Jack Ma's Ant Group set for record $34B market debut

It's silly not to pay for everything on credit cards here, when you can get 3-5% back on anything with the right card. That's around $4k/year if you spend $100k before even accounting for doubling on some cards and other benefits like travel vouchers, Uber credits, and free insurance coverage. (Minus a $600-$1000 a year in annual card fees for high end cards.)

And, of course, if you don't pay your bill in full each month, then you're likely looking at 15-20% or more (APR) on whatever balance you left unpaid.

If you pay your balance off each month, these cards are great. I enjoy thousands/year in benefits after fees.

Delta Amex with 100,000+ miles is used for automated bills, $95 fee. Pre-covid I made back the $95 fee by saving on checked bags etc. Will be cancelled in January due to covid.

Just like the phone made wrist watches and portable music devices obsolete, it's also made the wallet obsolete. I agree that both NFC and QR code are equally convenient (although obviously QR codes are more accessible because they work on all phones and no special scanning devices are required), but I think the main issue is with NFC in a card versus NFC in a phone. The phone is always going to be more convenient, because people today are rarely - if ever - without their phone.

Regarding NFC, I've just seen too many times of having to put the phone in the right place in the right orientation to get the communication to work, and then it still takes time to make the payment. It's faster than credit cards when it just works but slower when it doesn't. And Alipay and WeChat are faster than both.

In China, you don't need a wallet. You just need a phone. So you get used to knowing what you need. There's an initial learning curve, but then you can be paying and biking around and everything else with just your phone.

Some merchants, like street merchants or drivers, will simply have their code printed out. You scan it and pay them and they get a notification on their phone or tablet that you've paid. Other places, like at bigger restaurants, have QR screen readers that will scan the purchaser's phone.

Either way, I don't see what you're getting at. The terminal is the phone in many cases, and other cases, there is a terminal in the sense of an integrated scanner system, but why does that matter? For the user it is much more convenient and faster. It's essentially instant, and I have never waited for the amount of time it takes for a credit card or NFC payment method to process. Further, it allows basically anyone to have this method because, again, the terminal is your phone and can be so for both parties in the transaction.

> And NFC works when my battery dies.

So what? You can charge your phone essentially anywhere in China.

By and large when I've used these systems, the vendor just checks they received the correct amount of payment in their app. It's largely immediate

I'd say that paying with a contactless card has a problem here, an NFC credit card lacks a confirmation button, and the one on the terminal is controlled by the receiving party.

How would that work? If someone somehow put a fake QR code over a merchant's real one, the merchant or person you're paying would not get a notification when you scanned their code to pay them. Thus, both parties involved in the transaction would be alerted to the situation immediately. The wrong QR code would be tied to someone's account and be easily found by the system.

At the next level up, of course, vendors will have their own phone so they can check their notifications to make sure that a payment went through. And that is a big step forward for vendors in developing countries - there's no risk of receiving counterfeit currency with electronic transactions.

Perhaps they don't care because they are accustomed and desensitized to it?

I'm in the UK.

Setting up a company is easy. The last time I did it, took an hour or so of filling out forms online, but it's cheap and a few hours later, or the next day, you have a legal company.

Registering for tax/VAT etc takes longer. The forms took me longer to fill and the system took a few weeks to proceed through each step (codes sent in the post, figures in online forms checked by a person, etc), but you can start trading before they are done if you follow the transitional arrangements.

Getting a bank account is much slower. Recently I did it with Starling, because they offered a much faster online process than the high street banks. It still took a frustrating 4 working days, with support messages back and forth because they kept challenging me for "proof" that I was a business. Having a company was not sufficient proof. Lots of money laundering requirements, having to prove the type of business, having to provide evidence of online presence, etc.

I temporarily altered my LinkedIn profile (which I saw they did check) to satisfy their requirements.

The time before that was a high street bank, Barclays. The process took about 2 months. They interviewed me twice, and another of the directors, and conducted background checks on everyone. In the interviews they asked a lot of challenging questions about the nature of the business, even though it was a non-profit with 5 independent directors, handling only a small amount of money.

Other people, in more regular types of small business (plumber, hairdresser, cafe etc) report that getting business accounts can often take 1-2 months, and be quite frustrating because you want to start trading and that's a bottleneck.

Merchant accounts (for taking credit cards) are no longer necessary because of services like Paypal and Stripe. It used to be that merchant accounts were a challenge to get as a small business, because they didn't serve early businesses.

But even now, with Paypal, last time I did it, they set a cap on £1000/year of transactions until certain documentation was received by them. Despite sending them 10 different forms of business documentation at their request, they were never satisfied, and so that business stopped using Paypal, relegating it to a handful of users that couldn't pay any other way.

I like that AntD has a more 'enterprise' feel than other component libs that tend to be based on material design.

Firstly, all of the proposed courses of action involve giving more power to the US, which shall I remind you, kills millions of people in wars like it's nothing. It's not clear at all that decreasing China's power but increasing that of the US will do any good to anyone. Just in Iraq, the US killed more people than anyone accuses China of imprisoning illegitimately. So unless you can find a way to reduce China's power without also increasing that of the US, no one outside of those under US propaganda or interest will want to do much of anything.

Secondly, China is a nuclear armed country. Intervening in their domestic affairs is not easily done.

Finally, comparing the CCP to the NSDAP is frankly absurd. They are not comparable. The Nazi party wanted to kill around a third of the world's population and enslave another third. The CCP is accused, at worst, to be trying to change the culture of one of their provinces using inhumane tactics and torture, which sadly is just par for the course for the world in general.

>These merchants tend to just trust you when you pay and then show them the "paid" screen on your phone. You could fake it, but I guess in general people don't, and the "paid" screen does include the merchant's chosen profile image, so you would have to have done your homework to fake it.