Ben Balbo

Time and again I see people do stupid stuff on the web. I’m talking about the developers. There’s this big fat rule in the world of web development: never trust your users to do the right thing.

This could mean asking the user if they’re sure that the want to delete an appointment from their calendar, checking a provided email address is valid or prompting them to save changes before moving to another page.

These examples are quite trivial though – hopefully nothing super bad will happen if these checks aren’t performed. When it comes to money, however, you really want to make sure you’re double checking everything.

I had a rather interesting encounter with a stupid system that processes tons of financial transactions every day (I assume). It’s an online payment system for a number of Australian services: you can pay your car registration fees, building permit fees, council rates and parking infringement fines, to name a few.

Here’s the first screen:

And here’s the payment confirmation page:

It seems that changing the contents of the price field in the first page alters the final payment amount!

Why the developers thought this was a good idea is beyond me. When dealing with money, or any information for that matter, you should always check the values match what is expected. In this situation, I expected one of two results:

1. The payment page recalculated the payment amount and charged that amount, rather than the amount sent from the browser, or
2. The payment page tells the user that the payment amount does not match the bill amount and prompts the user to start the payment process again.

Update: ZenPsycho just suggested the system might intentionally allow users to pay more or less than the required amount. This is a valid point, and perhaps some of the billing system’s clients might like to offer this. I forgot to mention though that the form element for the amount included “readonly” and “disabled” attributes, so if the client chooses not to allow the user to change the values, the system really should enforce the payment amount. At the very least it should warn me that I’m about to pay less than the current amount and ask me to confirm.

According to the Richey Family, being tied down is the lord’s command. The author, Crystal, provides a few quotes outlining “Selfish(feminist) reasons women don’t want children” and I’m one of them! Of course her quote of my post is rather ambiguous and arguably out of context, so I imagine the others are too.

Crystal goes in to what I can only assume is a thorough review of the Bible’s coverage of offspring.

The first commandment in the Bible is “Be fruitful, and multiply” Genesis 1:28 and marriage was instituted by God as a stable environment in which to have and rear children. In our society, children are often considered a nuisance and a burden. They can be seen as standing in the way of people’s career paths, financial goals, or social freedom. (Crystal)

She’s damn right there, no arguments from me. I’m not sure how those views are particularly feminist ones though, they are consumerist and capitalist ones. The text she refers to is thousands of years old and doesn’t reflect the world in which we live today. By all means live your life by God’s word; be understanding, caring, supportive, don’t judge or covet thy neighbour’s wife, love all creatures, be they God’s or not. But hang on a second Crystal – aren’t you being a bit judgemental?

Do not judge, or you too will be judged. For in the same way you judge others, you will be judged and with the measure you use, it will be measured to you (Matthew 7:12)

The Bible does say “Be fruitful, and multiply”, but this was written at a time when the world population was much lower that it is today. The world population was 1 billion in 1804, and rose to 6 billion by 1999. This planet can only support about 3 billion humans at their current use of natural resources – we surpassed that number in 1960. The likelihood of childhood deaths is much lower than that a few thousand years ago and the age of natural death is over twice that of a human living around 1AD.

At the time of Christ, it was important to have as many children as possible. Some would die during birth, some from childhood diseases, and the rest would be dead before they reached 40. If God was asked today what would change in the next release of the Bible, I’m sure there’d be some changes to assist in lowering population. Perhaps abortion would be acceptable, but not resuscitation of those with certain medical condition.

Now, back to feminism. Wikipedia’s article on this states:

Feminism involves various movements theories and philosophies which are concerned with the issue of gender difference, that advocate equality for women, and that campaign for women’s rights and interests

Crystal, are you saying that humans not wanting children has come about because women want the right to not have them? Did they not have that right before feminism was given a name or a movement to promote those rights?

What about the men that don’t want children, such as C’s husband, Geoff, Neil, Frank, Steve, Simon (who doesn’t want kids but his girlfriend does) and many more on my post: Why I Don’t Want Kids? Are they being persuaded by feminists to not want children? Are they feminists?

It is important that we view children in the way God does, not as society does. (Crystal)

You’re referring here to your opinion that people view kids as a nuisance and a burden. I do not concurr with this opinion, but rather believe that people don’t believe that the lifestyle they want matches the lifestyle of having kids. Personally I love kids. They have a great perspective on the world. Their innocent views and observations are enlightening and uplifting. I just prefer to be able to give them back to their parents at the end of the day.

If I had the time, I’d like to comment on the quotes you have from the Bible on your site, but that would be mostly irrelevant to this post given they are supporting references to your argument as opposed to your direct opinion (other than by tenet).

Photo by huxleyesque.