As an outsider: which countries lean which way? I'm curious how things trend where and I didn't even really know that debit was used by a majority in certain places (Countries? Regions? Historical based delimiters?).
Germany is very debit-card oriented (with no interest of switching). The Netherlands seems similar. Eastern Europe and the Balkans are also mostly debit-card oriented, but people seem more open to switching to credit cards (if they can get one - especially the younger generation).
Ireland and the U.K. seem much more credit-card oriented than rest of Europe. Turkey is also very CC oriented (kinda strange - was not expecting that).
In the UK people predominantly use debit cards but credit cards are widely available. Everyone gets a debit card with any current account (i.e. non-savings account). In March this year there were 2.3 billion debit card transactions vs 400 million credit card transactions according to this:
The preferential treatment of credit cards for certain transactions influences how they're used in the UK.
Suppose in January two people Carol and Dave bought a £250 August flight to Paris from some outfit that didn't do a great job hedging their fuel prices. Carol used her credit card, Dave used his Debit card. UK law says Carol's flight was bought by her bank, after all her bank handed over the money, Carol is on the hook to pay them back but didn't directly pay. But Dave bought his ticket, the bank isn't responsible.
Today the airline fails because their fuel costs blew up. UK law says Carol should be able to get her money back from the bank because they bought this ticket and now it won't work -- this is called "Section 75". Dave may have some protections via other consumer protection rules, but he's more likely to end up losing out.
The best chance for Dave might be "Chargeback" which is a card scheme which might let Dave tell his bank that he now wishes he didn't pay for the ticket. It's not very likely to work because January is a long time ago and so the bank will probably argue that Dave should have realised earlier that he didn't want to make this transaction. Because this flight touches the EU there are a bunch of extra protections which might help, none of them is as simple as Section 75.
The Section 75 protections mean Brits who are credit-worthy tend to pay for large purchases on a [credit] card even if they intend to pay it off immediately.
For what is worth, a few years ago, I was able to chargeback a significant furniture order after the company collapsed. It is indeed at the bank's discretion and my bank didn't really advertise the process, but the people in branch pointed me to the right place and the process was no fuss.
So, no, you do not have the same legal protection as Section 75, but it is always worth a try.
> The Section 75 protections mean Brits who are credit-worthy tend to pay for large purchases on a [credit] card even if they intend to pay it off immediately.
And Visa and Mastercard's global zero liability provisions protect everybody with a debit card, so de facto the difference is no longer relevant.
That said, some banks are pretty bad at making use of their dispute rights with the networks. I've seen several German issuers actually refuse to file "service not provided" disputes in case of a large airline bankruptcy a few years ago. (German bankruptcy managers can be somewhat intimidating rhetorically, but fortunately their personal opinions have no bearing on banking/payment laws.)
There's no reason Section 75 protections couldn't be extended to debit cards, except that in the mid-1970s banks were lobbying very hard for credit cards to become more legitimised and S75 was the successful result.
The banks took on a little bit of risk and in return unlocked a free money generator.
On the contrary debit cards are revenue-neutral or even loss-making for them
Italy is also super oriented on debit cards. People call them "credit card" because they don't know the difference, or even "Bancomat" which is the brand name of the most used Italian debit card network.
Italians don't really care about credit cards, they just want to pay with their "Bancomat" card.
It used to be like that in Germany, it changed quite a bit. My debit card now is refused more often than my master card when I’m in Germany. I do tend to stay in large cities and not in the country side though, so my perspective is not a statistic.
But it definitely changed massively during Covid. Before Covid shops refusing _any_ card where still common (again, large cities is my spectrum) and debit card were accepted vastly more often than credit card.
Debit cards would still be used a lot more commonly than credit cards in Ireland. The UK is, I think, slightly different, due to a slightly unusual situation with disputes.
Some providers in the UK issue debit cards with limited interest-free overdraft and charge back features. So they are basically credit cards if you squint your eyes enough.
India has about a billion debit cards, but people mostly use them for ATM cash withdrawals, if that (banks used to give them by default during account opening, but have stopped this since UPI came into the picture). Only a single-digit percentage of people use credit cards, but they use them often and for relatively high-value transactions. The rewards game in the credit card space is slowly but surely reaching US levels, and they are associated more with stability and credit-worthiness since banks don't hand them out like candy, and India is, until recently, a debt-averse nation to revolve balances.
Mostly people use UPI, which is equivalent to debit cards given that amounts go directly from one bank to another. But UPI also supports some credit cards and lines, so there's that.
I’m not sure what the justification is, but I assume it’s some flavor of “so index fund holders don’t miss out on returns”.
It’s crooked because index inclusion drives massive flows at any price. SpaceX understands this and with so much money on the table probably exerted influence (maybe the big AI players contributed too).
Passive funds don’t care about price (quite the opposite, they reward higher market caps in a feedback loop).
But with an IPO, you’re supposed to let the market have some time to find the right price.
Not to mention the changes related to profitability rules etc.
Agree with this sentiment. However, I think the S&P 500 fudged the rule to 6 months which I believe adequately straddles the line between 1. provides time for price discovery and 2. includes a large piece of the market that would otherwise be included if not for the seasoning cutoff.
Agree with you entirely with respect to other indexes including earlier than 6 months.
Not that this is the perfect fix, but at least for sci-fi books you can usually look the Hugo Award winners[0] for ones that are solid. Not all of them are my cup of tea, but I have found that I definitely love some of the series that are found there. I'm sure there are other award types per genre that could help point you to some as well. Not that these can't be gamed, or sponsored or whatever, but at least it is a good starting point that is (¿maybe?) less prone to bot bias campaigns.
The Hugo and Nebula winners (and shortlists, do not forget those) aren't perfect, but they're almost always worth a look. Pretending that they're total garbage is doing yourself a disservice.
Wow, I hadn't heard about the fraud in 2024, which I looked up in response to your comment. That's troubling to say the least.
Bias, though, is going to be inevitable and the Hugos are going to represent the taste of the Worldcon voters. It seems like overall there's been a happy confluence for awhile now between their taste and general sf taste.
I've discovered three of my favorite contemporary sf authors through recent Hugos: Ann Leckie, Arkady Martine, and Tamsyn Muir. I've read other recent nominees where I was unmoved or even questioned their inclusion.
I've also read a decent selection of historical winners, by no means exhaustive or even the majority, and the worst was without a doubt Hominids by Robert J. Sawyer.
I strongly support this! For the last few years, I've been signing up as a Hugo voter, and read a bunch of great stuff that I otherwise would have missed. Sometimes the best books are a bit divisive, but still make the shortlist. (Saint of Bright Doors, for example...)
Exactly. The 60 and 70 year olds I spend time with, women especially (not a dig, but an observation), are just as addicted to facebook as the Instagram / TikTok crowd are to those platforms.
There is a hypothesis that dealers disincentivized salespeople from selling EVs due to a lower expected amount of service department revenue in the future. I work in the industry close enough to get a whiff of that and I never heard anything more than speculation.
I did this, and yeah google maps is all but unusable without color, that and the camera takes some getting used to.
I'm on an iPhone, but what ended up doing was creating a shortcut that toggles the phone to grayscale and back, and then having two automations, one for when I open any of the apps I actually want color in (maps, camera, photos, etc) that toggles grayscale off and then another automation to toggle grayscale back on when I close any of those same apps.
The option is located in Settings > Accessibility >Display & Text Size > Color Filters
It isn't perfect, but it works most of the time (I also added the shortcut to the back of the home screen so if it is off or I need one-off color I can just toggle it manually).
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