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Comment by kome | Hacker News Reader

Americans have such a strange relationship with technology... the most innovative startups, and yet the worse infrastructure.

here in Europe it's the contrary :)

and btw: the service will be active in 2023 or 2024... while I enjoy immediate transfers bank to bank since years...

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Two things (probably more) contribute to this, I think:

1) Americans have been trained from birth to distrust government in all forms. Centralizing more and more services triggers a visceral fear response. (IMO it's nonsense, for the most part, but it's there nonetheless.)

2) Being "first to market" with new technologies often means you're just stuck with the sub-optimal first version, while other countries can learn from your mistakes when they do their first implementation.

On the flip side, when I'm in Europe, I definitely run into more places that only take cash, which I find annoying to no end. It's rare for places in the US (at least in fairly well-populated areas) to not take credit or at least debit cards.

> On the flip side, when I'm in Europe, I definitely run into more places that only take cash, which I find annoying to no end.

This is mostly for tax evasion reasons and sometimes for employees skimming off the top. The more “proper” a place, the less likely they are to encourage cash transactions.

Happens in US too, of course. It’s always the shady places that are cash only and everyone else is digital.

Or it's Germany. They prefer cash over plastic for privacy reasons.

https://www.npr.org/2019/06/09/728323278/for-many-germans-ca...

That's a bit cynical. While I'm not saying that doesn't happen, I would say that smaller businesses typically accept cash-only to avoid the fees of accepting card payments. And this is not only the 1-2% transaction fee charged by (e.g.) Visa/Mastercard, these fees also include things like

* Fees for the rental and maintenance of payment card terminals.

* Gateway fees.

* Cost of fraud prevention services.

* Fees or premiums to insure against ‘forward delivery risk’

All of this erodes the already thin margins that small businesses typically operate at.

And then you have cash: no fees, instant payment, private.

Most of those fees don't apply to e.g. Europe. It's pretty much just hardware (starts at 30 euro or so for the cheap versions) and some transaction costs (1.5% or less, depending on volume). It's often cheaper to accept electronic payments than cash. Handling cash costs money (bank deposits, buying change, vaults, cash registers, higher insurance cost).

Even street and marker vendors in The Netherlands accept electronic payments.

>Happens in US too, of course. It’s always the shady places that are cash only and everyone else is digital.

The US is a big place. Maybe where you are it's like that, but that's not at all accurate where I am.

It's either mom and pop places, or places that have been around for decades that "charmingly" never added support for cards. Both of which are probably less shady than average.

Although the pandemic has forced some of those places to start accepting cards now.

Your local Walmart/Chain Restaurant/$FRANCHISE is going to be just as shady, but less obvious.

Source: Know people who have recently worked across a variety of franchise type locations, they definitely still have _plenty_ of things go below board.

> This is mostly for tax evasion reasons and sometimes for employees skimming off the top

What are your reasons to state that so strongly as if it's a fact?

A house built down the road from me came pre-wired with cat6 and also solar panels preinstalled. Other houses here don’t even have the roof alignment for solar electricity.

There’s advantages and disadvantages to being early.

Could also be a forced thing due to being relatively fragmented with many different countries under a union which isn't as tight as the US union of states.

Great thing about the US is that it's possibly the biggest homogeneous market in the world where you can form a lot of reliable expectations of people throughout. By contrast, countries such as China and India are highly diverse culturally. You can't even expect people to be speaking the same language (yes, each have national languages but not everyone speaks them and it's not a first language for many.)

China is diverse linguistically? You mean to say I can encounter some one in a major metro in China and they won't speak mainland Mandarin?

I have never been to China. I'm from the US and I only speak English. Currently I'm living in the Philippines though.

I imagine China is a lot like the Philippines. There are a lot of dialects and then one national language. The national language here is Tagalog, but English is also a national language.

You can expect that almost everyone speaks the local dialect unless they are from another region. You can expect that most people speak conversational English. Some have a difficult time speaking Tagalog and may revert to English if Tagalog is the only common language among the speakers.

People feel confident speaking the languages they use regularly. For regions outside the Tagalog regions, that's mostly the regional dialect. Most street signs are in English. Local TV is mostly Tagalog but there are English stations as well.

Everyone is unique, but in many cases people have no reason to speak Tagalog. They may hear it, but hearing is different than speaking. In any case, you can't make the same assumptions nation-wide as you can with people in the US.

In the Philippines, you could do pretty good with marketing in English. Kids are taught English in school and it's possible the regional dialects could quickly disappear in the future. If you're going to learn only one language in the Philippines, it should be English. Other countries may not have this same unity on language. Each country is different.

In the US, you have (Wikipedia 2019 numbers) nearly 330 million people who you can make solid assumptions for in terms of language. Most of those people are English as a daily driver if not a first language. It's hard to beat the combination of one of the most widely spoken languages and one of the largest countries by population.

I don't know what other language has that many "first language" speakers in a single country. Mandarin could be, but even within the Mandarin language there are lots of dialects (one caveat is that the writing system is the same for all.) So, it's difficult to determine what the actual numbers are. According to a quick Google search, a quarter of the Chinese population doesn't speak the common tongue at all.

An honorable mention might be Brazil, a country with a population of over 200 million and all-in on Portuguese.

While the Chinese government has forced the majority of young people to learn Mandarin in schools, even just taking a 1 hour train ride from Shanghai to Hangzhou, both cities have local languages that are mutually unintelligible. Elderly people, especially in the countryside but also in the cities occasionally, often don't know how to speak Mandarin at all. But if you mostly hang out with urban youth you should be fine entirely with Mandarin.

Unless you only speak to younger people in tier-1 cities, China is enormously diverse linguistically.

I can confirm that, the situation may improve in the next generation.

i am not sure if improve is the right word here :)

i believe losing linguistic variety is almost a tragedy.

I take issue with the word "improve" there. Whilst I definitely agree that a common language is valuable in many ways, it would be preferable if a common language could be achieved without a loss of diversity (i.e. additional to, rather than replacing, the existing languages).

Different languages embody different cultures, and different ways of thinking. This diversity should be celebrated and embraced, not only as an aesthetic matter, but also because being able to communicate and think in different ways makes humans more capable.

Agreed. But this trend looks unstoppable,to most parents in Shanghai, even English is more important than local language.

Maybe what happend in 2020 would change that...

Agreed - I have a few Shanghainese friends, and they tell me their parents discourage them from learning/speaking Shanghainese, since there is no "value" in doing so. They used to push them to learn English (but maybe that will change a little now). Perhaps they have a point, but when you're young and still good at learning language, you don't have to choose one or the other.

I have heard similar stories from Europeans coming from places with strong dialects / local languages, so it's not unique to China for sure.

regarding the flip side, at least in Germany that is partially due to your point 1: distrust in government. Where the USA wants guns to protect themselves, Germans want cash.

1) They have been trained to distrust government and are the country with the most consistent freedom on the planet bar none. I am not from the US, but if US Americans suddenly decide to change that, it would be a big loss. Europe certainly cannot hold up to anything here, even if it too believes in division of powers.

And otherwise I like cash and social security is one factor. Let's take a "problematic" country like Germany and its social security net. In the event that you cannot take care of yourself, the government gives you the minimal amount of money you need to survive. In exchange for total control of your accounts. There is a gray area with abuse of social security, but I think it is clear what that control can entail.

Will they even seize 10$ you got from your friend for a pack of cigarettes? Yes, they will... Being critical of government is the better way, it cannot be your parent and if it is, it is a lousy one. These rules were made by civil servants that cannot even get into that situation and it shows.

So don't give up the suspicion just yet.

>> the most innovative startups, and yet the worse infrastructure.

Nobody in the US wants to pay for infrastructure. It's the governments role, but political figures want to spend our money in less critical ways.

This isn't unique to the US of course: the US is spending a higher share of its GDP on infrastructure than the EU is at this point. The welfare state in both Europe and the US is consuming all available resources, and that's only going to get far worse over the next 20-30 years due to aging and contracting workforces. Most of Europe outside of Germany has zero available resources for big infrastructure spend. The US could divert $200 billion from its military spending (requiring a near total retreat from the rest of the world, including Europe, Japan and South Korea), however that would merely lessen the extreme budget deficit that already exists thanks to entitlement spending. That budget gap will grow dramatically over the coming decade. The US needs to raise taxes by $1.5 trillion just to break even.

Its because a generation or two of Americans were propagandized heavily that anything socialized will immediately lead to Soviet communism. If we build infrastructure Lenin will rise from the dead and transform into a giant mech warrior and wade across the Atlantic to destroy us all.

I would watch this movie

It's called Red Dawn and it's awesome.

Germany?

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