I would argue it is zero sum ("you've got some fraud" vs "you have no fraud") if there is any great volume of transactions and what's being sold is valuable, and/or marketable at a black market price below retail, and/or offers fraudsters liquidity options. I am skeptical because an untrained system is going to make mistakes out of the gate, even if it's trained on oodles of transactions from other businesses. Anti-fraud isn't a one-size-fits-all game.
Sure, maybe you offer "zero fraud" from a chargebacks-line-item-on-the-balance-sheet perspective. The impacts of fraud on customers' perception of a company, and the effects those perceptions will have on the bottom line, however, can be significant. This is not say I assume your service is deficient in any way...the marketing is just a little snicker-inducing from someone like me who works in the field. The only sure way to have zero fraud is to turn off sales.
Final control over force-approving rejected transactions is a nice feature on its face. I understand why your merchants don't use it...they'd have to soak the expense of paying someone to monitor accepts and rejects in an attempt to optimize sales (which is what they are paying you to do).
If a merchant does not have full visibility into and control of their anti-fraud program (and the expertise to know what to do with it) approval/reject/false positive rates are always going to be in the hands of people who don't know their customers or business as well as the merchant does. That is why larger, mature businesses invest in anti-fraud people and technology. That's certainly a bridge too far for the typical small business, so services like Bolt can certainly deliver a ton of value. I just advise a merchant who thinks that just because they can't see fraud there isn't any impact to their business that they're missing a potentially crucial part of the picture.
Fraud liability absorbed by a service provider isn't "zero fraud." It is: "you don't get charged directly for chargebacks and other financial penalties, but your brand is still at risk, plus you have no control over false positives."
I think that's a bit of a reach. That malaise may have contributed to certain aspects of the conglomeration of groups/sounds that came to be called grunge, but let's not forget the vigorous marketing efforts around it at the time. Economically-speaking, the decline of the timber industry in the Pacific Northwest may have as had as much or more to do with music-impacting unhappiness.
I cook ~80% of my meals. Generally speaking I try to eat out infrequently, and when I do I seek out items I would not typically cook for myself (or lack the expertise and equipment to attempt).
1. I love cooking, especially for other people. It's also far less expensive for me to cook delicious, healthful food than it is to eat out constantly, even with time spent taken into consideration. Throw in a partner with special dietary needs and there is further reinforcement.
2. I do if I have a special event on the horizon (holiday, dinner party, that kind of thing) or I am going to pack food for travel. Otherwise I just make a mental plan based on what I have and what is available/in season.
3. I grill a lot of spice-rubbed meats, bake muffins and scones using almond and coconut flours, bake fish, roast vegetables, make slow cooker soups, and the list goes on. My girlfriend and I also make homemade yogurt using one of these (http://www.amazon.com/Yogourmet-104-Electric-Yogurt-Maker/dp...), cooking the yogurt for ~36 hours until it has a custard-like consistency. Delicious.
4. My girlfriend has to follow the FODMAP diet (basically eliminating all fermentable substances...of which there are so many) due to a medical condition. She used to follow something slightly less restrictive called the specific carbohydrate diet, and with selective exceptions (I don't have any medical restrictions) I still do. Think little to no processed foods, no refined sugars, no grains of any kind, no starchy vegetables - lots of greens and meat and cheese and homemade yogurt. I throw in rice and some other non-SCD carbohydrates (rice, etc.) so that I can participate in endurance sports.
5. I plan to make leftovers. I try to think of meals in three stages: their original composition, how they'll taste as leftovers, and how they could become an ingredient in a quick third dish (like an omelette).
Maybe the MRAP was requested in the event that the Puyallup Fair (the WA state fair for the uninitiated) gets totally out of control.
RE: the meth labs, etc. it would be interesting to see usage data for the equipment. Who knows...if an occupied meth lab is raided every week, the vehicle could make sense (not that I have any tactical expertise in the slightest).
I was surprised to see a number of mine-resistant vehicles associated with very rural counties in Washington State. Not being completely sure whether a mine-resistant vehicle was a tank or not, I googled the term and came across this article:
“Here’s the thing,” Shellmyer says. “Washington, Iowa, has 8,000 people. We have an MRAP now. We have a SWAT team. We have [police] dogs, and we have a SWAT team transportation vehicle that’s not armored.
The city councilman began to think: “Goodness, this is overkill.”
I myself am not blessed with the gift of faith, and I don't particularly enjoy Rails, but I greatly appreciate your making your very mature passion project available to one and all. Very impressive!
I enjoyed: "It's like a cross between Facebook, Google Groups, and SharePoint, but it's completely free and open source and awesome." I especially like that it's awesome in addition to being completely free and open source, rather than _ just because_ it's free and open source.
This is a trail-poacher's dream. It'd be wonderful to have this cross-indexed with any extant publicly available data sources (state/national parks, property lines etc.) to try to determine the legality of a given route. Illegal trails are likely illuminated by this heatmap, but their illegality is not.
I code at approximately the same rate as the core rope memory weavers wove. I wouldn't trust mine to help people fly to the moon, though. That's incredible!