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scarab

15 karma · joined December 26, 2014

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scarab··on Stripe is PayPal circa 2010
This is so true.

PaymentIntents and SetupIntents make setting up a basic subscription Billing interface incredibly painful. The documentation is awful and spread across multiple sections of the Help pages so you have to read multiple articles to piece together how it's supposed to work in your specific scenario.

Even understanding when a PaymentIntent is recommended vs when a SetupIntent is needed takes some doing.

And don't get me started on trying to understand whether I need to use the confirmCardPayment or the confirmPayment or confirmCardSetup etc etc functions.

scarab··on Shaving is an example of how consumer products extract more money
I found that wiping down Gillette cartridge blades with Isopropyl (rubbing) alcohol after use significantly improves their longevity, specifically how long they keep a sharp edge for.
scarab··on Stripe migrates Stripe Subscriptions users to more expensive Stripe Billing
This is fantastic thank you; I thought our customer card data was effectively held hostage in Stripe so the only way to move customers to a new system was to wait until their credit cards expired and were updated.

We're planning to migrate away from Stripe after this latest in a line of price increases.

scarab··on Now Bigger Than eBay, Shopify Sets Its Sights on Amazon
Great points.

Re: "Keep in mind there's a review process though" - My experience of this is that Shopify wouldn't approve my App because there were existing Apps in their store which they thought were too similar.

So make sure it's sufficiently differentiable to existing Apps (no, I don't know what that means either!)

scarab··on Britain's Next Megaproject: A Coast-To-Coast Forest
Whilst it's true there's not much of what you'd call 'wilderness' in the UK - it's a small island after all where you are never more than 70 miles from the sea, surprisingly only 1% of the UK is built on and only 7% is considered an urban area.

Woodlands currently occupy 12.6% of the UK land area which is almost double the urban area.

scarab··on UK launches program to explore removal of greenhouse gases from the atmosphere
Interestingly, only 1% of the UK is built on:

"The urban landscape accounts for 10.6% of England, 1.9% of Scotland, 3.6% of Northern Ireland and 4.1% of Wales. Put another way, that means almost 93% of the UK is not urban"

And of that 7% that is designated urban, a large proportion is gardens, parks, allotments, sports pitches etc.

Woodland (i.e. Forests) is 12.6% of the UK which is double the size of designated urban areas even if green spaces are excluded.

The majority of the UK is enclosed farmland. So to significantly increase the forestation of the UK, you would need to repurpose farmland.

From http://www.bbc.com/news/uk-18623096

scarab··on Pingdom reduces many free plan features
Pretty disappointing to Pingdom cripple the free plan like this without grandfathering existing free accounts. This is on top of them pushing the prices higher for the rest of their plans over the last year and relentlessly spamming you with messages inside their web interface to try and get you onto a paid plan. It certainly doesn’t inspire me with any confidence to move to a paid plan with the knowledge that they will continue this sort of behaviour in future.

Anyone got a recommendation for alternative services that are similarly capable in the free tier?