How have we even arrived to a point where all payments go through Visa/Mastercard duopoly and to pay people hectically unlock, reconnect, and reinstall stuff on their smartphones?
And before Blik most people used online direct transfers for online payments, not cards anyway. It is funny how the leapfrogging works.
The only reason I need a debit card is paying subscription to American companies. I really wish they integrated better.
E.g. in Norway, BankAxept handles 80% of in-store card payments in Norway - essentially nearly all debit card payments, despite the fact most debit cards are also Visa cards. The Visa/Mastercard part typically only gets used outside of Norway.
BankAxept is also owned by the same group of banks that owns Vipps, and MobilePay that dominate the mobile payments market in Norway and Denmark as well, with smaller user bases in Sweden and Finland.
And many of these European payment providers (including Blik and Vipps/MobilePay) are moving towards being part of the European Payments Alliance to make these systems interoperable across Europe as well, which would take Visa and Mastercard out of a significantly larger proportion of European payments. Some of those cross border payments are already in place.
Chargeback is also one of the reasons why you pay (directly or indirectly) for Visa or Mastercard.
And in stationary shops it depends on the shop network - I usually pay with Blik and I had to return stuff in Lidl once and they did it no problem.
Brazil has Pix. Though if Bolsonaro wins the election he'll sell the financial system to the US, even though Brazilians love Pix.
These are not fringe payment systems, either. They're really big where they are.
EU is working on something similar, and I think it's launched in a couple of countries.
We're literally in the middle of the election Bolsonaro is winning.
But you're right. I should have stayed with actual corruption and country destroying policies such as selling out Pix. There's plenty of that.
Maybe that he says he'll pardon his father, who had a documented[1] plan to murder the winner of the last election, and others.
And yet people vote for these crime families.
[1] for those who don't know: yes, they did write down their plans to overthrow the government and kill political opponents, and partially implemented said plan.
Why can't it be both? Both are a problem politically for different reasons. Pretend you make crass comments to the wrong world leader and suddenly your trade deal is in the toilet.
> They want people to focus on the former to take attention away from the latter. (And it works.)
It always works. The most salacious things are the things that media will concentrate on.
Most main stream political discussions are extremely shallow.
Moreover most main stream politics can be boiled down to nothing other than tribalism especially in countries where there are typically two parties swapping in and out of government every few years.
What you have perhaps overlooked is that many average people are also fairly crass, and they see these traits as “relatable”. In current US culture, and perhaps Brazil as well, decorum is only important to a narrow slice of society.
I agree about your comment on tribalism.
The penis exposure I would have imagined would have worked quite well in the 60s.
Generally the media likes to take credit for things after the fact. If people's sons were coming back in body bags in some foreign war that isn't going to be popular. I remember when the reality of the Iraq war started affected people here. People were unhappy about the Iraq war when people they knew started coming back to the UK in coffins.
The problem often with a lot of modern media is that because it is often partisan they will often ignore their own side's wrong doings. So the only thing they often can go after without exposing their own side wrong doings is the crass stuff and other surface level shite that isn't important.
Generally the media is shit anyway (and I guarantee it was crap then). One of the BBC reports I saw recently were "The Conservatives disagree with Labour on X", as if they were ever going to say the other people were doing the correct thing. Why even bother reporting it? What is the value? There is none.
> What you have perhaps overlooked is that many average people are also fairly crass, and they see these traits as “relatable”. In current US culture, and perhaps Brazil as well, decorum is only important to a narrow slice of society.
Decorum/Etiquette is dependant on the company you typically keep. Usually different between different social castes (working, middle, upper, elite). What is and isn't acceptable is different depending on who you are around, their age group etc.