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Comment by Denvercoder9 | Hacker News Reader

> To be fair, Europe as a whole is 20-30 years behind on most fronts from the state of the art of information technology.

This is a gross, unjustified generalization. Sure, there's a lot of old crap around, but that's no different from other parts of the world; but there's also lots of new, modern stuff, with a huge diversity across the continent.

Just to give a common counterexample, the SEPA system allows me to trivially transmit money to anyone in the eurozone, for a considerable portion of them (including everyone in my country) in seconds, completely free of charge and involvement of any third party except my and their bank. Cash App, Venmo and comparable services basically don't exist in the EU, because the governments stimulated and mandated large scale interoperable digital infrastructure.

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Agreed, there are so many areas where the US trails the rest of the world as far as technology is concerned. The Australian taxation system tech would probably be enough to make most US citizens cry for what they have to endure, and I'm not even sure it's the best one out there.

Paying on credit card in the US was painful compared to the experience in Australia a few years ago. Australia had tap-to-pay everywhere and so many places in the US were still requiring swipe and signature (I mean WTF).

I have found SEPA to be quite good. Australia has PayID as well which works well.

To cherry-pick, Estonia is leading the world when it comes to digital government. It has been an absolute pleasure to use their e-resident system to run a company. They're fostering a startup ecosystem that is punching well above it's weight[0]. From autonomous delivery robots[1] to Wise.

Government technology can often lag behind private sector technology, both from an inately conservative approach, but also because they have to care about things that often get ignored with private sector tech, like supporting everyone (e.g. robust accessibility).

But to say that Europe is 20-30 years behind is just not a realistic view of the world.

[0]: https://www.zdnet.com/article/estonia-has-just-1-3-million-p... [1]: https://estonia.ee/delivery-robots-created-by-estonian-engin...

Technology isn't the reason the US appears to lag in some cases - business and governmental policy decisions are behind everything you list, and plenty of people don't like it.

The truth is that 20-30 years ago Europe was lagging behind the US in some respects - credit card acceptance, computer usage in some businesses, etc. But obviously they're on par with the US today, and where they're ahead or behind the US the reason isn't access to technology, rather it's usually government policy.

It's quite nuanced, which of course the GP comment wasn't. ¯\_(ツ)_/¯

Government policy and societal attitude are two parts of the reason. It's not really fair to compare US and Estonia really, One is managing 350(?) million people and the other 1.3 million. Even comparing Australia to Estonia though, the differences in behaviour from the government entities are remarkable.

Australia has a real "we're going to catch you" vibe to it's taxation and social services, where as, Estonia seems to really have an attitude of trying to build awesome things to make their citizens better off and to streamline things.

Governments and their relationship to technology, both as a provider and also as a regulator is a complex beast. As you say, so many of the problems are manifestations in the imperfections of our democracies. Regardless of which AU, EU, GB, US all have flaws that we have to live with and work to improve.

It’s not generalization, it’s mistaking what layman think of technology (websites and apps, 90% of which are useful only for extracting investors cash) with what actually is technology.

Where do you think those digital infrastructure are hosted?

Well, where do you think those digial infrasture are hosted?

Increasingly on the big 3 American cloud I can tell you that.

OVH, Hetzner, Scaleway, etc? European clouds that don't gauge their customers.

I take this as a joke.

SEPA is good but not that good. It normally takes two days for my money to arrive, longer over weekends and holidays. The UK Faster Payments system actually does work within seconds most of the time, but only within the UK.

The SEPA Instant Credit Transfer scheme introduced in 2017 introduced 10-second transfers. Not all banks are participating yet, particularly in (south-)eastern Europe, but it's a fast growing share, and in my home country (the Netherlands) just about everyone does.

All of my SEPA transfers after 2017 took days and none of them involved banks in (south-)eastern Europe. But it's good to hear that things are improving.

I can transfer funds from my Finnish bank account to my German bank account and I get a push notification from the German one within seconds of submitting it. If your SEPA transfers aren't instant, it just means that one or both of the banks involved haven't just adapted it yet.

Banks might also have only implemented receiver or sending, but not both. My mom can receive my instant SEPA transfers, but she can't send me one back since her bank has only implemented the receiving part.

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