Our central bank is going to release a platform called PIX. Financial institutions with more than 500.000 clients are required to implement it. Finally we are going to have a standard across banks, and money transfers are going to be less complex, clunky and costly.
Of course, other apps have come before. We have apps like PicPay, PayPal and Nubank, just to name a few, that provide instant, free money transfers. Unsurprisingly, each one rolled out their own standard, but they had to register at the central bank as a financial institution. This means that, at least the popular ones, will have to provide compatibility with the central bank's platform.
This new WhatsApp feature, to me, looked like a bold attempt to kill PIX at launch. People wouldn't mind this new feature inside their banking app that already exists, for a few months, in the messaging app they're used to. If the average Brazilian user sees a QR code, is it a WhatsApp Pay QR code they see regularly? Or is it that obscure feature inside their banking app, which they didn't pay attention to? What would make more sense for businesses to adopt, for the sake of simplicity?
I'm glad Facebook will not get away with that one. If they're going to launch this feature, our central bank should make sure that it's compatible with the nationwide standard that's going to roll out. I'd rather not need Facebook to conveniently pay for my loaf of bread.
We're also severely under-tested. Given our fickle social distancing and isolation, I highly doubt we "only" have 600K infected people. Our flagship universities (USP, UERJ) have already estimated that the real number can be up to 16 times higher.
The population is encouraged to reach out to the health service only when they have the most severe symptoms, since the public health service is at the edge of collapse in many states. The number of people dying at home, and dying from severe respiratory syndrome is abnormally high. It all adds up to an even grimier picture.
About our governors and mayors, I personally think most of them are doing what they possibly can do. They're facing an immense pressure to roll back lock-down measures in order to "save the economy" partly because of the finance minister's catastrophic failure. Businesses had a hard time getting credit, and the people in need were left scrambling for that ridiculous $120/month benefit.
I think Pop!_OS offers the most solid experience of Linux on desktops today. Apart from the lack of proprietary codecs by default (I know there are licensing issues, still I missed it), the default settings are pretty good. I reserved a whole day to set it up when I decided to install it, but right after the installation it felt ready to work, just needed to install some things and transfer my stuff.
Their decision to support Flatpak by default, to create a recovery partition which allows the user to reinstall the system without losing data (in a no-brainer way), and their overall attention to detail won me over. Kudos to the team for creating this distro and making it available for other computer brands.
It's like they couldn't resist saying that those non-white students are inherently less performant. "They're condemned to failure if they get in (look at their slightly lower grades), so it's better not to give them an opportunity at all!"
Their barely contained despise, hatred and anger bleed through the lines. It's funny how decades of racial segregation were simply ignored, almost like diversity initiatives popped out of nowhere in a society that has always provided equal opportunities.
> They seem to go to great lengths to make sure that your results page has something on it by any means necessary
You just described how YouTube's search has been working lately. When you type in a somewhat obscure keyword - or any keyword, really - the search results include not only the videos that match, but videos related to your search. And searches related to your keywords. Sometimes it even shows you a part of the "for you" section that belongs to the home page! The search results are so cluttered now.
Our central bank is going to release a platform called PIX. Financial institutions with more than 500.000 clients are required to implement it. Finally we are going to have a standard across banks, and money transfers are going to be less complex, clunky and costly.
Of course, other apps have come before. We have apps like PicPay, PayPal and Nubank, just to name a few, that provide instant, free money transfers. Unsurprisingly, each one rolled out their own standard, but they had to register at the central bank as a financial institution. This means that, at least the popular ones, will have to provide compatibility with the central bank's platform.
This new WhatsApp feature, to me, looked like a bold attempt to kill PIX at launch. People wouldn't mind this new feature inside their banking app that already exists, for a few months, in the messaging app they're used to. If the average Brazilian user sees a QR code, is it a WhatsApp Pay QR code they see regularly? Or is it that obscure feature inside their banking app, which they didn't pay attention to? What would make more sense for businesses to adopt, for the sake of simplicity?
I'm glad Facebook will not get away with that one. If they're going to launch this feature, our central bank should make sure that it's compatible with the nationwide standard that's going to roll out. I'd rather not need Facebook to conveniently pay for my loaf of bread.
Edit: replaced "service" with "platform".