One reason to like the visa mastercard duopoly. They work everywhere. I go to the Netherlands a lot for work, and it is a real pain as they have their own payment system, IDEAL, one needs to live there, that is closed to foreigners. Many vendors, especially outside of main tourist areas will not take foreign cards. Guess they don't want to pay 0.1% fees. Yesterday, was left embarrassed in Albert Heijn where they only took Dutch cards and I did not have enough cash. (some AH do, most don't)
But as you just discovered, they don't work everywhere. Plenty of Dutch and German stores don't accept them. Visa and Mastercard interchange fees are nowadays capped to 0.3% by law, but they used to be 2%+ (and still are in the USA AFAICT), that's why historically Dutch and German retailers shunned them. Why pay 2% to accept a few more cards from foreigners and tourists when 99% of your customers already have a 0.3% fee card (Maestro or VPay)?
Also, the Dutch iDEAL system might form in important building block of a European home-grown payment solution, that hopefully will give the Visa/MC duopoly some actual competition: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/European_Payments_Initiative
I agree. But plenty of Dutch vendor only accept Dutch mastercards and not foreign. The fee s the same. WHY? And foreigners can't get IDEAL or Dutch mastercards. I have gotten used to carry a lot of cash when there. Fortunately, Holland is safe. Someone looked at me very funny when I payed them EUR 500 in cash last week.
But we also know why a European home grown payments system is not happening. The incumbent banks hate it and have enough power to block such solutions.
For a €100 payment, we're looking at €0.06 debitcard transaction vs €1.70-€2.50 creditcard. If I were a Dutch retailer outside of areas/sectors with a lot of foreign/tourist business I probably wouldn't bother with credit cards either, as probably 99%+ of the Dutch have Maestro, VPAY or cash.
I have European debit cards. They get rejected in many Albert Heijn when Dutch cards (debit and credit) are taken. Jumbo takes foreign cards. Jumbo gets my (and a lot of my colleagues who pass though) business, AH not. Many restaurants take Dutch credit cards and not non-Dutch European credit cards. I went to a restaurant that takes Bitcoin but not EU debit (and Bitcoin transactions costs are much higher)
So if the fees on non-Dutch European and Dutch cards are the same, what explains this? Xenophobia? That is what my colleagues in Holland say.
There is no such thing as a generic "European debit card". Dutch retailers accept specifically only Maestro, VPay, MasterCard Debit or VISA debit cards, but usually not not VISA Electron, or various other other country-specific European debit cards like Bancontact or giropay or EC. Albert Heijn (except in a few stores in Amsterdam and Schiphol) doesn't accept any credit cards and does not distinguish between domestic or foreign. It's a matter of costs, not xenophobia.
Retailers just choose from the options from their bank, which are the debit card I already listed (Maestro, VPay, MasterCard Debit or VISA debit), and optionally VISA and MasterCard credit cards (which are separate from their debit cards). Retailers do not have the option of accepting Dutch Maestro/VPay but excluding Maestro/VPay issued elsewhere in Europe. They do have the option to exclude credit cards altogether, and many do for the reason of € 0.06 transaction cost vs 1.7% and that around 100% of Dutch account holders have one of (Maestro, VPay, MasterCard Debit or VISA debit). Xenophobia has nothing to do with it, any more than retailers in your countries might not accept Bancontact, giropay or UnionPay cards.
As a tourist, though, a pro tip is that big banks in Germany charge for deposits, not withdrawals, so if you happen to have a debit Mastercard with no exchange fees (e.g. in Canada, EQ Bank or WealthSimple), you can use your Mastercard at a bank ATM completely fee free and at Mastercard exchange rates. Plus it doesn’t matter which bank you go to, just pick the nearest name brand big bank ATM and you’re good to go.
AMEX unusable in Europe? Hardly. I payed for my dentist Friday with it, both supermarket and lunch today, and all Amazon, etc. Some vendors dont take it, but in my European country most places
From the other side of the table, I've worked in companies avoiding Amex support as long as they could, and even after actively obfuscating the support to push the user to use another card.
For smaller entities it's a PITA to have to manage a separate additinal contract, and it costs a lot more for the merchant, when virtually nobody only owns an Amex.
If you're in europe there are probably other payment means that don't rely on Visa/Mastercard thay will be much more welcome.
Funny thing to me was the store credit cards that are processed internallu without hitting the network (e.g. Carrefour cards, AlbertHein as well I think ?)
Otoh, companies chasing the highest dollar value customers or differentiating via service may want to take it. Higher ticket prices, more revenue, despite the aggravations.
It’s almost as if a business needs to decide if it’s mass market or high end. I would only buy certain classes of goods with my AmEx due to how confident I am that Amex customer service has my back.
For example, the Amex platinum card will reimburse you for items the merchant won’t accept as a return. I recently bought an electric screwdriver that sucked, but wasn’t able to make a decision until I’d used it for longer than the merchant return window. I paid with amex and just got it refunded.
Yes. This also happens on luxury goods: if you're selling hotel rooms on top of a casino, accepting Amex/Diner etc. is table stakes.
Cheaping out on processing fees or putting friction on the payment part will be a signal that you don't understand your customer and will potentially be nickel and diming the experience all the way down, which is clearly not the image you're trying to convey.
I have an Amex card because my work forces me to take one. But I don't find this a "luxury" experience at all. It's really hard to use the damn thing, for example try to get a taxi at the rank in Paris Charles de Gaulle. 90% of the drivers refuse it and the ones that do accept it often pretend the "machine is broken" later.
In other countries like Romania the taxi drivers just laugh in your face when you try to pay with an amex. I hate that thing but our stupid HR VP from the US forced it on all of us. Probably gets some nice kickbacks in return.
Of course, that value is entirely funded out of your own pocket.
Instead of paying with your Amex for overpriced goods, you could put a bit of money to the side for every normal purchase, and use that pot to 'refund' your electric screwdriver yourself.
I’m not clear what you mean, but I understand the concept of being your own warranty backer. This is different - I would have bought this screwdriver with a visa, if I didn’t have that Amex.
The Amex makes me confident I have recourse. Is your point that I would spend less if I didn’t have that confidence? I suppose so, but I’d actually rather prefer having that confident experience rather than feeling insecure or like I got ripped off.
That’s real value, and I don’t mind if it means I buy an extra tool here and there. Especially if I can get some extra refunds.
> For smaller entities it's a PITA to have to manage a separate additinal contract, and it costs a lot more for the merchant, when virtually nobody only owns an Amex.
I completely agree on the cost part for AMEX, but how do you mean it's a PITA to accept those cards? It's usually as simple as enabling an option with your card payment service, not very complicated at all.
I much prefer parallel in R with mclapply() to the Julia implementation of parallel. One of the few areas where I prefer R to julia (other being R data.tables to julia dataframes)
I used to think so, but I have a function that gets called about a billion times each and every day as new data comes in, and and takes about 0.01 seconds to evaluate (optimizaiton with nlopt). I tried to code it in c (30% speed improvement) python (twice as slow), Julia (about the same speed). Reason is that call has 5 parameters that operate on a vector of length 50 to return a value to minimize. Turns out R is pretty good at such vector calculations.
No, its 4 lines of code. I just benchmarked for myself. All it is for 2 vectors x and y of average length 50, and 5 parameters, with exponential, addition, and multiplication, and ultimately sum to return to the optimizer. I was also surprised as I expected c to be much faster. And with Rccp, its actually slower than the R, overhead I guess. When I looked into it, apparently R has really fast code for such vector calculations. With julia, admittingly I did not use simd which would likely make it faster.
Now, I generally use Julia for heavy computes, and usually its much faster than R. But not always.
And this little bit of code runs for hours on the largest instance on AWS every day. Why I was looking so speed it up.
If possible I would encourage you to make an MWE and post it on the Julia Discourse - "Julia slower than R for optimization problem" or something like that, there's a good chance that the community will be able to eke out some more performance. Alternatively you might have hit on a case in which Julia itself is currently leaving performance on the table, which would still be helpful for the community to know as being slow is often considered a bug in Julia world.
Great idea, I do lurk there, just might do that next time I look at the code. My hunch is that simd is the low hanging fruit julia brings. But, and I am not an expert, both might end up doing BLAS anyways, which is why they are so similar.
I think that is exactly what is happening. Most of my code is much much faster in Julia, and the code is nicer. But R has its moments. Which is good since this particular app has 3K lines, and I do not want to port it to Julia.
And data.tables in R is faster (and I think nicer to write) than DataFrames in Julia. And since data.tables feed my optimization, R still wins.
I disagree, there are at least 2 reasons why eps can be better.
a) you can exactly match the fonts in an eps figure to a latex file, which will look much better.
b) you can use \psfrag to change text to get proper mathematics in figures, like gamma2 in an eps becomes $\gamma^2$
c) maybe also, the pstricks package is very nice, but does not work with pdflatex
if pdflatex could do both, I would switch today
but
Any asshole can publish a book and a lot of them have.
Aspartame has been studied avidly, if not obsessively, for decades. It has never shown a serious carcinogenic risk. That's what we're talking about here.
> In 2021, Gen Xers, Millennials, and Gen Z young adults (ages 18-59) were 34% more likely than older adults (ages 60 and over) to report losing money to fraud, and some types of fraud stood out. Younger adults reported losses to online shopping fraud – which often started with an ad on social media – far more often than any other fraud type, and most said they simply did not get the items they ordered. Younger adults were over four times more likely than older adults to report a loss on an investment scam. Most of these were bogus cryptocurrency investment opportunities. And this age group reported losing money on job scams at more than five times the rate of older adults. Many college students reported that they were scammed after getting a message at their student email address about a so-called job opportunity. The median individual reported fraud loss by people 18-59 was $500 in 2021.
Latex is horrible but makes beautiful documents and the relevant world either uses latex or Mircosoft Office. Why use anything else? Latex lives by the community of people who use latex for their work and to collaborate. All know 20 year old latex documents will be compilable in 20 years. No competitor outside of Microsoft can survive that.
> All know 20 year old latex documents will be compilable in 20 years.
Except it's not. For example, in 2021, the NeurIPS template compiled differently in different versions of TeXLive (https://tex.stackexchange.com/questions/598567/different-pdf...). To my knowledge this change of behaviour has not been addressed in TexLive.
> Latex is horrible but makes beautiful documents and the relevant world either uses latex or Mircosoft Office. Why use anything else?
And why invent anything new when there are already existing alternatives? Why invent C++, Rust, Zig when there already was C? Why invent Clang when there already was GCC? Why invent Git when there was already CVS? And so on. (Maybe not the best examples, but that's what I could think of on the spot.)
The point is that there are aspects in which the current solutions (in this case, LaTeX) fails, and new systems can address them, since they tend to have much more liberty in the design space than the older system.
I as a graphic designer have been using ConTeXt for more than 10 years now, and I think it's amazing for producing more 'custom' documents and handling typography and stuff. LaTeX and Word fall too short in that purpose.
I guess Typst more of a tool oriented for programmers and computer science people as it seems targeted to give some programming power right into their documents. I may be wrong, but I don't see LaTeX that approachabe from that way (unless you have a decent knowledge of TeX and you are not prone to headaches caused by backslashes).
