I'm no windows fanboy and I don't doubt your experience, but I honestly don't understand how this can happen. I recently did three clean Win 11 reinstalls and I was done in an hour. Maybe because I did it on slightly older hardware...
This is CANTV they are talking about. This is the company I requested a new phone line from and it took 9.5 years to get it installed.
After waiting for 3 years, I gave up ended up paying one of their technicians I randomly found working in the street. He gave me a phone line that apparently used to belong to a taxi company, judging by all the wrong number calls I got. All that just to get 4mbps DSL service in 2019.
Last year, out of nowhere, I finally got a call from the company saying they were ready to install it.
Thankfully, a bunch of companies appeared out of nowhere (a lot of them with links to people in the govt, surprise) in 2020 and we got fiber.
Oh and a couple of years ago, my parents "lost" their phone line and have been without POTS ever since. Maybe it's karma for me paying for a phone line all those years ago...
It's 100x more difficult than you think it is. I come from a "semi-sanctioned" country, and it's extremely hard. Opening a bank account is impossible unless you can travel to the US. Stripe won't touch you with a 100 foot pole.
I can't even imagine how hard it would be from Iraq, even if it's currently "not sanctioned" in theory.
See also the last presidential elections in Venezuela, where they did not even bother to pretend they did not steal the election, even under overwhelming evidence. A year later, we are still waiting for the official ballots.
That's almost the final level. The final level would be not even holding elections...
There are cases where Google might find a URL blocked in robots.txt (through external or internal links), and the page can still be indexed and show up in the search results, even if they can't crawl it. [1].
The only way to be sure that it will stay out of the results is to use a noindex tag. Which, as you mentioned, search engine bots need to "read" in the code. If the URL is blocked, the "noindex" cannot be read.
Probably because in our countries (I'm also from S.America) the reliability of the post office is questionable at best, so it wasn't something I ever really used.
It's cne.gob.ve, and that doesn't work either. They want us to believe that because the website is down, the whole system that counts the votes is down. Hey, maybe the votes are counted in WordPress...
Calling Hinterlaces "the most respected" is quiiiite a stretch. The owner Oscar Schemel, frequently parrots the govt propaganda talking points ("it's the evil empire, there's no inflation it's sabotage etc)
As a caracan myself, it's actually "caraqueños" :)
Regarding the subject, it is indeed very popular. You can go to restaurants, car parts stores and clothing stores and find the Binance QR code prominently displayed.
And a LOT of freelancers working online have no way of receiving payments from abroad other than through Binance (verifying Paypal here because of currency controls). No one wants to receive the local currency.
I wouldn't say that you'll see grandmothers in the grocery store buying stuff with USDT, but it's definitely used.
I don't know about the other numbers, but my wife has had two scheduled c-sections and the recovery for both suuucked when compared to everyone we know that had natural birth.
Of course, the process of going through labor pains for many hours might make things even between the two...
Yep that's it. I just didn't want it to look like I was shilling something in the comments :)
Locally, Binance P2P is used a lot for remittances, and plenty of establishments use it as a way to receive payments as well. I've seen the Binance QR code in a bunch of restaurants and autoparts stores, for example
I used it earlier this year to send money to my sister in Argentina. Super fast, no fuss.
I'm currently living the dictatorship in Venezuela. Ask me if you think Ciro's opinion is not valid, for whatever reason. (Don't know him btw. Epale Ciro!)
Regarding your question, I believe it's mostly down to corruption basically. Local businesses have huge markups because they have to deal with theft, paying off customs officials even if they have all the paperwork etc as well as the taxes. As others have mentioned, these freight forwarders have figured out ways to get around that, probably with more bribing, not paying import taxes etc. It's a never ending corruption cycle and the customers are part of it.
Oh don't get me wrong, I totally understand your point as a seller. What's weird to me is that the seller gets blamed, even after the shipment is marked as delivered by UPS/Amazon logistics or whatever company was used to drop it off in Miami.
Unfortunately, I'm very familiar with the scamming culture around these parts as well:/
I understand where you are coming from, but most of the time that's the only way people that live in south or central America can buy stuff online at decent prices. It's cheaper for me to pay the shipping fees to my country than it is to buy stuff here.
I use a freight forwarder to do most of my online shopping through Amazon, ebay and lots of other stores. I've bought everything from phones, TVs and even a standing desk.
It's a huge industry here. If you go to any warehouse district in Miami near the airport you'll find a bunch of these companies.
As a sidenote, I did some small development work for a friend that owns one of these companies. He was running a smallish operation and was making some good money.
There's a couple of software solutions for tracking, billing, ,support and CRM for those types of companies and they are absolutely abismal. There, I gave someone a business idea :)