Well and honestly most of War and Peace is pretty easy and pleasant to read as well (I'm setting aside the philosophy-of-history stuff) -- there's just so much of it.
What is a "large company" in this context? My employer is on track to run about $5m through Stripe this year, which will be our fourth full year using Stripe. Our first year we did about $2.75m. This year I've been getting occasional emails from a Stripe sales rep for the first time, which suggests that we've crossed some sort of threshold...
Your stripe transaction cost is probably around the advertised fee, 2.9% + 30¢
With an actual merchant account you can probably get closer to 2% or at least 2.5% + 25-30¢
At 5 million in transaction revenue, a .5% decrease would be 25k a year. You can probably get a larger decrease depending on how much risk your company's business has.
Stripe's sales rep might be contacting your company because you've hit the threshold where it's probably worth getting a merchant account, and they want to see if you're considering leaving to give you a discounted rate to stay. You're pretty much in Stripe's retention department because of your volume. It is definitely worthwhile at this point for your company to shop around for a merchant account. Some don't even have application fees if you're not a high risk business. At the least they can get an idea of how much they could save, and use that to leverage lower fees from Stripe.
I would still consider trying for a processing gateway that handles all the card transmission, though, even at a slightly higher margin. Handling the card at all means you need PCI Compliance. At your revenue you're probably PCI Level 2 or 3, which only requires a self-assessment questionnaire (that is lengthy but doable), and a quarterly vulnerability scan. At 6 Million transactions a year, you'll be PCI Level 1, which means you'll need an auditor to come in and look at your processes and policies.
Stripe will offer interchange plus model so you are actually paying the real interchange rate + whatever they tack on for settlement probably 25 basis points and some fixed rate of 0.05 a transaction. You shouldn’t be paying a blended rate if you’re doing significant volume.
If you’re using a gateway, there are some that Handle tokenization so you never have to touch the PANs and you don’t have to worry about PCI levels and audits. There’s no reason your systems should be touching PANs unless you’re really large and using multiple payment processors for scalability and redundancy like if you need to process a million transactions in a few hours.
Maybe "asking 'why'" isn't the right way to express it. Perhaps what the OP was really after here was a concrete illustration of the formula, rather than a rigorous derivation of the formula from first principles.
There are many concrete geometrical illustrations of fundamental concepts in algebra, but most people aren't even aware that they exist.
The niece's comment, oddly, both points to this and glosses over it. You don't teach a child multiplication by only forcing them to memorize times tables. You also show them stacks of coins, etc. But we do teach children algebra by only forcing them to memorize symbolic procedures. Meanwhile Book 2 of Euclid is free online, or very cheap from Dover.
> there ARE points in a student's academic path where they HAVE TO memorize stuff and do rote operations like the multiplication tables.
Sure, but imagine learning multiplication tables without having any idea what it means to "multiply"; literally just memorizing sequences of symbols, without ever looking at piles of coins or whatever.
Multiplication is so basic that this is hard to imagine, but I'm sure that, say, difference-of-squares rules feel like this to most beginning algebra students -- and for most people that probably never changes.
I first encountered difference-of-squares in late middle school, memorized the procedure and used it handily through twelfth grade, and had no idea that there was a visualizable geometric basis to it until I read Book 2 of Euclid's Elements in college.
> I first encountered difference-of-squares in late middle school, memorized the procedure and used it handily through twelfth grade, and had no idea that there was a visualizable geometric basis to it until I read Book 2 of Euclid's Elements in college.
Many mathematicians would disagree with your characterization. For them, the difference of squares is an abstract concept in algebra, and the geometric interpretation is merely a manifestation of it that just happens to work in some domain.
As an example, the formula is equally valid for complex numbers, but I doubt you'd get there from Euclid's. No doubt some geometric interpretation can be found for that as well, but then I'd pick some other algebraic field where it's true and you'd have to search yet again for a geometric interpretation.
Fair enough. Maybe I should have just said that it's possible to give concrete illustrations of basic algebraic concepts, and that doing this would probably help some students learn algebra, and might help others retain it.
But for whatever reason this is generally skipped in middle/high-school algebra.
I'm torn. I think it's always good to show these - it certainly makes the subject more interesting!
At the same time, if one is to use algebra for future studies/work, one really needs to be able to manipulate those symbols in the abstract, without feeling a need for some deeper understanding. I can see teachers not wanting to deal with "But what does that really mean?" for every detail in algebra.
This goes to the question of why anything other than basic arithmetic is compulsory. The famous 10th-grader's whine "what are we going to use this for", which infuriated my own 10th-grade Algebra 2 teacher, and even made me roll my eyes at the time, is actually a fair question when algebra is taught as abstractly as it typically is.
I think you've explained exactly why here -- because the emphasis on abstract manipulation presupposes that this is useful for something that we need to get on to. But that's just false for almost all students. And yet they're required to take the class to get a diploma.
My vote would be to treat any math beyond basic arithmetic as a liberal art, and do a lot less of it in compulsory curricula, but spend a lot more time on deep understanding. This would benefit everyone. The current approach pretends that everyone in the class is going to be a certain kind of engineer or scientist some day.
I suspect most of us have a serious imbalance in our lives between productive work, leisure, and recreation. See Louis Kelso and Mortimer Adler's book "The Capitalist Manifesto" for a rich discussion of these topics. They define 'leisure' somewhat counter-intuitively as work, but the sort of work that elevates the mind or advances the common good -- as opposed to the productive work one is required to do in order to earn a living.
Leisure for them is very different from recreation, which is a kind of rest -- think board games, light reading, hiking, Netflix, etc. Everyone needs all three of these things in their lives (leisure, productive work, and recreation) but we often get them confused or end up overemphasizing one to the neglect of the others.
I wonder if OP is saying something similar or at least resonant with this -- basically that we shouldn't treat everything in our lives like productive work.
This is an interesting take on conservatism. I suppose it must be a fairly common take among people who consider themselves progressive, and helps makes sense of some things I've observed recently.
I consider myself generally conservative but would sum up my outlook more along the lines of "change isn't necessarily/automatically good" than "the past was right". Chesterton's Fence etc.
Nobody thinks that change is inherently good. Change is a product of time, not a moral dimension.
I don't consider myself a progressive per se, but I think their framing would be something like this: change, if not good in itself, frequently begets opportunities to make things better.
Similarly I would doubt that anyone actually thinks that the past was good simply because it came before the present. The desire to return to "the way things were" is born of a critique of specific aspects of "the way things are", combined with a sense that tradition is likely to embody hard-earned wisdom that may not be immediately apparent or perfectly defensible by abstract argument.
>In the early seventeenth century, for example, the French Jesuit missionary Pierre Biard complained that the Wabanaki did not have to work hard enough to feed themselves ... “Had he ever gone fishing…? Gathered nuts, or berries deep in thorns and mosquitoes? Ever tracked a deer through snow, skinned a rabbit…?”
Huh. Seems probable that an early 17th-century missionary to North America knew a little bit about roughing it, maybe even more than the OP's poet... who also seems to have missed his point. Here's something he actually said:
"They are never in a hurry. Quite different from us, who can never do anything without hurry and worry; worry, I say, because our desire tyrannizes over us and banishes peace from our actions." [1]
