There is a trade-off. Many systems do offer the ability to get your money back without the cooperation of the recipient. But those systems are also filled with the scam, where you send someone money, then convince them to send the money back manually, and finally reverse the original transaction.

You can counter this by more policing of these types of scams, but usually the amounts in each individual case are small, so police have very little incentive to do anything about it.

In any case, my politics demands not depending on the bureaucracy of a big corporation for legal redress.

[1] https://www.stashfin.com/blogs/dispute-upi-transaction-guide

Once you have sane system like pix or upi, there is far less need for chargebacks and frauds.

No. The way to build confidence that your software is well made, you do a proper external security audit and obtain the requisite certificate from a proper auditing firm.

It's also incorrect to think peer review in mathematics is low quality (like it is in some other fields). Certainly, when major results are in place, editors ensure that high quality peer reviewers are recruited and do their job properly. Like all human processes this fails sometimes, but not enough to not do it.

The only solution would be similar to what China exercised. The EU passes an order telling all EU entities to not comply with US sanctions or face legal problems. Then it comes down to how the US responds and whether EU can take that hit.

[1] https://www.whitehouse.gov/presidential-actions/2025/02/impo...

If you apply this thinking to the economic system practiced in most countries, the answer is that the system forces have been set up in a way that the capital owners need to be paid back on an exponential schedule, and there are barely any counter-forces to this. Hence, the system will never hit a real steady state. People will continue to creatively design more and more immoral methods of extracting monetary value from a finite system that cannot indefinitely and continuously grow exponentially. There is no other way to pay back the capitalists. There is no counter-force.

Also in my observational experience in physics, a fair number of students (probably like 10%) get some sort of major corrections to their thesis. After writing this, I did a search, and in the UK, the number across all fields is 16% [1].

[1] https://www.lexacademic.com/blog/how-common-is-passing-with-...

Similar things could happen with whichever glacier you are looking at.

Sane ways to organize payments:

- Merchant gives you a bill-id. You input it into your bank website - where you see the bill amount being charged. You accept, and bank pays merchant.

- You give merchant your card number (that's the only information - no expiry, no ccv, no name). A notification pops up on your bank website asking if you want to pay what the merchant is requesting. You accept.

- You go to your bank website and obtain a random number, either allowing a single transaction or a recurring transaction. You give the merchant the number. After merchant charges it, no other merchant can charge the same number.

This obviously makes life easier for both users and developers.

You need to solve the second to get a PhD. For good reason. The second is way harder than the first. And now AI is making second way obsolete. It's not the end of the world, but it is the end of how things have been done for centuries.

Unfortunately, the growth potential that software industry generally provides has generally prevented governments for creating and enforcing similar laws for software products and such.