The simple answer would be that a greater supply of homes means more people can afford homes in the long run (assuming relatively low population growth). But that is hugely dependent on which states/cities/neighborhoods you're talking about. The section of the world that this article is discussing apparently never gentrified like some of the neighborhoods surrounding it. Things tend to be different in highly urbanized cities like NYC vs. relatively open areas like the Inland Empire.
I was expecting a) a blog post, and b) from the .html-ending a hypertext document, maybe with text and images?
What possible reason could there be for this to be "an app"? It's a blog, it's for reading -- and you already need a reader to access it -- why would you implement a (new) rendering engine?
Ok, I can see an argument for adding comments via javascript and a service, or for posting blog posts and doing admin stuff. But the other reasons (user tracking etc) for having this as "an app" only detracts from the readers experience.
Well, if they just served html, they'd still only need to serve the content (and the viewer, the web browser, would indeed be cached in the form of an installed application on the end user's system).
The content can be served as a JSON object containing just the post and the metadata. If you scale up to millions of requests, suddenly you're saving a lot of bandwidth by not sending the same header, sidebar, footer etc everytime.
1) You could send the sidebar, footer etc as json, and the content as html. [edit: an by json I mean javascript ;-) or a combination of a script-tag with a fancy-nav.js, and then pull in any additional elements via json/javascript urls]
2) "lot of bandwidth" - I doubt it. It's only the embedded html you'd have to resend -- and that gets compressed with the rest of the main html document. Everything else (images, css, javascript) gets cached via normal request caching.
Endangering people's lives is quite abstract. If you happen to do IT security and carry documents about hacking cars with you, then in theory you are endangering people's lives. Still probably your goal is to improve security to safe lives.
If you carry documents that are uncovering a surveillance state you might endanger the lives on a few people relying on it. Still probably your goal is to improve privacy and long-term safety for the general population.
I think we should be way more careful with what we call terrorism. Democracy requires whistleblowing, free speech and critical perspectives on governments actions. Even if that means that this complicates some of the government's operations. The question is not just about safety but about commensurability.
When you get in your car to go to work, you are endangering peoples' lives.
So, uhh... yeah... this is a justification that can be stretched quite far.
True, but the quoted statement appears to be self-contained. It is that much more interesting that the author of the document seemed to feel the need to add justification beyond the assertion that the documents could endanger people's lives. It is this added justification that strikes me especially problematic.
The definition of terrorism that is implied is so vague and arbitrary that it seems that it can be attributed to almost any political process.
It's a quote from another document so we have no idea if it's self contained without seeing the original document.
It's also worth remembering that Greenwald chose that quote to go in his article so would have chosen to put it in a context that emphasises his viewpoint.
I still don't understand why Miranda flew though the UK when he was carrying UK intelligence materials - still looks like a baited trap for publicity to me.
In practice, compartmentalizing sections of a page into declarative chunks of JS and HTML actually helps keep things really organized. When each link in a nested directive chain is completely independent of one another, it makes refactoring a problematic area much simpler. And of course all of this makes unit and functional testing much simpler.
FWIW, when Stripe launched they did not have any way to correlate chargebacks at all, nor did they offer separate authorization/capture phases (which is required to ship physical goods: you are not allowed to actually charge someone's credit card for a purchase you are shipping until you're about to actually ship the product). They also had rather weak webhook retry support (it would retry a couple times over short periods of time, if I remember correctly). They have since fixed these issues, but in the mean time their main benefits have been cloned by PayPal (easier to read documentation, and a JSON-based API that can be used from a browser).
Their prices were also fixed at the highest end of PayPal's fees (2.9% + $0.30), and while they now mention you can get volume discounts, they make it clear you shouldn't even attempt to discuss this with them until you are looking at over a million dollars processed every year. PayPal and Amazon, in comparison, list discount pricing on their websites for volumes as low as forty thousand dollars a year. Meanwhile, if your average receipt price is less than about $12, you probably aren't even considering Stripe, because PayPal will offer the same service to you with "micropayments" pricing: on a $1 purchase this will save you over 20% of revenue on processing fees.
I have not evaluated Balanced as a payments provider (I only remember them being usable for outgoing payments, not incoming ones; is this feature new? regardless, their pricing is as high as Stripe), but for the purpose of payouts you are looking at a tradeoff: they charge $0.25 per transaction, with $1 if the payment fails; in comparison, using PayPal MassPay costs 2% of the transaction cost, but is capped at $1. If you are building a large marketplace, and end up having to do a lot of dinky payouts, PayPal is going to be more cost effective. You also will have to file less paperwork using PayPal (you don't need to 1099-MISC someone if you use a third-party payment network, as PayPal will send a 1099-K instead, but you do if you use ACH), and will more easily be able to support international merchants.
I can't speak for anyone else, but the reasons we've chosen other providers over PayPal had nothing to do with their fees. I expect I'd pay 5% and shift all my existing business in a heartbeat, given a payment service that had:
1. a data model that wasn't oversimplified or awkwardly reported,
2. a decent API that also supported comprehensive automated integration tests, and
3. solid documentation and customer support.
No large, established company would pay 5%, obviously, but running small, on-line businesses without physical products, our priorities are different. A couple of percent of profit margin either way is nothing compared to the pain caused by accounting hassles and the lack of confidence if it's not possible to test an integration properly. In a small company, we're all doing everything, so any time we have to spend on accounting details or manual testing before we roll out an update is time we're not spending on things like marketing or feature development that actually make money.
Sure. I was responding to "It surprises me that anybody uses Amazon or PayPal when Stripe and Balanced exist.", not attempting to make the argument "It surprises me that anybody uses Stripe or Balanced when Amazon and PayPal exist.". You are welcome to make the choices you want to make, and if Stripe actually manages to accomplish that first bullet point for your use case, that's awesome (seriously). However, treeface was making the argument that the opposite was not true: that working with PayPal and Amazon never made sense due to the offerings of Balanced and Stripe being somehow better; I was explaining (with a "FWIW" even) why companies would want to choose these solutions.
Apologies if I misunderstood your point. You seemed to emphasize fees above almost anything else in your earlier posts, including suggesting that this would probably be the deciding factor in a PayPal vs. Stripe choice at a certain price point. I was only trying to point out that for the kinds of small business that a lot of these payment services are chasing, the rate they charge isn't necessarily the only relevant factor, nor even the most important one.
Sadly, I have yet to find a payment service that is anywhere close to meeting all of my three criteria, and that includes many of those that get mentioned a lot on HN. That is why if anyone made one, they would have my companies' business faster than you can say "integration". For now, we settle for a combination of helpful customer service and APIs that we can make work with enough effort, and we hope that in time the services offering those things will improve their limited reporting and testing facilities.
As for the underlying data models that most of these services use, I'm afraid most of those are probably beyond redemption, and sooner or later I can see that being a significant liability to the kinds of service that are useful primarily because they're low-hassle and let you get on with other stuff. (Friendly advice to payment services: If you bundle up a charge to my customer, any tax we have to charge them that you may or may not record, any fees you charge on that transaction, any tax you're including with those fees, any refunds that may be made on a later date and therefore in a different tax reporting period, any tax to my customer included in those refunds, any fees we get back as a result, any tax that no longer applies on those fees, any chargebacks that occur, any tax that no longer applies to my customer as a result of the charge back, any fees you're no longer collecting, any tax on those fees, any chargeback-related fees and how much you're spending on my Christmas present for putting up with this lot all in the same single transaction record in your database/API, then our accountants probably don't like you, and neither do the guys here who have to reverse engineer all of the real data that we need to do real accounts in order to make our accountants happy again. There is simple, and then there is too simple.)
You certainly don't do any real volume, because you can't pass 5% onto customers and if you absorbed it and did any real business it would be huge $$$.
Just curious, what do people do when part of their order can be shipped out now, and part of their order is being shipped by someone else in a different state and can't be shipped yet? And you might not know all this at the time of the order?
Authorize.net doesn't support partial captures on an authorization.
Is the best alternative to store their credit card and use that saved card to capture partial amounts? This would mean you couldn't do a full authorization upfront to ensure the customer has the funds available.
You are going to hate me for this, but: I guess you switch to PayPal ;P. The DoCapture API has a field CompleteType that can be set to NotComplete (as opposed to Complete) that lets you implement partial capture functionality.
1) Use a payment processor that supports partial capture.
2) Only capture when the shipping is complete.
3) Do a full capture, and refund promptly if you/seller can't ship the rest. This is technically not allowed but some merchants/platforms get away with it. The "prompt refund" part is very important, you don't want to end up with chargebacks.
> PayPal will offer the same service to you with "micropayments" pricing
Just a warning to anyone that reads this: Last I tried (February 2013), micropayments were completely broken. Payments would fail for any customer that didn't have enough to cover the transaction as positive PayPal balance (eg. everybody - I never have more than $0 in my PayPal account).
I'll have to agree with this. Don't get me wrong PayPal is not great and the horror stories are well horrifying BUT it has a pretty global adoption and customers are fairly likely to know it.
In fact in Germany (which I think is one of the most "anti credit card" countries) I know many people that will only buy stuff online if they can pay via bank transfer or PayPal because PayPal is simple and has a recognizable brand name.
I own a CC but there have been times where I had checked out stuff and didn't buy in the end because it was CC only.
Amazon has that same brand name advantage if it's easy to use for customers they have a good shot imo.
Stripe is still in private beta or non existent in many countries. I'm rooting for them but there are already clones coming out in countries where they are not available which might not be great for them long term.
I use both Amazon and PayPal but not Stripe or Balanced, mostly because I already have accounts set up with Amazon and PayPal. This is a huge barrier for new payment companies. To succeed, they need to both (1) be so much better than the competition that it's worth the hassle of making a new account and (2) communicate that to millions of people. These are not small problems.
I use Stripe for Draft, and I know I'm losing money. I get emails everyday from people outside the US who can't use a credit card or they don't trust any vendor with their CC. I'm probably going to have to add Paypal too :/
> I use Stripe for Draft, and I know I'm losing money. I get emails everyday from people outside the US who can't use a credit card or they don't trust any vendor with their CC.
I think you need to make a judgement (in the absence of hard data, which you often won't have before launching something!) on the types of users that might use your service.
For example: I'm building a service where the sole demographic is developers, and typically fairly savvy ones at that. I feel that I can get away with Stripe (credit cards) being the only payment option available because most of my users aren't going to be particularly averse to buying things online.
If I were selling physical goods, or SaaS with a diverse userbase, then I would certainly consider other options.
I am a developer, in Mexico. I have to jump through hurdles to pay some sites (Browserstack, dnsimple). I want to give you my money and even though I loathe PayPal it's the only solution that always works.
I agree with the other reply. Stripe would be ideal but when looking for international solutions, they just aren't there yet. We are looking into payment solutions to cover our LatAm customers and it is very difficult right now.
As a game developer who sells virtual goods, I don't care how hard it is to implement my payment solution. I care how easy it is for my users to use and how many will use it. Stripe claims they are easier to implement. I don't care. They have to show more people will buy if I use Stripe instead of PayPal and that just isn't true. PayPal has far more people who already have accounts and who just have to type in a pin or password to pay. Compared to typing in a whole card, the increased number of users who will buy is really big. Make your users have to do anything difficult and they just won't most of the time. That's the facts of life on mobile. They especially don't like to type.
One of the things I love about Symfony2 (other than the framework) are the following bundles:
-FOSUser
-FOSRest
-Sonata Admin
In a few minutes, I have a multi-user website, complete with REST server and a user administration interface. As someone without a lot of hands-on experience with Laravel, is there a similar combo of Laravel bundles that can get me up and running with a multi-user website?
Laravel has built-in auth support and a bunch of good Composer packages that can add more features. It's also got RESTful and resourceful controllers built in and a very awesome routing system. You can use any admin/cms package, but this one I made specifically for Laravel and the Eloquent ORM:
He's trying to say that Google paid something tangible for something intangible. It's difficult to estimate the present value of a patent portfolio, ergo it's "intangible".
I think the point the OP is making is that if it were someone like Mark Zuckerberg, the protest wouldn't be futile. It would likely trigger a nationwide debate about the constitutionality of the program and it would possibly be overturned in court.
The point of my post is that these people are surrounded by other people to whom they have obligations. You can't respond to two words without considering the context of the paragraph! It should be obvious that even a so-called "successful" action comes with extreme stress on one's associates. It means subjecting other people to risk. This cannot be considered lightly.
I don't get your point on obligations. He has a family ok, but nothing would prevent him from resigning from Facebook and writing a post explaining his reasons for doing so(unwillingness to spy on its users). He would still be a rich man able to provide for his family and there are tons of others who could step into his place.
I'm not saying he should do that but with the amount of money he has he can afford to lose a job and still don't worry about his financial future.
The government would go after Facebook as an entity when Zukerberg speaks out. This means other FB directors could be held liable, shareholders could sue him for breaching his fiduciary duty, his life could be made hell even if PR wise it's impossible to arrest him, etc. We are talking about the most powerful monopoly on force humanity has even seen here, a group of people who consider it their right to kill people or detain them indefinitely without a trial.
I support what you say in theory, but a sign of intelligence is to take longer term approaches to solving the issue. (I would hope they are furious at the government for doing this or at least for hurting their business, I know I would be.)
>The government would go after Facebook as an entity when Zukerberg speaks out.
You honestly think the government is going to go after a multibillion dollar international corporation? Doing that is what gets the government into trouble, because the corporation has the resources to defend itself. And they're clearly not going to destroy Facebook and Google in any event -- can you imagine the public outrage, to say nothing of the economic damage?
Governments retain power through leverage. They don't actually have the power to destroy everyone, but they have the power to destroy one person, and the power to threaten everyone with the risk of being that one person. When the government is wrong, this relies on everyone being too afraid to do the right thing, and people not talking to each other and working together.
This is pretty basic stuff. If you stand up and no one else does, you die now. If no one stands up, you die later. If everyone stands up, you win. Which would you rather do?
More likely though they'd go after corporate officers for real or alleged criminal behavior (think of the "honest services fraud" charges against Jeff Skilling, reversed by the Supreme Court on the basis that the law was being stretched well beyond breaking point) and refer to the SEC for investigations....
The government has in the past gone after some extremely powerful corporations and when they had the endurance patience, and care, they have succeeded. We should remember that the government spent 50 years trying to destroy AT&T's monopoly on long distance telephone calls and eventually they succeeded.
Again, corporate officers of large corporations generally have the resources to defend themselves. They can harass you if you're the only one, which is why everyone needs to do it.
>AT&T's monopoly
They spent 50 years trying to break them up and within 20 years after that they had pretty much bought each other back up again and continue to do so as time passes.
You should also note that the public hated AT&T because they were the prototypical example of an abusive monopolist. It's a different story when the reason for the campaign is that the corporation is going to bat for the public against government overreach.
There is also the matter of Citizens United -- it's extremely unfortunate when the government legitimately wants to attack oil companies or other evildoers, but it works just as well (if not more so) when the corporation is doing right and the government is wrong.
Actually I think the breakup of AT&T was one of those moments when policy changed because all of the businesses got scared. When you look at the long history there, and it is a long history, it was right after that, that the government backed off from being aggressively pro-competitive.
We see a shift thus under Reagan from pro-competition to pro-oligopoly which continues and accelerates under Clinton, Bush, and Obama. It is an indication that in class warfare the elite always win.
As for AT&T getting back together, they still don't own a record label, broadcast/entertainment media, the Japanese telephone system or the major manufacturers of phones in the US and abroad to an extent anywhere near what they used to..... People forget just how big Ma Bell was at its zenith.
There is no evidence of anyone taking longer term approaches. There is much evidence of Zuckenberg, Page and other just surrendering.
It works the other way around than you say. Surrendering is short term win at the price of long term loss. Taking short term win at price of dooming us all is not nice behavior, even if being a dick might be intelligent.
I'm not sure Tesla's first-mover advantage here is really going to last. Ultimately, I think it's likely that existing gas stations will slowly start converting to electric charging stations. If they can match Tesla's charging tech, it will even the playing field fairly quickly.
Now if Tesla were to start selling their charging tech to existing gas stations, they might get an even bigger piece of the pie.
Actually, I think putting them into gas stations would be a horrible idea. When was the last time you wanted to sit at a gas station for 20+ minutes to fill your car? They need to put them in places that you are willing to spend a little more time (and quite possibly money) while you charge. Grocery stores, restaurants. I guess they have mostly been putting them in rest stops which also makes some sense along those longer stretches between cities. But while 20 minutes is a great charge time... it sucks to have to sit for 20 minutes if you have nothing to do. It doesn't take me 20 minutes to stretch my legs and have a piss.
I agree with you in principle about the necessity of needing something to do in the meantime, but a huge number of gas stations already have convenience stores attached to them. Perhaps not in bigger cities, but pretty much anywhere where space is not a concern.
ok... maybe "horrible" was too strong of a word. But 20 minutes even with a mini mart attached is too long. Next time you fill up your car, start a timer when you start filling. And then wander around the convenience store until the timer reaches 20 minutes before you can leave. I bet that feels like a life time. :)
The station is not meant for day to day "fillups." It is for long interstate trips... the kind where 30 minutes out walking or having lunch is quite welcome.
We're so used to standard gasoline cars that it can be hard to remember that you never visit a charging station in normal use. You charge your electric car overnight at home.
There are already a good deal of gas stations that fit the supercharger model -- they sell gas, but also have attached restaurants (often fast food, but often up-scale too). Basically the sort of place truckers like to stop -- food and gas in one go.
I see the super chargers (and electric cars in general) more as a way of putting many gas stations out of business. Who will need to ever "fill up" their electric car when they can charge it over night each day? The only time you'll need to charge on the road is on long trips, which is exactly the void that the superchargers fill for Tesla.
I would think Tesla would see that as a win, not a loss. Tesla is a car company, not a charging-station company. They're only building supercharger stations because supercharger stations have to exist for Tesla to sell their cars, and nobody else is building them. If gas stations started putting them in it'd mean Tesla could sell their cars without having to deal with the expense and hassle of building out a huge amount of infrastructure.
