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[sigmaleph]

it's a shame i'm not that kind of person who can reliably produce Content (of any sort, let alone the kind people like) because even a little bit of patreon money goes a long way when you're converting from usd to ars

not that my financial situation is bad or anything, just idle thoughts

Comments

[brin_bellway]

My immediate thought was "personally, I have the opposite problem", but the things in my life it reminded me of aren't really opposites.

("I, a Canadian, am negotiating with a Canadian company for access to a Canadian VPN server: *why is this transaction in USD*")

("I hate that I am being forced to convert CAD (and take the exchange-fee hit) to pay for this peanut butter when there are perfectly good U.S. dollars in my Paypal account")

([in general, a lot of time and effort poured into finding ways to turn USD-denominated menial-Internet-labour payouts into something useful as efficiently as possible, and often failing. on multiple occasions I bought an iPad from amazon.com and then turned around and sold it on Craigslist-type sites for 90% value, because every other use for Amazon-US credit was even worse. toyed with using an Amazon-bitcoin exchange sometimes used by people looking to launder the proceeds of stolen credit cards, but bitcoin transaction fees are insane and even if they weren't you only got like 85% value there, worse than iPads.])

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So yeah, not really opposites even in terms of exchange rates (and I expect you're mostly talking cost of living)--indeed, I have been known to willingly choose payment in USD over CAD, because they offered me CAD at parity and haha fuck that--but I have nevertheless developed an instinctive flinch at the idea of involving USD in a transaction.

[sigmaleph]

Huh, that's annoying

and yeah mostly what I'm talking about is cost of living, but the thing is it kind of manifests as the prices of things in ARS changing ~slowly* while the exchange rate can change much more quickly. It *feels like* everything costs the same but suddenly USD became more valuable.


*well, we have absurd amounts of yearly inflation compared to most other countries. so 'slowly' is not really true relative to how it would happen in a country with single-digit inflation. but it's still slower than some of the bigger fluctuations in exchange rate

[brin_bellway]

Right, I *had* vaguely heard that the Argentinian economy was much more volatile. Our inflation rate is quite low, I'm told, and the USD spot-rate (expressed in terms of number of U.S. cents it takes to buy one Canadian dollar) has been pretty steady at 75 ± ~2 for years now.

(Though I do remember a time that we were at parity: perhaps some of the book bloggers I worked for remembered it too, and hadn't been paying enough attention to notice that this is no longer the case. In fact, "take Amazon-US credits, buy iPad, arrange Craigslist sale, suffer 10% in resale losses, deposit the cash into your bank, buy something on amazon.ca and pay with a debit card (or, even better, a credit card)" results in *more* money than taking Amazon-CA credits at parity and paying them directly, *and* you get the flexibility of being able to buy something other than Amazon (the selection at which is really not all it's cracked up to be, especially if you are more sensitive to price than to convenience†).)

(and wait until you learn about Norbert's Gambits. and I have a horrible feeling that once my financial situation is good enough for it to come up, I'm going to have to learn how to keep my *investments* in USD, in order to play nice with the IRS (and then do gambits to *get* the USD for it). ...I might just use savings accounts until I have enough built up that paying a specialist accountant $500/year to fill out Qualified Electing Fund paperwork is a decently small percentage of the total money.

(or maybe I'll get *very* lucky and the United States will make like a *normal* country and stop taxing non-resident citizens, and I'll stop having to contort myself into their convoluted foreign-investment tax laws. (or even just make an exception that country-of-residence investments don't count as foreign! that would be enough!) but I don't want to bet on it.))


P.S. Breaking news: Paypal about to become even worse at this.

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†And if you're seriously considering going through that rigmarole in order to get 90 U.S. cents on the dollar instead of 75, you are clearly more sensitive to price than to convenience.