#payment-processing

[icewindandboringhorror]

(also feel free in the tags to clarify Why you made the choice you made!! :0c)

[jakeperalta]

every time I get an email notification I'm like SUNRISE ON THE REAPING DISPATCHED??? and every time I am disappointed 😔

[mostlysignssomeportents]

Fintech bullies stole your kid’s lunch money

I'm coming to DEFCON! On Aug 9, I'm emceeing the EFF POKER TOURNAMENT (noon at the Horseshoe Poker Room), and appearing on the BRICKED AND ABANDONED panel (5PM, LVCC - L1 - HW1–11–01). On Aug 10, I'm giving a keynote called "DISENSHITTIFY OR DIE! How hackers can seize the means of computation and build a new, good internet that is hardened against our asshole bosses' insatiable horniness for enshittification" (noon, LVCC - L1 - HW1–11–01).

Three companies control the market for school lunch payments. They take as much as 60 cents out of every dollar poor kids' parents put into the system to the tune of $100m/year. They're literally stealing poor kids' lunch money.

In its latest report, the Consumer Finance Protection Bureau describes this scam in eye-watering, blood-boiling detail:

https://files.consumerfinance.gov/f/documents/cfpb_costs-of-electronic-payment-in-k-12-schools-issue-spotlight_2024-07.pdf

The report samples 16.7m K-12 students in 25k schools. It finds that schools are racing to go cashless, with 87% contracting with payment processors to handle cafeteria transactions. Three processors dominate the sector: Myschoolbucks, Schoolcafé, and Linq Connect.

These aren't credit card processors (most students don't have credit cards). Instead, they let kids set up an account, like a prison commissary account, that their families load up with cash. And, as with prison commissary accounts, every time a loved one adds cash to the account, the processor takes a giant whack out of them with junk fees:

https://pluralistic.net/2024/02/14/minnesota-nice/#shitty-technology-adoption-curve

If you're the parent of a kid who is eligible for a reduced-price lunch (that is, if you are poor), then about 60% of the money you put into your kid's account is gobbled up by these payment processors in service charges.

It's expensive to be poor, and this is no exception. If your kid doesn't qualify for the lunch subsidy, you're only paying about 8% in service charges (which is still triple the rate charged by credit card companies for payment processing).

The disparity is down to how these charges are calculated. The payment processors charge a flat fee for every top-up, and poor families can't afford to minimize these fees by making a single payment at the start of the year or semester. Instead, they pay small sums every payday, meaning they pay the fee twice per month (or even more frequently).

Not only is the sector concentrated into three companies, neither school districts nor parents have any meaningful way to shop around. For school districts, payment processing is usually bundled in with other school services, like student data management and HR data handling. For parents, there's no way to choose a different payment processor – you have to go with the one the school district has chosen.

This is all illegal. The USDA – which provides and regulates – the reduced cost lunch program, bans schools from charging fees to receive its meals. Under USDA regs, schools must allow kids to pay cash, or to top up their accounts with cash at the school, without any fees. The USDA has repeatedly (2014, 2017) published these rules.

Despite this, many schools refuse to handle cash, citing safety and security, and even when schools do accept cash or checks, they often fail to advertise this fact.

The USDA also requires schools to publish the fees charged by processors, but most of the districts in the study violate this requirement. Where schools do publish fees, we see a per-transaction charge of up to $3.25 for an ACH transfer that costs $0.26-0.50, or 4.58% for a debit/credit-card transaction that costs 1.5%. On top of this, many payment processors charge a one-time fee to enroll a student in the program and "convenience fees" to transfer funds between siblings' accounts. They also set maximum fees that make it hard to avoid paying multiple charges through the year.

These are classic junk fees. As Matt Stoller puts it: "'Convenience fees' that aren't convenient and 'service fees' without any service." Another way in which these fit the definition of junk fees: they are calculated at the end of the transaction, and not advertised up front.

Like all junk fee companies, school payment processors make it extremely hard to cancel an automatic recurring payment, and have innumerable hurdles to getting a refund, which takes an age to arrive.

Now, there are many agencies that could have compiled this report (the USDA, for one), and it could just as easily have come from an academic or a journalist. But it didn't – it came from the CFPB, and that matters, because the CFPB has the means, motive and opportunity to do something about this.

The CFPB has emerged as a powerhouse of a regulator, doing things that materially and profoundly benefit average Americans. During the lockdowns, they were the ones who took on scumbag landlords who violated the ban on evictions:

https://pluralistic.net/2021/04/20/euthanize-rentier-enablers/#cfpb

They went after "Earned Wage Access" programs where your boss colludes with payday lenders to trap you in debt at 300% APR:

https://pluralistic.net/2023/05/01/usury/#tech-exceptionalism

They are forcing the banks to let you move your account (along with all your payment history, stored payees, automatic payments, etc) with one click – and they're standing up a site that will analyze your account data and tell you which bank will give you the best deal:

https://pluralistic.net/2023/10/21/let-my-dollars-go/#personal-financial-data-rights

They're going after "buy now, pay later" companies that flout borrower protection rules, making a rogues' gallery of repeat corporate criminals, banning fine-print gotcha clauses, and they're doing it all in the wake of a 7-2 Supreme Court decision that affirmed their power to do so:

https://pluralistic.net/2024/06/10/getting-things-done/#deliverism

The CFPB can – and will – do something to protect America's poorest parents from having $100m of their kids' lunch money stolen by three giant fintech companies. But whether they'll continue to do so under a Kamala Harris administration is an open question. While Harris has repeatedly talked up the ways that Biden's CFPB, the DOJ Antitrust Division, and FTC have gone after corporate abuses, some of her largest donors are demanding that her administration fire the heads of these agencies and crush their agenda:

https://prospect.org/power/2024-07-26-corporate-wishcasting-attack-lina-khan/

Tens of millions of dollars have been donated to Harris' campaign and PACs that support her by billionaires like Reid Hoffman, who says that FTC Chair Lina Khan is "waging war on American business":

https://prospect.org/power/2024-07-26-corporate-wishcasting-attack-lina-khan/

Some of the richest Democrat donors told the Financial Times that their donations were contingent on Harris firing Khan and that they'd been assured this would happen:

https://archive.is/k7tUY

This would be a disaster – for America, and for Harris's election prospects – and one hopes that Harris and her advisors know it. Writing in his "How Things Work" newsletter today, Hamilton Nolan makes the case that labor unions should publicly declare that they support the FTC, the CFPB and the DOJ's antitrust efforts:

https://www.hamiltonnolan.com/p/unions-and-antitrust-are-peanut-butter

Don’t want huge companies and their idiot billionaire bosses to run the world? Break them up, and unionize them. It’s the best program we have.

Perhaps you've heard that antitrust is anti-worker. It's true that antitrust law has been used to attack labor organizing, but that has always been in spite of the letter of the law. Indeed, the legislative history of US antitrust law is Congress repeatedly passing law after law explaining that antitrust "aims at dollars, not men":

https://pluralistic.net/2023/04/14/aiming-at-dollars/#not-men

The Democrats need to be more than The Party of Not Trump. To succeed – as a party and as a force for a future for Americans – they have to be the party that defends us – workers, parents, kids and retirees alike – from corporate predation.

Support me this summer on the Clarion Write-A-Thon and help raise money for the Clarion Science Fiction and Fantasy Writers' Workshop!

If you'd like an essay-formatted version of this post to read or share, here's a link to it on pluralistic.net, my surveillance-free, ad-free, tracker-free blog:

https://pluralistic.net/2024/07/26/taanstafl/#stay-hungry

Image: Cryteria (modified) https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:HAL9000.svg

CC BY 3.0 https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/3.0/deed.en

[lazybakerart]

bakugou acting like a loan shark tracking down his ex-classmates every month for their contribution to the Deku Fund 😤

[0rionz-belt]

IM IN THE FUCKING TRENCHES ITS A HOSTAGE SITUATION

[wiisagi-maiingan]

It seems like my tribe was REALLY not prepared for open enrollment tbh. It's been ~6 months and the enrollment office phone has been straight to voicemail since practically day one, emails are NOT getting answered, and none of us (me, my auntie, my cousins, etc) have gotten news about our applications, which we were all worried about until we realized that it's what's happening with pretty much everyone.

They even removed the application processing ETA from the tribal site, probably because they realized that it was not realistic in the slightest.

rip 😔

[dreamertrilogys]

HELLO????

[monstermoviedean]

the good news is that i apparently was not at the end of my rope. the bad news is. Well

[chicago-geniza]

I hate buying books from Poland because it costs One William Dollars for international shipping and then between Poczta Polska and the overzealous US import border control ("overzealous" is putting it mildly; I imagine they've only gotten worse) there's a 50% chance your book will get a maritime funeral over the sea and you will be $35 in the hole for fucking. Cudze słowa, a book about popular philology, because you're a huge nerd

[mostlysignssomeportents]

Plinkpump linkdump

I'm on a 20+ city book tour for my new novel PICKS AND SHOVELS. Catch me in PDX on Jun 20 at BARNES AND NOBLE with BUNNIE HUANG. After that, it's LONDON (Jul 1) and MANCHESTER (Jul 2).

Every now and again, I reach the end of the week with more stray links that I've been able to squeeze into the newsletter, and when that happens it's time for a linkdump. This is linkdump number 31; here's 1-30:

https://pluralistic.net/tag/linkdump/

It's been five years (to the day!) since Wired killed off "Beyond the Beyond," Bruce Sterling's excellent blog, a wanton act of online vandalism that, among other things, made it much harder to figure out what was on Bruce's mind, a subject I find endlessly fascinating:

https://pluralistic.net/2020/05/17/cheap-truthers/#cheap-truth

Sterling's got a Medium that he almost never updates. I follow it through RSS, the best way to keep up with both things that update frequently and also hardly ever:

https://pluralistic.net/2024/10/16/keep-it-really-simple-stupid/#read-receipts-are-you-kidding-me-seriously-fuck-that-noise

This week, he posted a long, thoughtful, and seriously intriguing review of Cafe Europa Revisited, Slavenka Drakulic's followup to her 1996 international blockbuster Cafe Europa:

https://bruces.medium.com/cafe-europa-revisited-2025-be8875c06c4c

I confess that I had never heard of Drakulic, though, as I read Sterling's review, it became clear why he dotes on the acerbic Croatian essayist, a keen observer of the material world and theorizer of political upheaval:

https://www.penguinrandomhouse.com/books/602764/cafe-europa-revisited-by-slavenka-drakulic/

Drakulic is well-known for an essay collection called "How We Survived Communism and Even Laughed," and the subtitle of this volume is "How to Survive Post-Communism," which just about says it all. Sterling characterizes it as the start of a new hot genre, "Old books directly written for old people by old people."

"The West" (whatever that is) is getting old. For more than a decade, Bruce Sterling's been predicting a future of "old people, in big cities, afraid of the sky." Original Sin, a new heavily reported book on the 2024 election makes a good case that Biden was indeed in a state of advanced senescence through much of his presidency and the entire election campaign, and had no business occupying the White House, much less running for another four years:

https://www.nytimes.com/2025/05/13/books/review/originial-sin-jake-tapper-alex-thompson.html

Biden's unwillingness to confront his age and frailty, along with Trump's obvious mental and physical decline, has many terrified American political thinkers talking about the gerontocracy that's running the country:

https://pluralistic.net/2023/07/01/designated-survivors/

Corey Robin got in some good licks on this one, in a piece called "We really are the oldest democracy in the world":

https://coreyrobin.com/2025/05/15/we-really-are-the-oldest-democracy-in-the-world/

"Oldest democracy" as in, "the democracy with the oldest leaders." The Democrats are gearing up for the midterms with such repeat offenders as Maxine Waters (86), Rosa DeLauro (82), John Garamendi (80), Doris Matsui (80) and Bonnie Watson Coleman (80). Also running: David Scott (79) who had to step down as ranking House Ag Committee member over health concerns. And: Dwight Evans (70), who missed most of last year's votes after suffering a stroke.

Meanwhile, Nancy Pelosi (85), Steny Hoyer (85), Danny Davis (83), Frederica Wilson (82), Emanuel Cleaver (80) and Alma Adams (78) won't say whether they're running in 2026:

https://www.axios.com/2025/05/15/house-democrats-age-members-reelection-biden

At 53, I can tell that I've lost a step. Sure, I have the benefits of wisdom, but man, I am so tired. Maybe the reason our Democratic leaders have sat idly by and watched as Trump dismantled democracy and installed fascism is that they're too tired to scale the fences like their South Korean counterparts did?

https://www.theverge.com/24312920/martial-law-south-korea-yoon-suk-yeol-protest-dispatch

I'm not saying everyone over 65 in Congress should retire. I'm saying that a caucus that skewed younger might be more, you know, vigorous. I'm minded of my favorite John Ciardi poem, "About Crows":

The young crow flies above, below, and rings around the slow old crow. What does the fast young crow not know? WHERE TO GO.

https://spirituallythinking.blogspot.com/2011/10/about-crows-by-john-ciardi.html

Meanwhile, young people might just be getting something out of the regulatory apparatus. Thanks to a smashing court loss in the USA and regulation in the EU, Apple is now required to allow app makers to use their own payment processors, skipping the 30% App Tax Apple levies on every in-app purchase, to the tune of $100b/year.

Among other things, this means that every Fortnite skin and upgrade could suddenly get 25% cheaper without costing Epic Games a dime. The only problem is that Apple refuses to obey the regulation or the court order:

https://pluralistic.net/2025/05/01/its-not-the-crime/#its-the-coverup

This week, Apple blocked Fortnite's app from the App Store:

https://www.macrumors.com/2025/05/16/apple-blocks-fortnite-return-to-ios-app-store/

And defied EU regulators by slapping deceptive warning labels all over any EU app that accepts payments without kicking 30% up to Apple:

https://www.theverge.com/news/667484/apple-eu-ios-app-store-warning-payment-system

Apple's in a lot of trouble in the USA (Apple execs who lied to a federal judge about this stuff now face criminal sanctions), and it looks like they're spoiling for a fight with the EU. After all Trump flew to Davos and threatened to destroy any country that tried to regulate US Big Tech. The rest of the world doesn't seem scared – or at least, they're more scared of the risk of trusting US cloud technology that can be cut off to kneecap a rival economy, or used to spy on government and industry, or both. In the EU, Cryptpad – a free, open cloud based document collaboration platform – is luring away Google Docs and Office 365 users at speed:

https://cryptpad.org/

Meanwhile, back in the USA, things are looking grim for Meta, as the FTC's case against the company moves into the end-game. The stakes are high: Meta could be forced to sell off Whatsapp and Instagram:

https://www.bigtechontrial.com/p/from-roadshow-to-expert-witness-courtroom

That is, if Mad King Trump doesn't step in. Seems like nothing is too petty for the Trump admin. How petty are they? This week, Trump's CBP seized a load of t-shirts from the subversive design studio Cola Corporation:

https://www.404media.co/cbp-seizes-shipment-of-t-shirts-featuring-swarm-of-bees-attacking-cops/

Why did CBP seize Cola's tees? Apparently, it was design that featured a cop being attacked by a swarm of bees. Cola knows good publicity when he sees it: he's printing up more of the tees and selling them in a new line he calls "the confiscated collection":

https://www.thecolacorporation.com/collections/confiscated

Get yours while supplies last!

If you'd like an essay-formatted version of this post to read or share, here's a link to it on pluralistic.net, my surveillance-free, ad-free, tracker-free blog:

https://pluralistic.net/2025/05/17/odds-and-sods/#cafe-europa

[anistarrae]

i feel bad for not really participating in art fight this year, had personal things going on in my life during July😭 ill try to attack back as many people as i can while it’s still going, every attack ive recieved means the world to me :')

[bluecatwriter]

Me today: Okay, still feeling anxious and depressed but I am determined to have a better attitude today! :) Lemme just check my mailbox real quick...

Letter from my insurance company: We have determined that your hospital stay was medically unnecessary because you weren't actively bleeding to death at the time and therefore we won't cover it

Me:

[trans-yllz]

I text the house groupchat that I have paid the missing rent in full and expect to be paid back for their portions of it eventually. nobody responds even just to thank me for somehow coming up with an extra 635 dollars. I text them each individually about completely seperate things. they both respond within literal seconds

[itshomobirb]

they should let me explode things with my mind. for enrichment.

[funerals]

got my sleeping meds finally after like a month of not sleeping well im so happy