China has decoupled a lot more since then. If you visit now I would say paying for things smacks you in the face way before access to Google services does. Recently they've enabled foreign cards so you can pay for stuff in stores with WeChat but it's still something you need to set up. The uninitiated just come and assume they'll use Visa/MC.
I've never been able to use Chinese pay services even when living in China. It used to require a Chinese ID card, which you don't get unless you are a Chinese citizen with hukou.
My wife has wechat/pay, so it won't be a big deal when we go back. Starbucks will take foreign credit cards (or at least they did?), you could suffer at McDonalds though. I wonder if the xiaochi's still take cash?
You can open a bank account in China without any real requirements and thus have a 'local' card. You just need a passport, phone number, and a local address (a friend's is fine).
And yes I think long long ago the WeChat setup would expect a Chinese ID number, but for at least some years now they've accepted passports as an alternative.
But very recently (in the last six months) they've started allowing foreign cards for WeChat pay. So you can add a card and pay for things in store, but not access the more general money transfers, red packets, etc. that people do with it. I guess those have stricter KYC requirements, plus they are keen to stop money getting out of the country.
Smaller places I never _see_ take cash, always WeChat, but I suppose that doesn't strictly mean they won't take it.
You needed a working visa/resident permit last time I opened up a bank account in China (but that was in 2007, a bit long time ago). Linking to a foreign card to WeChat/AliPay would be really convenient, like how I was able to link ApplePay to Suica when I was in Japan (super convenient, but I had to top off manually on my phone, which was a bit annoying).
I'm really wondering how the hole in the wall xiaochis (e.g. 成都小吃, this is mostly a Beijing thing) work now. I'm guessing they would be the first ones not to take cash anymore if they didn't have to.
Nobody asked me for a visa in 2015, and I was on a tourist one at the time so it can't even be some unified database thing they were using. A nice thing about Chinese banks is they can just hand you the card over the counter as well. That would never happen where I'm from in Europe-you have to wait for it to get mailed out to you.
Then again, I often find in China that workers/officials/whatever make up the rules on the spot, depending on what they know how to do, or what they consider too mafan. So maybe some will just 'feel' like you need a visa and others won't.
I get a similar thing in hotels where they can't be bothered to register my passport with the PSB, because they don't get many foreign visitors and so e.g. the computer to do it is not turned on. So they just don't do it.
I would guess you could get a hole in the wall to take cash most of the time, I just never see it done. One problem with cash in China is that the largest note has a pretty low value given how inflation is going and how costs are in tier one cities. Chinese people seem to think this is some kind of image management thing, where if they issue a larger denomination everyone will start freaking out about inflation. But I guess it's moot given how cash is losing favor anyway.
I can imagine it differs between cities. Like Beijing should be the toughest for almost anything, however, while Shanghai is much easier...you don't have to go to the PSB to get your residency permit renewed after every foreign trip, for example.
My landlord used to make me pay my rent in cash, and we have to pay three months at a time. So I would withdraw 18,000 RMB from an ATM to take to my landlord. Thankfully, there are a couple of ATMs in Beijing that let you withdraw up to 10,000 RMB at a time, because when I had to use a normal one, everyone behind me in line was pretty angry. Then I would put it into my man purse, which was really fashionable in the 00s, because cash was king and you needed a lot of 100 RMB bills to buy things.
I think China changes so fast that these fun personal touchstones come and go so quickly. I remember when I was first there you couldn't walk very far without hearing 'fapiao! fapiao!' from people selling them, so there must have been a fair bit of gaming cash-based payments, either for tax or company expenses purposes. Nowadays in Shenzhen I don't see that.
I used to adhere pretty strictly to the rules. Like I'd go register at the PSB as I moved around, all that stuff. At the time I figured, well, it's China, maybe they have some centralized place they're recording all this and they'll approve my next visa faster. But I've met other foreigners who just do not care about any of that, never register, and they get much better visa offers than I do. It's just a huge chaotic machine really.
You can talk to one official who'll tell you it's literally impossible to do X, where X is some thing that massively impacts your life there. Go to a different office or speak to a different person and oh yeah, you want to do X, no problem, and it's done in five minutes.
That drives some people crazy but I recommend anyone to experience China at least once in their lifetime. It's a very perspective-changing place.
It got to the point that I registered with the PSB twice a year: first before I would renew my Z visa, and once after I renewed it (so twice in one month basically). Because my registration permit would become invalid when I went on international trips, but it didn't really matter until I went to renew my visa, and then my permit would become invalid again with the new visa, so that's what I had to do.
Different PSBs in Beijing had different policies though, Haidian was looser than Chaoyang (or at least the ones I had in each, both Haidian and Chaoyang are huge and probably have multiple ones).
Before I lived in China for 9 years, I spent two years in Switzerland. You do not want to mess with the contrôle des habitants, Swiss police/officials are not very understanding. I delayed my exit from Switzerland for one week (to attend a conference) and it became a huge deal even if Americans are firmly on visa waver. Mostly the opposite of China.
You can now use Alipay tied to a US debit card. I did it last month and it works fine; the biggest obstacle is your US bank may get jittery and require a couple of phone calls to unblock the debit card. Setting the whole thing up takes less than five minutes.
Most Americans don't even have a passport and have never left the country apart from Canada/Mexico. But to be fair I find Chinese people's views of America are equally based on cliches.
> Its biggest competitor in the country famously has a cheese-flavored latte.
Actually Starbucks has that too, you can get it in 7-11. It's not like it has a 'Cheesy' flavor though; more of a creamy dairy thing to it. 'Cheese' is a pretty common addition to dessert drinks in China and to my Western tastes is pretty good.
The counterbalance is that this is like a game of hot potato. You set up your platform with known flaw, and you wait around trying to hit max locked funds. But the whole time you're nervous someone else is going to spot the issue and take it before you do.
If that happens, and you used some kind of personal credibility to set it up, you've missed your shot.
The loan is zero-risk for the lender because it's taken out and repaid within the same transaction (sort of like a database transaction). If the borrower fails to repay, the entire transaction fails/reverts and the money is never lent out.
Now, the borrower doesn't only have to put the borrow and repay calls into that one transaction. They can put anything in between, for example interacting with Beanstalk.
I'm not much for regulation of crypto/DeFi in general, but instant lending like this should absolutely, 100% be illegal. It's exclusively useful for exploits and MEV vampirism, and for nothing else.
You can't cash out flash loans, they need to repaid within the same block. The only legitimate use case seems to be arbitrage/stablecoin stabilization.
I mean, most legit exchanges are not 'rooted' in scams, even if some of their employees take advantage. The only way you could say Coinbase were 'rooted' in that is to assume your premise: that crypto itself is a scam.
I don't think most exchanges are rooted in scams no - I'd say they're rooted in a greater fool scheme, given that the main purpose of buying crypto is to sell it for profit and it isn't really used for exchange outside a few niches like darknet markets.
Then I think you are assuming your premise/begging the question. You constructed the conditions in a way that leaves no room for a valid example. If you think crypto itself is a greater fool scheme then purely definitionally there can be no example of a non-greater-fool-rooted crypto business.
This is what I've observed, it's not a prima facie assumption. I was initially optimistic when bitcoin came about. Most of the industry seems to be based on speculation and selling "x but on the blockchain" solutions to nonexistent problems. I also know people who are trying to use blockchain tech to solve real problems, but they're in the minority.
> if the new place you were applying called, and asked me, "Do you have any feedback about X candidate?" You better believe I had things to say about the people who were negative.
> And bosses are petty, they'll get revenge if they can. And odds are you'll need them to say something nice about you at some point.
You're opening yourself and your company up to getting sued. An employee uses the exit interview for the purposes the company claims they're for and you take 'revenge' on them? That's pretty unprofessional. You should be trying to change the fact that the exit interview unfairly impacts your perf review, if anything.
Hypothesis is a really interesting platform, but in my mind it's kind of too community-focused. Hypothesis's restricted groups (https://web.hypothes.is/help/annotating-with-groups/) are closer to what I think people would want, but to get them you'll have to self-host.
Not trying to throw shade at them, but I feel like their push for annotations is hampered a little bit by how much their specific implementation of accounts and permissions feels like yet another social network, with all of the negatives that entails. There are other issues as well, but that's the big one that kept me using the platform.
That being said, there is also an Open standard for this stuff that I remember at the time it came out being pretty excited about. But I haven't seen much if any adoption of it, so it again makes me wonder if there's something wrong with it or if it's just that nobody has made anything super-attractive yet to take advantage of it.
Which standard is that? ePubs, for example, use canonical fragment identifiers, which could also work on HTML. I think hypothes.is uses them too but adds fuzzy matching fields so that they can match up after document changes. At least from what I remember
I'm working on an annotation project myself, though not really related to what the parent commenter is looking for. A generic solution to the highlight/annotation problem is quite difficult, especially if you allow for document changes.
I read through the docs when they first came out but I don't remember all of the details anymore. Fragment identifiers are part of it though. I've gone back and forth on how much I like them, allowing for document changes is always going to make stuff really complicated, fuzzy/fragment matching is about the best you can do I think without the cooperation of the source you're annotating.
It feels like annotations probably should be tied to specific document versions, but I also get the reasoning why they're not in this proposal. Unless you're self-hosting everything or forcing everything to go through the Internet Archive... it's just kind of difficult.
I've been curious about trying to get annotations to work before using something like Matrix to handle accounts/groups, but not curious enough to actually try to build a working example.
