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".
…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
Absolutely, if you discount minor regional conflicts such as Word War II.
Even if you disregard that point, though, the overarching point of my comment still stands.
I'm starting to understand why the sentiments around EU here on HN is completely different from what I hear from anywhere else.
Ah, the famous European continent that includes only Western Europe. Approximately one million people died in the process of breaking up Yugoslavia.
Even if you disregard that point, though, the overarching point of my comment still stands.
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.
Now innovative companies like Tesla and BYD come and just eat their lunch.
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 are right thou, solutionists love problems and will even create new problems if their solutions no longer apply.
"Killed itself"? Do you know VW is the largest car company in the world?
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.
> 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.
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.)
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.