I heard a stat on BBC World News recently that 11% of the world’s gold is owned by Indian women. It’s highly regarded there. They consider it a safety net if, for example, they encounter hard times. They can sell it to get by. From there, I’m not sure if that answers the question. But it seems it’s considered a safety net not just cosmetic.
In the trading platforms gold is often linked to emotion in the market. If people anticipate a bad stock market they will cling to gold so gold increases.
In Belgium the water company has imposed forced-banking by removing the cash option. Then at least one bank has shutdown their website and shut their doors, essentially forcing people to buy a smartphone and install their non-free app. So if you want water service, you must buy a smartphone and sell your soul. How perverted is that? Sure, those customers can also change banks but more banks could take the same shitty direction: run non-free software or lose access to water.. how’s that for human rights?
That’s not a reality for any Belgian banks as far as I can tell.
One bank even shut their doors, took down their website, and forced all their customers to either use their non-free app or lose access to their money.
What incentive would a bank have to release their apps as FOSS? .. but the simplest answer is “why would they?”
Indeed they wouldn’t because most consumers are pushovers, willing to fetch and run any garbage non-free software and willing to share sensitive data with Google in the process. So there’s no reason to offer a FOSS option -- as people are not demanding it.
I am one of the very few who demand FOSS. I will not run a non-free app (esp. banking) and I will not create a Google account to reach their exclusive playstore. And now that bank’s web services have started going to shit (blocking tor, reducing web features or simply being shut down to force people to use the phone apps), I’ve gone analog. If a critical mass of consumers were to do the same and stand up for themselves, banks would be forced to do the right thing. But they are not. Ethical consumers are too small of a group to be worth getting business from.
There is a cost to making a good app.
That cost is actually reduced in the open source world. Wheels need not be reinvented. The bank would only have to code a few basic features as an example, publish the API, and let the community develop their app at no cost to the bank. The bank would only have to finance the code audit and acceptance, which the commercial software producer must do anyway.
For example - I’m currently using a bank because their app is awesomely good (compared to other banks).
Surely you have a low bar for what’s good. Just about every banking app I’ve encountered is not even downloadable unless you have a Google account. That already crosses the enshitification line. You have to create a Google account, share your personal phone number with Google, agree to Google’s terms, let Google harvest your IMEI number, let Google keep track of where you bank (since it tracks every download), trust Google not to sell that info to debt collectors, etc. Then once you have the app, it likely detects and refuses to run inside a VM, thus forcing you to buy new hardware to keep up with updates. Then the app likely has spyware therein simply judging from the excessive perms they tend to require.
Why would they open source it - it means customers might go to other banks who do better on interest rates, or fees.
Are you saying a FOSS app from bank A would simply work on bank B? That they have the same API? Perhaps, but that can be controlled by using a unique API.. though indeed that protectionism would incur an extra cost.
Why does any company ever undercut the competition by offering something more attractive?
Bank A makes their customer’s lives easy/convenient, but forces them to bend over and install freedom-disrespecting spyware. If bank B wants to take some of bank A’s market share (healthy competition), they produce an app that is equally convenient but respects freedom.
Healthy competition is not in play here. Banks are highly skiddish and risk adverse. The US has over 6000 banks yet US consumers experience very little diversity between them. They’re all basically the same because in when money is on the line no one in the finance industry wants to gamble with doing something different or original. They copy each other and produce shitty websites. Even the website software is outsourced primarily to a few different suppliers.
Even before smartphones existed, I was disturbed that if I wanted an electronic statement, I was forced to login to a website manually and do a lot of clicking. Fuck manual labor. They called that “electronic delivery”. But it wasn’t delivery; it was pick-up. I want my statements like I want my pizza: delivered. It’s been possible to email PGP-encrypted statements since the 1990s, but no banks in the US do it. I think just one bank in Germany did it. But in the US no bank wants to try something different because if they succeed, other banks will copy them anyway. So they only put their neck on the line with risk only to have the benefit of the success be exploited by the competition who avoided taking risk.
If we want FOSS banking apps, I think the first and most important step would be legally requiring banks to provide standard APIs.
Germany supposedly has an open standard banking API. I don’t know if it’s legally mandated but in principle its mere existence and acceptance by some banks would theoretically be sufficient to inspire FOSS apps. I vaguely recall that GNU Cash recognizes that standard.. can anyone confirm?
I don’t think I’ve seen any portable FOSS banking apps for any country in the F-Droid official repos. Which suggests that a standard open API may not be sufficient. Or perhaps I have something wrong here.
That’s nice that you get an email & that they’re willing to open up a dialog. That’s far more respect than I get anywhere else where they block you (ingress or egress) without saying why.
If I got an email from school admins after blocking my egress Tor connection I would tell them I am trying to use the best search engine in the world (ombrelo.im5wixghmfmt7gf7wb4xrgdm6byx2gj26zn47da6nwo7xvybgxnqryid.onion) for a project and demand a proper internet connection.
That’s just an example where I heard cash wages were normal. The law is strange because it just says cash wages are acceptable if it’s the norm in an industry. The law does not list industries where that’s a norm, so if someone is prosecuted someone would have to convince a court whether or not cash is normal for the line of work.
UberEats and Deliveroo seem to be getting away with it. Those workers have been made into independent contractors (something they protest because of the lack of job security it gives them).
Strictly speaking it’s the invoice number that’s encoded into the structured code, which then maps to an account. That’s how the expected amount is known. It’s a good system so long as there is also an analog option if bugs happen, the grid goes down, or if a cyber attack brings down the bank or invoicing system and the tech fails. You can’t fix those things in a day. Bug hunts can take weeks to find and more weeks to resolve and recover the data. And the engineers are not cheap. When there is an analog option you can always add unskilled workers cheaply and even train them on-the-fly if needed. You can’t just throw more people in to accelerate work on a software problem. But with analog systems you can. You can scale them up quickly with temporary contractors. Even if all the info systems are down you can accept cash and make paper records until the info system is recovered. When a software dev is hired, they actually cost the employer money for training and the time it takes them to understand the complex code and quality systems. Some say it takes 3 months before a developer becomes productive enough to offset their own cost. Some say that crossover point is closer to a year. If a software dev CV shows that they left a job short of working 3 years in a position, employers will often reject them because that’s not enough time to have made the company a worthwhile profit.
How is philosophy orthogonal to religion?
When a group claims rights to practice their religion because being forced to go against their religion is unconscionable, and they are rightfully granted their religious freedom while another non-religious group equally considers the same force to be unconscionable, but lack the shield of religious freedom (as they don’t follow a religious text that’s relevant to the matter), how is that not a philosophical discussion?
If you went to a university to get an answer to this, which discipline would you pose the question to if not philosophy department?