Comment by pavlov | Hacker News Reader

Comment by pavlov | Hacker News Reader

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> “Why can't I as a regular retail investor trade a stock on Saturday?”

Stock trading on exchanges traditionally has delayed settlement. You don’t need to have the money and stock at hand when you make the trade, but you’re expected to provide them on the settlement date. For a long time this was two days later, but is now being changed to only one day in the U.S.

Trading on Saturdays would either mean complications for settlement, or that settlement must happen on Saturday too. Surely not impossible, but these things have ripple effects that are not immediately obvious.

> “Why can't I move money from one bank account to another on Sunday?”

This exists in Europe with 24/7 SEPA instant credit across banks and Eurozone countries. It doesn’t cost anything extra.

But getting to that point needed a serious mandate from the European Union, years of planning, and cooperation by the various governments. The effort was worth it because it’s a far better solution for consumers than e.g. cryptocurrencies or the American proprietary payment solutions like Venmo.

>> “Why can't I move money from one bank account to another on Sunday?”

> This exists in Europe with 24/7 SEPA instant credit across banks and Eurozone countries. It doesn’t cost anything extra.

> But getting to that point needed a serious mandate from the European Union, years of planning, and cooperation by the various governments.

Hm, it also exists in the USA with credit "within a few minutes" across banks (the one time I've used this, it resolved within a second), and doesn't cost anything extra. Getting to that point did not require a mandate from anyone, or government involvement of any kind.

It does seem to have been a four-year cooperative project between several banks, though it is not immediately clear to me that instant settlement was a founding goal of the project so much as something that got implemented after four years.

Are you referring to FedNow? It’s a new system for instant payments between U.S. banks. And it was developed with a mandate from the Federal Reserve.

I'm referring to Zelle.

Ah. While Zelle works fine, it’s fundamentally very different from SEPA instant credit.

It’s not available with all banks. Both sender and receiver have to actively sign up to Zelle. And the transfer limits are quite low.

SEPA instant credit works with all existing bank accounts in the Eurozone. You send money to someone’s IBAN which they’ve already had for decades and are accustomed to using for bank transfers. If the receiving bank doesn’t yet support instant credit, it becomes a regular bank transfer that usually clears the next banking day. (It’s like batched email delivery back in the dial-up days. As a sender, you don’t need to care if their email system does immediate or batched delivery. And of course nowadays everyone has immediate.)

The transfer limit is 100k EUR, so the same system is useful to both businesses and consumers.

I think Zelle is limited at $5k last I tried? (When I lived in New York, I tried figuring out if I can pay rent without the absurdity of paper checks. But Zelle’s limit was so low that you can’t pay a Manhattan family apartment rent with it.)

> ... But getting to that point needed a serious mandate from the European Union, years of planning, and cooperation by the various governments. The effort was worth it

I'd take my EU strong from an economic point of view and without "yay sunday SEPA transfer" any day over the EU we have today. The EU is a massive failure and it's going to fall into oblivion versus the US and China: especially now that the EU voted to kill its main economy, Germany, by destroying german automakers (with the mandatory shift to EVs).

The EU produces metric shittons of rules and legislation which brings absolutely nothing of value to its citizens.

If anything I don't think the EU is something to strive for: on the contrary, it should serve as an example of what not to do. Even if this means no "yay, instant sunday payments".

Sure, they gave us 100 years of peace on the European continent, and hassle-free commerce, travel and communication across borders, and the freedom for any of its citizens to study and work anywhere within its borders, and modern mobile phone networks [1], and universal phone chargers, and strong protections of our personal data, etc., etc., etc.

…but other than that, what has the EU ever done for us?

https://genius.com/Monty-python-what-have-the-romans-ever-do...

[1] GSM was created as a European standard by the EU

> Sure, they gave us 100 years of peace on the European continent

Ah, the famous European continent that includes only Western Europe. Approximately one million people died in the process of breaking up Yugoslavia.

OK, I admit to being (more than) a bit overzealous on that point. Still, peace has existed within the borders of the EU and its predecessors since the formation of the ECSC (one of the EU’s predecessors) in 1951.

Even if you disregard that point, though, the overarching point of my comment still stands.

Technically speaking, you're still incorrect. Algerian War happened inside the ECSC borders, however outside the European continent. Then, there were much smaller Basques-Spain and IRA-England conflicts.

The right wording might be "there were not yet a war between internationally recognized acting EU member states". That may still be an achievement, because you cannot say the same for a lot of other alliances, e. g. for NATO.

Source?

> 100 years of peace on the European continent

Absolutely, if you discount minor regional conflicts such as Word War II.

The first version of the EU is about 70 years old, so it surely can’t be blamed for WWII either.

So, the EU is 70 years old. But we should thank them for bringing 100 years of peace. From 1924 to 2024.

I'm starting to understand why the sentiments around EU here on HN is completely different from what I hear from anywhere else.

No matter which way you slice it, 100 years of peace in Europe is an absurd claim.

OK, I admit to being (more than) a bit overzealous on that point. Still, peace has existed within the borders of the EU and its predecessors since the formation of the ECSC (one of the EU’s predecessors) in 1951.

Even if you disregard that point, though, the overarching point of my comment still stands.

After WWII Europe was occupied by the allies on one side and the Soviet Union on the other side. It was called the cold war and peace was guaranteed by mutually assured nuclear destruction. Not by the European Union.

> The EU is a massive failure and it's going to fall into oblivion versus the US and China: especially now that the EU voted to kill its main economy, Germany, by destroying german automakers (with the mandatory shift to EVs).

German auto makers did that all by themselves. The first Tesla Roadster was released in 2011, it took a whole goddamn decade for the German industry to react.

And now the Chinese are churning out cars at a ridiculous speed.

The german car industry killed itself by being complacent and ignoring the writing on the wall.

Now innovative companies like Tesla and BYD come and just eat their lunch.

I remember being at a robotics conference in 2014, chatting with an engineer from some German car company. He was saying that EV would never break through, because "who doesn't love the sound and feel of a combustion engine."

Of course the engineers that work at German car manufacturers love combustion engines. That is why they chose to go work there in the first place. That is why they had (and have) such a disconnect from the consumer market. Cars are built by people that love cars, not by people that want to get you from A to B. They're people that love the solution, not the problem.

The inertia of big companies starts even in people who are not part of the company yet. It is the people who love finicking with the intricacies of combustion engines that end up at car manufacturers, not the other way around.

you're forgetting about the massive value add in cars due to custom infotainment systems.

you are right thou, solutionists love problems and will even create new problems if their solutions no longer apply.

> The german car industry killed itself by being complacent and ignoring the writing on the wall.

"Killed itself"? Do you know VW is the largest car company in the world?

Right now, the profits and revenues of the German car industry are multiples of Tesla and BYD.

tl;dr: EU is a massive failure because Germany is phasing out new combustion cars over the next 11 years.

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