You're right, except for the last sentence. Lack of financial literacy has some levels. One could refuse to use Credit Cards because they don't perceive the benefits (point programs or cashback) they could individually attain, but one can also refuse to use Pix because "I only have to pay my credit card invoice once at the end of the month and can spend without worries during the month" (which is even dumber, but is the reality we're living on).
The cashback you are given back is taken from a fraction of the fee levied on merchants by the Payment Processing company they use.
The only thing holding this system together is the lobby (also funded by a part of the aforementioned fee on merchants) by the Payment Processing industry to uphold laws that prohibit more expensive payments for more expensive payment methods, and also the extensive marketing (funded by guess what).
It's an extremely simple yet ingrained system, and the only way to topple it and stop paying hidden costs thinking you're getting an extremely good deal on cashback, is to peel back the curtains and realize it, and make most of the politically-active part of the country's population to do so too.
Credit card isn't more expensive than its main competitor, cash, though. It's just the costs of credit card acceptance are transparently added to each transaction, while the costs of cash are distributed over the whole day's cash transactions and so more opaque.
Merchants have a psychological (and in some countries, legal) barrier to charging more for cash than other payment methods, even though it's the least efficient. Given this, cash-back is the best way to share the efficiency gains with the end user. Maybe if Pix or Twint or debit cards or what-have-you are so efficient, they should also give consumers cashback.
Cashback is just giving part of the profit margin of the fees charged on the transactions to the customer. I would rather that profit margin gets split between the customer (lower prices) and merchant. Also, didn't the EU eliminate cashbacks by precisely price capping transaction fees?
I've seen merchants giving a discount for payment with Pix. And a few stores refuse credit cards and only accept debit and Pix (and cash?).
Also, isn't the main competitor to CC the debit card? And now in some countries instant payments? Is debit that rare in the US?
Although to be honest I'm not 100% sure if it isn't some tax evasion thing.
It could give cashback if it cost 3% of the transaction. But it’s it’s actually much cheaper. For credit cards you have to pay for the brand, the issuer and the acquirer. And each gets a nice cut.
Reducing merchant fees seems like a mistake if you are in competition with both cash (which has high intrinsic merchant costs) and credit cards (which has low intrinsic costs, but which are padded so they're closer to the costs of cash, with consumer cashback coming out of this padding). I'm certainly not going to _choose_ to receive less cashback, as a consumer.
Pix costs are very low and the fee for the merchant as well. They pay less for it and get the money instantly. That’s why many small merchants only accept pix and some big merchants offer discounts for payments using it.
Discounts for Pix vs cash sound cool and a fine alternative to cashback via the payment system. Though I can imagine this might be hard in some countries, where there is a strong pro-cash lobby.
I mean, the cashback is paid for out of the fees you pay for the service. In a world with low capped charges (EU etc) then you'll just pay less, which is equivalent to cashback and much fairer.
So long as the price is the same for cash and card (and Pix?), then you should pick the one that gives you the best kickbacks. I don't think capping CC fees will actually lower prices for consumers much (because merchants prefer round prices for psychological pricing). For evidence, see the fairly uniform pricing of products sold in euros between countries, despite varying vat rates between eurozone countries.
> see the fairly uniform pricing of products sold in euros between countries, despite varying vat rates between eurozone countries.
Huh, not sure I agree with that (the uniform pricing thing). I mean, one should believe that, but it doesn't appear to be true. For example, recently I saw a tablet for 208 euro (converted from GBP) on amazon.co.uk, approx 220 euro from amazon.de and 360 euro from amazon.ie, for the same item.
I was really surprised because I figured electronics would be pretty similarly priced across the EU/UK, but apparently not.
Suspicious transactions are a legitimate use-case for payment processing. If you don't fully trust who you're buying from, the scam preventions, chargebacks, refunds etc. work fine. But buying lunch or small chocolates, cigarretes etc with credit cards is INSANE.
The natural solution for this is a private constructor with public static factory methods, so that the user can only obtain an instance (or the error result) by calling the factory methods. Constructors need to be constrained to return an instance of the class, otherwise they would just be normal methods.
Convention in OOP languages is (un?)fortunately to just throw an exception though.
In languages with generic types such as C++, you generally need free factory functions rather than static member functions so that type deduction can work.
Being exceptionally talented programmers does not automatically make them good language designers. I can think of a couple of people who may not be as good at programming, but are light years ahead at designing languages (and maintaining them over long term).
Source code isn’t written afresh every day. The point was the code was written at a different era and the current era wouldn’t produce this sort of code, and presumably you wouldn’t see anything but a generic 500. This is likely because product managers can’t stand free thought and action amongst engineers as it doesn’t appease their bean counter overlords sufficiently.
That’s pretty presumptuous, but especially so when there are comments parallel from googlers pinning the date and it’s easily determined by using this very powerful information retrieval tool called “Google.” Not to mention the possibility I work at Google, or that I wrote it myself!
I hate wrangling with configuration to make an amalgamation of plugins do what's expected in the expected order for my build; Gradle is just code and a DSL
>There is an idea that is not obvious until you hear about it for the first time: as interfaces are types themselves, they too can have type parameters
Not obvious???? Go language designers and programmers are living in another world
