Wise forced to restrict use in Indonesia to fund transfers only

The money transfer service Wise sent out an email to customers with registered Indonesian addresses on their accounts telling them that they must empty their accounts before 23 May 2024.

From then on, Wise customers in Indonesia will not be able to store, receive, or send money from their Wise accounts. They will be limited to using Wise only as a wire transfer service and nothing else due to local regulations governing financial transactions.

The company is advising customers with Indonesian addresses to inform their benefactors or clients that they can use Wise to arrange transfers to their bank accounts instead.

While fund transfer is the core of the service and Wise is a licensed remittance facilitator, it offers a wider range of services including an account that people can use to store balance and internationally send and receive money, international remittance, and issuing debit cards for international transactions.

In a lot of ways Wise is similar to PayPal as they allow customers to receive, send, and store funds on their accounts but in Indonesia Wise doesn’t appear to have a license to operate as a bank or digital wallet provider which means they’re not permitted to allow customers to store funds in a Wise account.

It would be … wise for the company to acquire the wallet license if they wish to offer their full services in Indonesia. Until they manage to secure that license, their services will remain limited to remittances, just like Western Union.

Live Action Avatar: The Last Airbender

Watched three episodes of Netflix’s live action Avatar series. As someone who only knows the original series from internet memes and still has yet to watch even a single episode of the animated series, I don’t see what’s wrong with it. It’s a perfectly fine fantasy series which seems to draw story inspiration from Star Wars.

I get that there may be differences but what do you expect when it’s an 8 episode series as opposed to 20 in the first season? On top of that, no adaptation is going to be a perfect 1:1.

I don’t know if character and story arc changes were necessarily abandoned to keep the story moving or if the team couldn’t get it to work but the original series is still there to watch and I plan to catch it finally once I’m done with the live action.

Google Testing Removal of News Tab

With Australia, Canada, and Indonesia passing laws or regulations requiring platforms to pay for news links and the US having introduced the Journalism Competition and Preservation Act last year, removing the News tab looks like Google’s response to avoid having to pay link tax to media companies.

The News tab is only missing for a limited group of users for the moment. It is a test after all and I still see it when I use Google search.

Indonesia’s Deadly Elections

71 Indonesian election officials died on duty from exhaustion following last Wednesday’s elections while more than 4,500 fell ill. Health Minister Budi Sadikin said other than exhaustion the second highest cause of death was heart failure.

Apparently nearly 400,000 people out of 6.8 million officials across the country were approved to work on the election despite having health concerns. Officials have been working 10-15 hour days to verify ballot papers, tabulate the results, submit and verify the submitted results to the central database, which has problems of its own.

So far, with 71% of the ballots officially counted, data from more than 1,200 polling stations were found to be erroneous out of more than 820,000 stations, which triggers a revote in a number of locations.

In 2019 nearly 900 election officials died on the job from exhaustion while more than 5,000 fell ill.

Third Time Lucky for Prabowo Subianto

Pretty comprehensive read on the apparent victory of Defence Minister Prabowo Subianto in Indonesia’s presidential election last Wednesday. Sample ballots by all official surveys have him at nearly 60% of the votes in a three horse race, negating a run off in June. Official results must be announced by 20th of March. Inauguration will take place in October (yes, an eight month wait where anything could happen).

This was his third straight run at the Presidency after previous attempts ended at the party convention. In 2009 he unsuccessfully ran as Megawati Soekarnoputri’s running mate, losing to the Yudhoyono-Budiono ticket.

The best take I’ve seen on this victory was on a post I can’t find anymore. It said Jokowi is so impressive that he managed to carry a player with 0% win rate to mythic level. I’ll link to it if I find it.

Strongly believed to have given his blessing end endorsement to Prabowo in this election instead of his own party’s candidate, Jokowi of course defeated him decisively in the last two elections to the point that Prabowo threw a tantrum refusing to accept his loss. Post election riots in May 2019 by his supporters led to the death of six people in Jakarta.

Of Exit Polls and Mail-in Ballots

Apparently a lot of Indonesians have never heard of voting by mail, thinking people can only vote on the day of the election instead of sending their ballot papers by mail.

There’s no mail-in ballots in the country but extensively used overseas where polling stations are limited to consular offices and embassies.

Worldwide exit polls for this month’s Indonesian presidential election have been released in defiance of the election rules which prohibit them from being announced until polling booths are closed in Western Indonesia on Wednesday.

Surprisingly all of the results gave a win to Ganjar and Mahfud MD, the least popular pairing across all domestic surveys, and by large margins.

In some cases the exit polls were conducted ahead of the actual voting day which differ from country to country, presumably based on those who cast mail-in ballots.

However, by no means it’s an indicator for the final results. Prabowo-Gibran are expected to sweep the election on Wednesday and they’ve been polling increasingly better by the week, exceeding 50% in some cases, which would negate the need for a second round in June.

By the way, overseas votes are counted as part of the South and Central Jakarta constituency, so they don’t matter as much in the national level.

Overseas exit poll results for the
2024 Indonesian presidential election

South America:
Ganjar-Mahfud 72.6%
Prabowo-Gibran 22.7%
Anies-Muhaimin 4.7%

Europe
Ganjar-Mahfud 56.5%
Prabowo-Gibran 9.4%
Anies-Muhaimin 34.1%

United States
Ganjar-Mahfud 40.4%
Prabowo-Gibran 21.4%
Anies-Muhaimin 38.2%

Timor Leste
Ganjar-Mahfud 63.9%
Prabowo-Gibran 26.3%
Anies-Muhaimin 9.8%

Hong Kong
Ganjar-Mahfud 54.2%
Prabowo-Gibran 31.6%
Anies-Muhaimin 14.2%

Australia
Ganjar-Mahfud 56.7%
Prabowo-Gibran 10.4%
Anies-Muhaimin 32.9%

smokiedokie:

I opened my copy of The Tale of the Body Thief & immediately had to close it again because of this silly little annotation

dduane:

owldaughter:

clandestinegardenias:

clandestinegardenias:

My therapist just told me my problem is that I need to write more fanfiction.

This sounds fake but the logic behind it is actually really interesting? She said obsession with a new fandom triggers quick dopamine release when we consume all this related content–it’s easy and addictive.

What we’re NOT getting is that ‘slow dopamine’ that’s more sustainable and engaging. That’s the kind we get from DOING things that take effort but are ultimately rewarding.

So like, she suggested that writing fic and making fanart are ways to balance the quick dopamine of watching a show/reading fic with the slow dopamine of working at something that takes effort.

Moral of the story is you should engage in the process of creation around your favorite things. You’ll feel better for it.

Oh.

OH.

Let’s all go do fandom.

FOR SCIENCE!

🙂

Artifact News Reader is Being Shut Down

I’ve enjoyed using Artifact and it’s upsetting that it’s being shut down because it really seemed like it was on its way to be a really good news reader. It’s often the first or second app I open to kickstart the day. I like that Artifact lets you load an AI-generated article summary if you don’t have time to read the full story.

Artifact at some point added social elements but people just didn’t see it that way because it’s a news reader first and foremost. It also let you publish your own takes of the news linking to them, making it a blog platform. This part I enjoyed a lot. I didn’t post too many times but enough to keep me writing my thoughts on things that bugged me.

They said Artifact will remain up until til the end of February. I’ll be spending some time to republish those posts here and backdating them accordingly.

Ultimately for a blogger it all comes back to running your own space if you want to keep your published thoughts available to read on the web. Maybe one day I’ll eventually decide to have my own self hosted blog and social web instance like it’s always meant to be and move everything to that because platforms like there, including Medium and Tumblr, may one day shut down if they can’t justify keeping them around whether through lack of revenue or something else.

For my daily news reading there’s always Flipboard which I also still use regularly but I’m going to miss Artifact.

Shutting down Artifact