So then pay by eCheck for the minimal/reasonable $2 fee. Why should you expect them to eat the ~3% fee that they incur should you choose to pay by credit card?
Exactly. Nont enought people understand that when you pay someone "$1000" with a credit card. You are actually only paying them $970. i.e. you're not paying them your full rent.
People shouldn't have to understand it; it should be baked into the cost of the product up front. Don't tell me rent is $1400 (plus some extra amount), tell me rent is $1445. Don't tell me the product is $5 (plus 6% sales tax), tell me it's $5.30.
If you want to charge me $1000, then put the price at $1030 or whatever your fees come out to. Anything else is disingenuous.
It's not though. This is a very American attitude because that's just how it's been in America. But now companies (and customers) are realizing that this is bullshit.
People want lower prices, so one way companies can lower the price is to pass the credit card fee on to the consumer, while also giving them the option of using a different payment method with a lower fee.
Personally I would always pay with cash/e-check if there was a financial incentive to do so. Offering the same price for both is just silly since the cash customers are basically subsidizing the credit card customers.
A better way to do this is by offering a "cash discount", so the stated price is never added to, only subtracted.
So why not have rent be the cost of the lowest price payment method, with an extra charge for paying with a card being the cost of the card fee minus the cost of the fee with the lowest cost option? Then there's a "free" option where you're paying the price that you were quoted, or the option to pay a convenience charge for using a card? Telling someone rent is $X when rent is actually $X + $Y is ridiculous.
And I'm not sure your point on "a very American attitude". I live in America, so... yes? When I tell someone my address, they don't look down their nose and say "that's a very American address". Of course it's American. That's where I live. Contrary to some opinions, American things aren't always automatically wrong just because they're American. I'm sure if I lived in Belgium I would pay tax and VAT and credit card processing fees and think nothing of it. But I don't live in Belgium. I'd have the same reaction if my landlord asked me to pay rent in Yen just because there was a favorable exchange rate for him.
My point is that, Americans expect paying with credit card to be the same as paying with cash. In a lot of other nations, that expectation does not exist.
And you're right- a better way to do it is to have the lowest fee added to the cost.
Companies have always realized that CC merchant fees are bullshit; but their agreements are also bullshit and some even prevented merchants from merely informing customers of the fees.
Why should it be baked in if you do not have to pay with a credit card? Rent is not $1445 because you don't have to pay that much. You would have a point if you said that rent is $1402.
You don't want all these taxes and charges mixed into the price because them people are oblivious to the fact that they are being skimmed by the government and credit card company: that there is a portion of the income that isn't for the actual product or service. ("Hidden charges are bad" principle).
The issue in credit cards is that merchants are in fact required to hide the cost: they are not allowed to charge extra for credit card transactions. Likewise, they are not allowed to give a discount for cash transactions. ("Hidden charges are bad: so banks like them!")
The apartment building may in fact be breaking the merchant agreement by applying this charge. This is a good thing; vendors should fight against that hiding.
See, if rent is $1400 and you can pay exactly $1400 by any method: credit card, check or cash, then you're being ripped off if you don't use a credit card! They are pocketing the merchant fee that they would have had to pay on the credit transaction. Why would you care, it's $1400 to you either way, right? Wrong: if you use credit, you "earn" points. If you have a credit card that earns 2% of purchase prices in points, you get 28 points, and if these points can be be converted 1:1 for dollars in some way (like buying an airline ticket), that's 28 bucks! So it's like you're really paying $1372 for your rent, and getting a $28 kickback. The building coughs up a merchant fee, and some of that is kicked back to you in the form of points. Doesn't that person paying by check look like a complete sucker now, if the amount is the same for all methods of payment?
The card user is effectively getting a discounted rent, and supporting the leeching credit card company too, which gets a cut of the discount. Why should the building support that? If rent is $1400, it is not fair that someone pays only $1372, after getting a $28 kickback in points, which comes out of a $50 fee that the building has to pay. The building is robbed of operating income, which means that the rents are higher than what they should be.
Now vendors of goods like credit cards and pay the fees, and comply with the rules of hiding the fees, and not offering cash discounts. Why? Because credit cards encourage rampant consumerism. They bring in business.
The apartment building doesn't need this argument: you owe rent and that's it.
Interestingly, the IRS in the US evidently allows taxes to be paid by credit card. But there is a charge:
The same arguments apply: without a charge, you'd be getting a tax break, analogous to the rent break. The government is not a store; it does not need to attract "customers" to pay taxes.
That is absolutely incorrect. Heavy underdogs in the group stages of this world cup had frequently had moneylines of +1300 and higher (ex Netherlands vs Austrailia). There is NEVER an NFL game in a typical season where the moneyline (ie without pointspread) on the underdog will pay out that high. So, the is a much SMALLER likelihood of the underdog snatching a surprise win.
Many pro sports leagues like the NFL are designed to have parity amongst the teams, to make it more exciting. There is no way to ensure parity in national teams. If there was an international American football competition, it would have even less parity than international basketball competitions (where the US is extremely heavily favored in nearly every game).
Thanks for this, I had considered using celery for a recent project but ultimately backed away because I got the feeling it was more trouble than it was worth. As a point of reference would you say the learning curve for a celery setup is similar to that of django? Not that theres anything terribly hard about django, but Id agree that its probably overkill if youre relatively new to python and are just looking for a quick way to produce some html with no intent on developing it further.
I wouldn't say Celery's learning curve is steeper than Django's, but it definitely seems like overkill for your case. If you need to do some time-consuming action periodically (and making an HTTP request by hand each time is not an option), then you could just use cron for the start if your project is relatively simple. And if you literally need to just produce some HTML when asked for, then why are you considering using an async task processor such as Celery?
I just started using Celery this week for the first time, to handle parallel processing of thousands of tasks in a data pipeline.
Three days in, I can tell you that it does work, but it does take a lot of searching through the docs to optimize. It's very hard to run with class objects too, so we just created long-scripted functions for the worker.
Even now I'm trying to figure out why the worker is unable to refresh access tokens after 60 minutes, and tempted to just have it run as root.
Django is kind of slow learning curve, but understandable. Celery for me was quicker, but more along the lines of: follow the instructions, and google / stack overflow until it works. A lot less understanding involved.
>> That disqualifies a good 99.9999% of the world from being eligible to bid.
Yes, however it doesn't disqualify a single person/party who actually has the capability (and interest) to purchase the minimum block of 3,000 btc (~$1.5M dollars).
UberX is significantly (40%-50%?) more than a NYC yellow cab. Its basically $6 base for uberX (versus $2.50 for yellow cab), $.75/minute for in-traffic in uberX (versus $.50 for yellow cab). Also uber's threshold speed for traffic is much higher than NYC's (below 11mph = traffic for uber, vs below 6mph = traffic for yellow cab), which means that more often than not you are in this (more expensive) price tier. Its hard to average over 11mph if you are going cross town in Manhattan.
The root of the problem is that with the current setup, theres a huge 'luck factor' into whether or not your Show HN post most makes it off of 'New' and onto the first page. Its often 1 or 2 votes that can mean the difference between a post reaching the front page where it can then go on to recieve double/triple digit upvotes, versus remaining on 'New' and only getting 2-3 votes (in which case someone searching 'Show HN' thinks to themself 'well that post must not be very good, since it has so few votes'.
Of course the same could be said about news articles, however people dont spend hundreds of hours writing a news article (in fact it's rarely even the poster's work at all). While it would certainly be unwise to rely on a Show HN post as the sole means to launch your project, it certainly one of the top 5 traffic generators when you are just getting off the ground, and it sucks when your thread falls into obscurity because you didnt get that one extra vote to move you off of 'New' onto the first page.
That's why the "smart" thing for someone to do is to game the system, either through ring voting, asking friends to upvote on twitter. I can't blame them, thigh it's technically a bit borderline. I guess it's more legit for show hn than blogspam though.
I really think that if you have a group of friends who are regular participants of HN, the ringvoting detector doesnt come into play. (not that I've tried)
But maybe it's "okay" if the people are actually regulars? Hard to say since I'm not a mod here.
