Yeah, Mercury's going to have to up their game if they want to stay relevant. I remember my disappointment when I found out I had to park 250k in a 0-yield checking account to qualify for the 1.5% yield on a savings account that can only do something like 5 transfers a month, making it a complete non-starter for running a real business. It felt like they're playing all the same old tricks on us as the incumbent banks, just with a prettier UI.
This new Brex account with 0 fees and 1.6% yield on the entire deposit with no transaction limits feels like a breath of fresh air in comparison.
Surely I can't be the only one irked by the fact that they're bringing the concept of "copies" and "borrowing" to what are just bytes sitting on hard drives that can be copied and transmitted at 0 marginal cost?
I agree that it's a better user experience than the non-digital alternative, but I'd like to see digital books at libraries be available for free to anyone who wants it at any time, without any arbitrary restrictions whatsoever.
It’s even worse as publishers sell digital lending copies to libraries that cap out at fewer lends than a physical book would be good for, forcing repurchases! Most libraries are small and this policy prevents them from building up large digital collections over time.
> that cap out at fewer lends than a physical book would be good for
Oh yes - my favourite local library branch [1] is mostly volunteer-run and as such was the last one to get computerised lending, so any books older than ten years or so still have that paper slip in the back onto which the due date used to be stamped. Looking at those, quite a number of books (and not just the ultra-popular ones) would have already expired if they had been subject to the same lending caps as digital books, but in practice are mostly still in an okay (or even a bit better than just okay) condition that still looks good for quite some more lends.
On top of that, it seems that some publishers now use licenses that simply expire after a fixed term (two years or so!) regardless of the number of lends (compare https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=20982315).
[1] A former US Army library in Germany that was donated to the city when that particular Army base was closed in the mid-90s and now effectively functions as a dedicated English language section of the regular city library.
The cost of a digital copy for libraries is also many multiples of the cost of a paper copy, which libraries purchase at normal retail prices. I talked with a local high school librarian who told me his library simply couldn't justify having ebooks as they could cost as much as $200 for licensing that still isn't perpetual.
> SIPC protects against the loss of cash and securities – such as stocks and bonds – held by a customer at a financially-troubled SIPC-member brokerage firm.
It sounds like SIPC protects against loss of cash for the purpose of purchasing securities _and_ the loss of the securities themselves. So in this case it sounds like by sweeping customers' cash into a money market fund, SIPC protection would apply to the money market fund investment.
I think Robinhood's issue might have been that they didn't actually do any securities trading and tried to just rely on SIPC insurance for customers' cash that's just sitting around.
Regardless of if my interpretation is correct, I'd be _really_ surprised if they just somehow ignored the whole Robinhood fiasco and managed to make the exact same mistake on the regulatory side.
That distinction doesn't make sense to me, for one simple reason. For Robinhood to promise a return of 3%, they must have been sweeping the money into some sort of investment vehicle. But the SIPC still said they weren't covered.
I wouldn't be so sure, there was the rather plausible speculation that the 3% from Robinhood was a loss leader that wasn't meant to last long, in order to drum up hype for the launch. They could very well have been planning to earn the fed rate and fronting the difference for a period of time and then bait & switching (and/or introducing some premium plan to make up the difference).
Also, money market funds, which are generally considered cash-equivalents, don't usually yield north 3% either afaik, and I can imagine putting customers deposits in riskier higher yielding investments could have also have ran foul of banking regulations.
Brex is using neither of these strategies here as far as I can tell, and they're providing a decent amount of transparency into how the funds are going to be handled, so it should be fairly easy for regulators to review. If regulators do take issue with their strategy, I suspect we'll probably hear about it in the news soon enough. In the mean time, it's still an early access product, so it's not like we can use it immediately anyways (I'll definitely be signing up though).
From the first sentence under the "What are securities" section:
> SIPC protects stocks, bonds, Treasury securities, certificates of deposit, mutual funds, money market mutual funds and certain other investments as "securities."
Well, I'm not going to take responsibility for reconciling the inconsistency here.
People said at the time that Robin Hood was offering a money market fund by another name, using short term investments to produce that 3%. The head of the SIPC took exception to the idea that the accounts would be covered, as I quoted. I can't say where the confusion lies.
From the deafening silence I'm going to take the less charitable interpretation that it's meant to enable Cloudflare to essentially sell Warp users' IPs to Cloudflare customers as an added perk.
I wished on more than 1 occasion that I could just use one of my ZeroTier nodes in other locations as an exit node and tunnel traffic through it though.
I think that might already be possible but it'd be nice if the configuration was abstracted away behind some simple interface.
That'd allow it to replace Wireguard and Mullvad for me as I mostly use it as a means to bypass georestrictions.
> forgetting the kind of person who is techie enough to use RSS feeds is probably techie enough to turn off telemetry
More like they have no choice but to ignore them because these are users who explicitly chose to be ignored.
If you want your usage patterns to affect product decisions in a product you use, then don't disable telemetry for that product. You can't have it both ways.
Most successful companies do both. Listening to your users is of course important, but it can't be a wholesale replacement for data driven aggregate behavior analysis because people have their own biases can forget things (and sometimes lie) and individual feedback can't be easily generalized to your entire population of users past a certain scale.
That explains why everybody puts up with it. It doesn't explain why a startup like Mercury can't come along and shake up the status quo by not nickle and diming their customers like the greedy fucks that are the incumbents.
We give a lot more for free than normal banks. We only charge for wires because right now we have a high fee with our partner. We will fight to reduce that over time.
This new Brex account with 0 fees and 1.6% yield on the entire deposit with no transaction limits feels like a breath of fresh air in comparison.