Hacker News Board Hacker News, browsed like a classic message board
Live data from Hacker News

Plastc will cease operations and will not fulfill any pre-orders

plastc.com

Post reply on HN
Print view View original

161–168 of 168 posts

Re: Plastc will cease operations and will not fulfill any pre-orders

#161

Post by MandieD »

chrisseaton wrote: post #51
egeozcan wrote: post #38

Earlier quoted context omitted.

What I don't understand is the need for multiple credit cards. I have a bank card (an EC-card) and I haven't used my credit-card since a month (other than automatic transactions).

Why would you ever use a EC card instead of a credit card? Credit card companies literally pay you to use their cards. Why turn down that money? I carry two credit cards because one is American Express and pays me more but fewer places accept it, so I have a backup Visa that pays me a bit less but everywhere accepts it.

A lot of merchants, like small hotels and restaurants, in Germany and Austria flat out won't take credit cards, because of the expense. They often will take EC cards and have the chip-and-PIN readers for it.

Americans never believe this until they've made a frantic run to an ATM after hosting a big dinner out or when they want to check out of that charming Gasthaus in a ski town.

When I first got over here in 2004, Media Markt (large electronics chain) didn't take credit cards, but did take EC-cards.

Re: Plastc will cease operations and will not fulfill any pre-orders

#162

Post by randrews »

phreeza wrote: post #158
randrews wrote: post #100

Earlier quoted context omitted.

That's what caused me to get stopped by the police my first day in Berlin a few years ago. I wanted to go to a board game store, so I looked one up on Google in the hotel lobby, walked to a u-bahn station, paid a couple euros for a ticket, walked downstairs and got on a train. And promptly got pulled off the train at the next stop for not paying. They were very understanding when I explained I had only been in the co…

FWIW the police does not perform ticket checks in Berlin. Traditionally it was done by employees of the public transport company and now increasingly by third party contractors.

It might have been some security guard thing, I don't remember. It was a few years ago.

Re: Plastc will cease operations and will not fulfill any pre-orders

#163

Post by thaumasiotes »

robjan wrote: post #109
thaumasiotes wrote: post #73

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Maximum fare?? The fine for fare evasion should be well above the maximum fare.

In London, the barriers automatically charge the maximum fare if you forget to touch in or out of the system. It helps because you can jump the barrier to get into the system but you never know if ticket inspectors/security will be present at the station where you plan on alighting. The penalty for being caught jumping the barrier is significantly higher.

Caltrain (the heavily dysfunctional system serving a minor portion of the San Francisco Bay Area) is similar, but a little less convenient --

Tag in and forget to tag out, you pay the maximum fare.

Forget to tag in, hope you don't get checked. There is no option to tag out without having tagged in. (Although I've seen this happen to someone, and he was just given a warning.)

Get checked without having tagged in, pay $400, which is about 30 times the maximum fare.

Re: Plastc will cease operations and will not fulfill any pre-orders

#164

Post by thaumasiotes »

defen wrote: post #85
thaumasiotes wrote: post #72

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> having many credit cards is a complete pain to manage, because for each card you need to [...] change the address when you move Why? I did that once, and it was a huge pain. But the cards work just as well no matter what they think your address of record is. Now I just don't change it.

So you use your old address as your billing address? Aren't you worried about the new resident of your old address receiving official communications intended for you?

No, because that is my parents.

If I was worried, I'd tell the payment cards to stop sending me mail.

Re: Plastc will cease operations and will not fulfill any pre-orders

#165

Post by Cpoll »

thaumasiotes wrote: post #77
Cpoll wrote: post #34

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> It's nice to have one card as a backup, and some hardcore churners / points collectors are going to want 5 or 6 cards and use different cards for different categories... but they're real niches, it's not something that a mainstream, mass market consumer is going to want to manage. I don't think this is the case. I think the average person has several credit cards (and is probably in the red on all of them). On the…

> one that waives the foreign currency conversion fee I have a credit card for precisely this purpose (it's also general-purpose cash back). It's not as useful as you might expect -- most places in China that accept foreign credit cards do so only through an agreement with a chinese bank that imposes a ridiculously disadvantageous exchange rate. (But there's no "conversion fee" -- the bank generously bills you in USD…

I use that card for online shopping, where cash isn't an alternative. It's a fair point that exchange rates vary.

Re: Plastc will cease operations and will not fulfill any pre-orders

#166

Post by djanatan »

sbarre wrote: post #153
flashman wrote: post #122

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Even though I have a contactless card, I still prefer cash because it reminds me how much I'm spending. It's all too easy to tap away $40 several times a month and wonder where it all went.

I found the opposite was true.. Having cash in my wallet meant I didn't know where it got spent (not specifically in bars though, just in general so maybe we're talking about different things). With tap + debit, I can track all my individual transactions via services like Mint, plus my bank sends me an email on every transaction that happens to my accounts, so I have redundant logging of where all my money goes.

I find that both of you are right and this is why I'm always broke.

Re: Plastc will cease operations and will not fulfill any pre-orders

#168

Post by throwanem »

DonHopkins wrote: post #114
throwanem wrote: post #9

dang, sctb, et al: Please update the title to reflect the correct name of this (former) company, which is "Plastc" (no 'i'). Thanks!

It should have been obvious they were doomed to fail when they couldn't afford to buy a penultimate vowel for their name.

They sold it for a few million in VC funding.
Post reply on HN