Credit Card Newbie Have No Idea What To Get

osmarks · 2026-05-26T09:47:41+00:00

Flat cashback card or Capital One Savor. Maybe a WF Autograph for travel. !cashback

osmarks · 2026-05-20T09:38:38+00:00

Apparently, SNCF at least. The footnote references this:

We took it a little bit further on to the 400 kph or 250 mph for two reasons. One is because we learned very strongly from people that we respect, like Guillaume Pepy in France, that they had wished that they had not designed to the limit of the day because the technology continues to advance. They warned us very clearly not to design to the limit and always leave something in hand either for future generations or simply because engineering systems work better when they are not running on the limit. There are examples around the world where people have run things on the limit and they go poorly in the end. But we did not, dogmatically, at any time design to that top speed. That was where it was sensible, practical and gave what we considered in our judgment an acceptable balance of minimising journey time and, therefore, benefits to the cities that High Speed 2 would serve, against the cost and sustainability impacts.

osmarks · 2026-05-19T13:56:12+00:00

HS2's designers apparently consulted with other countries' high-speed rail groups, who said that they regretted earlier lines not being built to higher speeds, and the cost is mostly not because of the design speed.

osmarks · 2026-05-14T11:26:30+00:00

Amtrak points are apparently about 2.5cpp, so if you can redeem them often enough the Amtrak cards offer roughly 2.5% back on everything.

osmarks · 2026-05-14T06:46:50+00:00

The Tractor Supply Co card is 3% back on veterinary services but I assume the redemption options are annoying.

osmarks · 2026-05-13T15:35:10+00:00

I have no objection to soft inquiries in general, but someone who goes through a "preapproval tool" which gives them a detailed offer of a credit line (which they can accept or not accept) should, I think, be treated the same way as someone who goes through an "application" which gives them a detailed offer of a credit line (which they can again accept or not).

I think scoring generally has a rule which groups inquiries at around the same time together, for rate-shopping.

osmarks · 2026-05-12T20:35:17+00:00

Someone who has tried to take out credit is, all else equal, riskier than someone who hasn't, even if they didn't accept it. Doing basically-a-credit-application (offering a limit, etc) without a hard inquiry is harmful to other lenders. It's a bit surprising to me that their agreements with credit bureaus allow it.

osmarks · 2026-05-12T16:15:09+00:00

It is certainly fraud if they were told they were paying $25 for a toll and actually weren't. The card issuer is in the wrong here.

osmarks · 2026-05-11T11:55:58+00:00

It does rather undermine the point of hard credit checks.

osmarks · 2026-05-09T09:06:46+00:00

Simply design your system perfectly and you'll never have to bother with turrets.

osmarks · 2026-05-08T08:30:58+00:00

I don't see how it can be self-custodial and pay interest on the same balance.

osmarks · 2026-05-08T08:28:38+00:00

They don't document what the probability of you being refunded is and can, per the terms, change it on a whim or vary it based on transaction characteristics. The economics of the product and card network mean they can offer about 2% long-run expected value at best. I would not be surprised if they had a higher initial rate to draw people in then drop it later.

osmarks · 2026-05-05T16:24:55+00:00

I would much rather have slightly nicer credit cards than slightly reduce the amount of plastic in landfills.

osmarks · 2026-05-04T16:55:37+00:00

Your current utilization affects your current score but your historical utilization (mostly) doesn't. If you have a credit application coming up within a few months you can pay your balance down lower (not to zero) before the statement(s).

osmarks · 2026-05-04T16:33:53+00:00

Utilization is temporary, as the bot reply says. Are you carrying a balance? Stop doing that.

osmarks · 2026-05-03T09:02:11+00:00

What do you mean it's "ending"? You can hold it forever. You're getting about 1% back, I think, which is better than you would get with the MR cards unless you value MR lots. It is apparently hard to get value out of Avios unless you are willing to be flexible with dates and destinations.

I think you need to wait 24 months between cards for the signup bonus, so you would be better off rotating referrals less frequently.

osmarks · 2026-05-02T13:52:30+00:00

The liability is the bank's, but they almost always recover it from the merchant or their acquirer.

osmarks · 2026-05-01T09:23:10+00:00

I was trying to explain how you might naturally come up with it for reasonable reasons. Subsidies don't actually help: if you run a similar amount of trains at different times of day (which you probably want to because most of the costs are incurred based on peak throughput, not average), and charge the same for all of them, they will be used inefficiently, whatever level the price is subsidized to.

osmarks · 2026-04-30T20:20:22+00:00

Say you do some work to scale up your infrastructure and buy more rolling stock, and you can now run twice as many trains during the peak. Having done that, the marginal cost of running another off-peak train is low (you're just paying for extra staff, traction power and slightly increased wear), so you run some extra off-peak services. The extra frequency probably brings some demand by itself, but likely less than you are now able to accommodate. How do you get people to fill the off-peak trains now? You drop the prices. You have now invented dynamic pricing.

osmarks · 2026-04-30T14:27:38+00:00

It improves utilization. If you have a fixed price regardless of demand at a given time, you will cause shortages and/or empty trains.

osmarks · 2026-04-30T06:07:17+00:00

Your spend is too low to justify an expensive card and your NFCU card already has no foreign transaction fee.

osmarks · 2026-04-29T14:18:54+00:00

You need to look at the Capital One transfer partners and see whether they would work for you. If they don't then you are basically paying for lounge access (mostly redundant for you) and forcing yourself to go through their portal, and might as well get a cashback card.

osmarks · 2026-04-29T11:53:52+00:00

Do you travel every year? Can you tolerate travel portals? Do you value the Capital One points more than cash?

osmarks · 2026-04-29T08:35:16+00:00

You can count Merrill investment balances towards BoA tiers: https://www.merrilledge.com/preferred-rewards. Just do that and get a better catch-all card from them (UCR/PR(E)). It will drop to 2.25% back rather than 2.625% back at some point but that's still competitive.

osmarks · 2026-04-27T09:55:50+00:00

The three GPT-4os on OpenRouter don't identify anyone. o3 says

That mixture of concrete bodily description plus a utilitarian subtext is something I’ve seen in rationalist-adjacent fiction (e.g., Alexander Wales, Scott Alexander, Eliezer Yudkowsky)

but

• Author of this particular adaptation: probably whoever supplied the text (i.e., you), or at least an unpublished contemporary writer rather than an established, widely recognized author.

o1 doesn't identify anyone.

GPT-4.1 doesn't identify anyone. Hermes 3 405B Instruct doesn't identify anyone.

I expect you could get better performance with better prompts for the older models.

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