There is also a major difference as I understand it. They need to be resolved at the end of a certain period. There is a legal difference from Credit cards as in there is no continual liability and thus no continued line of credit. Getting a true credit card is also a lot harder here (not France) than a deferred payment card (usually 1 month) and has stricter credit checks.
These are historically called “charge cards” in the US and are common for corporations who give employees “credit cards” for travel and the like.
American Express is big in this market - what looks like a normal Amex Business Platinum card can very well be a charge card that needs to be paid in full at the due date every month.
There are minor differences but the big one is no carried balance between months is allowed. Payment in full due each month.
Visa and MC have basicly all of these configurations, depending on country & legislation:
- Direct Debit
- Deffered Debit
- Rolling Credit
- Installment Credit
And if you are a $MegaBigCorp customer of them, you can customize even more.
indeed. my credit card requires me to preload money from my bank account. it's like there is a second account that keeps a balance that i can spend using the credit card. whenever i use it, the balance is updated. how the credit is paid off i don't know. it could be either right away, or the amount is just hidden by my bank until it is time to pay off at the end of the month. either way, the credit limit is zero. so i can never spend more than i put in first. (though this may be based on how much i spend or be a configurable value.)
There is a point though - Mastercard and Visa treats them as "prepaid" credit cards, which are different from both true prepaid cards (as issued in the US), charge cards, and true debit cards (former Maestro and Visa Electron). Again, different regions have different lines for this, especially in Europe.
IIRC, bunq in the Netherlands issues Mastercard "credit cards" (with no "debit" annotation as on true Mastercard debit cards). They're treated as credit cards for Mastercard purposes but are backed by deposits.
It's more taboo to talk about revolving credit card than crack addiction for a french.
I don't know a bank that offer them, even the shady online bank.
Historically, these have been issued by "consumer credit" specialized banks like Sofinco; and retail chains ("carte Aurore"); traditional banks would seldom advertise them, if offered at all.
Things have been changing a bit in recent years. Since the "debit" and "credit" nature of the card is now written on them, French folks have started to request "credit" ones for travelling (to rent a car for instance).
My understanding is that for car rental purposes, anything using Visa/MC (and not a national debit network like Visa Debit in the US) will work, it doesn't actually need to be backed by a revolving credit. At a US gas pump, a Frenchie needs to select "credit" even though the card has "debit" written on it. Still, should the clerk refuse the card because it reads "debit" without running it... better have this "credit"-labeled one.
> My understanding is that for car rental purposes, anything using Visa/MC (and not a national debit network like Visa Debit in the US) will work, it doesn't actually need to be backed by a revolving credit.
Many companies will refuse all debit cards, or all cards with "electronic use only" restriction, at least for the deposit, irrespective of the payment network involved.
It was fun when the weather was good (some high clouds, no rain, no fog, preferably warmer weather) to receive the BBC across the north sea on the higher channels, quite fun to watch when there was nothing in the Dutch channels (we had no cable connection, physically none). The french1 was only possible with reflections so very noisy. Canal+ was also sometimes interesting but that was scrambled.
Dutch VHF was patchy due some kind of interference I recall, but the channels were mirrored in UHF.
If you take this measurement as the goal it would be best at near standstill speed (around 4m/s). If you want to maximize the traveled distance of the group it is around 60kph, which is the metric most people actually care about when discussing throughput.
1 car / (actual max following time) no matter the speed. Where do you see speed in the equation? It's not. You can put it in of course but my point is it's unnecessary if you know following distance, which is theoretically more invariable than speed on a road anyway
Inter car distance is highly irrelevant as the overall speed will quickly drop due to excessive braking due to tailgating. Maximum throughout is around 60kph. You keep 2s distance if you want to be safe. So at highway speeds that is around 50 to 70 meters
They don't have to be but they at least can try to help. When dealing with automated response units the outcome is the same: much talk, no solution. With a rep you can at lease see what's available within their means and if you are nice to them they might actually be able to help you or at least make you feel less bad about it.
Comparing range of gasoline cars is idiotic. There are plenty of cars with long range (1000km), and they all have 60L+ fuel tanks and most run on diesel (which gives you ~15% more range per liter). It'd even argue the same for BEVs. More battery is more range.
It is if it's something they couldn't do on their own before.
It's a magical moment when someone is able to AI code a solution to a problem that they couldn't fix on their own before.
It doesn't matter whether there are other people who could have fixed this without AI tools, what matters is they were able to get it fixed, and they didn't have to just accept it was broken until someone else fixed it.
Right!? It's like me all the sudden being able to fix my car's engine. I mean, sure, there are mechanics, and it surely isn't rocket science, but I couldn't do it before and now I can!!! A miracle!
Cue the folks saying "well you could DIE!!!" Not if I don't fix brakes, etc ...
It was an easy fix for someone who already knows how WiFi drivers work and functions provided to them by Linux kernel. I am not one of these people though. I could have fixed it myself, but it would take a week just to get accustomed to the necessary tools.
I would first blame the programmers, the design and lack of specialty offloading before blaming any programming language. Well designed web calls scale nearly linearly with usage and usually poor design or programming is the source of slowness. You can always trade language complexity for speed but assuming it is the cause of all perceived slowness is a poor man's view.
It is the same story every time again, first it was java, which has so many large scale projects most people won't even know it's running things they use, now it's apparently python who is to blame for all slowness on the web. When the next JIT or scripted language comes along which is not someone's favourite pet that will get the blame.
Python is slow, though, and so was java compared to other compiled languages of its time. Sure, it might not matter much if you're mostly doing database calls. If you're not, though, then yes, it's the languages fault if your app is slow. You can try to make it faster, but it's gonna be marginal gains. Or, you could just switch to another language and get a 100x speedup for free.
I also denounce the notion that trading language complexity for slowness is the case. Python is already complex, and there's some language and frameworks that are actually quite a bit easier to use for web backends. Like java, or dotnet. It just makes no sense to use python for this usecase, even if you ignore the slowness.
But that's not completely true, there is one very good reason to use python. Your devs know it. But, that doesnt say anything about the language itself.
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