<story><title>Egypt prepares to start move to new capital, away from the chaos of Cairo</title><url>https://www.reuters.com/article/us-egypt-new-capital/egypt-prepares-to-start-move-to-new-capital-away-from-the-chaos-of-cairo-idUSKBN2B91X3</url></story><parent_chain><item><author>tazjin</author><text>Just a minor comment (I currently live in Egypt):&lt;p&gt;&amp;gt; Control centres will monitor infrastructure and security electronically, roofs will be covered in solar panels, payments will be cashless&lt;p&gt;Good luck with that - a huge number of places don&amp;#x27;t even put prices up because everything is negotiable and cash is king.  If they only want the kind of Western-style stores with explicit prices in this area, then this could be restated as &amp;quot;we don&amp;#x27;t want the poor part of our population here&amp;quot;.&lt;p&gt;Cairo (and to larger degree, Giza) have a very intense, unique feel inside the city and I don&amp;#x27;t think this move will change anything about that.</text></item></parent_chain><comment><author>riskable</author><text>Hey now...  Just because a payment is cashless doesn&amp;#x27;t mean you can&amp;#x27;t haggle the price down.  I&amp;#x27;ve been in plenty of shops where you bring the item to the counter and the cashier enters the price directly into the register.  No bar code necessary!&lt;p&gt;Even if you use a barcode there&amp;#x27;s no reason why the price can&amp;#x27;t be entered in directly or modified at the behest of the cashier.  In the West we just don&amp;#x27;t trust our cashiers enough to do that sort of thing so we lock out that power (&amp;quot;Manager assistance needed at isle four!&amp;quot;).&lt;p&gt;What the world needs right now is cashless payments that don&amp;#x27;t have absurd (&amp;gt;0.1%) transaction fees.  I used to work at First Data (largest credit card processor) and you know how much it costs them to execute a credit card transaction?  NOTHING.  It&amp;#x27;s literally nothing.&lt;p&gt;It&amp;#x27;s not even a factor of, &amp;quot;we have this many servers in this many data centers and here&amp;#x27;s how much the electricity costs, divided by the total number of transactions in a given day.&amp;quot;  Why?  Because every customer that uses First Data still pays a &lt;i&gt;monthly fee&lt;/i&gt; that more than makes up for the cost of all the employees, data centers, software, etc etc.&lt;p&gt;If all First Data ever collected was that monthly fee they&amp;#x27;d still be profitable (assuming all they did was handle credit card transactions).</text></comment>
<story><title>Egypt prepares to start move to new capital, away from the chaos of Cairo</title><url>https://www.reuters.com/article/us-egypt-new-capital/egypt-prepares-to-start-move-to-new-capital-away-from-the-chaos-of-cairo-idUSKBN2B91X3</url></story><parent_chain><item><author>tazjin</author><text>Just a minor comment (I currently live in Egypt):&lt;p&gt;&amp;gt; Control centres will monitor infrastructure and security electronically, roofs will be covered in solar panels, payments will be cashless&lt;p&gt;Good luck with that - a huge number of places don&amp;#x27;t even put prices up because everything is negotiable and cash is king.  If they only want the kind of Western-style stores with explicit prices in this area, then this could be restated as &amp;quot;we don&amp;#x27;t want the poor part of our population here&amp;quot;.&lt;p&gt;Cairo (and to larger degree, Giza) have a very intense, unique feel inside the city and I don&amp;#x27;t think this move will change anything about that.</text></item></parent_chain><comment><author>throwaway0a5e</author><text>&amp;gt; If they only want the kind of Western-style stores with explicit prices in this area, then this could be restated as &amp;quot;we don&amp;#x27;t want the poor part of our population here&amp;quot;.&lt;p&gt;We both know that&amp;#x27;s exactly what they want.</text></comment>