You’re implying that you should never invent new tools. But every tool was a new invention upon its creation. Also, all software is an “engine” for an “engine”.
React is popular for a reason. Declarative UI is a million times easier to implement and maintain. If a total newbie had to learn UIKit and SwiftUI then pick one, they'd pick SwiftUI 100% of the time.
You used to be able to serve websites via a Dropbox of .html files. It supported CSS, JS and everything. At some point after 2015 they turned off that capability .
Garmin's is literally "oh shit the pilot passed out!" and an entirely inexperienced passenger can push a single button, ending up with the plane stopped on the nearest appropriate runway with the engine off. The autoland system in airliners requires a lot of setup by the pilots and continuous monitoring all the way down, plus working ILS (instrument landing system) equipment at the airport.
Yeah, I don't know what button he would have told you to push, but it definitely wouldn't have landed the plane. I don't think there were even automatic wing-leveling systems that far back.
It’s nice that Vancouver doesn’t have a highway cutting it in half like Seattle, but it also takes longer to drive anywhere.
From my experience, many of its neighborhoods/dining districts feel really cold/loud/unwalkable due to the high speed 4 lane roads everywhere. Traffic noise still seems like a huge issue, trying to parallel park when cars are buzzing by at 50 mph isn’t fun, and the unprotected left turns are pretty gnarly.
> many of its neighborhoods/dining districts feel really cold/loud/unwalkable due to the high speed 4 lane roads everywhere
Yeah, this is an unfortunate aspect of Vancouver's city planning; our zoning forces nearly all shops and restaurants onto busy, loud, polluted arterial roads. Changing this isn't really on the political landscape right now, and I don't think it's going to change anytime soon.
Driving is just one mode of transportation. Buses can take 3 or 4 times as much time to reach any destination, which is far too much to be a viable alternative to people with a choice.
Ask yourself if you would like to spend 45 minutes aboard the bus system as opposed to 15 min. in a car
> Ask yourself if you would like to spend 45 minutes aboard the bus system as opposed to 15 min. in a car
Ask yourself how the options would be different if cities weren't so focused on cars.
Edit: To be less vague - my choices to get to work are 20 minutes on bike basically for free, 25 minutes via metro for ~$100 a month, or 40 minutes by car for about $500 a month in tolls and parking plus thousands a year for the car itself and maintenance. There's no reason this can't be the norm in the US aside from local politicians deciding they don't want it.
Yes I acknowledged this in my previous comment. But it could be normal for every city with some pretty simple changes that no mayor is willing to make.
If a full lane is dedicated to buses instead then that bus would be much faster than the cars stuck in traffic, while moving significantly more people.
In general, I agree with you. In specific, I drive almost everywhere despite being a supporter of public transit, because I can't afford to live near a skytrain station and the 'last mile' adds an hour to a trip. If we had more buses, and most routes had dedicated lanes, sure. But since we're half-assing it all, more gridlock is just more gridlock. Which, among other things, means more pollution.
edit: compare to a city like Seattle, which has similar weather, hills, density, etc. A notable feature of the transit centers there is a Park & Ride: a place where folks can park their cars (for free, when I lived there) and get into transit. Vancouver does not have anything of the sort. If you want to park somewhere and take transit into the downtown core, there are extremely limited options. So you get too many drivers. Disincentivizing cars usage is great when there is a viable alternative -- in the absence of such an alternative, it's just flagellation for its own sake.
Sure, you're making a reasonable choice given the current reality. But it doesn't have to be that way. When I say driving should be difficult, I don't mean just make the roads worse without any other changes. I mean improve active transportation, transit, and housing density/affordability. In the short term, each improvement here will cause some pain in making driving slightly harder, but after sufficient time the other options will be good enough that nobody will miss driving.
I feel like LA and Amsterdam are both evidence that having a big highway cutting a city in half is neither necessary nor sufficient to make journeys (even car journeys) faster.
It's not immediately apparent from the street names; but the Grandview Highway and Georgia St effectively act as parts of a bifurcating through-way, albeit with a congestion nightmware between them.
Not really comparable to a highway. I mean, yes it's a wide street, but you can just walk across Georgia Street as a pedestrian. Can't do that with the sort of highways that scar the landscape of so many North American cities.
I'd venture to guess that a key difference is that most Black adults grew up in America while most Asian adults immigrated here, maintaining their previous culture's eating and exercise habits.
I’m not in the payment space, but it seems like it’s rapidly commodifying. The hardware to support mag stripe, contactless, and EMV isn’t terribly expensive per unit, and as long as there’s some bare minimum functionality, the competitive edge is the processing cost.
This seems less about stealing customers and more about keeping Stripe attractive to existing customers who might be continually evaluating other payment providers and their hardware offerings.
Long term, we likely end up like China with WeChat and Alipay, using apps and QR codes primarily for payments eventually. Venmo and PayPal support C2C and C2B payments with QR codes, Zelle is beta testing them currently.
Gravity Payments, First Data Merchant Services (the direct sales side of First Data), Vantiv/Mercury and numerous other platforms and platform resellers (Square & Stripe resell others processing platforms) have spent the last decade driving down prices.
Some wholesale contracts for certain ISO resellers are as low as 1 basis point (.01% of a transaction) and $0.01 for bank underwriting (where the bank holds the chargeback risk if the underwritten business goes bankrupt), with platform fees being as low as 3 basis points and $0.02 cents.
Stripe is probably doing the underwriting in house, hence why sometimes deposits of recent transactions to your bank account are delayed for a few days to a week.
In the merchant processing industry, there are frontends (where your transaction initially is routed for approval by Visa/MasterCard/American Express/Discover or by one of the Debit Networks) and backends (where the amounts of these transactions are debited between banks).
Stripe does use Wells Fargo for the backend settlement, they are one of the most popular acquiring banks on First Data (though many other banks can be used for underwriting risk and settlement of payments on First Data).
Interestingly Square basically created this category (the merchant aggregator) by somewhat secretly running all their early clients' payments through a single merchant account.
Don't you need to be a bank to settle funds from issuing banks? That's not what I interpreted you meaning when you said "platform reseller" for processing.
I believe Square is a bank now, so maybe they'll stop using Chase.
The frontend (what authorizes the transaction with the card network, like Visa, Pulse, Star, Mastercard, etc) and backend (settlement bank that ACHes the cash around and usually takes the underwriting risk (unless the independent sales organization, eg: Stripe or Gravity decides to do this themselves)) are generally called a payment platform in the industry.
This platform can get wrapped with many different payment terminals (Verifone, Pax, Dejavoo, Ingenico, etc) or processing interfaces (Authorize.net, PayPal, Stripe, Square, et all).
Kinda surprising, I would expect them to have underwritten their own payment processing, but it might be the case that they don't want to have the outsized liability of chargebacks on their books if a client business goes bankrupt, all to save 2 cents on a $100 transaction.
Perhaps once the US economy slows its rapid economic shift they will consider handling their own underwriting and batch settlement.
This is tangential but you seems really knowledgeable about the payments industry. Can you perhaps recommend some sources to understand how the payments infrastructure works (POS but also web/online/mobile)? I only seem to have a broad idea and would love to understand the nitty-gritty of it all!
Beware, Gravity screwed over numerous businesses I work with. They purposefully misclassified businesses SICs (a code that defines what very specific category your business is, eg: a bar or a restaurant) to reduce credit card processing fees (interchange fees) for their customers, but were caught doing this for a massive number of businesses.
The card networks and issuing banks that had this money stolen from them went after the businesses that dodged these fees illicitly, with bills of tens of thousands or hundreds of thousands of dollars for fees that should have been paid.
