historicaldocuments
@historicaldocuments@lemmy.world
- Comment on Hot Ones trying to sneak in the package protection 2 days ago:
I like the credit card for most purchases because I’m just going to pay it off later anyway. I don’t buy a lot of cups of coffee or sodas, so that’s not an issue. The fraud recovery is worth it for me even if I’m paying the fee.
When food trucks became a thing locally you had to have cash, and you had to at least know enough words to specify the number on the menu and what type of meat you wanted. Now that same business has a bunch of local locations all doing card transactions, and maybe doing a cash discount. I wouldn’t know since the food <-> money+card_fee transaction is worth it to me. I would wager for that type of business that they pick up more overall business than they lose, and they really should teach at least a little bit of this in school so you don’t get people weirded out by a minimum fee, but then again I was in line at a gas station that had a “minimum purchase for cards” sign, and a guy was like $5 short. The cashier explained, guy goes and gets a $2 drink. Cashier explains again, guy goes back again and still doesn’t come up to the limit. A tacked on “hidden” CC fee probably saves a lot of trouble in the long run.
I’d be more amenable to ACH if I had a dedicated business account. I use it for my current broker, but balked once before when I signed up for Robinhood and one of the later steps was “now we just need your bank account and routing number.” Nah guys, I’ll pass. I’m assuming most checks these days get filed electronically anyway.
- Comment on Hot Ones trying to sneak in the package protection 2 days ago:
the processor makes sure the floor is covered […] but there is no ceiling with any processor that I’m aware of
Nobody’s in business to lose money.
I suppose because online transactions are more likely to be fraudulent or something
I can see that. I’ve been lucky enough to only see two cases of stolen card numbers, and in both cases there was a small purchase (to verify the number), and then largish purchases I guess to see if merchandise can get delivered before the fraud is noticed. I wonder if they write off on their taxes the fees on those largish, fraudulent purchases they catch.
I guess with the costs of running all the servers to look for fraud, security on the whole works, hot backups, cold backups, etc, that 3% doesn’t look so bad for all that goes on behind the scenes, but it also doesn’t look like their stock prices are hurting (what the heck happened to Fiserv that owns Clover that they dropped 50%?).
Do you also take American Express? Is there any difference on your end between Visa/Mastercard/AMEX? I’m genuinely curious since I remember all the old commercials.
- Comment on Hot Ones trying to sneak in the package protection 3 days ago:
See also: merchants charging a ~3% fee if you use a credit card because similarly covering the cost of a payment processor is increasingly becoming a cost that is not absorbed. Even with medical practices!
At least this is easy to understand, though. Credit card processor charges us X% so we’re passing that on. We used to eat it or fold it into business costs, but with the economy doing it’s slow-death we can’t anymore.
What really gets me, especially with large purchases like a medical bill or a transmission replacement for example is that 3 or more % quickly becomes advantageous for the processor. On a $10,000 that 3% becomes $300, and it did not get $297 more expensive to wiggle some bits around over a $100 payment’s $3. Then, some businesses decide that the best way to offset that cost is something akin to an ACH transfer…just hand over your bank account information and don’t worry about it!
- Comment on Well if that isn't just about the most evil thing you could openly admit to doing. 1 week ago:
Religion.
- Comment on Those moutains are so quaint 2 weeks ago:
I haven’t been all over that area, but at night when there’s nearly nobody on the road it does have a feel to it.
- Comment on Those moutains are so quaint 2 weeks ago:
en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Skin-walker
Almost every place has its own myths.
- Comment on How best to open a blueberry? 3 weeks ago:
After the torx bit snaps off in the blueberry, what size EZ-out gets it out the best?
- Comment on Is Anon the asshole? 3 weeks ago:
If it came with batteries they make a Ryobi 40v inverter that’s not a bad, but I have a few other things that use those batteries.
- Comment on Why do so many programming languages have their own package manager? 4 weeks ago:
C and C++ are the only exceptions I can think of, off the top of my head; libraries are managed by, and coupled to, the operating system
For C/C++ there’s conan, vcpkg, and whatever Redhat calls their scl system these days. I know there’s more, but those are the ones I can remember off the top of my head. You could argue that podman serves in this capacity to some degree.
- Comment on A true Bullwinkle fan 4 weeks ago:
Doesn’t have to be in the state:
Some LLM assisted Fermi estimation suggests that those long European style plates would have room for plenty of characters and a QR code if you choose the right character set. As long as the camera resolution is good enough to pick out the QR code it should be good, but since they’re already issuing tickets for distracted driving for cell phones sitting inside the car, it should be good to go.
- Comment on A true Bullwinkle fan 4 weeks ago:
At least until the flock people raise a red flag because they’re too lazy to handle an ampersand in their OCR/database code.
- Comment on [deleted] 4 weeks ago:
In the comments you said you get tests run every 4-6 weeks. In my experience old age problems don’t start at 32.
Try some different things in between one of those 4-6 week cycles:
- Track your diet with whatever website or software looking for basic stuff like calories and all the little sodium/calcium/potassium type stuff.
- Drop caffeine entirely. Taper off because the withdrawal headaches suck, and it’ll take pretty much the whole month. I doubt this will help, but the best sleep I ever had was when I quit caffeine.
- If money isn’t a problem grab a blood sugar monitoring kit and spot check it depending on how quickly you want to burn through the consumables. Get advice from people who have to do this on how to do it right.
Is it like a brain fog? One that no amount of water seems to touch? Like you’re moving and thinking through a soup that gets thinner and thinner through the day until it finally gets thin enough to seem normal?
- Comment on This Is Why I Sit Down To Pee Pee 5 weeks ago:
Never served; don’t know for sure.
It makes more sense when you consider that the point is to get rid of the psychological blocks that would keep you from being able to do your business as quickly as possible whereever possible under whatever circumstances. That three to a urinal thing is under a short time limit.
Read up on what snipers do.
- Comment on Why does not a CR (Carriage Return) automatically start a new line on some online text editors? 1 month ago:
You could probably get 80% of that process done by learning some python. If you have a string “s”, then replacing double newlines with a single newline is as easy as
re.sub(“\n\n”, “\n”, s)where “\n” is an LF in many programming languages. A CR is often “\r” in the same vein. Just be aware that regular expressions can be very, very frustrating; and every webpage is going to be a new adventure in how it got formatted. If you use something like spyder it’ll allow you to see what the data looks like inside the python process so you get a chance to iterate.
- Comment on Why does not a CR (Carriage Return) automatically start a new line on some online text editors? 1 month ago:
There is Carriage Return (CR), and also Line Feed (LF, often called New Line). If you think about old mechanical printers with the metal arm sticking out, a CR operation would move the type head to the far left column, and a LF operation would advance the paper by one line. Variously through the years depending on hardware (typewriter, teletype, those early CRTs that you had to refresh the screen, or modern computers) you would get one or both of those if you pressed Return/Enter, and it’s configurable in software, depending on the software. I don’t know what windows does these days with notepad, but at one time the Enter key sent both (CRLF). UNIX style systems tended to use LF, and older Macs as someone else referenced used CR. If you wrote a generic program to handle anything you had to account for all of them. Mostly these days it gets abstracted away which generally works well enough unless a team of people used a random collection of software to edit a text file.
printf "\r\nHexadecimal, like that scene from The Martian.\n" | hexdump -C 00000000 0d 0a 48 65 78 61 64 65 63 69 6d 61 6c 2c 20 6c |..Hexadecimal, l| 00000010 69 6b 65 20 74 68 61 74 20 73 63 65 6e 65 20 66 |ike that scene f| 00000020 72 6f 6d 20 54 68 65 20 4d 61 72 74 69 61 6e 2e |rom The Martian.| 00000030 0a |.| 00000031
The 0a is a Line Feed character, and the 0d is a Carriage Return character. In my terminal without piping it through hexdump you get:
printf "\r\nHexadecimal, like that scene from The Martian.\n" Hexadecimal, like that scene from The Martian.
The LF at the end of the string makes it so that the prompt at the terminal doesn’t appear on the same line as the output, and the blank line before the text is caused by the LF at the beginning. I don’t know/care/have to worry about what eats the CR.
- Comment on A Ripple in Space 1 month ago:
johncderrick.com/dinosaur-timeline
The timeline stuff always gets me.
- Comment on A Ripple in Space 1 month ago:
Pretty good resource for that kind of thing if you have another interested kid and access to the internet. There’s also this:
- Comment on A little dehydration Never killed nobody 2 months ago:
I, too, try to avoid the water fountains on the common wetwall where the water in the pipes is cycled all the time thanks to the constant use of the bathrooms. I usually shoot for the fountain next to the old eyewash station they were forced to put in when the electronics lab used to be the chemical lab–there’s never anyone using that one.
- Comment on This has gotten out of hand and I demand satisfaction. 2 months ago:
I know this is a shitpost, but here’s the explanation: you can’t force people to like you.
You may get off on power trips going to businesses where people aren’t allowed to deny you service or return bad attitude in kind, but everywhere else you’re a $1000/hour with a forty hour minimum payment in advance work starts after the check clears kind of guy.
- Comment on What is 3x/4x USB ?? 2 months ago:
They’re revisions to the USB standard. USB stands for “Universal Serial Bus.” In the before times there used to be different connectors and formats for sending data over wires for a lot of things. Eventually USB came along and solved a lot of problems all at once: simple.wikipedia.org/wiki/USB
- Comment on Engine auto-off 2 months ago:
A jeep renegade I rented did ok
You must’ve gotten a good one.