Brazil's government-run payments system has become dominant

I'm thinking, maybe controversially, centralized national payment service like this should be government-run based on my experience with Alipay which is a digital payment service in China.

Due to it's commercial origin, Alipay is filled with unwanted ads and traps. Almost every time I made a payment with it, a pop up prompts me to enlist their Ant Financial LOAN service either now, or being prompted for the same question again 30 days later (yep, not Yes or No, but Now or Later). It's just fucking ridiculous, I don't need a LOAN for a $400 projector, and I don't need a LOAN for a $4 hair cut (Xi should probably do something about it, really).

I'm glad that at least people of Brazil don't have to suffer that kind of shit. At least their government-run program is better scrutinized and boring, thus more dependable, that's a good thing in my eyes.

> I'm thinking, maybe controversially, centralized national payment service like this should be government-run based on my experience with Alipay which is a digital payment service in China.

After dealing with many private sector services, I think a lot of things should be government run.

For instance: weather apps. Private sector ones are just a vector to track and sell your location data, and they rely on government data anyway. It'd be much better the government roll out an API and an app that uses it, so you can avoid the private sector altogether.

It's funny but I always had assumed all countries had their own state-owned weather services, until I found out there was no such thing in Germany.

That's exactly why NOAA in the US is under attack. Conservatives see $$$ potential if they privatize it.

I believe in Germany the national weather service in fact rolled out such an app, but was then stopped by a court because this counted as unfair competition with private entities.

That's not true. See https://de.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Deutscher_Wetterdienst

I'm sure the NOAA is under attack because someone in the administration really wants to launch a new weather app.

payment services should absolutely have a public option, as should many other basic eservices like email, mychart, etc. the issue is that our government in particular is incompetent, has legal difficulty hiring for merit, and has public sector unions (which is effectively empowering people to negotiate against the collective democratic will of the people).

i’ve worked on internet projects with the feds before, basically the current iteration of the federal government does not really seem capable of doing these things because of how the rank-and-file is structured.

i think it would also be important to make sure that control over payment isn’t abused. i recall when donations to wikileaks were effectively blocked by public/private coordination. presumably that would be even easier if it just required public action.

Oh well! Good to know! Next time I'll use DWD instead of using those weird apps. Thanks!

i think it more has to do with wanting to cut the deficit in preparation for tax cut extension + NOAA and other science agencies are politically vulnerable in a way that medicare/ss are not

In The Netherlands, weather companies sued the national weather service because their new app was seen as competing with their interests, but they lost the court case (summary proceedings): https://www.rechtspraak.nl/Organisatie-en-contact/Organisati...

> stopped by a court because this counted as unfair competition with private entities

I came across this recently as well. This is one of the most insane aspects of our current zeitgeist.

In a world where VC unicorns and megacorps commonly engage in dumping behavior to coerce market share, public orgs still need to walk on eggshells so they don't outcompete the "uwu smol bean" private sector. Even when they are providing what could be considered a public good or necessity, like weather info. Totally insane.

Granted this is from Trumps first term, but actually yeah. https://www.cnn.com/2017/10/14/politics/noaa-nominee-accuwea...

"Speaking to the The Palm Beach Post at the time, Barry Myers said he supported the weather service returning to its “core mission … which is protecting other people’s lives and property” instead of spending “hundreds of millions of dollars a year, every day, producing forecasts of ‘warm and sunny.’”" Also from the same article: "He told ABC News in May 2005: “We work hard every day competing with other companies and we also have to compete with the government.”"

Theres some more info here: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Barry_Lee_Myers

No the DWD is not allowed to provide a weather app I believe. Because it would compete with commercial apps. It offers an app which issues weather warnings though.

Until you say something the government doesn't like and they decide that part of your punishment should be lack of access to payment services.

I'd prefer a constitutional mandate or guarantee that this can't happen. Without it this is a noose. A convenient noose with lots of nice properties but a noose none the less.

> the issue is that our government in particular is incompetent

Our federal government is huge and our state governments are small. Precisely the opposite of how the founders configured it. This is part of the problem.

The states need to band together and develop a cooperative solution and then push it upwards to the federal level.

This is a lot easier than centralized planning and management of an entity the size and scope of the US. We have a lot of offshore territories and two states. This complicates things more than people care to admit.

> Until you say something the government doesn't like and they decide that part of your punishment should be lack of access to payment services.

How much worse is that than the same thing happening when you do something a private company doesn't like?

And how much different is that than what the Federal government could already do? If the government says you're a terrorist, you're not accessing any banking.

Windy.com gives you ECMWF. ECMWF has a much stronger model.

> when you do something a private company doesn't like?

Well, it's completely different, because ostensibly I can switch to another private company. Is there an option, ever, for me to just change which government I subscribe to?

> If the government says you're a terrorist, you're not accessing any banking.

In the US this can only be true for foreign citizens. Broad classes of assets and liquidity are well protected for US citizens unless you end up in the unusual situation where they sue the money itself. If you have cash in your hand nothing can stop you from spending it.

Thank you for introducing political relativism into this conversation, although, I'm not sure it's advanced anything in particular.

DWD is allowed to provide a weather app, but not for free. So they offer it for a nominal one-time fee instead.

Why is it that apps in the US are not as (overtly) commercialized or gamified (like Temu) as some of their chinese-counterparts? Is american culture just less tolerant of it? You would think there is more profit to be made by doing so which would be very capitalistic in a sense.

That's only controversial in the USA I guess. Here in France we know for a fact that government-run services are better than privately owned ones.

In the US, just bookmark the NOAA projection maps and your local zip on weather.gov. you don't need an app.

As opposed to Visa/MC deciding that? At least I can vote for the government...

NOAA is only vulnerable until a rural town gets decimated with no warning by a tornado.

And its not a far-fetched example as both VISA/MC actually have a history of effectively banning legitimate businesses for no particular reason.

I'm in NZ and actually prefer the Norwegian Govt weather site www.yr.no, which is about as accurate as our local one, easier to use and has no adverts.

That seems like a very broad statement. Citation?

Says the national from a country that’s had at least 12 different government orders in its time, more than any other G20.

You really like government, you just can’t figure out what it ought to be or how to keep it.

Because we have a Northern European streak in our heritage that is heavily against all that flashy casino style crud

> Is american culture just less tolerant of it?

Yes I think so. These flashy gamified things are considered kitsch. Designers here prefer lots of white space.

In the US your weather app is effectively government run.

Your iPhone skins the government data and makes it pretty. Nobody is selling your location or information. And you can always get the data directly if you want.

100% this. My (BR) state have a weather service¹, it's amazing. What people don't realize, it's that the service isn't just made for normal people see if is gonna rain, it's that the service is fundamental for agriculture and farmers. So they have radars, frosts alerts, specifically tailored to farmers as well.

It's also used to give alerts to electricity companies, etc...

Their weather prediction, it's just way better than any other service.

There's also national service, run by CPTEC/INMET, but they are lacking funding IMO...

[1] https://simepar.br

Well, Pix is not free from those too... Besides being operated by the Central Bank, you still have to use your commercial bank account to send/receive money and, even though the Central Bank do require some minimum UX implementation standards, banks can still show messages offering lending services before you finish the transaction. So you also get banks already offer some kind of instant micro-loan even for small Pix transactions, just as you described.

At least most aren't as intrusive as Alipay, but they do exist.

I'm generally a pro-capitalist but replacing your goverment 12x seems like a good thing? They're refactoring for what they want. Better than "This hundred year document that couldn't conceive of the internet or machine guns is giving us guidance on those things with a ouiji board"

I just needed to change language to English from below the hamburger menu icon.

Looks useful for Christchurch. Cheers

Unfortunately, the incentives for bad UX and privacy violations are too great for companies to behave when given the opportunity. It’ll always be a race to the bottom if not done by the government.

In UPI (similar Indian system), govt backed system acts as a central conduit between apps, banks, payment service system. So, the user can easily switch apps/banks. This prevents any hard monopoly but ensures competition and innovations at all levels.

Hm, the problem is that a little over half of all politicians are ideologically opposed to the government running anything (the reason your comment felt "controversial", I suspect). Id hate to come to depend on it and always be one election away from it falling apart.

I can't say I have a good alternative. The co-op model works for supermarkets on an international scale, and for banks on a national scale (I am unaware of any international co-op banks). I wonder if it could work for payments.

The app is still available, but to use all features you have to pay a couple of Euros: https://play.google.com/store/apps/details?id=de.dwd.warnapp...

This is exactly what has been playing out in the Netherlands the past couple of months: the weather institute (KNMI) released their own weather app that is functionally the same (in some cases superior) as the commercial apps that want your consent to track and serve ads.

The commercial parties sued KNMI, even though they use the public data provided by KNMI. Luckily they lost: https://www.dutchnews.nl/2025/02/knmi-weathers-legal-app-sto...

And as a bonus, there was some Streisand Effect when this was in the news, and people have been moving to the KNMI app in droves.

> In the US this can only be true for foreign citizens. Broad classes of assets and liquidity are well protected for US citizens unless you end up in the unusual situation where they sue the money itself. If you have cash in your hand nothing can stop you from spending it.

Why would this be any different if it was the government running payment services rather than private entities? You haven’t explained why having those middlemen protects you from the same authority that makes up and enforces the rules anyway.

Switzerland has this for weather - government data, projections up to a week in advance. Of course no ads, tons of info ie on PM2.5, pollen, avalanche risk in mountains etc.

> For instance: weather apps. Private sector ones are just a vector to track and sell your location data, and they rely on government data anyway.

Or you do it like we do here in Germany and take the dumbest route you can imagine.

We had a very well working publicly funded weather app from DWD (Deutscher Wetter Dienst). The primarily purpose of this app was to warn from extreme weather conditions, but it also included an ad free (because publicly funded) and rather accurate forecast.

Then a private entity sued claiming that the DWD app also providing weather information is unfair competition for private competitors. The won in court and now the publicly funded DWD app has a paywall for a previously free feature.

As if Biden and Trump would not have been replaced at multiple points in their regimes, if the US had a mechanism for it? The trains kept running in France. Sounds like a system that is both more responsive and more stable.

Some services, like payment, are most convenient when done by a monopoly. It makes sense to have them blessed by the govt. They could be govt run or regulated monopolies or have the rights to operate the monopoly bid for by competing companies.

> why NOAA in the US is under attack

As far as I know, AccuWeather is the main beneficiary. You can easily find reliable sources about it.

The cause is that NOAA publishes all weather data, calculated models (global coverage), meteostations data (global coverage), and weather radars to the public for free (US only, maybe also Canada, I don't remember). Therefore, many weather companies use such data to do their business and compete directly with AccuWeather. They don't like this.

On the other hand, state weather agencies that calculate global models in many countries don't provide such data for free. Therefore, startups and small companies who work in weather and climate fields use NOAA data and directly compete with AccuWeather or don't pay them for data access.

The weather app doesn't give much money. The main business sells weather and climate data B2B: agro, insurance, logistics, retail, supply chains, advertisement, medical, etc.

Companies whose primary business is weather apps are small, and such areas are highly competitive.

Hey, don't look up what the current admins plan is for NOAA