial cells, the traditional measure of toxicity (aka IC, or inhibitory concentration). The study has positive and negative controls, but this assay is poorly controlled relative to how it is being interpreted (impact of artificial sweeteners on human gut microbiome).

The only way to accurately calibrate this novel assay for relevance to human health is to expose the bacteria to a wide range of natural foods (e.g., avocado, spinach, berries, honey, etc) and show that it does not return a positive result. If nearly everything is toxic, the assay is not useful. However, if most natural foods have no toxicity signal, then the assay has genuine value.

<comment><USER3> I've always found any of these studies that treat artificial sweeteners as a single group very suspect.

1) The only thing the different types of Artificial Sweeteners have in common is a high sweetness value per volume (2k-4k time more sweet than sugar is common). Other than that they are different chemicals so it seems strange to treat them a single group. Sure a few of them might have issues but it seems silly to say they all have the same single issue. Really a red flag for who funded the study.

2) Due to the very high sweetness levels compared to sugar, even if the artificial sweetener is many times worse than sugar per volume, it is still safer due to only 1/2k being actually being used.

<comment><USER4> > _treat artificial sweeteners as a single group_

In defense of an otherwise-poor study, it didn't do this. Six of the most common artificial sweeteners were tested on the bacterial assay and their results reported and discussed separately. Another sequence of assays was run on a panel of sports supplements with varying sweeteners. It looks to me like the only reason for grouping these chemicals was practical - they have interchangeable dietary uses, so it's helpful to observe their varying responses on a single test.

It'd be a pretty interesting study, except that the assay's quality and sensitivity seem hugely in doubt.

<comment><USER5> Doubling down on that point a bit more -

I think that, assuming the study is high quality, one that looks at all the popular artificial sweeteners together is probably more valuable from a "practical application" perspective, because it allows you to make more of an apples-to-apples comparison among the individual sweeteners.

If all you've got is bunch of isolated studies that only look at one of them at a time, you'll always have some room for doubt about whether a difference in outcome reflects the sweetener being tested, or some difference in the experimental protocol.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER6> Top comment at r/science:

Ordinary table salt and most other essential non-organic mineral naturally found in healthy foods, are toxic in increasing doses to bacteria. As a biochemist I'd be willing to bet that those necessary minerals in the human diet would stress the hell out of these bacteria in increasing doses also. The bacteria in this paper do NOT show growth inhibition with these artificial sweeteners in the doses used.

It's a pretty huge jump in scientific presumption - from a change in fluorescence in a contrived sub-inhibitory bacterial "stress" assay, to the authors statement of "we may speculate that the response observed in our study may be relevant to gut microbiome and thus may influence human health". (statements in italics not tested by authors)

So doubt their basic premise has any validity.

[https://www.reddit.com/r/science/comments/9ki9nw/scientists_...](https://www.reddit.com/r/science/comments/9ki9nw/scientists_report_many_artificial_sweeteners/)

Not only that, they were only using a fluorescing E. coli as a proxy for the incredibly diverse gut microbiota. For it to have any real bearing on human health, they'd need to do at least an animal model study and show a difference in 16s rRNA quantitation and/or sequencing for relative abundances of different species. But I sympathize with the need to make your study sound significant and worth doing....

</comment><comment><USER7> The article doesn't say which sweeteners did they study and this is a very bad style. Fortunately it links to an article on EurekAlert which in its turn links to the actual scientific paper (doi.org/10.3390/molecules23102454). It says aspartame, sucralose, saccharine, neotame, advantame and acesulfame potassium-k (ace-k) (BTW at least saccharine and ace-k are already known to be carcinogenic AFAIK) were tested against Escherichia Coli (I would rather be interested in testing them against Lactobacillaceae).

Lactulose is a great prebiotic (not widely known infortunately) very good for gut bacteria (AFAIK), has geroprotective properties, is a mild osmotic laxative, has zero calories, doesn't affect blood sugar/insulin and tastes great. I use it instead of maple syrup. As far as I also know erythritol (looks, feels and cooks almost exactly like sugar) and palatinose (same, but has calories yet doesn't kick insulin and doesn't feed mouth bacteria so is safe for teeth) are good for gut bacteria too. We could also mention inulin (which is a well-known prebiotic very beneficial for gut microbiome) but it's sweetness is weaker.

<comment><USER8> Paranoid mistrust, cancer fears, and fart-driven explosive diarrhea had already winnowed my list of non-sucrose sweeteners down to just erythritol, pure stevia powder, and very small amounts of xylitol.

I'll have to look into lactulose and palatinose.... And it looks like lactulose is out for the diarrhea reason, and isomaltulose--Palatinose is a trademarked name for it--looks practically identical to slow-motion sucrose, including caloric content. It has a lower glycemic index, but is half as sweet as sucrose, so you may end up consuming more calories for the same amount of sweetness.

Erythritol is not good for gut bacteria. It is 90% absorbed before reaching the colon, and excreted mostly intact in urine and feces, and the early absorption is why it doesn't have the diarrheal effect common to most sugar alcohols. Sweeteners that are neither absorbed nor digested draw water out of the digestive tract as they pass. Those that can be fermented by colon bacteria also tend to produce gases, that help push the water out. Xylitol is not fermentable, so the diarrhea you might get won't be quite so bad.

I think I'll stick with a mix of erthyritol and stevia, with proportions titrated such that equal-volume measures of erythritol/stevia and sucrose crystals have roughly equivalent sweetness. The flavor profile isn't quite right, but it's good enough for me until something better comes along.

(edit) I'll also add that it seems to work best in foods where other flavors can dominate. While you can sort of taste it as not being real sugar in lemonade, in sugar-free fudge, all you can taste is the sweetness. But it also forms crystals during cooling, and I haven't quite worked that out yet. Gritty/crunchy fudge is not exactly ideal.

<comment><USER9> I've found that stevia sweeteners with inulin (not insulin) seen to be beneficial for my gut bacteria. Actually seems to help with "loose days".

Sweetleaf is generally what I use.

<comment><USER7> Inulin may "help with loose days" much more than you probably think. It may actually help to systematically decrease your appetite and insulin resistance, decrease ghrelin (the "hunger hormone") and increase leptin (the "fullness hormone") if you eat it every day. I can recommend Dr. Raphael Kellman's "The microbiome diet" book for more info, it is easy and exciting to read and has a fair amount references to scientific research in it, it may happen that you will never have to worry about calories again after you read it.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER10> There are only 12 milligrams of sucralose in a packet of Splenda. So the toxic levels found in mice had the same concentration as an 8 oz. cup of coffee with 16 packets of Splenda.

<comment><USER11> >an 8 oz. cup of coffee with 16 packets of Splenda.

I have literally seen people do such things at Dunkin Donuts. "Yeah can I get a medium coffee with extra cream and 20 sugars." You WUT M8?

<comment><USER12> At a certain point you have to admit to yourself that you just don't like coffee.

<comment><USER13> With that much sugar I'm not sure if it's the flavour or texture you don't like.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER14> The article is a bit confusing in that they refer to two separate studies. Both of the studies are open access

(Neotame) [https://www.mdpi.com/1420-3049/23/2/367](https://www.mdpi.com/1420-3049/23/2/367) (6 sweeteners) [https://www.mdpi.com/1420-3049/23/10/2454](https://www.mdpi.com/1420-3049/23/10/2454)

Also there seems to be a typo in the article:

> ...the bacteria found in the digestive system became toxic.

I don't think they mean the bacteria themselves became toxic.

</comment><comment><USER15> Seems like everything has artificial sweeteners nowadays. It's a trend that I noticed only in the last couple of years. And not just fizzy drinks like Sprite or Pepsi - which have sugar _and_ sweetener! - but breakfast cereals, yoghurts, ketchup-like sauces... all have "no added sugar" on the package, you dig a bit deeper and they are full of sweeteners.

Chewing gum and other "healthy sweet" products like that have used sweetener for years, and have always had a warning not to take too much, or it'll give you the shits. Clearly bad for your gut or you wouldn't be getting these side effects. Yet here we are, with sweeteners everywhere and getting more pervasive.

I just try to avoid sugar and sweeteners as much as possible. Seems like half the things I add in "My Fitness Pal" have a little orange warning about something :(

<comment><USER16> > Clearly bad for your gut or you wouldn't be getting these side effects.

That's not how that works. Ifyou eat too much fruit the sugar in that can cause a laxative effect,and the mecahnism is the same as with suga alcohols. The undigested sugar causes osmosis, which floods the gut with water, which causes diarrhea.

<comment><USER17> There have been studies done where patients were given lots of fruit and it did not cause a laxative effect.

[https://nutritionfacts.org/2017/02/23/can-you-eat-too- much-f...](https://nutritionfacts.org/2017/02/23/can-you-eat-too-much-fruit/)

> Seventeen people were made to eat 20 servings a day of fruit. Despite the > extraordinarily high fructose content of this diet, presumably about 200 > g/d—eight cans of soda worth, the investigators reported no adverse effects > (and possible benefit actually) for body weight, blood pressure, and insulin > and lipid levels after three to six months.

<comment><USER18> That article says nothing about a laxative effect.

<comment><USER17> Exactly.

<comment><USER18> You failed to provide evidence that fruit exhibits no laxative effect. That study didn't report a laxative effect because it wasn't testing for a laxative effect.

<comment><USER17> It would have been reported as an adverse effect and it wasn't.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER19> Currently a perfect diabetes, obesitas (and also cancer & alzheimer's) storm is brewing.

My gut instinct (pun intended) tells me it mainly has dietary causes which are not limited to increased portions alone.

<comment><USER20> Processed foods + sedentary lifestyles = perfect storm.

Pretty obvious "something" happened in the 70s and we've been on this ride ever since: [https://nchspressroom.files.wordpress.com/2010/01/obesity.gi...](https://nchspressroom.files.wordpress.com/2010/01/obesity.gif)

<comment><USER21> If someone is sick, they'll become slow. All they'll want to do is lie down some place quiet.

Watch kids, healthy kids. After a meal, all they want to do is run, talk, jump - move. Sitting still is the last thing they want to do.

My point is perhaps, sedentary behavior is caused by something, a symptom outside the control of those afflicted by it.

Here are some culprits we could explore:

Schooling: Being trained, forced to sit in a spot for hours could train people to be sedentary.

Processed food: Maybe its doing something to the body. Like how zombie ants are controlled by fungi.

Aging process: All animals become less active with age... Even snails.

Environment: Tech makes it harder to be active physically. A tv remote, car, internet for shopping...

Poverty: There's a proven link between experiencing poverty at a young age and inability to control food intake, and spend responsibly.

Genes: People used to bulk up for winter hunger. Now there's food all year round. But the lizard brain is still in control.

There might be more reasons why people binge eat, and remain sedentary such as processed water, poor air quality, domestication (The more Wolf gene a Dog has, the more active it is)...

<comment><USER22> Refined oils, fat, and animal protien cause arterial hardening immediately, lasting for several hours. Keep ingesting and you end up with heart disease....arteries filled with plaque restricting blood flow, raspiration, mental function. Ingesting refined sugar and flour causes an insulin spike (make fat out of carbs!) that lasts for hours causing a crash and repeated cravings for...more carbs. This leads to diabetes. Cancer needs sugar and animal protien to live.

Check out China study.

<comment><USER23> Fat is slept on macronutrient because of the misguided idea that increased fat = increased cholesterol in arteries. Vitamin K2 is an important vitamin that isn't metabolized well from foods containing K1 (vegetables). Animal sources and natto (fermented soy beans) are the best sources of it. It has been shown to help with heart disease, cancer and bone health.

The interesting thing with animal protein is that no study has shown a dose dependent increase in cancer when consuming more of it. Chronic inflammation from gluten, processed foods, pesticides, refined carbs, and refined sugars are the biggest culprits in dietary endorsed cancer.

<comment><USER22> So you are denying that endothelial dysfunction and it's triggers exist? Interesting.

<comment><USER23> Its triggers are high insulin, high fasting blood sugar, high triglycerides and low ldl. These are all caused by the food types I listed. High fat low carb diets have been shown to reduce all of these symptoms.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER24> I am concerned by the absence of a dose-response until above a threshold concentration for all substances tested. Perhaps osmotic effects, displacement, and chemical competition for receptors, all of which may be in- vitro effects, may explain the curves. Is the threshold relevant to in-vivo concentrations? No idea.

The reason toxicity is expressed as an LD50 is to account for the dose- response of toxins. If toxins behaved as purported in this experiment, we could use a simple concentration number instead: no effect, no effect, no effect, dead.

Also, it looks like all the substances that showed toxic induction did so around the same concentration. Very suspicious for chemically disparate substances with, presumably, different mechanisms of action.

"How can we all have died at the same time? ...(thinks)...The salmon mousse!"

</comment><comment><USER25> I was big on artificial sweeteners (I refuse to eat any sugar), mainly erythritol and monkfruit, but some science(1) says that just their taste profile can trick your body into thinking it's consuming a real sugar with the associated glucose/insulin response and this could be one reason as to why non-nutritive sweeteners can throw your blood and insulin response profiles out of whack, which may be a reason as to why individuals who consume artificial sweeteners suffer the same maladies as those who consume high levels of sugar.

If the science on this issue becomes conclusively affirmative, then it's sort of the nail in the coffin for artificial sweeteners, because it doesn't matter what the compositional makeup of the sweetener is, it's our own bodies own responses to the taste/smell that are giving us the ill effects.

I would definitely like to be dissuaded as to believing this is not the case, though, as it's caused my to ignore my sweet tooth for far too long! :)

For those who are interested in and/or consume artificial sweeteners, I think this link is definitely worth a read:

[1] [https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC4661066/](https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC4661066/)

</comment><comment><USER26> It would be interesting to see some kind of health warning with stats or articles, including replication, funding sources, invitro/animal/human studies etc.

I just cannot trust even the most basic science announcements on mainstream media as things stand. It is simply more important that it generates clicks than it advanced people's understanding these days.

</comment><comment><USER27> Perhaps this an avenue towards a new type of antibiotic?

</comment><comment><USER28> Anecdotally I've noticed when I chew large amounts of artificially sweetened gum (mentos pure fresh) throughout the day, I will have restless legs throughout the night.

</comment><comment><USER29> It's pretty clear to me that there is significant bias in the premise. Why, specifically, should it be artificial sweeteners that are toxic to gut bacteria? Irony is not a scientific motivation, it is a journalistic motivation. What makes artificial sweeteners more likely to be toxic to gut bacteria than, say, food coloring, preservatives, or (dare I say it) natural herbs and spices?

</comment><comment><USER30> You can thank former Secretary of State Donald Rumsfeld for allowing Aspartame to remain FDA approved despite scientific research concerns:

[https://tonic.vice.com/en_us/article/nzpbkx/the-story-of- how...](https://tonic.vice.com/en_us/article/nzpbkx/the-story-of-how-fake- sugar-got-approved-is-scary-as-hell)

<comment><USER31> Meh, this study is misleading. They didn't test if any other foods had the same effect. So sure, sweeteners might have a detrimental effect by this biomarker. But they didn't check if anything we'd consider healthy, like broccoli or onions, have similar effects.

This is like saying "smoking increases your change of a heart attack 10X after one puff!" without noting "...but having sex increases it 7X and drinking a can of coke increases it 5X".

</comment></comment><comment><USER32> Off-topic, here is one of my favorite HN comments ever, about artificial sweeteners: [https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=9440566](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=9440566)

</comment><comment><USER33> Reading this while enjoying my diet coke was a bad idea.

<comment><USER34> I feel you. I was drinking a coke at dinner with a friend who started talking about how sugar suppresses the immune system. The coke just didn't taste the same after that.

</comment></comment><comment><USER35> It looks like the study confirms what we already knew. It would be more interesting to see what happens with what are considered more healthy alternatives, such as xylitol or erythritol. They seem to be "mostly fine", but more research would be very beneficial given that people use them more and more.

</comment><comment><USER36> I'm not a mouse...

<comment><USER21> >I'm not a mouse...

Expanded: Animal studies are just a start. Human trials might get opposite results.

E.g. The drug Indocid or Indocin is safe for human consumption but kills rats. It's a cheap rat killer.

If rats were tested first, we'd assume they'll kill humans. The reverse applies as well.

</comment></comment><comment><USER12> Putting that aside, they also give you horrible gas.

</comment><comment><USER37> Anyone know how gut bacteria respond to Stevia?

</comment><comment><USER38> When will we have artificial fat?

<comment><USER4> Oh man, that is a tough order.

Sugar has the convenient trait of being essentially a flavor, so all that's needed is to trick chemical receptors on the tongue with something that's nontoxic and either not bioavailable or very high intensity relative to sucrose. Fat ends up affecting flavor, mouthfeel, and food traits (e.g. water retention, bulk) - and a lot of those roles are inherently tied to fat volume.

Safe, bio-unavailable fats already exist, more or less, in the form of fatty alcohols. They can cause minor irritation to the liver, but nonlinear long- chain fatty acids are safe enough that we already use them in food as emulsifiers. Wax esters, which bind fatty alcohols to fatty acids (i.e. normal fats), are also poorly digested and extremely fat-like. Escolar and oilfish are notable as fatty fish with wax esters making up almost all of the fat.

Unfortunately, that 'volume' issue now comes home to roost. Wax esters in low doses (e.g. orange roughy) are fine, but in high doses (e.g. escolar), they tend to cause stomach pain and bowel issues - not because they're toxic, but because they simply aren't digested. Other replacement fats like Olestra (once FDA approved as a fat substitute) have the same problem: they simply come out in the same form they went in.

To replace a significant portion of our "fat experience" with artificial fat means we need something which is similar in the mouth, low calorie and cholesterol, but also digestible. The best options we've found are either variant fats with lower absorption and calorie density, or other-macronutrient substances which serve only some of the same roles, like pectin or whey. Those, again, can lower cholesterol but can't do much better than half the calorie density of fat.

I'm not sure what artificial fat on the level of artificial sugar would mean. It would, I suppose, have to be something which is digested sufficiently to excrete without deriving energy or other components like cholesterol. And in an Algernon Argument sort of way, we probably shouldn't expect to find the body digesting very many compounds it derives no benefit from, so "somewhat better" is probably all we can hope for.

</comment></comment><comment><USER39> The title is slightly misleading. The study is only about neotame, and not artificial sweeteners in general.

EDIT: Nevermind, only one article was linked. Thank you for linking the rest below.

<comment><USER40> Huh? The second paragraph says "six common artificial sweeteners", and the third says:

> Researchers from Ben-Gurion University of the Negev in Israel and Nanyang > Technological University in Singapore tested the toxicity of aspartame, > sucralose, saccharine, neotame, advantame, and acesulfame potassium-k. They > observed that when exposed to only 1 milligram per milliliter of the > artificial sweeteners, the bacteria found in the digestive system became > toxic.

<comment><USER41> It links to two studies.

Neotame (2018-02-09) @ [https://www.mdpi.com/1420-3049/23/2/367](https://www.mdpi.com/1420-3049/23/2/367)

Sweeteners (2018-09-25) @ [https://www.mdpi.com/1420-3049/23/10/2454](https://www.mdpi.com/1420-3049/23/10/2454)</comment></comment></comment>


Lets Have Launch - learn Mongo, Express, Angular & Node by building a launchpage - <AUTHOR> http://act2.me/letshavelaunch/ A blog post that teaches you how to build a launchpage using Mongo / Express / Angular / NodeJS. <comment><USER2> Hey - nice writeup. Just to let you know, the link to twyst.in is broken.</comment>


Forget The Term Global Warming. Hello Global Weirding. - <AUTHOR> http://www.nytimes.com/2010/02/17/opinion/17friedman.html

<comment><USER2> I'll round it up for Thomas: \- it's likely that the earth has seen temperatures as high or higher as recently as 1000 years ago, with no human input. The level of warming is not precendented in recent (geological) history \- the rate of warming from 1979-2005 matches other rates of warming in the instrumental record, so the rate of warming is not unprecedented. -there has been no statistically significant warming since 1995 -the production of co2 and associated increase in the atmosphere has followed previous trends and predictions \- sea ice loss and glacier loss may or may not be related to the warming temperature, in many cases it is not clearly known (ie Himalayas) and requires more study. In other cases it may be microclimate changes causing snow loss (Kiliminjaro, deforestation) \- there is no statistically significant increase in extreme weather events measured over the 20th century. While there was an increase in insurance losses, this is due to more people and property living in high risk areas. \- the early IPCC and other predictions made in the late '80s and early '90s have failed to predict the global average temperature \- the underpinning of the AGW theory is that the earth has warmed since the mid 20th century, and scientists haven't been able to find any other reason, so the assumption is that it is greenhouse gases causing this, given they have gone from ~ 0.000035% to .000038% of the atmosphere

Don't believe me though : these are the facts as I have read and understand them, everyone reads and believes different things. Also see Richard Lindzens' recent post to the Boston Globe ([http://www.boston.com/bostonglobe/editorial_opinion/letters/...](http://www.boston.com/bostonglobe/editorial_opinion/letters/articles/2010/02/19/the_sound_of_alarm/)) for his views on this type of editorial - he sums this up in a much better way than I could.

Finally, the 'in the pay of big oil and coal' is a tired meme and shows political advocacy rather than a true discussion of the issues. Most of the genuine research sceptics are self funded or in tenured university posts. Yes, there are oil-funded research groups, but these do not provide the bulk of sceptical views. The oil, gas and coal industries have donated millions to climate science research, and AGW research has received billions from governments. Like there is no shadowy conspiracy of climate scientists to instate a communist world government, there is no shadowy network of big oil funding for sceptics.

</comment><comment><USER3> Flagged: Pure politics -- contributes nothing but hearsay.

</comment><comment><USER4> I live in a 2 bedroom apartment and drive a Corolla. Thomas Friedman lives here: [http://17.media.tumblr.com/tumblr_kr4dmdT1gb1qa45fzo1_500.gi...](http://17.media.tumblr.com/tumblr_kr4dmdT1gb1qa45fzo1_500.gif)

When Friedman's carbon footprint comes down to within an order of magnitude of my own then I'll _consider_ what he has to say about the dangers of CO2 emissions to the world. Until then, I'll consider him just another blow hard who enjoys feeling important about himself, can't resist telling the rest of the world how to live, and doesn't even appear to take his own words seriously.</comment>


Books to read before I die - <AUTHOR> https://www.cooksillustrated.com/features/8560-72-books-to-read-before-i-die <comment><USER2> This list and others of its kind have always felt a little off to me. If you read the most famous single book of three different authors I feel like you wouldn't get too much out of it. I would rather die knowing I read Shakespeare and Faulkner than read Othello and As I lay Dying. This kind of list format takes what should be an organic exploration of other humans who are praised for their writing and turns it into a checklist of disconnected pieces. Maybe you read half a play and hate it, maybe you devour Shakespeare's entire body of work?

I guess that is also why I dislike a lot of contemporary stuff, the aesthetic life of the artist behind the work is harder and harder to connect with. This all sounds super elitist but it's hard to discuss books without straying into that territory haha. The breadth of genre is so vast as well, Roald Dahl and Richard Feynman on the same list? It just really lacks a depth of focus to feel like more than ticking boxes.

<comment> dawg- As a hardcore book lover, I have the deepest hatred for all lists of books. They are pretentious wastes of time, usually written to make the author look like an eclectic and well-rounded person and for no other purpose. This is just about my only strong opinion in the world. I would die a thousand deaths on this hill.

 _Publishing_ a list of books like this should be in the same category of social bad habits such as name dropping celebrities you have met, or casually mentioning the large amount of money you make per year ($two hundred _Kay_ ), or having a PO Box in a rich neighborhood so you can have an address that impresses people.

Ticking boxes is exactly what it is. If I can be a little overdramatic (yes, now is where that starts), it's a betrayal of the very soul of reading.

<comment><USER3> > _As a hardcore book lover, I have the deepest hatred for all lists of books. > They are pretentious wastes of time_

How do you keep track of the books you want to read?

There are many books I've heard of, and heard people recommend, that I would really like to read. The only way I can keep track of them is by noting them down in lists.

<comment><USER4> I'd guess that person is talking about _published_ lists of books.

<comment><USER3> Then I'd say to them, what is wrong with publishing your own list of books to read? Others might get something from it. Or your list of book recommendations?

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER5> [https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tsundoku](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tsundoku) should be mandatory reminder for every "list of books to read" list

<comment><USER6> I definitely relate to this, even if I no longer have a large physical collection of books. I kinda cringe when I see lists like this of recommended reading, and especially dread that a list might be very compelling, because I already have a personal list that I'll never be able to finish before the end of my life.

<comment><USER7> Me too, the time required for my to-read list is getting longer than my anticipated lifespan. What's the Japanese word for that?

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER8> I'd stop at the 71st just to be on the safe side.

</comment><comment><USER9> Can't seem to find a publish date, but this list almost certainly has to be a couple years old, considering Christopher Kimball was ousted from Cooks Country/Cooks Illustrated/America's Test Kitchen in 2015.

<comment><AUTHOR> July/August 2014 issue of Cook's Illustrated

[https://www.cooksillustrated.com/magazines/188-july-slash- au...](https://www.cooksillustrated.com/magazines/188-july-slash- august-2014/editorial)

[https://www.bookofjoe.com/2014/06/cooks-illustrated- editor-c...](https://www.bookofjoe.com/2014/06/cooks-illustrated-editor- christopher-kimballs-book-bucket-list.html)

</comment></comment><comment><USER10> All book links are affiliate links (tag=cpk-72books-20)

<comment><USER11> Seems like as good a place to ask as any - is there an adblock list style solution for stripping not just query parameters (and I suppose they're sometimes needed, can't always strip them) but also e.g. /ref=blah paths that some (Amazon for example) use as well?

<comment><USER12> Why? I actually make a point of going to an affiliate link before buying anything from the big river. Just doing my part to reduce their profits as much as possible. (My current go-to is kottke.org although I wouldn't object if people wanted to go to [http://don.dream-in- color.net/books/](http://don.dream-in-color.net/books/) instead)

<comment><USER11> The /ref= isn't from afiliate/referral links, it's just tracking.

<comment><USER12> I don't think that's actually what's happening with that. ref=nosim is an old thing (no longer necessary) for going to the product page directly. I can't see any tracking that they can do with a URL component that they wouldn't have anyway (e.g., knowing the referrer, IP etc.)

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER13> This is the type of title that I considered sensationalized. "Before I die" is a cliche only used to grab attention, because obviously there are no lists of books to read after one dies.

<comment><USER14> Maybe you're reading it too literally. To me it just means "I don't want to die without having read this books".

<comment><USER15> I wonder how many different types of bucket lists there are. This is a "to- read" bucket list; I've definitely seen or at least heard other people opine on "to-visit" bucket lists. The more traditional "to-do" bucket list sometimes includes places to visit, but also a more wide-ranging list of activities and experiences.

I wonder what else warrants a full bucket list.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER16> It'd be nice if he explained why he chose to include each book on the list. I think the section where he lists books that he'd like to reread is the most important section.

</comment><comment><USER17> I love Cormac McCarthy and Blood Meridian is a fine way to get into his work, but it was a hard read for me because of the pacing. NCfOM, The Road or Outer Dark are easier to follow IMO. I hope this comment is considered useful enough to pass the HN guidelines.

</comment><comment><USER7> Middlemarch is one of my faves - can't believe he couldn't get through it.

</comment><comment><USER18> Hmm... I have read 9 on the "never read" list and 4 on the "never finished" list. And never heard of most of the rest :)

</comment><comment><USER19> Somewhere I read he got this list from the America's Test Kitchen team.

<comment><USER20> Given that this was presumably published when he was still in charge of the business, it would hardly be surprising if a lot of the list were contributed by others.

(Kimball's no longer involved with CI. He left a while back under acrimonious circumstances.)

<comment><USER7> I've always been split - he seems not nice but the show isn't quite the same without him.

<comment><USER20> I admit I haven't watched the show for a while. The new podcast (Proof) is much better than the old ATK one though IMO. It also feels as if they've gotten a bit more adventurous with recipes; they always felt rather conservative mid-American under Kimball.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER21> I read Kimball and assumed Ralph Kimball.

<comment><AUTHOR> diff'rent strokes: never heard of Ralph Kimball ;-)

<comment><USER22> Xerox PARC alum, main designer of the sequel to the Xerox Alto computer, the Xerox Star, which is the the first modern personal computer (GUI, mouse, Ethernet, print & file servers, etc).</comment></comment></comment>