香港,中国

  • 7 Posts
  • 30 Comments
Joined 3 years ago
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Cake day: March 13th, 2022

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  • The founding fathers, in their infinite wisdom, designed the three branches of the government of the United States of America to have a series of checks and balances to protect their fragile republic from threats such as this. Now we all get to see it in action:

    The Judicial branch has ruled that Google is an illegal monopoly and should be broken up, but it doesn’t have the power to do so directly, it has to advise the Legislative and Executive branches to do it. However, the 4th and 5th branches of government - the CIA and the Lobbies - both want Google to remain intact. The CIA finds Google’s tech dominance extremely useful, and the Lobbies’ patrons make a lot of money from it.

    So, the Judicial branch advises the Legislative and Executive branches what they should do, but before they do anything the CIA and the Lobbies review the advice and then tell the Legislative and Executive branches what they will do, which in this case will probably be some massive (small for Google) fines.

    See? Checks and balances! The different moving parts all working together to ensure that the Government serves the people it was created to serve.



  • 👆👆 This

    Over the past several years Alipay and Wechat pay have gone from nowhere to everywhere in Hong Kong, and though I’ve gotten used to them for payments, my West-trained brain just kind of blanks out all of the other stuff in them as visual noise. But when I do open up one of those sub-apps out of idle curiousity, there’s nothing but benefits in there. It was a full year before I tapped on the icon called ‘bill payment’ and found I can use Alipay to pay for literally all my bills - utilities, services, everything except the Western parts of my life like Netflix and Xbox Game Pass. And it’s not like the banking systems’ autopay services where you give up control and let the (London-owned) bank and service decide whether you pay or not - if a subscription service decides you have to sit on hold for an hour to cancel your subscription manually through a phone call, you can just stiff them instead: the app will side with you, and the subscription is de facto cancelled unless they want to explain in small claims court why they have such a user-unfriendly unsubscribe procedure.

    Anyway that’s a long-winded way of saying that despite the wild bazaar vibe you get from those apps, they’re also extremely regulated in the public interest. The Government lets Alipay and Wechat make a fortune just by running those platforms on the understanding that if they step even a little out of line and leverage that privilege against the public, they’re done. And that includes transaction fees.

    Meanwhile Paypal is streamlined spotlessly but they take a fat chunk in transaction fees compared to the *checks notes* zero transaction fees that I’ve paid on Alipay. No transaction fees ever.


  • “Hey everyone, we found an upgrade to planned obsolescence: we call it planned obsolescence 2.0. Instead of designing hardware to break and require replacing after a few years, we’ll design the software to break every month! We’ll say it’s an upgrade. It’ll reduce our material costs and we can pass those savings on to the shareholder.”