I just signed an offer to purchase a BYD Sealion 5, plugin hybrid small-to-medium SUV.

I’ve been largely happy with my 2018 Honda Fit and briefly researched a hybrid Fit.

In ZAR, the hybrid Fit is listed as ~530K, while the BYD is 570, however the BYD is way bigger, has much nicer interior and insanely more features, including: adaptive cruise control, lane assist (it can basically drive itself for simple traffic), 360 view camera, comparatively huge screen for my Apple CarPlay, sun roof, V2L (allows 2-3kw load off the battery or engine if the battery is low).

I largely liked my Honda Fit and my Ballade (that might be a South African model name), but have been annoyed for a long time at them being laggards on things like CarPlay (at least in South Africa, apparently the Fit in other markets had offered it for much longer).

I was thinking why the hell someone visiting HN, so arguably curious and interested in technology, would go for a PHEV but then you mentioned South Africa.

It advertises 52km range, which is plenty enough for us for day-to-day driving to be entirely in EV mode.

I work from home and would prefer spending money on things like better school for kids, holidays, house being comfortable and as paid off as possible than on an over priced car as some sort of status symbol (it’s common for people here to choose to spend a fortune on their cars while living in small rented apartments, it’s quite financially stupid).

I also believe that we pay comparatively high taxes on our motor vehicles, our location probably also means that shipping here just costs more, the Sealion 5 is ZAR 570K which is about EUR 29.6K / USD 34.8K

Edit: Seems Sealion 5 price here not necessarily high compared to other countries. It might be BYD “entering the market” and thus putting less of a markup. Hyundai did that here in the early 2010s, but China is a different beast so who knows.

I don’t mind the honesty.

Price is so good that even if it’s a little lacking in this regard, I’ll probably still be very happy as a lot of the features are just a bonus.

Important for us was that it’s bigger as we have two growing kids, and that it is essentially an electric that we can plug in to charge.

I’ve only ever used simple cruise control on my CVT Fit and before that on a manual. On the BYD test drive (on my own chosen route) the cruise control seemed to work at least as well as what I was used to and the adaptive in traffic was impressive (to me whose never before had it), but was just one drive so will see how I feel after driving it for a while.

Also, I certainly wouldn’t count on it, but it’s conceivable that a software update could improve things, my honest hunch though is that it would be very unlikely.

I was just referring to specifically the cruise control which seems useful only in traffic conditions. As soon as the road gets a bit cleared up it has a tendency to accelerate too much, and a bit too eagerly.

But we have similar conditions, 2kids and in need of space and Sealion 7 won over many other EVs for number of features, platform, and especially price.

The OTA updates are quite regular and for us one fixed a bug that did not let the doors lock entirely when the car was off.

That verbatim option looks like it might be a way to largely bring back the old Google which tended to work quite well for me (except that modern SEO spam means we can probably never have the old Google again).

I’ve been pissed off with Google for (10+?) years now, ever since it became apparent to me that they changed their search from returning what you queried to some kind of fuzzy guess at what they think you’re looking for (probably based on what average, ie, non technical, people look for).

Possibly that verbatim option puts it back to what used to work pretty well for me, but because they changed it without really saying and then made the option for the old behaviour hidden away with an obtuse name, I had no idea about it until reading this article and had largely written them off as being more interested in showing adverts than what I was actually looking for.

Once I discovered that ChatGPT and similar are almost always way better at finding what I was actually looking for than Google ever was, Google is now very far from my first choice of search service.

It also helps that LLMs tend to be very good at helping you find the correct term, project, technology name, etc, for something when you’re not sure up front of what term to search for exactly.

Modern day seo spam is attributed to Google dumping page rank in American serps starting back in 2018. Brands were propped up by signals others can't emulate and the smart seos realized it was a fools errand to work anywhere except in house at said brands so they could continue to easily spam and not get noticed, collect easy pay checks and sit on hacker news all day.

This take is so tiring to read on HN. GOOG won the FUD WAR with Russias misinfo playbook.

Ohh yea. E-a-e-t.

GOOG doesn't track clicks either..........

Well whatever the cause, SEO spam means that searching for anything generally popular returns pages and pages of results to sites with low depth content and no real substance.

I realized this when I was curious to know when a TV show’s next season may start and all the search results were useless fluff articles, even though their titles looked promising.

In conjunction with my having concluded some time prior that they had generally switched their search (for example when searching for software development stuff) to seemingly always assume I was actually searching for something else, made me convinced that Google had become quite useless.

> Once I discovered that ChatGPT and similar are almost always way better at finding what I was actually looking for than Google ever was, Google is now very far from my first choice of search service.

I found that all of them really suck nowadays. AI also hallucinates and lies to me, which means they waste my time. Wikipedia is still ok but the AI Skynet crap is constantly attacking it, trying to erode its quality.

Maybe it needs that verbatim option?

I found that Google ignores it for the most part.

I also think that behaviour kind of came from youtube. For videos it makes a tiny bit more sense to ignore what the person wanted. For google search it makes no sense, and this is one of many more reasons why I think Google must be disbanded.

*over any untrustworthy network.

To fair though, there are very few situations where the network is completely trustworthy, like your home network with no one else on it or a VPN direct to an HTTP server.

My understanding was that if you have a valid https session, you are good.

A really really untrustworthy network could MITM your SSL connections and impose itself in front of all of them (Cisco IronPort?) but I think even then your browser will complain unless you've installed a proxy that allows it or a custom root certificate.

If there is no one else on the network between you and the server (like on your wired home LAN with no one else on it), you’re good, regardless of HTTPs.

It’s not enough for the network to be untrustworthy for MITM attacks, they have to use a certificate signed a by root certificate that your computer already trusts.

Organizations with those IronPort gateways use device management and Active Directory policies to pre-install a root certificate into your OS. The IronPort decrypts the original server then re-encrypts it with its own certificate to your computer.

If you used a non-organization managed device on those networks, it would show big scary warnings before letting you visit any HTTPS site that the certificate issuer is not trusted by your computer.

In case you don’t do this already, avoid:

- Pulling on the cable to unplug it, instead ensure you pull on the solid connector on the end.

- Bending at the point of the cable connector, resting the phone upright on the cable + connector when plugged in (e.g. in cup holder in a car) or stretching the cable too long that it causes a bend in the cable at the connector when plugged in.

There was a recent HN post about cable abuse and it said coiling too tight doesn’t itself damage cables (I will add I don’t like how it makes the cable get a memory and wants to kind of recoil itself all the time), but I think the action of too tight coiling incidentally puts more stress on where it joins the connector.

I enjoyed the article. Nappies are very impressive and something I never really thought about before becoming a parent.

Reminds me of something I often slightly chuckle about as a parent.

I’ve often encountered non-parents, particularly teenagers, who remark how the thought of changing nappies horrifying and a really big deal. But as any parent knows, changing nappies is really one of the easier parts of looking after babies and toddlers.

I had read so many casual internet comments about infants being horrible and how unbelievably difficult it was that by the time I actually had kids, it seemed almost mild by comparison.

It's not an easy thing, but some of the histrionic claims about child raising on the internet are really out there. It's no wonder kids are horrified by the thought.

> It's not an easy thing, but some of the histrionic claims about child raising on the internet are really out there.

Have you considered that objectively difficult infants/toddlers/children exist? Children with O.D.D., for instance, show symptoms early, but diagnosis usually doesn't come until much later.

Perhaps the comments you came across online were from the parents of those kids.

-A parent of a very challenging child with Level II Autism

I think that might be the thing. Parents whose children are more challenging might more often "be at wits end" and turn to online communities for guidance, help, or other insights, whereas parents whose children are not as challenging just breezes through, and thus do not end up as a data point online on how difficult parenthood is.

Also, even though I don't know you, I am certain that you are a good parent, and that you are doing your very best, and that your child is lucky to have you as their parent. :) Stay strong.

Happy families are all alike; every unhappy family is unhappy in its own way.

No one remembers when their friends or family tells “we are doing well everything is nice”.

Everyone passes on or remembers horror stories.

This is true of many communities. The internet is full of complaints because people rarely take the time to say just “my car works just fine”. There’s no value in that info. People go out to talk about it when they have a problem, that’s a real conversation starter.

Discussion groups aren’t a balanced slice of how the overall situation looks like. They tend to sway towards the negative side because discussing about everything being fine gets old fast.

I can 2nd this. As a parent of a level II autistic son and then 6 years later a now 1 year old girl that does not appear to have any autistic traits. We delayed having the 2nd child by years because the first was so draining. They are night and day. During parental leave I found it hard to play with my son in ways where he acknowledged that it was fun. He mostly did repetitive activities alone like flexing a folding rule or similar. My daughter is completely different. As parents our son Ahmad thought us a lot about not projecting our expectations onto the children and meeting them where they are.

It's not that. IME people with kids with actual conditions are somewhat less likely to complain, and are far, far less prevalent than mums who just inhabit "complaining about my kids" culture.

I’m on hour five of putting this child to bed.

People were always amazed at how our kids went to bed with no problems. In that spirit I offer what worked for us which may not work for anyone else. First we limited nap time. Second we did the exact same routine every night. Rocking and a bottle then bed. When they got bigger it was rocking, reading some books, bottle then bed. Then we added in teeth brushing. Every night same thing. Bed time was lights out (with night light) and stay in bed if you need anything holler. I’d go back a few times for “I’m hot/cold can’t sleep” then they’re out. Wake up same time every day. I love routine so it’s easy for me. Others may struggle.

This. Without this consistency within 2 days you have a kid ready to receive a label!

People have different personalities and so do infants. Parents can find one child easier than another and this changes from person to person.

How strong the family and well situated the family is also likely plays a factor.

My second child's terrible 2s is approximately 600x worse than her sisters.

Joking aside, it's actually surprisingly way way tougher.

One similar funny experience I had was that I've never had any trouble with poop or diapers, but a family member said "Just wait till she starts eating solids!" and then she started eating solids and there was no step function in experience. Changing her was still the same.

I had a similar experience to your family member. I have a 2 year old and when she started eating solids, the smell got to me much more than before.

Still not too hard but much harder in my case ;-).

My kids were considerably larger and smellier when they started eating solids, but still nothing crazy. Changing diapers is basically nothing, but having all the stuff that they need related to diapers and just being at the age when they are in diapers is mildly challenging if you travel a lot.

Well, the smell definitely changes, but otherwise it was obviously the same.

But like it was mentioned already, changing diapers remains the easy part .

> It's not an easy thing, but some of the histrionic claims about child raising on the internet are really out there. It's no wonder kids are horrified by the thought.

Could 'the horrors of parenting' be something that is promoted to younger people, to discourage then from having children? A sort of governance marketing to help address the perceived issue that there are simply too many people?

There's an accelerating population crisis. Who would have motive to push birth rates lower than they even are, and how would they "push them"?

The world has enough people and can trivially import some from places with too many to places with too few.

That process has some social complexities, because as it turns out, human cultures are not all the same.

Governments usually rather have homegrown babies, where they can influence everything from day one, than importing different ones.

So .. if this is a conspiracy, it would have come from a private entiety (like club of rome, who lamented overpopulation a long time ago).

But I don't think so. Lamenting and whining has just become a sport for some.

> But as any parent knows, changing nappies is really one of the easier parts of looking after babies and toddlers.

For sure, probably because stinky diapers are visceral but psychological challenges aren’t, yet I think most parents would agree about having to dig far deeper into our inner resolve to deal with age-appropriate behavioral issues.

I find smelly things easy to deal with as the solution is clear and the path to it is simple.

Other problems may not have a clear path to solution and are not as simple.

> who remark how the thought of changing nappies horrifying and a really big deal

It’s a similar experience to changing parents diapers when you are an adult and they are end of life. Seems horrific, then you just do it.

Babies are easier because they leave the faintest stain on the diaper the first week or so.

Then it becomes more but not much scent, like a training period. And it's really only 4-6 months that it begins to get foul.

Another advantage for the baby side is a hack I can't believe more people don't do. Just notice when they make a very recognizable face or start grunting then hold them over the toilet.

False positives are no big deal (just a fun change of scenery for the baby), for false negatives you change the baby as normal.

Easier the first week? Have you forgotten the meconium days? I mean it’s nothing crazy but that stuff was so sticky. We thankfully didn’t have any total blowouts but talking to parents who do it sounded pretty rough to clean up comparatively.

Maybe ours was weird then? We just didn't have much volume of that.

No amount of it is pleasant but it still felt, even at the time, like training wheels on a diaper.

Our first kid’s poops came out with velocity. For the first month or two, every poop change was also a full outfit change. We are very glad that our second kid’s poops come out at a normal speed, so that it is just the normal amount of drool which necessitates the new outfits instead.

It's easier because your child is like an extension of yourself. I think changing your own kid's diaper is a walk in the park unless there's a big mess!

Nappies are no big deal but I honestly think it's simply some switch in the parents' brains that goes "let's not worry too much about this, it needs doing". You filter out the gross and you simply do it on autopilot.

I sometimes wonder about the people who must clean messy public restrooms. All of the gross, none of the "but it's for the sake of a cute human that I love".

I used to clean bathrooms in a Manhattan shopping mall. I now have a tiny human. Cleaning the bathrooms was much, much more disgusting. It has been nearly 15 years and I still think about the horrible things I witnessed at that job. Changing my daughter’s diaper doesn’t even register to me as a gross thing to deal with.

Any particularly uh, pungent anecdotes to share?

It was mostly things that you would expect, given the job and location. People doing their business where they shouldn’t, mostly, but also sex, drug use, bleeding, shaving, vomit, flushing syringes and condoms down toilets and clogging them, etc. The most disgusting one I personally had to deal with involved finger painting with feces and menstrual blood. This isn’t really gross but my supervisor discovered an OD death in one of the bathrooms one morning and I’m grateful I never had to see that because I’d probably be afraid to discover another each morning if I had. That job offered me a lot of perspective and I’m happy I worked it but it was also frequently disgusting!

> I sometimes wonder about the people who must clean messy public restrooms. All of the gross, none of the "but it's for the sake of a cute human that I love".

I worked "maintenance" at a local outlet mall back in college so I was that guy, and after the first couple of times it was just a matter of "this needs to be done, I'm the guy who does it" turning my brain off and getting the job done. I remember basically nothing from those evenings, I would just put my headphones on and mentally be somewhere else.

It was a shit job in a lot of ways, figuratively and literally, but at the same time I had amazing work/life balance. From the moment I clocked out until the next time I clocked in what happened at the outlet mall was not my problem in any way and I didn't have to think about it at all.

When I had my first, she pooped in her diaper as I was holding her at the dinner table.

Then I looked up and my mother came running towards me, all excited to be able to change a diaper for the first time in seven years.

Agreed. Baby stage has sleep interruptions but is otherwise super easy. Changing diapers is easy. Feeding is easy. Trying to figure out why they're crying is easy (almost always hungry, tired or poopy). The problems start for real when babies start crawling, walking, having opinions and talking.

Our son is 3.5 years old and it's super fun and rewarding but I'm not going to lie, it's hard to get lectured by a toddler about the difference between a Majungosaurus and Carnotaurus or a T-Rex and Giganotosaurus. Or have him ask me why the Velociraptors in Jurassic Park don't look like the paleontologists' current consensus on what they looked like... Or the million other super specific questions I need to come up with answers to (and I don't really want to discourage him as my parents did me). So even though he can currently use the washroom 100% independently, infant stage was still 1000x easier.

Haha I love explaining things. It gets challenging and sometimes you have to stop the train...

What kills me is when I have to convince them of sometand they just are incapable of listening to any kind of reasoning. Sometimes you can let it slide but some issues are just too big like road crossing for example.

> Baby stage has sleep interruptions but is otherwise super easy.

Your assertion does not correlate with my lived experience. But dirty diapers was definitely not the biggest issue.

> Feeding is easy.

Mileage may definitely vary on that one.

Was just talking to my wife about this yesterday. Our son is 10 months old so we're still in the diaper stage, and it's really not a big deal. Since disposable diapers and baby wipes became a thing, not really sure why anyone complains about it.

Compared to trying for hours to get him to sleep, or dealing with the sheer panic we felt when we had to have him rushed to the hospital, a poopy diaper is nothing.

A soldier adjusts to the horrors of war in the same way, fwiw. ;)

Oh, there’s definitely hard parts of having kids—but changing diapers isn’t really one of them.

The truly hard part is putting them to sleep

At 8pm, and then 10pm, then 10:30pm, then 12am, then 2am, then 3:30am, then 5am.

As an expectant first time parent, this is the bit that I'm bracing for most.

Relax: it only lasts a few months. Rarely more than 60 or 70.

It’s rough at first but you will learn the baby’s rhythms and preferences. If you track their sleep and wake up times (I did it the old fashioned way in a notebook) you’ll see a pattern emerge pretty quickly, and then it gets easier because you will figure out how to work with it.

Every baby is different so most of the advice you find won’t work, but if you try enough things you’ll eventually find something that works consistently. Or you might just luck out and get a good sleeper.

The big tip I have for you is to understand wake windows. Babies can get too tired to sleep(!) so you need to make sure to put them to sleep roughly 1-1.5 hours after they last wake up.

Highly recommend getting a sleep tracker app.

Follow a routine every day. I posted elsewhere in this thread what worked for us. It was tough when they were infants because neither of ours slept through night till about 2. The routine saved us.

try co-sleeping, and also a comfortable baby-carrier that allows you to carry the baby around while keeping your hands free so you can work. the most difficult from babies not sleeping is that they are not supposed to sleep alone. see attachment theory. the other advice, if you can follow it, is to sleep yourself every time the baby sleeps. again, co-sleeping makes that easier.

I dunno, we found that our kid slept slightly better moved to his own room at 5 or 6 months old. Although that meant maybe 4 wakings rather than 5. Now he's nearly three years old and sleeps solidly for 10 or 11 hours. My guess is that food and metabolism have a big part to play.

My mutant power is the ability to put babies to sleep. Before I had my own I'd put other people's kids babies to sleep easy peasy. It's something I've been able to do since I was a teenager.

Or waking them up for school... (A correlated problem)

I agree, I never found changing diapers that difficult or bad. I was also hardened by years of chronic insomnia so the sleep disruption wasn't a big deal, I took most of the night-time duties to let mom sleep.

The thing I remember being most annoyed about was cleaning all the bottles. That was really obnoxious.

Honestly the hardest part of changing diapers is when they get bigger and insists on wiggling everywhere while you are changing them

> But as any parent knows, changing nappies is really one of the easier parts of looking after babies and toddlers.

When you have twins, or triplets, or more... Nothing at all is easy. Unless you're privileged (or have help), their early years become your living life's only work.

> ... encountered non-parents ...

One reason why I hold anxiety for infants at orphanages or under care.

Eh. Apart from sleep/scheduling it's probably the worst part about babies. We just had our first boy and we're adjusting to the whole penis spraying piss everywhere...thing. I didn't realize just how far they could spray. Also, somehow the back of his clothes keep getting wet while he's fully dressed in and in a diaper which completely boggles my mind.

Personally I'm really bad with smells, though. Even with hundreds (thousands?) of diapers changed I still really have to focus on not losing my lunch on the bad smelling ones.

Toddlers...yeah.

> I didn't realize just how far they could spray.

i’m assuming you’re the mom? ;) Yes the pressure starts off strong, can easily fly onto their face lol. happened to me…fun times.

> somehow the back of his clothes keep getting wet while he's fully dressed in and in a diaper which completely boggles my mind.

We just solved this recently with our baby boy. I can try to offer some tips. He likely needs a different diaper size, or (more likely), his penis isn’t correctly facing downward when putting the diaper on. 1st secure one side, and before you secure the other, peek at his penis (looking into the diaper from the side - near his hips). Make sure it’s pointed straight down and adjust if necessary. then quickly strap the other side. Basically you want the diaper to gently and firmly keep that penis pointed down all day. When boys are about to pee, the penis becomes briefly erect. If the diaper is not firmly holding that penis down, the penis can easily drift sideways and shoot urine in a weird direction. When this happens the urine can leak around the hips and up the back - instead of going into the absorbent pad. A quick test - when you change his diaper, is his penis still pointed down? If not then that’s the issue. If it is, try other troubleshooting steps.

Girl diaper changes are “easy” in this regard.

Two things that helped us: 1) "activate" the diaper [0], they are tightly pressed for transport and have to unfold the fabric to soak well. 2) Make sure the side guards are up, tight fit around the legs and a short pull around it to adjust them and not have the guards folded under the seam also helps.

[0] https://cdn.shopify.com/s/files/1/0700/5519/8950/files/brief...

> Yes the pressure starts off strong, can easily fly onto their face lol.

Into their face? Try onto the ceiling or a 6-8ft arc in any direction. One of my coworkers warned me so I usually had the situation under control but my wife had only ever changed girls (young cousins and kids she babysat), thought she was prepared but wasn't.

Size diapers based on the amount of pee not on the size of the baby.

That was life changing advice for me.

> We just had our first boy and we're adjusting to the whole penis spraying piss everywhere...thing. I didn't realize just how far they could spray.

I assume this is a penis with the foreskin removed. With the foreskin, it should not be an issue.

If you have a pee-er, the make a pee-pee tee-pee to place over the wenis to protect from errant spays.

I think our baby boy peed on his face once when getting changed and decided never to do that again. While I think our daughter might take it as a matter of pride to pee and poop while being changed, after the diaper is off.

Also, if he’s still healing from birth, that problem solves itself over time as swelling reduces and it starts to naturally point in the preferred direction on its own

> if he’s still healing from birth… swelling reduces

Babies swell up from being born? Is this common??

We got a top hat plus potty for ours. We put her on after every diaper and it’s surprising how often they go! After a while they know to hold it until they sit in the potty

Same. This is the kind of HN content that I'm here for.

> But as any parent knows, changing nappies is really one of the easier parts of looking after babies and toddlers.

Agreed. I tell friends that, for me, changing diapers is much less frustrating and gross than watching my toddler feed himself.

Before I had children I've never even think changing nappies is a big deal, I've noticed the movie/TV show mentioning the sleep and didn't realize how bad is it, you have practically no proper sleep for a year, that would be the main reason why I didn't want third child.

It also helps that newborn poop doesn't smell particularly bad. It only starts smelling like poop when they start eating real food.

Banks don’t really eat the loss, instead they ensure all their services have enough of a markup to cover the cost of fraud.

All consumers collectively pay for all the fraud, it’s just that we don’t tend to realize it as it’s not a specific line item on any of our bills, instead we all pay just a little more than we should for everything we buy.

yes, obviously all of the bank's money comes from consumers. what other scenario do you see where a bank(etc) "eats the loss" but the money somehow comes from somewhere else

While it may be obvious to you that your fees include covering all the banks losses to fraud, I think that most people assume the bank makes less profit or something due to such incidents, when the truth is they just raise their prices to maintain profits.

I don't see the difference between the two TBH.

If the rate of fraud reduced bonus payments to executives.

If 3D secure was mandatory everywhere that would help a lot, but if I understand correctly, it’s not really used in the US and with them being so big, card issuers are largely forced to allow non 3D secure requests or their clients will be unable to use their cards for too many things.

So an enormously good anti-fraud mechanism is severely handicapped.

It’s really frustrating for most of the rest of the world.

I don’t get it, do US citizens prefer being defrauded over what is perceived as a slight inconvenience?

Even for non-victims of fraud, they still pay for the fraud as all merchants up the prices of their goods to cover fraud costs/insurance.

No, the laws are different- and more consumer friendly in the US- so the US consumer behavior is different.

Back when credit cards were first starting out (which happened in the US) the US Congress passed a law- the Fair Credit Billing Act of 1974- that consumers were only liable for $50 of losses as long as they reported the missing credit card within 60 days of the end of the fraudulent billing cycle. This was back when credit cards purchases were all made on paper with the machine that went "kachunk" and transferred a carbon copy of your card- everything was done completely offline. That law has not been changed, in fact, most banks completely waive the $50 and don't hold card-holders liable for anything reported (basically, annoying a customer over $50 isn't worth it to the bank). Thanks to the internet, suddenly cards got a lot easier to steal and a lot easier to exploit- but banks are still on the hook for all losses reported within 60 days of the end of the cycle. The result is that American banks have invested an enormous amount in real-time monitoring of credit card transactions, and are doing lots of stuff to monitor this- they care deeply since ultimately they are on the hook- but the consumer doesn't care. This is why US card's from the consumer perspective are so much laxer, because our banks have invested far more on the back-end because the consumer is held harmless in a way they aren't with European cards.

As a totally separate issue, the EU has regulated the amount of interchange fees that card-companies can charge, but the US has not capped them. The result is that US card-holders can get significant kickbacks for using cards (especially true for the top decile of wealth), in a way that is functionally impossible with EU issued cards that have capped interchange fees. There is a big lawsuit happening now to try and allow merchants to only accept low-fee cards (the standard VISA/MC/AMEX deal requires treating all cards equally, which gives them an incentive to push people to higher interchange cards). We will see what happens with that suit, but until then, American high-spenders can have much higher rewards on their cards, which also encourages greater use of the cards- and making them have less friction than the EU versions.

> Thanks to the internet, suddenly cards got a lot easier to steal and a lot easier to exploit- but banks are still on the hook for all losses reported within 60 days of the end of the cycle.

For card-not-present transactions (i.e. online ones) the liability is on the merchant. They however also have an incentive NOT to use 3DS because it adds real friction to purchases. I'm also not sure if all USA banks even support 3DS.

This theory explains why cardholders in the US are still using cards despite these being relatively less secure than in other countries, but fails to explain why issuing banks wouldn't take steps to protect their own fraud losses, such as introducing 3DS or PINs.

The actual explanation lies in the game theory of fraud prevention; see my sibling comment for details.

Why would the law being different mean they wouldn't use 3DS though? Surely it'd cut out a good amount of fraud along with the realtime monitoring? I understand that US consumers don't have a stake in this, but can't all the banks just agree to enforce 3DS? I can't imagine Americans are going to stop using their cards because of a small amount of friction added

> can't all the banks just agree to enforce 3DS

They could, but it's one of those things that really only work if everybody joins. Because 3DS is rarely used right now, a portion of merchants don't even support it, so if you start enforcing is as a single bank, your customers will start complaining their card doesn't work. The banking industry in the US is also more decentralized than in the EU, so getting everybody to join in simultaneously is hard.

The window of opportunity for 3DS has also more or less passed, the industry is moving on to the next generation of tech (wallets/tokenization), that should be both easier to use and more secure.

Because adding friction will deter many impulse purchases. Americans use credit cards constantly. The equilibrium would be perturbed in a way very much not advantageous for the credit card issuers if consumers became more cautious about using credit cards.

It’s the same reason credit card issuers are willing to pay Apple a few basis points to participate in Apple Pay: reducing friction has a non-linear impact on propensity to pay.

> I don’t get it, do US citizens prefer being defrauded over what is perceived as a slight inconvenience?

Do you think we are requesting to have less secure payment methods or something?

No, we don't "prefer to get defrauded", but things like this are a matter of negotiation between the card issuers and the merchants.

> but things like this are a matter of negotiation between the card issuers and the merchants.

Not necessarily, the EU has mandated strong customer authentication by law (PSD2), and as a result has practically universal 3DSecure support.

Exactly, if citizens could convince US lawmakers to make it mandatory, it would be a huge net benefit to society as a whole.

I suspect that banks and merchants would lobby against it due the work involved. After all, they’ve already marked up their services and goods to cover the cost of fraud/insurance. So right now they don’t pay the cost of it, instead all their customers do through higher prices than they would otherwise have needed to pay.

> Exactly, if citizens could convince US lawmakers to make it mandatory, it would be a huge net benefit to society as a whole.

That's not obviously true. Adding security would likely reduce fraud, but would also make transactions more difficult and time consuming, and may also make recovering from fraud more difficult and time consuming.

The costs may not justify the benefits.

Bold of you to assume that the public has more influence on legislation than lobbyists do in the US.

Ah, the natural call of the wild European: blaming individual Americans for a century of policy failures with truly majestic smugness.

Yes, I vote for leaders. So does everyone else, unfortunately.

Legislate that the banks are liable for refunding this class of fraud and you'll find they suddenly take this stuff a lot more seriously and "discover" the technology.

I don't understand your point. The banks and credit card companies are already responsible. If I have a fraudulent charge I call and tell them it's fraudulent and they say okay and take it off and either getit back from the issuer or eat the difference.

I think what you're missing is the bank and credit card companies rarely eat the difference. The business who sold the item which was charged back is the one paying the cost of the transaction (no income, lost item) plus a chargeback processing fee (typically $15 per chargeback).

They can also punish you for doing so, like banning you from the bank.

They also report account closures to ChexSystems, which can make it harder to open accounts at other banks for years. Credit card issuers can drop you and ding your credit. Definitively not your fault, but still your problem, and the consequences are for you.

Quite hard to do when banks are major bribers of politicians.

> I don’t get it, do US citizens prefer being defrauded over what is perceived as a slight inconvenience?

The general idea is that if the conversion rate drop of a given security mechanism is higher than the average fraud rate, it doesn't make financial sense to deploy it.

However, at the industry-wide level, this is a pretty classical coordination problem, in that conversion rate only drops because there still is a simpler alternative around unless all merchants and banks were to enforce 3DS at the same time. If there's nothing more convenient left to move to, users will for better or worse have to learn the new, more secure thing, and conversion rates will go up again.

This is what the EU has done with mandating 3DS for many payments, but even there regulators have recognized that a 100% coverage is counterproductive, and there's a sweet spot somewhere in the middle.

As more evidence for the same general idea: US credit cards don't have PINs, because any individual bank introducing them would see a huge drop in usage rates since customers would just use their competitor's card without a PIN instead. In other markets, all cards have PINs (whether due to regulatory invention or card network incentive), and people have just gotten used to them.

IIRC, MasterCard SecureCode and Visa's verified-by-visa were more of a thing in the US maybe like decade or two ago? I think NewEgg and B&H did support it at one point? Afterwards, everyone has simply disabled the thing, and you simply get a wave-through by most issuers when shopping on foreign sites, where you get redirected to issuer's website, then back to the online shop, without having to type or confirm anything.

Back when it was a thing, it was quite a nightmare, where you had to register for a 3ds account, often separate from your normal online account, and keep a separate password etc. Then those iframe windows look exactly like the phishing websites, too.

Honestly, it's much ado about nothing. If the transaction is suspicious or likely fraudulent, today, you already get an SMS or an alert within bank's app on your phone. All you have to do is confirm and retry the transaction a minute later. This works for both in-person transactions, as well as remote ones, with the same flow, unlike 3ds, which only works for online shopping.

FWIW, HSBC USA Mastercard uses 3D secure if it's something you want and you're in the states.

Capital One also offers it for their credit cards, which makes them the only ones usable in countries where requiring 3DS is common. (No idea why this is a thing actually – merchants get the fraud chargeback liability shift as soon as they request 3DS, whether the issuer actually supports it or not.)

The real problem is that in the US, almost no merchants request it in my experience, despite the fact that they'd get an almost free (in terms of conversion rate dropoff) liability shift. I suppose the few US issuers that do support it have a bad enough implementation that the conversion drop is still significant.

> No idea why this is a thing actually

a) It still affects their bottom-line: the issuer might still try to dispute this using a different code despite payment scheme (formal term for Visa et al.) rules, and the merchant targeted is prone for fraud (for example, airlines have been hit with this by exploiting tourists looking for cheaper tickets by offering them suspiciously cheap tickets on seemingly-trustworthy websites by fraudsters and funding them by insecure cards)

b) Misinterpretation of mandatory rules: PDS2 is applicable only for EEA customer - EEA merchant, but some extended it for whole world despite the rules literally dictating the limits

c) Soft friction for encouraging domestic card usage: because of accept-all rules by payment schemes (and no local rules that allowed merchants in a region to reject international payments), this is a way to block US cards by guise of fraud prevention (because international cards are expensive for merchants to process)

Wow, c) never occured to me but makes total sense.

b) can probably explain this happening for EU merchants, but I've also seen this in Japan and Central America, and I think even before PSD2 in the EU.

That's what I love about the payments space: While you're absorbed in your own game of checkers, you never know if your opponent is actually playing 1d or 10d chess :)

Yeah from a software dev perspective the implementations are shockingly terrible from a UX perspective. I'm surprised Stripe doesn't make it automatic with their integration

One problem is that the UX is largely defined by the issuer. 3DS (on the web) is literally an issuer-rendered iframe.

How much is lost to fraud that would be prevented by 3d secure, 0.1%?

In Europe, the max interchange fee is 0.3%. In the US, the average is 2%. So the relative impact of fraud is much higher.

And then the next question, how does this affect consumer spending, what percent of purchases get the 3d secure message and change their mind instead of confirming the purchase?

Huh? Your conclusion does not follow. A large fraction of the interchange fee is kicked back to customers.

The size of the pie being so much bigger means the issuer’s tolerance for fraud is much larger, but it’s orthogonal to whether there’s actually more fraud. In practice credit cards fraud actually impacting customers is vanishingly rare at this point.

A large fraction, yes, but I believe in absolute numbers, US issuers still retain much more interchange than European ones.

The numbers are even public: https://usa.visa.com/content/dam/VCOM/download/merchants/vis...

If you take a look at some of the more "expensive" cards, interchange is often higher than 2%, yet issuers often pay as much only on certain categories, and flat cashback cards usually pay 1.5% (2% is relatively rare).

Compare that difference to a total interchange of 0.3% in the EU.

There is also an additional (usually pretty high) fee for getting chargebacks.

And based on my own personal experience, even if you persevere and force them to acknowledge the problematic behaviour, they can turn around and say it's not a problem and working as intended.

For example, when using Azure Front Door, it's apparently absolutely not a problem that as yet un-cached file in their CDN downloads from their own Azure Blob storage have a maximum download speed of around 2MB (16Mb) per second:

Them:

> Hello Jonathan,

> I hope you are doing well!

> I sincerely apologize for the significant delay in our response, which was necessary to conduct further internal testing.

> After a comprehensive review, we have determined that the behavior you are experiencing is typical for this type of operation.

> This is primarily due to the connection not being entirely directly, as it must pass through Azure Front Door. This process also involves distributing the cache among point-of-presence (POP) servers, which inevitably impacts the > operation's speed. Let me provide you with documentation covering that matter:

Me:

> So to be clear, Azure Front Door maxes out at less than 2MB/s (16Mbit/s) for uncached items even when everything is on Microsoft’s own servers?

Them:

> Hello Jonathan,

> Thank you for getting back to me.

> These values may vary by region, but those particular ones apply for South Africa North.

I also tested this behaviour in US and EU regions (from an Azure VM requesting a file from Azure Blob storage in the same region as the VM but via Azure Front Door) and in EU it was also similarly limited while in the US it was only a tiny bit better.

We use Cloudflare now, cheaper, faster, configuration UI which isn't painfully slow. Not without their own recent incidents, but better than Azure Front Door 99.99% of the time.

Sounds like the author is running the same browser configuration as the vast majority of internet users.

While I use ad-blockers and the like, I know I’m far from the norm.