I had a similar experience. After it was released in the US, I took a trip to the Netherlands. I had a lot of “how did you do that?” reactions from merchants when I paid for things with my phone.
Depends on country, and how contactless cards being the norm in many places meant there was less push among people for payment with phones, compared to USA where it seems it no modern bits for card payments happened between introduction of magnetic strip and phone-based EMV2 NFC payments.
I remember changing card ~2012, in Poland, because my ancient Visa Electron with magstripe-only was confusing to new cashiers who thought lack of chip meant it's contactless. Around that time phone-based "cards" were also widely promoted though the tech wasn't exactly ready yet so you needed cooperation between banks and telcos to provide secure element.
I had the same experience as you on a trip to the Netherlands. Ironically, the only place where it didn't work was the Apple store in Amsterdam. I don't know if that was an actual technical limitation, or they were aware that it was not yet available in the Netherlands and so didn't even let me try with my phone and its US credit card.
> If you always pay down your credit card debt every billing period, you're considered a "deadbeat" because you're using the benefits of the credit card's payment processing but not paying in interest.
So why do they keep offering me incentives to use their product? Is it the hope that one day, after 20 years, I'll finally overspend and they'll get to collect some interest from me?
Credit cards enable you to buy more products and services earlier, which is good for financial institutions that have investments in the businesses that provide you those products and services. Money that just sits there does nothing for anyone, but money does good things when it keeps moving. Even if they don't make anything off you, you're moving money around so the businesses they have partial ownership of can be seen as valuable and have reason to grow. They can't just give money to these businesses instead of you because then there'd be little guarantee that they'd provide enough value to be worthwhile. By giving you a credit card, you're telling the financial institution behind the credit card what businesses are valuable to you and what they should be invested in.
This isn't to say that they don't still consider you a low value user, since you're not providing them with much in terms of direct revenue. Yes, finance companies love it when you hand money directly to them and won't mind if you forget to make a payment after 20 years and and up paying interest.
My guess is they probably have mountains of data that they use to optimize the probability of overspending across a population.
You may be unlikely to overspend after 20 years because you are financially literate, but if you're paying off your credit card every month, you and I are very much outliers on the bell curve of net worth in the US. If you have an engineer job you almost certainly are an outlier. We aren't the target audience of these ads. There are a lot of people in the middle of the curve who mostly pay off their credit card every month but might slip once or twice, and they want to optimize that probability of slipping.
Because they collect their 3% or whatever, and even after giving you your "cut" for strongarming the merchant for them, they still get 1% or whatever it is.
You've paid off every month on time for 20 years, and they get 1% of that. For basically running some servers and balancing payments.
That's big money - debit cards do the same thing for what, 25 cents a payment? So once the credit card hits about $9 it's all gravy.
Maybe I'd pick on an auditor as an example. They need to think about whether people are doing what they say they do. They don't need to care about what they are doing.
To me, caring means expecting work to be done to your standards instead of an independent standard.
> Younger people are talking about the pro-palestine / anti-zionist views promoted in the app as a reason that lawmakers are so motivated this time.
There are a lot of pro-zionists views promoted on the app as well. But in tiktok's defense, zuckerburg's properties, alphabet properties, reddit, etc lean heavily in favor of pro-zionist content because those companies are officially in bed with public and private zionist organizations.
> Wild speculation, of course.
Think it has more to do with anti-china views more than anything. But zionist influence definitely plays some role here.
I do suspect that if I saw you do that, that I’d think that you were being an asshole, regardless of how much I agree with your views about title inflation. Taking out your displeasure on one a cog in the machine with little agency reeks of the exact lack of life experience that you otherwise appear to be speaking out against. Though maybe in your organisations an utter lack of interpersonal skill can be overlooked if someone is REALLY good at C or something.
When you openly laugh at someone, who isn't being intentionally funny, it is widely regarded as a sign that you don't respect them. Those sorts of things are commonly apprehended as something called an "insult" in modern society.
> That would still not be taking out one's displeasure on someone.
You have made this statement before, but not taken the time to explain why you believe that. Perhaps if you explain your position others will be more sympathetic to it.
I think it partially reflects the accessibility of the field.
You can start hacking on things as a kid with little more than a computer and an internet connection. You can literally have junior engineer knowledge when graduating high school. Add in a bit of formal education and a few years of experience, you can be a legitimate senior engineer at 24.
In fact, one of the best engineers I ever worked with was 21 and working at staff level. Things just clicked with him, so it didn't take long in the professional world for him to round out his knowledge.
By contrast, most other fields require expensive equipment or advanced techniques to gain actual, real experience. A high schooler might be able to weld a track car together, but it's a lot harder for them to do FEA (finite element analysis) or load testing without serious equipment.
L4 is mid level (an engineer who you can generally trust to complete the tasks they're assigned)
L5 is Senior (who owns/shapes the direction of the team)
L6 is Staff (who has to see upcoming problems and shape efforts across the organization)
L7 shapes a product
L8 shapes a division
L9 shapes an industry
It's very possible that a 24 year old could become an L5 with a typical path: college 18-21, straight to Google for 3 years on the same team and becoming one of the main contributors on the team.
Considering that Google grew its headcount by over 50% between 2020 and 2022, there could be plenty of mid level engineers joining the 24 year old's team who they are able to lead now since they have an extra 3 years worth of experience + context in the specific area.
All it means is the individual has any amount of experience. It's OK if you didn't know that, but go ahead and absorb it now. It is not weird or unique to software. People on other engineering career paths, like mechanical engineers, will also be called "senior engineer" after a few years on the job, to distinguish them from inexperienced ones.
A person with at-most 3-4 years experience, but much more likely a lot less is not senior or experienced. I entirely disagree with your assessment.
Someone has to have actual experience to be considered senior. Being a couple years out of college is not experienced.
> All it means is the individual has any amount of experience.
By this logic - what would we call someone with 15 years of experience? What about 25 years? Super Supreme Senior Engineer, Level 9000?
The field needs to stop inflating titles. It's bad enough having people willy-nilly call themselves "engineers", let alone tack-on qualifiers like "senior".
Words are meant to communicate things through shared meaning and this is what seniority means to ~everybody else except you, so although nobody will stop you from adopting your private definition that nobody else uses, I think persistence in doing so will make you look a little silly.
The thing you're glossing over is Senior at Company A != Senior at Company B.
If your company wants to grossly inflate titles, fair enough - but your next job will then look like a demotion.
Counting someone as senior purely by a clock is also absurd. It's about knowledge, depth and breadth. A person with 3ish years of experience does not have either... we used to just call that "engineer".
The main issue is how hard it is to stick other qualifiers to titles.
You can't have a "makes decent estimations engineer", or "wasn't quit by the team lead engineer", or "gets paid twice as much data scientist". Some company go with "ninja" or "rockstar", or stick level numbers straight in the title but meh...so we settle for "senior" for most of these demarcations.
Indeed. We also acquired a lot and are getting bids to build a modest 3 bedroom house for us and two kids. People saying “build more” seem to be under the impression that construction labor and materials are cheap and we’re just refusing to do it.
Single family housing is not the way that you’d build your way out of this. You need all sorts of housing, like the missing middle of affordable townhouse style units with one or two bedrooms and no onsite parking.
It’s going to take decades to get out of the system we’ve built for ourselves with sprawl and the automobile. Until it’s possible to build in volume and cheaply you won’t see prices go down because there so much pent up demand.
The market is not how you build your way out of this. You need state-backed construction on a postwar scale, bans on corporate investment in real estate, abolition of zoning, and myriad other interventions that are blocked at every step by people looking to profit off their neighbors being forced into the streets.
The country as a whole is one thing, but San Francisco has been putting in a lot of time and money into creating bike-friendly infrastructure, and in some cases, succeeding. We'll have to see how the local culture adopts it, but, especially with ebikes, theres a future where the automobile's dominance wanes.
