American banking is so backwards and this will only make it worse.

In Australia and New Zealand, no bank offers you checks. Do I own you $50? Well give me your BSB and account number. I type it into my phone app or web browser, type $50 and click send. It shows up tomorrow morning. Works on weekends, holidays, ANZAC day, New Years Day and no fees. $0. Person-to-person transfers are free, move in 24 hours and your account number doesn't need to be private.

I came back to America back to the world of three business days for an electronic ACH payment to clear (if you're lucky)!! WTF?! Our banking system is in the 1990s because PayPal, Square and now Facebook will lobby to keep their business models.

Fuck. That. Shit. Money should move through the banking system using standards, not via Facebook with their proprietary PayPal like garbage.

I find it thoroughly unbelievable that banks are trying to offer advanced, consumer-friendly features, only to be thwarted by the lobbying efforts of the technology industry. Don't get me wrong: technology companies are not morally superior and above political manipulation, but they would most certainly lose going head-to-head with the banking industry.

The banking system is stuck in the 1990s because banks have insufficient incentive to change, and there is a non-trivial segment of the population lacking knowledge of, access to, or trust in technology when it comes to financial matters.

Next day would seem as backwards as US ACH to us now :).

Getting off topic for the article at hand, but what's different in Australian plumbing in that area?

I've literally never owned a plunger in my whole life, and I don't know anybody who does. It baffles me everything I'm in the US and every toilet has a plunger!

Also, the showers mostly all have baskets under the drain caps to capture hair and stuff now.

It makes me sad and annoyed whenever I flush one of these toilets. The swirling doesn't do anything useful. It seems to actually increase the clogging probability because it typically manages to swirl 100% of the toilet paper together and then finally move it downward all at once for maximum clogging effect, which might be fine if the drain weren't ~2 inches across.

There are American toilets that aren't like this, but a shocking number of them are completely unreliable. I had a toilet in my apartment in California that, no lie, I managed to clog by blowing my nose. I used 3 Kleenex, dropped them in the toilet, and flushed. It clogged from that.

This turned around fast.