And yet in this article "innovation" seems to mean "creating companies that don't make a profit"
https://stats.oecd.org/Index.aspx?DataSetCode=PATS_IPC
This is a stupid measure (number of patents), but it's better than whatever nothing is in that article. Seems like the EU is doing fine. The EU has issues, but "Europe not being good at innovating" is quite the leap that I doubt they can actually base in fact.
I wonder what else the author will suggest in their next article. Loosening labor regulations?
> Should your startup go bankrupt, chances are you will as well, and you’ll have to live under a multi-year purgatory during which time your innovative abilities are severely curtailed. No bank will touch you also. It really is pretty bad
(For reference, limited liability companies exist and are the norm in pretty much all European countries)
Also, talking in general "Europe" terms as if things (culture, regulations, people's perceptions) are the same in the Netherlands and Spain, let alone Estonia and Romania.
American exceptionalism at its finest. If it's American, it's superior by default. Even if in their jobs market the weakest part (workers) is screwed over by design. I'd never work in the unregulated US.
Hmmm. Also looks like we're doing fine.
- TSMC and Samsung Chip fabrication is done with machinery designed by ASML (Netherlands)
- ASML litography is only possible with precision optics designed by Zeiss (Germany)
- The Linux kernel of the 'US' designed OS is actually Finnish.
Cherry picking will paint whatever picture you want.
OTOH ASML is definitely European, and, frankly, has no serious competition anywhere on the planet.
Here's an old post about window technology. Screens and shutters.
Never heard that in real life, everyone I know just uses Venmo. I occasionally use Zelle and Apple, too, but frankly I like having the money transfer service at arm's length from my real bank. Especially when I'm transacting with a stranger.
In the U.K. we’ve had online banking for 20 years now, and telephone banking before that. With most banks you can send an amount up to £25k to any account in the country and the money will be there pretty much instantly. All you need is the name of the person/business and their 6-digit sort code and 8 digit account number. Since about 18 months ago, it automatically warns you if the persons name doesn’t match on the name on the account. We’ve had chip cards and PIN rather than signature in Europe since the early 2000s, and contactless cards started being launched in 2007.
You want to signup for a digital service from the government, your bank, your insurance company,.. . Well you need to send in a copy of a bill and your passport. And then they will give you a separate login for every service. And it is not even like there are many services you can use.
In Denmark, for example, all communication with the government has been digital for almost 10 years, unless you are exempt. In the U.K. I've experienced places where I had to send in a physical letter.
So yeah, banking is fine, but that is about it. In other places they are at least 10 years behind similar countries.
And so on.
I find the EU and UK more or less on the same level for digital services. The UK is a little behind in some ways and a little ahead in others.
The US seems to specialise in making everything unnecessarily difficult. If I want an EIN and I don't already have an ITIN, it's a letter or a fax, and it takes months. If I want an ITIN it's an officially notarised copy of my ID documents - which usually requires a trip to an embassy - and a letter. And again it takes months.
If I want to set up an LLC I have to wade through the details of 50 states, all of whom have different prices, rules, filing requirements, and local tax rates, and hire a local agent, all of whom have different prices, rules, and filing requirements.
And then the IRS can fine me $25k per infringement if they think there's a mistake on my annual filing, even though I won't be paying tax on an LLC passthrough.
Except I will because if it's a passthrough I'll probably be hit with a personal withholding tax, unless I fill in the paperwork that proves there's a tax treaty which reduces it to zero.
If some tax has already paid I can probably claim it back but I'll get a paper cheque which my bank will look at and think "Huh? Why?"
On the upside if I was living in the US I'd have to worry about incredibly expensive health insurance and payroll taxes which would make starting a small business either non-viable or very risky.
And so on. Business friendly? No.
Without a national ID system it's much harder to create corresponding e-identity tools.
Edit: I'd said "explicitly rejected" but that would incorrectly imply a referendum or somesuch so I amended.
Most people have some form of ID anyway.
Most of Europe has ID cards and they Just Work. They even work as travel ID instead of a passport for flights between European destinations.
>There's nominal UK resistance to ID cards because the right-wing fascist papers say there is. I'm not convinced the population is all that bothered...
In the UK there's a very strong cultural association [countless films, TV dramas] etc. equating national ID cards with humourless totalitarian officials demanding to see 'Your papers!'. Hence the inherent distaste for the concept of having to carry something that proves who you are to any officious git in a uniform, who cares to ask for it.
Of course the irony is that, outside of passports, the UK pretty much has acquired a de facto national ID card by stealth, in the form of the photocard driving licence.
It's almost always the 'other' document you can use whenever reuired to prove your identity, if you don't have a passport. And the government is trying very hard to get people still holding the older [non photo] paper driving licences to 'upgrade' to a new photocard driving licence. Not only by extolling its benefits, but by threatening heavy fines for anyone whose details have changed in any way on their old paper licence and who hasn't immediately updated it.
Maybe it's a trust thing. Countries where the government has made many of the right decisions and where people trust them (like Nordic and some other European countries) seem to be okay with the national ID thing, whereas companies where people fear (maybe rightly) the government screwing them over (like the UK and US) do not.
This isn't generally the case; for the most part, a UK resident just answers some questions on application and won't be asked for ID to take out financial products. It's only normally if you fail to verify that you'd be asked that, which might happen if you've got no address/financial history here for e.g.
For online government services all tax/benefits are online and pretty seamless. The things that aren't seamless are much less common - for e.g. renewing driving license I remember being quite painful.
We don't have chip and PIN because it's dumb. It's chip and nothing, not chip and signature. There's no reason for credit card users to spend time protecting the bank's money like that - credit cards are not your money and their security is not your problem.
Who do you think ends up picking up the bill for all the money the banks lose due to sloppy security? I can guarantee that no bank CEO was ever forced to buy a smaller yacht because they lost too much money to fraud. All of those costs get passed onto consumers in the form of crazy high transaction fees, up to 10x higher than the EU, and an insane list of bank fees for so much as sneezing wrong in a bank branch.
You might personally no care about protecting the banks money, but neither are they, because they’ll just find a creative way to collect new fees to cover the cost. Not a cent will come out of their profit margin.
And of course the responsibility for committing credit card fraud is on the criminal, not the bank.
> IME businesses that take cash are mostly doing it for tax evasion, not to save you the transaction fee on cards.
Business don’t give a shit about saving you money on transaction fees. All of their competitors build it into their prices, so it’s price that drives up consumer costs pretty uniformly, so there’s little advantage in trying to keep that cost down. It not like the businesses customers can find a competitor offer substantially better prices due to lower transaction fees.
> And of course the responsibility for committing credit card fraud is on the criminal, not the bank.
That doesn’t change the cost involved. I personally don’t give a shite who’s responsible, I just know I’m not responsible, and I don’t want to pay the cost.
The current card network fee system is very similar to the US healthcare insurance system. Pharmaceutical companies can charge crazy high prices for medication, because the cost is paid for by insurance companies, the end user is never given the opportunity to shop around. As a result there is little competitive price pressure on pharmaceutical companies, there’s so many layers between them and actual price sensitive user, that they can basically just ignore the user, and rely on insurance companies to find a way to extract the rents the industry wants.
Credit cards also have 2FA (“3D secure”) for less trustworthy online sites, mostly international.
(Not the person you replied to) It depends on the regulations. I don't think all countries have the same liability/protection laws regarding credit cards as the US.
Chip & pin for most people is less convenient, so you'd not find too many Americans thinking they were behind in that regard. The PIN does give some added security, which is great if you are a bank because it's easier to justify denying any fraud claims.
About the only thing I might agree on that is a meaningful limit is sending money between my accounts at different institutions. Instant only if I do it at the branch, less instant if I want to make it happen through my smartphone.
There are “direct debits” that allow companies to draw money from an account, but they can only be set up by businesses, there are special guarantees, etc. etc. that mean the bank is liable to reimburse you immediately under the “Direct Debit Guarantee” if you report a fraudulent transaction.
It prevents gas pumps from stealing credit card numbers, which up until chip and pin that was a huge problem.
Same with random non bank ATMs. General advice was either go to a bank ATM or you'd get your credit card # stolen.
> I have no interest in giving a stranger my account number. Heck, for Zelle I'd have to give them my email address and that's already too much.
Zelle's sending limits are way too low. Can't pay rent with it, in the USA, still have to mail a check in many places to pay rent. Sure the bank automates paying mailing the check, but here is the stupid process:
1. Renter tells bank to auto mail a check to landlord 2. Landlord receives paper check, uses mobile phone app to deposit check into their account 3. Bank makes funds instantly available, then at some point someone manually reviews the images of the check to make sure it is real. 3a. If the check is too large, funds are not immediately available.
Or, to put it another way, because neither of our banks don't allow online wire transfers, the easiest way for my wife and I to send each other non-trivial amounts of money is to write a physical check to each other! That is insane.
In any given year of their career, Primary Care doctors earn less than software developers in a coastal city. (e.g. by the time a doctor graduates school and goes through residency, they may be in their 30s, at which point software devs are pulling down more $).
To be honest, it feels like 50-75% goes to overhead, and we just need to figure out a nice system to align incentives to eliminate it.
[1] Some exceptions apply. Please see your insurance (if you even have any) for details.
I had always assumed that healthcare had crazy high costs in the US because they have a middleman who is motivated to refuse payment as much as possible (insurance companies) so healthcare providers have to inflate costs to try and stay even.
Also, out-of-pocket healthcare spending as % GDP is lower in the US than in the UK. Expensive healthcare in $ doesn't matter when you're paid so much more.
Meanwhile the US has hundreds of thousands of medical bankruptcies every year.
https://balancingeverything.com/medical-bankruptcies-statist...
Health care is more expensive because most insurance doesn't contribute much to out-of-network costs, and if you have an accident in the middle of nowhere you won't get directed to the nearest in-network facility.
Even if you're in-network copays, exclusions, and other scams can turn a medical emergency into a financial catastrophe.
It's a completely outrageous, exploitative, inhumane system.
The bottom line is that our healthcare system serves several percent of the population (but not the very bottom tier, who have medicaid and public hospitals) incredibly badly and for everyone else is normally just annoying. It's possible for an American software developer with reasonable spending habits to have a medical emergency turn into a financial catastrophe, but it would be really hard.
A lot of Europeans seem to believe that their healthcare costs make up for the salary differential. This is not a reasonable belief even before factoring in taxes and cost of living in most cities.
[1] https://www.healthcare.gov/glossary/out-of-pocket-maximum-li...
I imagine it covers dentists, specialists, traveling out of country or private coverage because it's faster. I know for a fact my healthcare spending would be higher in Australia than it is in the US despite it having free healthcare. (As in, I’ve paid it.)
They fleece you solely through their existence. Polish government "single payer" had less than 200 million dollars spend on operating cost - 0.8% of overall costs. Just United Health spend 11 billion dollars on that, compared to 52 billion dollars spend on medical costs.
>The actual care is great.
Not if you look at actual health outcomes.
The venmo "innovation" does something every retail bank in the UK has done for over a decade.
https://www.theguardian.com/money/2012/feb/16/barclays-pingi...
(note the person in the article is holding the iphone 4 in a steve jobs approved manner)
If your bank provides an instant settlement, they are most likely paying you out of their pocket, and therefore taking risk.
According to its own website [0], it means "individuals and firms can transfer money between each other within seconds", and "TIPS offers final and irrevocable settlement of instant payments in euro, at any time of day and on any day of the year."
[0]: https://www.ecb.europa.eu/paym/target/tips/html/index.en.htm...
[1] - https://www.zellepay.com/faq/how-long-does-it-take-receive-m...
JPMorgan, Other Banks in Talks to Reimburse Scammed Zelle Customers
WSJ link: https://www.wsj.com/amp/articles/jpmorgan-other-banks-in-tal...
Archive link: https://archive.vn/yXy1P
> who has which app
As opposed to what? A monopoly where a single company controls features and prices?
That’s not what SEPA is.
Which means, among other things, you'd better have a locked down, stock OS image for your phone because without remote attestation banking apps simply will not work.
I've used it through the web with no problems. Maybe it depends on your bank?
Totally agreed that the trend of requiring devices that have preinstalled rootkits is terrible.
The US government, in a sense, couldn't regulate its banks into fast transfers.
e.g. is Open Banking (1) a technology or a European Parliament directive? It's a bit of both.
To paraphrase you: The US government couldn't yet regulate its banks into (the social advantages of adopting a uniform technology of) fast transfers.
It's coming but the US is hardly at the forefront of this (2) Nigeria has one already (3)
1 ) https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Open_banking
2) https://www.frbservices.org/financial-services/fednow/about....
Seems that innovations that don't involve shaking down the consumer 3 times before lunch are not really innovations in the US
You can use services like PayPal, Venmo, Western Union, etc to quickly transfer money between card accounts, including across the world; not instant but within 10 minutes or so, and not for free.
Transfers and payments using more traditional infrastructure like credit cards are not instant, they have settlement time. That time is there not because the systems are technically slow, but because it's a mandated time window to revert transactions, either fraudulent or done by mistake.