As a customer are there any downsides to using these BNPL platforms when I'm buying something? I generally never buy anything online that I can't afford to pay for it outright so I have never used them before.
> I generally never buy anything online that I can't afford to pay for it outright so I have never used them before.
They are designed to let people buy impulsively without annoying restrictions like not having enough money. Who would have though this was either an addressable market or a good idea.
I don't get why they are so popular either, or worth this much. They also don't have any moat - any payment provider can offer to do the same thing they do with less hassle for the customer (PayPal has started doing this for example). There are many direct competitors in addition (eg Zip).
It is interest free, and also has a repayment plan baked in. The credit card user is incentivized to pay it off each month, but the Afterpay user is incentivized to buy more stuff now.
Trickily, BNPL is pushed as 'not credit', which I find deeply disingenuous. The product they push is utilised by compulsive spenders, or poorer people. These people have always used credit, much to their collective disadvantage. Branding it as 'like lay-by, free up your cashflow' is in my opinion a dangerous option for many people.
Are you kidding? Poor people of course cannot handle credit, because they don't have the cashflow or savings to prevent the use of credit in disadvantageous situations. I am not saying poor people shouldn't have credit, I am saying credit is most destructive for poorer people, and so any service that targets that market is exploitative of their misfortune.
The main one in the UK is that you lose Section 75 protection, which is what forces credit card companies to protect your purchases. The obvious others are if you buy something you wouldn't buy without BNPL (their business model is charging retailers on the basis that people in aggregate will), or you miss payments and get late charges/a worse credit score.
I might have misunderstood, but when I looked into this a while back the main downside is the loan amount shows up on your credit report. Even after you pay it off you now have this “credit” with the provider. This could affect, for example, a future mortgage application.
I have trouble understanding how Clubhouse was supposed to grow like other social media apps. It doesn't have the traditional social network growth. If I meet someone at university for example, we can add each other on Insta or Snap (these days also TikTok).
Clubhouse doesn't have that. It's closer to Twitch instead, but the difference is Twitch is primarily to broadcast the most popular entertainment media and it has video streaming, something that people want even for podcasts these days.
Wouldn't someone be able to reverse engineer the pattern? I assume everyone is doing some variation of <service@domain.tld> so someone can try to figure out your other email addresses for other sites. Although I don't know if that's worth the time investment.
Right. The method has it’s own flaws, but it’s still another layer of insulation. Someone getting your email off a large user data breach is less likely to pick out your name and attempt to reverse engineer that pattern specifically for you, unless it is a targeted attack against you. For most people, that’s a highly unlikely scenario
For the catch all email setups yes. Not with the way apple does it. They have specific mappings setup so you have no way of finding other addresses of the user since every apple user is behind the same domain and the emails are long/random.
So I assume the things that are becoming free don't include using your own domain for mail? Will Google Workspace Individual include that? The TechCrunch article mentions it will be $9.99 with introductory price of $7.99 which is more expensive than current basic plan.
I really just want custom domain hosting with Gmail and ignore everything else.
I signed up using my free account while it was gsuite. Gsuite changed to Workspace, I stopped paying for Workspace and now I can't use my original free services, and I get a blurb explaining this is because I unsubscribed from Workspace.
Possible I'm doing something wrong so I'd love to know what it is, but as far as I can tell, I can't get my free tier back.
This was/is a domain account, right? @yourdomain.com? You upgraded from the free "google apps for your domain" account to a paid workspace account, and now you can't downgrade? If that's the case, that's unfortunately works as intended - that free domain-level tier doesn't exist anymore, so anyone who is on it (myself included) who starts paying and thereby upgrades to one of the current SKUs, can't downgrade to a SKU that no longer is offered.
No, I upgraded from a completely personal account, like your mom might have, to Workspace. I cancelled my Workspace subscription and now have no access to Gmail, calendar, keep, etc. I never used "google apps for your domain".
Reading over your previous post again I guess it was a "google apps for your domain" account. I did use my own domain and it was free, before I upgraded it (and when I upgraded it the product was still called GSuite). I wasnt aware the free tier was called "google apps for your domain". I guess then that the situation you described with the free tier no longer existing is what happened to me.
Good to know at least that I didn't do something wrong. However, there was no warning about this happening in either direction that I recall - no warning that I would not be able to downgrade and no warning upon cancelling my Workplace subscription that I would not go back to my previous free tier. Nothing I could find by some searching that described this either. I appreciate your response here, otherwise I would never have known if I did it wrong...
If you had Gmail on your own domain, then it was the legacy Google Apps Free Tier. You can still create a Google account for free with a non-gmail address, and people can use that email to add you to docs and such, but it doesn't have Gmail. The days when it was called Google Apps was the last time you could get free email hosting on a custom domain.
> You can still create a Google account for free with a non-gmail address
Yeah - my email is elsewhere now, and I was hoping that by cancelling Workspace, my account would convert into the type of account you get when you sign up for Google services with a non Google email. But it didn't.
Can't OP move to Cloud Identity Free to keep access to most of the free services[1]? They wouldn't have access to Workspace-specific services like Gmail and Google Calendar, but they would still have access to Google Drive, Docs, Sheets, Slides, Keep, and Meet. I assume other non-Workspace services like Google Play will also stay available.
In addition to what you listed, I would have liked to see something about Apple not getting special rules when it comes to their own apps. For example Spotify does not have to pay 30% since Apple has a competing music service.
This is one of the reasons I wish governments in the world implement proper digital authentication instead of relying on static identifiers like name, address, or SSN.
The Baltic states have had proper digital authentication for years. Priv/pub key pair on the Xth iteration digital identity card that is checked against your passport physically. The problem isn't that governments don't have proper digital authentication. It's that most countries want to reinvent it every time. The German version is a clusterfuck that they then had to force into existence by mandating it by law and yet normal citizen services can't be done with it.
These gigantic government IT projects are also a good way to funnel taxpayer money to the right pockets, that's why they're always behind schedule and over budget (just like all government physical infrastructure projects) and if you look closely it's always the same 2-3 companies getting all the contracts.
Bullshit. The German electronic ID card wasn't a huge project and it was developed in-house. By all accounts, it works pretty well if you actually have the opportunity to use it. The problem is that nobody supports it. In part because of federalism: You rarely interact with the federal bureaucracy directly and the states for some reason aren't interested in supporting it.
Finland offers a state of the art digital authentication system. It's just that Klarna doesn't want to use it because it adds an auhtentication step to their checkout process. It's just easier for them to take the random internet user's word for who they are (!!).
I am not sure how this is even legal under the PSD2 in EU. It might not be. But Klarna does not seem to care, and I really hope someone will take them to court over this.
Is there any pressure in Finland to make this illegal? If your transaction didn't go through the digital authentication to verify identity, then it's worthless and the money can't be collected?
Yes, PSD2 (Payment Services Directive vol 2) should require strong customer authentication for online payments throughout EU. How Klarna is able to skirt this regulation is beyond me. Either they've found a loophole in the law or they are already in breach but the financial regulators are holding back from enforcing it.
I'm somewhat happy that my country is so much behind on all this digital stuff. You usually have to physically present your ID to do something serious, or at least provide a picture of it. We do also have an official "government services" website, and it implements a proper oauth flow that many other government sites use and uses SSN + password for login.
I managed to buy firstname.dev a while ago and this was one of my fears of using it as my email address. I ended up switching to a .com one just to avoid any issues. I certainly don't want government services emails not to work just because maybe they didn't account for .dev TLD
Out of curiosity, are those popular services? I'm in process of setting up email on my own domain and it would suck having to fallback to Gmail if some service uses an accepted list of domains.
fastmail is reasonably popular. Gmail is bigger, but fastmail is big enough that they cannot be ignored, unlike when I ran my own personal server and often found myself in blacklists without any knowable way to get off.
I've had a couple places not take my .us domain, but almost everything is fine with my .org. The places I've run into that are really picky don't like gmail or other free email providers.
The one exception is Craigslist; if I email someone with my normal email, I never get a response. I always use gmail for that.
After entering the email address, do you need to do the Github login to complete registration? I didn't get any confirmation email so I don't know if I'm actually registered for anything
