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666 points jcartw | 1 comments | | HN request time: 0.203s | source
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nirui ◴[] No.43621834[source]
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.

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palmotea ◴[] No.43621950[source]
> 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.

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cubefox ◴[] No.43622005[source]
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.
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1. pphysch ◴[] No.43623038[source]
> 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.