125 karma · joined December 4, 2016
Unfortunately for me who commutes to Copenhagen on a daily basis for work, this offer does not include trips to Denmark (monthly ticket costs ~250 EUR).
Yes, I see it all the time in my logs.
It's a bit weird in the sense that everything is sped up and faster than normal. In the other hand, it's super simple and does not introduce the even weirder judder that a cinema-to-NTSC (telecine) conversion would do.
Personally I think it's easier to get used to everything being slightly faster but unmodified otherwise than to having additional frames being inserted and the resulting judder in all motion.
In English they are similar as well but spelling and pronunciation are different enough that there should be less confusion, at least on paper. Not sure why there is such confusion in practice.
Sped up by 4% to make them 25fps. The audio is supposed to be pitch-corrected, but some poorly done conversions did not do that.
In Portuguese the name is still customarily "Pequim". To illustrate, go to the Beijing page in English Wikipedia and change it to Portuguese. Check what's the title of the page.
That's also the canonical name used in French, Finnish, Italian, German, Spanish, Swedish, and many more. Last time I checked they're all western languages.
Names are chosen by the users. It's not because the English-speaking word was quicker to adopt the new name that it suddenly became "universal". Universal in English? Sure.
I'm sure that eventually most languages will switch to their local spelling of "Beijing", but that is many decades away. You can't change a word that has been used for centuries by decree. Languages don't work that way. Or maybe for English it does, not so much for many others.
I think the problem was that Brazil got into a positive feedback loop, and we had what Wikipedia calls "inertial inflation" [1]. We got this going for so long that everybody internalized the inflation, and expected it, and behaved as it was a foregone conclusion that there was going to be inflation next month. So it became a self-fulfilling prophecy.
I see the plan ("Plano Real" [2]) to break it as a social engineering hack. They realized, after so many failed attempts, that in order to succeed you had to change people's minds and make them see the price of goods/services/contracts as stable, which would also change their habits and expectations. Remember there was a generation of people, including myself, who lived their entire lives under high inflation so they didn't know anything else.
So what the government did was to create an index, called URV ("unidade real the valor" = "real value unit"), and mandated that all salaries/prices/contracts/etc. should be indexed against this particular index (and not any other index, or the dollar). Everything should be advertised in URVs. The government would publish, every day, the "price" of 1 URV in what it was the currency back then (cruzeiros reais). So when money actually changed hands, you would pay in cruzeiros reais the quoted amount of URVs using that day's URV price. The URV was roughly tracking the USD, which gave confidence to everybody that the index was "fair" and not losing value.
This went on for a year. And it actually worked: everybody started thinking in URVs instead of cruzeiros reais. All prices became stable in URVs. And then in 1994 they introduced a new currency, the real, where 1 real = price of 1 URV. And inflation suddenly dropped from ~50% a month to ~2% a month. Still high but a miracle to us compared to how it was before. (Eventually it dropped to less than 10% a year.)
So they basically "de-indexed" the economy (and people's minds), killing the positive feedback loop and the hyper-inflation. This was such a life-changer for Brazilians that the economy minister during Plano Real, Fernando Henrique Cardoso (the public face of this plan, even though he wasn't the author), ended up being the next president.
There are a few articles that may be a good summary as well: [3][4]
[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Inertial_inflation
[2] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Plano_Real
[3] https://www.npr.org/sections/money/2010/10/04/130329523/how-...
But the moment you had money in hand, you had to spend it as soon as possible or soon it would be worth nothing.
People would get their salary and run to the supermarket and buy everything they needed for the month, because if they waited a single day the prices would have changed. A lot of people internalized that habit and still do that nowadays (not in the sense of running to the supermarket, but buying a lot for the whole month).
This was before barcodes, and every item had a price label on it. Supermarkets had people employed full time just to be remarking the items. I remember running to pick up an item on one end of a shelf while the employee was remarking the items coming from the other end, so you could buy the item at yesterday's price.
I lived through 6 currency changes. Usually when prices started being in the scale of millions, the government would announce that in a very short period (sometimes that being next week), there was a new currency with a new name and 1000 OLD = 1 NEW. Until the government could replace all existing bills, the old bills would be accepted as if they were the new bills (at 1/1000 of the face value, of course). Old bills passing through the banking system would be stamped with the name of the new currency and the new value before being put back into circulation.
Contracts like rentals were all indexed: there was a clause saying the price would be corrected every month using the official index that tracked the inflation. Or were pegged to the dollar. This by itself fed into the positive feedback loop that was perpetuating the hyperinflation.
The government tried some bizarre measures to tame inflation. Often they would try freezing all prices, but that was never sustainable for long. The craziest one was probably in 1990 when the government simply froze 80% of everybody's money in the bank for 18 months to reduce the amount of money in the economy. This was a total disaster and even caused many suicides.
In 1994 hyperinflation was finally tamed when the current currency, Real, was introduced. It was the culmination of an ingenious plan that actually worked.
Feel free to ask me more, if you're interested.
> Could you please elaborate or link to a resource on that?
Not sure what exactly you're looking for. There are 3 types of BankID: "on file", "on card" and "mobile". The first two are seldomly used and not all banks offer it (mine doesn't). I believe that most sites only support the mobile version. The mobile app cannot be sideloaded on iOS, and requires Google Play Services on Android. (For now it works on rooted phones. For now.)
Although technically minded people can still find a way to sideload the Android app without having to have a Google account, this is far from being mainstream. For most people you have to agree with Apple or Google's terms and have an account with them. If you're banned and lose access to the store, you can't install BankID any longer. It's not fun to live in Sweden and not have access to BankID.
I don't like the idea that you have to establish an asymmetrical relationship with a foreign conglomerate to be able to identify yourself in your own country and use digital services.
I think that having competition at least opens up the possibility that one of the players will introduce a mechanism that does not rely (solely) on Apple/Google technology. For example, a simple hardware token could work.
Regarding IDs for foreigners, I believe that the EU cracked down on Sweden and at least the government websites allow other European digital IDs nowadays. At least the option shows up in the list of authentication choices, but since I can't use that flow I cannot state how well it works in practice.
My gripe with BankID is that it's a monopoly and it's tied to having a bank account. It's easy to fall into the cracks. For example, I know first hand more than one foreigner that moved to Sweden and couldn't do basically anything online because they didn't have BankID and couldn't get one because they needed to visit a bank branch and have an appointment, and they couldn't get one without having to wait for 2 months or more (partly due to COVID-19).
The system could be much better if there were many accredited providers of digital ID (this is somewhat already the case, there's Freja now) and there was a mandated standard protocol that the accredited providers implement, so you could have the ID from any provider and that ID would work on any site. The latter is not the case to the best of my knowledge: although many government websites are supporting Freja, most private ones like Kivra or Klarna and of course the banks only support BankID. This is not great.
It also forces you to have an Android or iPhone, and basically have a relationship with these foreign tech giants and accept their policies in order to be a "digital citizen" in your own country. If they ban your account for any reason, and you lose access to the store without any recourse, and you can't install the app, you are basically SOL. This is a trickier problem to solve, and it's not exclusive to BankID by any means, but if there was competition it would be more likely (at least on paper) that somebody might provide an alternative.
My take is that indeed: the system mostly works, it is convenient, but it's not perfect by any means. There's plenty of room for improvement. Just having real competition instead of a de facto monopoly would fix most issues.
Each municipality has to arrange at least one per year. This year it has been cancelled due to COVID-19.
In practice it really depends where you work.
In some jobs you will have a lot of latitude, and the employer will let you freely choose and only veto it if it's really disruptive (like everybody else in the team leaving at the same time). This is what I had experienced, working in IT.
I suspect that in some lines of work, like the service industry, you might be totally out of luck and have zero choice on the matter.
In Europe (or at least a good part of it) vacation is "spent" only on workdays, not weekends or holidays (which is fairer, you wouldn't be working on these days).
So in Sweden, where you get 25 days compared to Brazil's 30, you actually get roughly one week more vacation per year. This is not evident at a first glance just by comparing numbers.