I want to mention another infection happening at payment terminals and ATMs if you're using your credit card in a foreign country: You get a message saying "Would you like to pay in your own currency? Click [Accept] or [Decline]", and there's fine print that says there's a 12-15% currency conversion markup.
To give a concrete example, if you're an American traveling in Brazil withdrawing cash from an ATM or buying something for BRL 500, you'll be presented with an option to pay BRL 500 or pay just US$110.58 in your own currency (with text saying conversion includes 15%).
But the typical American (and Canadian) credit card adds at most 2.5% to the Visa or Mastercard exchange rate, which is at most 0.5% higher than the interbank rate. So basically by clicking the wrong button, you're paying an extra 12% to the payment processor. In the example above, your credit card would have charged you about US$99.04 had you declined the conversion, and saved you $10.
I can't imagine a situation where it's to your benefit to accept the "conversion service" they're offering. I wonder if the payment processor is kicking back some of the profit back to the merchant because this swindle is spreading everywhere.
The worst part is that a couple of people that I've tried to warn don't get it. They still think that they should pick US$ (or whatever their own currency is) because that's what their credit card uses.
Some are even worse than this. When I was in Portugal, the machine said "Press (1) for GBP. Press (2) for EUR.", then on the next screen, after you select "(2) for EUR", it says "Rate will Apply. Please confirm. (1) Accept conversion (2) Reject Conversion". If you select "Accept conversion", it overrides your currency decision and you pay in GBP with their markup fee...
I saw the same in an ATM in Greece. The first screen wanted me to let them convert the currency (at a 20% markup), I declined, and the second screen said "are you sure? You might be charged a lot" and had "accept" and "decline" where the small print said "do you want us to convert anyway?".
This happened to me, but it was the merchant that clicked it...
I inserted my card, and then was reading the text and choice that popped up on the screen, and while I was reading it trying to decide which I should click, the merchant grabbed the scanner and clicked the accept...
Of course I got a charge notification on my mobile app immediately and noticed that it was way higher than it should have been, so then I had to go back to them and get them to refund the transaction so we could do it again which took forever and a manager etc etc.
Currency conversion is not only incredibly fraught with traps, but believe me, even for very intelligent and research-savvy individuals, if you're not a professional in this area, you'll struggle to see all the pitfalls and still fall for them. I don't consider myself stupid, but I spent several days seriously researching it, and ultimately, after being exploited by several new tricks, I gave up. I consider those losses as a part of travel expenses and avoid letting it amplify my losses, that ruining my travel. PayPal is even more blatant fraud. You never know how much money is left after a transfer or withdrawal until you're surprised, and then they'll say they mentioned it in some tens of thousands of words of agreement that they would deduct this amount.
On the positive side, it seems that Wise must block it because I never see the DCC "choice" when using a Wise card.
As a negative point, I've noticed that AirBnB, which used to use reasonable conversion rates, has just recently started to use exorbitant currency conversion and not allow you to pay in the local currency of the country you're traveling to (so you can let your own credit card do the conversion at a lower rate). I.e., if you try to book a property in Brazil in BRL (literally clicking on the price to pay in BRL), the charge will nevertheless go through in USD (or whatever currency is your own) with AirBnb doing the conversion at the rate they choose.
Aliexpress also shows prices in one currency but then refuses to take payment in that currency and does their own conversion with an unfavourable rate... Seems to be allowed with some combinations of delivery country and currency but not others.
I have a European currency (not Euro) and I think being charged their USD price is better than my local currency's.. I pay with Revolut and what Revolut charges me (taking my local currency and converting it to USD), is lower than what AliExpress would charge me if I had chosen to pay them in my currency.
So they charge you for an amount different to advertised? Tell your bank. You might get a refund and at least they'll have the complaint on file so the next victim might get a refund. If enough people complain and AirBNB don't fix it, AirBNB gets banned from accepting cards.
It is usually an option in your bank's app. It depends on the bank though, obviously. If it's not there, you have to be vigilant while using your card (always select the local currency when given the option).
I checked and it doesn't look like any UK banks have this option - at least I looked at about 5 different banks websites and all have pages suggesting you always select to pay in local currency but none of them have any information on disabling this behaviour
Gemini confirms it's not a thing, and not really possible (the terminals just detect the country from the card number)
I don’t know a single bank in Europe that provides this option
Edit: Perplexity says this:
> cards cannot block DCC offers because the merchant terminal identifies your card’s country of origin from the card number and offers DCC accordingly. Always manually decline at payment to let the card handle conversion at better rates
My bank (mBank in Poland) has per card options for declining various types of transactions, among others: made using the magnetic strip, with DCC, with added ATM surcharges.
The bank probably cannot disable the "service" offered by the terminal but seems to get enough information to be able to decline the transaction.
A few years ago I was checking out of a reasonably up-scale hotel in Barcelona early in the morning.
They punch numbers into one of those wireless hand terminals. I tap my card, enter the pin and then before I can react to what the screen is now saying they've punched the 'Accept Conversion' button and submit it. By the time I realise what has happened, it's too late and has started printing the reciept.
I insisted they reverse it and redo the transaction without that - the staff didn't understand and didn't care they'd cost me another 10-15%. It really adds up for a week long stay.
I once asked a cashier about this and they said it saved me money. They said representatives from the large national bank had done a presentation and noted how this is the best option for foreigners. I think they truly believe they are being helpful. Closest thing to legalized robbery.
I had the exact same thing happen to me at a hotel in China. I could not get the person at the checkin desk to understand the problem so I ended up having to just eat the extra cost. Very frustrating, it was not a small amount of money.
Well, it’s an unwise strategy to use on me if they’re feeling pressed for time. I will get enjoyment from putting my foot down for as long as is needed to reach a resolution.
That’s a 20+ minute decision they just made to try to save a few seconds.
PayPal does this too. They will offer to do the currency conversion at an outrageous rate. Not quite 15%, though always substantially more than Mastercard’s rate of the day.
Amazon does something like this too, though I'm not sure of the percent. I just know that every time I select to pay in dollars, any change in delivery options will select it back to pay in euros, where the bank is.
I genuinely don't know if this is good or not, but the UIs insistence on reverting back to another currency after my initial selection leads me to believe that my initial selection hits them the hardest the most
Amazon.com does add a ~2% "currency conversion guarantee" fee when paying in EUR, on top of whatever conversion they use. I imagine that the average cost of that "service" to them is closer to 0%.
The even worse part about PayPal is that they have a whole system of nonsensical fees to fall back to when you inevitably figure out how to evade the obvious ones. For instance, sidestepping their dynamic currency conversion by temporarily changing which currency they bill on your card (which by the way is rate limited to only a few times per month) will result in another "non-foreign transaction but with recipient in foreign country" fee appearing, covering the inherent costs of converting German US dollars to American US dollars or whatever. They will at least hide the fee from you for business transactions, but the merchant still has to pay it.
That’s 100% a US problem. Never had this issue in the EU, PayPal etc are obligated to offer the option to “just bill in transaction currency and let the card issuer handle conversion etc” without fees.
Payment terminals used to have good UX, they all clearly showed you the price when paying. Tills had displays with the price facing the customer which were clearly visible.
Now traditional POS terminals have been replaced with tap and go devices by the latest fintech, non of them show the price to the customer by design. Instead you tap a small puck and you hope the price charged is the one asked only to find a transaction fee on top when later check your balance.
It's a deliberate design choice to withhold showing the price on these devices. It's cheap to add a small LCD panel to them, the technology previously existed and still exists however the choice have been made not to.
I was in awe of an old vending machine I saw in the Caribbean recently. I didn't want anything but I spent a few seconds just pushing buttons to check prices. The segmented display read out the price the very instant I touched the button for the item. There was no perceptible delay for a bloated software stack running on some cheap processor that waits for too many bits over a crappy cellular internet connection. Everything needed was right there, between the hard-coded logic and me.
> Instead you tap a small puck and you hope the price charged is the one asked only to find a transaction fee on top when later check your balance.
I'm sorry, but it's a mandatory knee-jerk response here: "Is this something I'm too European to undestand?"
Even the the smallest, crappiest devices are required to have a line LCD to show the final price. Goes to show that consumer protection minimums do really set the bar for eventual exploitation.
In Australia, a lot of places only have a "Square Reader" on the counter where you pay. i.e. cafes, coffee shops, convenience stores, market stalls.
Terminals do exist with full displays but they are less common, mainly if you go to a restaurant as they have options for tipping on the display.
Just looking at the Square website the "Square Reader" is $69 vs $329 for the "Square Terminal". This may be part of the reason cafes etc prefer them given tight overheads.
Yes, I'm referring to European directive mandating final price displays on terminals.
I think this would be the simplest reader one can legally use in Europe
https://www.sumup.com/en-au/air-nfc-card-reader (although European market sites do not even list this model anymore)
I think your retailer has misconfigured their setup. Everywhere I tap against a puck, it is also accompanied by a screen. The puck is always just a plugin module as opposed to being integrated on the terminal.
At least in Brazil, it was very rare. In the last 3-4 years, it's almost every time you pay. And you have to grab and hold the payment terminal (especially if you're using tap / contactless payment) so the cashier or waiter, trying to be helpful, doesn't click the wrong button and cost you 15%.
Some places they're insistent that you must do currency conversion or the payment won't work. Makes me think the merchant must be getting a chunk of that profit and telling their staff to accept the conversion...
As others have said, currency conversion has been a well-known "scam" for as long as I can remember. I'm sure Martin Lewis has been talking about this since at least the early 2000s in some form.
Here in Greece it always asks "Euro or USD?". Most merchants know to press Euro, the rest ask me. I think I've maybe had one merchant press USD by accident in ten years or so.
Exactly, who has more incentive to rip you off, your bank or some random merchant/payment processor/local bank that you are probably never going to interact with again either way.
They seemed to have given up on this in some areas. I don't think they asked me this once during my visit to France in October. This included Paris and smaller towns.
When you think about it, it's just another "Tourist tax" of which are are many. Other times you just get quoted a different base price as a tourist vs. native - openly or not.
Also, every time I visit a new airport in the US, it comes to mind how damn near every medium-sized city has a sprawling, fairly clean, air-conditioned airport, with shops and seating, usually open 24 hours. The Amtrak stations in those same cities, if they exist, are usually one-room buildings that close for most of the day. The Greyhound station is nowadays usually just a spot on the side of the road.
Why the disparity? I guess there are just that many more people flying than taking the bus or train? (Built-in security and a generally richer clientele certainly help too, I'm sure)
"Yeah what are we comparing the airport to, home? Plenty of airports are amazing and beautiful.
"
The only thing they compare favourably with are shopping centres. A horrible place to spend several hours or more. Noisy, expensive, usually sterile and ugly. Not my idea of fun. Little or no natural beauty (I gather Singapore and some others have tried to turn this around.)
I have yet to enjoy a train station or bus station more. They are smelly, polluted, greasy, full of pickpockets and worse, usually no places to nap safely without a lookout, and horrendous toilet situations. Maybe there are a few crown jewel stations in very wealthy places that are better than some airports in impoverished places but if you take location into account I doubt you'd be able to come up with many examples.
My guess is that it’s because there’s a lot of very negative comments about Brazil in that article. Trying to grade people for their opinions on a topic like that gets into dangerous territory.
Remember blogs on the old web when the author would plaster his name in a huge font on every page along with his photo, and have an extensive bio about himself and perhaps even his resume?
Well this author has gone to the opposite extreme: There isn't one shred of info that I can find about him. I liked his writings and was curious who he was in real life, but there's nothing. Stands on its own merits like Death Note, Bitcoin, or Truecrypt.
But you had the option of having an unlisted or unpublished phone number. To give one datapoint, in Los Angeles in the 1980s about half of all numbers were unlisted. I would expect that the unlisted rate was much higher in big cities like L.A. compared to the rest of the country.
What I find fascinating is that people paid for privacy. Yes, indeed, people paid several dollars extra per month to maintain an unlisted/unpublished phone number. Today very few people are willing to pay actual money for privacy.
What do you mean we can’t pay for privacy and it’s not an option at any cost? Just don’t use big tech services, you pay for them with your data. Use Threema instead, or similar. It is a paid service with focus on privacy.
> model drift driven by just small, seemingly unimportant changes to the prompt
What changes to the prompt are you referring to?
According the comment on the site, the prompt is the following:
Create HTML/CSS of an analog clock showing ${time}. Include numbers (or numerals) if you wish, and have a CSS animated second hand. Make it responsive and use a white background. Return ONLY the HTML/CSS code with no markdown formatting.
presumably the time is replaced with the actual current time at each generation. I wonder if they are actually generated every minute or if all 6480 permutations (720 minutes in a day * 9 llms) were generated and just show on a schedule
> Interviewer at Endpoints: You plan to potentially launch a generic GLP-1 in Canada and Brazil in 2026.
Looking at the original interview on Endpoints, Sandoz CEO Richard Saynor says this about Brazil:
In Brazil, the biggest prescribers are dentists. Everyone says, “Why dentists?” They do aesthetic work, and then you have your Botox, and then you want a bikini body. It’s behaving like an OTC consumer brand. Imagine selling this, rather than $300, at $50. Anybody over the age of 40 in Brazil will probably want to be on that.
But he doesn't explain how they got around the patents. Another comment on HN says they expire in July 2026, but can anyone explain why the patents expire so soon in Brazil?
I think that loophole has closed. If I recall correctly, compounding pharmacies were only allowed to do that as the US gov put the drug on a special list due to shortages. I believe they have removed it from this list (or will do shortly) and that pipeline will stop.
In Brazil, medicines lose patent protection 20 years after the original filing date.
The filing date was in 2006, so the patent expires in 2026.
But note that the patent was only granted in 2019, it took 13 years. They went to court last year, but the justice (as far as I know) has continued to follow the precedent that the original filing date applies.
So they went to the federal government to try to change the law, but the government has refused so far.
The INPI (Brazilian Patent Office) used to take a VERY long time to register/grant patents. It's faster now (about 4 years on average), but it's still slow.
But I'm seeing here that in the US it was 2017. So not that different from 2019 anyway.
PS: Brazil also have several local labs focused on generics, and besides this, there's also state-owned lab, Fiocruz, who makes vaccines and medicines as well, several of them, to distribute though SUS.
In Brazil by the constitution, everyone has the right of health, so if the public health care (SUS) don't distribute, you can sue the governament and get the medicine. So there's a big incentive for the governament to make patents expire as soon as possible to have generics and include on SUS.
e.g Fiocruz manufacture PrEP, and started now PrEP injection (Cabotegravir).
Patrick Winston also wrote a book about presentation and communication: Make It Clear: Speak and Write to Persuade and Inform. It was published a year after he passed away.
Several comments here mentioned shift work as a possible explanation.
The paper concedes that shift work is unhealthy[1] but claims that shift work doesn't explain their finding[2]. And their conclusion is "avoiding night light may be a promising approach for preventing cardiovascular diseases," but without telling us why. It's going to be fascinating if there's a mechanism by which sleeping with light can cause heart disease.
[1] "Evidence demonstrates higher risks of adverse cardiovascular events, coronary heart disease, heart failure, atrial fibrillation, and mortality due to cardiovascular disease in rotating shift workers."
[2] "Following separate adjustments for pre-existing diabetes, hypertension, high BMI, high cholesterol ratio, short, long, or inefficient sleep, and exclusion of shift workers, the relationships of night light with cardiovascular risks were attenuated but remained statistically significant for all outcomes except stroke."
> It's going to be fascinating if there's a mechanism by which sleeping with light can cause heart disease.
I suspect everyone in the field already knows the top-level answer: light at night blunts the output of the circadian pacemaker (SCN), with all sorts of downstream effects including control of various hormones. So the levels will be different with light at night. "at night" means biological night. If someone consistently sleeps on some schedule with bright enough light during their awake time, and it's dark during their sleep time, it's fine.
I'm not in the field. I read up on it at one point at a shallow level and talked to some researchers about it informally.
There's a discoverability problem with this tool because I've never heard of Fakespot or Mozilla Review Checker until today.
> Mozilla integrated Fakespot's technology directly into Firefox as the "Mozilla Review Checker" feature, making it easier than ever for users to verify product reviews without installing separate extensions.
If it was integrated directly into Firefox, it's funny that I don't recall ever seeing it. I wonder if it gets disabled if you set your security and privacy settings too high, or if you use the Firefox ESR versions (Extended Support Release).
To give a concrete example, if you're an American traveling in Brazil withdrawing cash from an ATM or buying something for BRL 500, you'll be presented with an option to pay BRL 500 or pay just US$110.58 in your own currency (with text saying conversion includes 15%).
But the typical American (and Canadian) credit card adds at most 2.5% to the Visa or Mastercard exchange rate, which is at most 0.5% higher than the interbank rate. So basically by clicking the wrong button, you're paying an extra 12% to the payment processor. In the example above, your credit card would have charged you about US$99.04 had you declined the conversion, and saved you $10.
I can't imagine a situation where it's to your benefit to accept the "conversion service" they're offering. I wonder if the payment processor is kicking back some of the profit back to the merchant because this swindle is spreading everywhere.
The worst part is that a couple of people that I've tried to warn don't get it. They still think that they should pick US$ (or whatever their own currency is) because that's what their credit card uses.