Venmo is irrelevant in (all?) most of the markets where Whatsapp is utterly dominating. In February it was reported that the platform has 2 billion active users.

Right. But all these countries have a popular payment app similar to Venmo that all people use. For example, in Israel where whatsapp is as popular as in Brazil, there's an app called Bit everyone is using, where you can send money using phone numbers. I'm sure India and Brazil have similar apps.

I seriously doubt that, I've lived in 3 of the countries (fairly large ones) where WhatsApp is THE communications and in all of those, at least to my knowledge, most (mostly young) people send money electronically through banks, sometimes more modern digital versions like Nubank in Brazil, but there's no all-encompassing default solution.

But in the US banking is very archaic and so bank transfers are not instant and I think even involve a fee unlike in most countries

There is no equivalent in Brazil yet, not with any significant market share.

The closest thing we have is Nubank, which is a mobile-only bank, but even that is not nearly as universal as WhatsApp.

Essentially everyone with a phone number uses WhatsApp, but payment apps so far have been restricted mostly to the 20s ~ early 30s audiences in terms of adoption.

I might be in a bit of a bubble here (Porto Alegre), but all my friends except for one who's a tinfoil-on-head privacy nut use PicPay. Even more hipster-y restaurants/bars are starting to accept payment over it.

Anecdotal evidence, I know, but lacking proper studies...

Here in Florianópolis PicPay is absolutely unheard of. I know it by name but have never used or heard about anyone using it.

In São Paulo it seems PicPay is more popular with younger people, as you can open an account being 16 or older. Nubank you have to be at least 18, probably as it mainly is a credit card.

I don’t have an account, nor have seen somebody using it, though. I’m totally outside their target group.

In India there are multiple apps like GooglePay, Phonepe, Paytm. All these are popular and widely used, Whatsapp was trying to get into payments in India for a long time but unable to launch because of regulations.

UPI payments are very popular in India and GooglePay really did a good job in getting the market share here in India.

FYI there is no similar equivalent here in the UK, so I wouldn't assume...

Unlike a lot of countries, the UK has free and near-instant bank transfers which seem to be a de facto standard for things like splitting bills with friends.

Incidentally I tried to use Venmo while in the US, but the app was geo-blocked so I couldn’t install it with a Google Play account set to the UK.

> Unlike a lot of countries

Interestingly, you might actually have that a bit backwards - North America is the only place I know of that doesn't have free (or with a fee of a few cents), near-instant bank transfers. It actually surprised me how backwards the banking system seemed the first time I was in the US (coming from West Africa).

Canada does. See my other comment about it: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=23558111

I have been fined by the police at 4 AM for the exact same thing.

> Maybe strangulation if the user cooperates.

Clearly another untapped business opportunity.

That's how InDriver works, a fairly popular app in Latin America, originally created in Russia.

More info: https://www.businessinsider.co.za/indriver-lets-drivers-hagg...

Could you explain a bit more about the atonal euphemism? Is this a common alternative to express a word in Mandarin?

It's a pun. 和谐 is héxié in Pinyin and 河蟹 is héxiè. They differ only in the tone of the last syllable. Since 河蟹 means "river crab", the reader will probably be able to guess that some other word is meant and correct it to 和谐 in their mind.

This is not just used to evade censorship, but also humorously. E.g. returnees from overseas 海归 (hǎiguī) are frequently called sea turtles 海龟 (hǎiguī). In that case, even the tones match.

It's a common way of getting around censorship (specifically taboo words). A classic (if recent), comedic example is the Grass Mud Horse [1].

[1]: https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Grass_Mud_Horse

The atonal euphemism is a common alternative to avoid automatic censorship of various websites.

Exactly. It’s a tongue-in-cheek that basically says that you need to circumvent censorship when you want to talk about censorship.

By the way, I’m not a linguist and I just completely made up that usage of “atonal homophone”. Could an actual linguist chime in and tell us what’s the correct way to describe a “homophone” that doesn’t match in tone, in the context of a tonal language like Chinese?

It's usually still called a pun or homophone. Most puns in English don't precisely match phonetics (especially stress) either.

Here's a bookmarklet you can add to your bookmark bar for translating to English:

  javascript:s=document.selection?document.selection.createRange().text:window.getSelection?window.getSelection().toString():document.getSelection?document.getSelection():%27%27;location.href=(s==%27%27)?%27http://translate.google.com/translate?u=%27+escape(location.href)+%27&sl=auto&tl=en%27:%27http://translate.google.com/translate_t?text=%27+s+%27&sl=auto&tl=en%27;

Verge picked up the story and Xiaomi subsequently fired the employee and apologized to Tarka: https://www.theverge.com/2019/6/18/18684417/xiaomi-ripoff-ar...

Android. iOS's firefox is Safari (like every browser on the iPhone) with a firefox overlay.

How is it math? It totally ignores that a movie star could be well known over many countries in the world. Considering Hollywoods reach, I wouldn't be surprised.

The term seems to include both "vegetarian" and "vegan".