Author: Brin

~ Brin ~ Leave a comment

rustingbridges:

andmaybegayer:

andmaybegayer:

Oh huh. when Horizon Zero Dawn PC came out it was very cheap, ZAR 236 (~USD 13), and I bought it quickly because I knew I wanted it and I assumed it was a mistake on steam’s part that I could take advantage of. They later tripled the price to ZAR 680 (~USD 40), which I thought was them fixing it.

Turns out what actually happened was that this was just steam’s regional pricing adjustment at work, but the adjustment was so steep (particularly in Argentina, which was only USD 7 equivalent) and for such a popular game that loads of people used VPN’s to buy the game at foreign pricing.

Lowering the effective price for other countries is a pretty sensible move on Steam’s part, and I hope they don’t stop doing it. The South African Rand is nowhere near the weakest currencies out there, but the amount of disposable income here is much lower (heck, South Africa only /got/ a legal minimum wage last year, and it’s about USD 1.3/hour after a 10% hike this year) and paying dollar prices is hells of expensive. 60 dollars is pricey in the USA, but paying ZAR 1000 in South Africa is hideously expensive for many people. It’s even worse in places like Kenya or Indonesia. There’s a reason why I’m considering moving my server infrastructure to Russian providers who work in Rubles.

The GOG store makes a selling point of “you always pay the base price” which I guess attracts euros and pounds but means that I sometimes find software 30% cheaper on Steam because they actually sell at local adjusted prices. SteamDB actually lets you see prices per country and you can see how wide some of the adjustments are.

@rustingbridges said

dang that’s a low minimum wage. what’s rent / general expenses like

Big Mac index is about 50%, i.e. you pay half as much for a big mac here than in the USA in raw currency terms, and that calculation more or less carries to a lot of food products, cost of living and so on. As you can imagine, ½ USA expenses but ⅙th USA minimum wage means living on minimum wage Is Not Great.

If you work 40 hour weeks at minimum wage you make ~ZAR 3300 (USD 200), and the lowest rent 1 bedroom apartment you can get anywhere near a city is usually around ZAR 2000. Rural areas are cheaper but there’s actually an adjustment on minimum wage for farm workers that drops it to like ZAR 18 per hour, or about One Dollar. You can make up to 3-4× minimum wage without a degree in most cases if you manage to work up to like, store manager or whatever, but that’s kind of your cap without some kind of professional training. Food and other expenses eat the remaining money extremely fast.

If you’re on minimum wage and on your own it’s extremely hard to get by, and even with roommates or family it’s very rough, if you want to try renting. A lot of people live in multigenerational homes for historic, cultural and economic reasons. What “if you want to try renting” means is something I’ll get to under the cut, because unfortunately for this explanation, South Africa is less one economy as much as it is like three in a trench coat. We’ve already covered Low Income, but there’s also The Professional Class and Informal Economies.

Keep reading

yeah that’s not great

Tags:

#adventures in human capitalism #South Africa #interesting #the more you know

~ Brin ~ Leave a comment

theweirdwideweb:

072ced9b7464ae3e97c31661d5ffa19f576d0866

 

bigenderbeastmaster:

f73e07482ffc40d3a3d2bfe7a9722f6e0aff73c7

 

clowncarbonation:

56566c71d8fcbf88831b90f7b36487730f956748

trinity 

 

yawning-caverns:

An Actual Real Person my Dad knew. Pretty sure he worked as a bush guide. When someone asked the time he’d pull off his hat – some kind of broad brim – and use to take a few measurements of the sun’s position relative to the horizon. Then he’d declare the time.

He was accurate to the minute.

 

elodieunderglass:

552ba2f70a1fa2b6d1c19396af42389b6b9ffecb

Fvvdvddsfdssdhnvfh you get back here and say this to the rest of the crew

Tags:

#time #anything that makes me laugh this much deserves a reblog

~ Brin ~ Leave a comment

brazenautomaton:

hey for those of you who liked the smut-theory blog you may want to go check out and spread this link right here: https://archiveofourown.org/works/25394464

I wonder what it contains

I wonder if someone will help me come up with a better summary

Tags:

#hell yeah!! #storytime #story ideas I will never write #recs #sexuality and lack thereof #today (well‚ yesterday) in reasons I never unfollow a blog for inactivity alone #(note: these are not mere crossposts‚ but revised and expanded versions)

~ Brin ~ Leave a comment

rustingbridges:

rustingbridges:

rustingbridges:

can’t believe paypal continues to be like it is. how is this not considered fraudulent

anyway paypal is fine if you want to send another american us dollars, but you should more or less never accept payment through paypal. you will regret it

paypal is extremely opaque about the fees that it charges. and once they’ve charged a fee, there’s more or less no way to undo it. if you immediately ‘refund’ such a transaction, it actually means you’re giving back the money you received *and* paying the fee paypal charged.

they have two payment options – one of which is free and offers no ‘protection’ and the other of which is not and offers their ‘purchase protection’. you can instruct someone to send via the free option but there’s no guarantee they’re going to listen, or that they’re going to parse the options correctly even if they do, at which point there’s already money down the drain in the form of a fee and it’s just a question of who eats it.

this is what the page to pick looks like (gotta love that mobile first design):

c4d885c493621c403b90d8142def636bb29976f0

here it says you might be eligible for purchase protection, and the ‘seller’ is going to pay a fee, but it doesn’t really explain what any of that means, or how much it will be.

this is bad, because a lot of people will decide they might as well be protected, right? since it’s free. but the program is relatively picky and a lot of the times people use it it does not actually apply. but it gets worse. let’s say I’m sending $150 by paypal to my business partner:

4cc8416ad08c7521d21259fe979abfdfc25987c5

it says right there BigNuts is going to get $150. he’s not. maybe in paypal’s accounting he gets the full amount and then pays the fee, but in practice he is never going to see the full amount. if Mr. McLug is in the US, he’s going to lose $4.35 on this.

but it gets worse if he’s international, as the fee gets jacked up – he’s going to lose $6.60 plus some change in whatever currency it’s going into. and the messaging gets much more confusing!

paypal still pretends there’s no fee for a goods & services transaction, but if you send via the lower cost option, it shows you the currency conversion charge up front.

if you’re sending $1000, the currency conversion charge is $5. if you’re sending goods and services, it’s $44 but to the sender it looks like $0.

so paypal is basically conning people into creating these fees in exchange for what is often a nonexistent guarantee. ok, what else?

well, paypal tries to bill itself as a ‘safe’ way to receive money over the internet, but it’s not actually better than anything else. it’s still part of the financial system.

if someone pays you via paypal, you still need to do all the work of verifying that they’re a real person and not scamming you, because there is no protection. if the payment paypal received gets revoked or marked as fraudulent, guess who’s covering it. you!

this is a pretty common move for scammers, because I guess people trust paypal and think they can actually trust payments they receive by it. but if you want to take money from someone you don’t trust, you basically need to do cash or bitcoin or something like that.

now, payment processors are famous for this sort of shit. and if you’re a merchant, you might write it off as the cost of doing business. the frauds will be amortized to an acceptable cost over your whole volume of transactions.

but if you’re just some person doing a one off transaction, this is much less true. and paypal makes this deliberately more confusing instead of being transparent.

This, and also:

Did you know there’s an arms race going on between [Canadian freelancers who get paid in USD] and Paypal, where Canadians try to withdraw into USD-denominated bank accounts (to avoid Paypal’s terrible exchange rates, and perhaps use the USD directly) and Paypal tries to stop them?

Last I heard, Paypal was winning. (edit: apparently the Canadians have struck back, but the method they’re using these days costs $4/month, so even if you can get it working it’s only worth it for sufficiently high volumes. [link])

—

(And God help you if you want to *send* an American money: even if you have the USD lying around because you weren’t allowed to withdraw it at a reasonable exchange rate, a USD$3 flat fee is huge when you’re only dealing with a few dollars at a time.)

Tags:

#adventures in human capitalism #reply via reblog #PSA #our home and cherished land #home of the brave

~ Brin ~ Leave a comment

archiveofidentityconstellations:

i would never work as a gothic heroine which is a shame because i’ve got the looks for it but the firm presence of mind to gtfo from anything unpleasant

 

archiveofidentityconstellations:

The Phantom: I have heard you sing. I have heard you, my child. I am the A—

me as Christine Daaé: [under my breath as I gather my things hurriedly] Our Father, Who art in Heaven, Hallowed be Thy Name

 

archiveofidentityconstellations:

rogue master of the manor: [begins making flirtatious veiled threats towards me]

me, a poor governess: [immediately makes plans to get a different job]

 

archiveofidentityconstellations:

ruined aristocrat who has a dark reputation spoken about only in whispers: May we speak alone for a moment?

me, Aware of things: No thank you, we’ve only just met. My aunt is my chaperone and a lovely conversationalist. Please do come and discuss her seventeen dogs

 

archiveofidentityconstellations:

dark brooding guardian: [makes borderline asinine comments about my blossoming beauty]

me, packing my bags: Time for finishing school!

 

archiveofidentityconstellations:

passionate possessive lover: You shall be mine! [yanks on my arm]

me: [immediately lays down heavily like a corpse]

passionate possessive lover: I am very strong, I can still ca—stop it with the noodle arms!!

me: [slunks down further]

 

archiveofidentityconstellations:

he keeps trying to grab my waist but everytime he leans over me my enormous hat knocks him right in the jaw

he keeps struggling to pull me up but he steps on my dress every two seconds

he lifts my arms over my head and tries to jiggle me into sitting up on my knees but i just looked like a squashed horse stuffed into a dress like :p

he tries to take me by my leg but i just flop back down and my petticoats are silk and therefore very slippery

eventually he gets fed up and calls a stableboy over and the stableboy tries to take me up by my head, yanking at me at the neck, and then my passionate possessive lover is like “no you little idiot! here take one of her feet” and dashes over to take me by the arms but as he leans over my enormous hat knocks him in the jaw

they’re trying to slowly drag me over to his carriage but all of the townspeople have stepped out of their houses and shops

people are slowly looking out of their carriages like “what the fuck?”

meanwhile the stableboy has his grip on my leg and the passionate possessive lover is carrying me by my arms like a ragdoll with his head thrown back so he doesn’t get knocked in the jaw again by my enormous hat and my derrière is skidding against the dirt making a lady-shaped line from one end of the street to the next

 

ebonyheartnet:

“Kidnapping. This is literally kidnapping.”

“Well, yes, but… yes.”

“Someone should do something, right?”

“Oh, only if they manage to actually get her in the carriage. I want to see how long it takes for him to give up.”

“Really?”

“Son, she could decapitate him with that hat.”

“How do you know?”

“That’s what happened to the last ass who actually got her in the carriage.”

 

caffeinewitchcraft:

“This is not very elegant,” my possessive ex-lover pants. With his head tilted back, I can’t see his face, but I can see the bead of sweat rolling its way down his jaw.

“If you sweat on me,” I say. pointing my toe so that my foot runs the risk of slipping out of the shoe the stable boy is clinging to, “I’ll use the hat.”

My possessive ex-lover swears and digs his nails into my arm when my derriere catches on a cobblestone. “Aren’t you already using the hat?”

A boy standing just outside his front door, close enough to have heard my threat, whoops. “She says she’s going to use the hat!”

The ensuing cheer from our onlookers puts the first hint of unease in my ex-lover’s eyes. 

 

a-humble-waffle:

The crowd begins to chant. “Use the hat!” they cry in unison, “use the hat!” I grin wickedly, looking my possessive ex-lover dead in the eyes. “Whatever the people want.” His eyes are huge with panic now. I only grin wider, glare more fiercely. I am going to use the hat. This is a grand spectacle now, and he will not see the finale.

 

dubiousculturalartifact:

#this went places and I’m here for them all  (via @stiltfox)

Tags:

#storytime #anything that makes me laugh this much deserves a reblog #rape tw? #kidnapping cw #murder cw