I hate that there is not much societal change going on other then moving business around and rebranding.
It’s at least a start. We cannot expect our governments to do more, the rest is on society at large. A good start for more change would be the expulsion of any US nationals from EU countries.
We can imagine the end of the world. We can imagine the collapse of society, but we can no longer imagine the end of capitalism.
I would like this. I enjoy playing hentai games, but MasterVisa bans or alters the games by denying their services to creators and stores alike. This is an affront to free speech.
Let’s not forget, they Almost forced Onlyfans to shut down because they were going to cut them off from their payment system.
??? relevance to parent comment?
Overruled.
For real? What the f that’s absurd
Yup. For example, the game “Seeds of Chaos” had to change their introduction on account of demons trying to corrupt the protagonists through blackmail, and the removal of the minotaur scenes.
Visa and MasterCard are why we have never had a blockbuster minotaur movie
Would be spectacular if they make an alternative that does not rely on commercial banks so that having a for-profit bank account isn’t required to be able to pay for things electronically. Just like you don’t need that with cash. This is something central banks can provide to the citizens of their country. If commercial banks want people’s money, they better give an incentive. Currently they get it just so people can access the electronic payment systems.
But if course that’s unlikely because commercial banks won’t just let themselves be cut out of the sweet deal they got now.
At least most European banks are happy to cut out the American middlemen (Visa and Mastercard) since they’re eating part of the cost, and we already have the infrastructure in place and working, it’s called “instant SEPA bank transfer”, most newer accounts offer it for free. The problem is the lack of political will to accelerate that indipendence and to stop hemorraging money (roughly 0.5% per transaction!)
Then as people learn to use it they’ll hopefully also stop using Paypal (another American company) when sending money to someone, or getting tracked in general every single time they use their debit card.
agreed, this is really low hanging fruit for fixing society in general- services (banking but also insurance (remember Obama’s failed public option)) that everyone needs but are privately run should have competition run by the government that is publicly funded and run with the goal of break-even instead of for profit.
Let the for profit ones try to find reasons to exist then!
Other candidates for a public option: ISPs, ride-sharing services, credit rating agencies, etc etc
Digital euro is the solution
There’s also credit unions.
Knowing your nationality, some Canadian provinces do have a public bank too, like ATB in Alberta.
Yeah, I’m using Meridian in Ontario. While credit unions in Ontario are regulated as nonprofits, I’d still say it’s probably better if Bank of Canada provided a public chequing account and payment processing since it’ll still lower the base cost of participating in the payment system for everyone.
Do it! Canada will come play too.
We could add credit cards to the Interac system.
That’s a great idea. I’d welcome a new option!
California, Oregon, Washington and Hawaii would also like to request EU status and new non facist payment methods
The Cali data companies will be in for a shock when they suddenly have to comply with any regulation, let alone the GDPR
They got CCPA
What I imagine that to contain:
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USA! USA! USA!
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Communism bad!
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See 1 and 2
Except if you’ve done any privacy work you’d know that GDPR and CCPA are accounted for simultaneously in almost every case, so they end up being equivalent in reality.
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The EU is a bureaucratic organization with some purely symbolic democratic rituals. Governments (not citizens) of member countries really affecting it are supposed to be democratic, but at this point they are just OK, mostly. Nothing good to compare with.
Anyway - all these names are as meaningless as flags. Every decision made defines a system. You might call something a social democracy, but through 1, 2, 3 decisions overnight it’s suddenly something different, if there was a critical point.
I wish.
You should look up “Parliament of the European Union” for more information, if you’re actually interested. Currently the EVP (conservative party) is the largest, and overall there is a majority of centre-right to extremist right parties. The current President of the EU Comission (basically EU government) is Ursula von der Leyen, a member of the EVP.
It’s been a long time since the EU was lead by social democrats, and even then, they were in a coalition with conservatives.
So no, the EU is neither technically nor actually a social democracy
The EU is not a country.
Some countries in the EU currently have or have had Social Democratic governments, but mainly they have governments which are Neoliberal, though a milder form than the US: generally the mainstream Rightwing around this parts has policies which are to the left of the Democrat Party in the US, though not by much, so for example nobody has a Healthcare system which is as bad as the US - even the ones with a Health Insurance based system have way more rules and consumer protections around it - and even in the worst countries Public Transport is better than in the in US.
Then again at least one country in the EU - Hungary - currently has Fascism whilst the other ones which are said to have Far-Right governments (such as Italy) politically sit between the US Democrats and Republicans.
In the things which are the responsibility of the EU (i.e. trade-related subjects), the EU is significantly more pro-consumer than the US, with for example the precautionary principle - i.e. proven safe before allowed, rather than the US’ method of allowing until proven unsafe - being used for chemical substances which people tend to come in contact with, and more broadly with consumers having way more rights all across the EU than they have in the US (were it massively depends on the State) and with stricter rules when it comes to pollution and more broadly Environmental damage.
I supposed that in the things which fall under the responsibility of the EU, it tends to be sort of half-way between Neoliberal and Social-Democrat, for example it’s very Neoliberal when it comes to Finance, but it’s Social Democrat when it comes to consumer rights and protections, especially for things like food, though even there it’s sort of somewhere between lax and strict in regulatory terms. I suspect this is due to different countries caring more about different domains and hence the politics of countries which care more about a specific domain getting more strongly imprinted in legislation at an EU level so it ends up reflected into very different political spins for different trade domains.
That said, Nordic countries (notoriously Finland) and France and Spain and Baltics have pretty right-wing national identities, not even speaking about Poland, and Italy, eh, has seemingly harmless morons on top. Greece too, but frankly neighboring with Turkey it’s normal to be nationalist, having an example of a really inferior culture. Can’t blame even Armenians for that (while in other regards their pride for a mountain village with crooks and thugs on top seems kinda too big.)
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Then why did you ask what the current policies of 27 countries’ governments were as if there were only one?
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You forgot New Jersey.
I hope Canada and Mexico can join. It’s time to start bankrupting murican companies.
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Finally!
This is a CBDC that she wants, something they have been talking about for years. Likely they want this because many European countries wont be able to survive higher interest rates caused by aging demographics, as the US high interest rates suck up global liquidity making rolling over debt more expensive.
They will be able to slow inflation using the programmability of the money to prevent you from surpassing your allotted climate credits, as they are already forcing companies to measure their c02 usage in a system called the Corporate Sustainability Reporting Directive (CSRD). They will also be able to increase inflation via issuing expiring stimulus, which would allow them to issue stimulus without worrying about the 18 month lag.
What Europe also wanted was a global climate change system, where they collect tax revenue from carbon credits, which would be charged to foreign emitters. Trump recently front run this with his own tariff system, following project 2025’s idea of eliminating all international tariffs. Though countries like Canada are talking about joining Europes climate plan instead, I think all countries will have to decide where to hand the keys to their domestic economic policy.
If you wonder why all the bureaucrats suddenly turned anti-globalist (while 20 years ago it wasn’t so), that’s because they saw how powerful a domestic centralized system makes their kind.
And 20 years ago it wasn’t so, because they really had to kill all sprouts of such domestic systems.
It’s the old Chinese\Roman\whatever game, where bureaucrats and troops were, for different events, moved further from their home provinces and old assignments or closer. Only what’s happening is the opposite of the best course of action in that game, we have a weak emperor, no emperor in fact.
So - 20 years ago choosing American companies made European bureaucrats more powerful. Now they are powerful enough to prefer domestic suppliers of all these services, now they can control those new suppliers and become even more powerful.
The world is always in change.
Yes please
HEY GUYS! YOULL NEVER GUESS. Portugal already has such a platform! Even Romania has started using it!
Everyone and their cousins have their own platform. That’s the issue. No one wants to standardize on someone else’s alternative so the incumbents reign supreme.
Is a federation of different platforms not possible? Warning: I know absolutely nothing about this.
It’s technically possible, guaranteed.
The problem is capitalism. Every company is too selfish, and every government too neoliberal, to build some at cost publicly-owned globally interoperable payment system.
Even now, the buy EU movement is largely just replacing US-oligarchy-owned services with EU-oligarchy-owned services. It’s better than funding the American nazi party, but it’s not a long term solution.
This is more going into the direction of feudalism than just capitalism. A million tiny realms and every one keen of keeping their population locked in and uninformed about the outside world. I think there’s even a name for it: technofeudalism.
Are you talking about MBway? I want to have the possibility to do it also we a card. Sometimes I don’t take my phone everywhere
No. MBway is the Venmo equivalent, Multibanco is the Visa rival
I’m really confused. I thought multibanco was just what we called the atm! Even went to my wallet to check my banco ctt card. Can ELI5 it to me?
The commonly shared software by all ATMs in Portugal is very cool too though. Lots of additional features like charging your prepaid sim or even paying your taxes too.
Well, it’s also the protocol! If your card has this symbol, it means it has that payment processor! Due to some weird language mixups it is both the atm and the protocol! Managed by SIBS, an interbank organisation
with all the transactions all around the world can you imagine the money they’re making by doing literally nothing and if this move is successful how much money they stand to lose? I would be surprised if they were not literally talking to hitmen right now.
I can recommend the Aquired Podcast Episode. A 3h long Story of how VISA became the world leader and how much profit they make year over year. It is craaaaazy. We need to get rid of Visa and other US bases payment providers ASAP!
Does using Google wallet give any fee to Google?
They don’t get paid directly, just with your data.
No but I stopped using apple/Google pay to stop giving them data. It’s a choose your poison though they stop the stores from collecting data as your card keeps changing.
I have a friend who works on this project. Still years away, but they are at least thinking very hard of not having US dependencies since the last months. I don’t have much trust in some people involved though (exactly because for many this was not an issue until a few weeks ago).
Why? I don’t get it, how is it better than SEPA?
When you’re looking at your bank balance you’re seeing bank Euros, for which your bank has to hold a certain percentage of actual (central bank) Euros in reserve (that’s what fractional reserve banking is about: Not just the central bank, also ordinary banks can create money), when you transfer money to another bank the receiving bank will have to make sure that it has enough central bank Euros to back up the recipient’s balance. SEPA is a standard interface and procedure to negotiate such transfers.
The Digital Euro is central bank money, just as bank notes and coins. It’s a (possible) step towards a full-reserve banking system without having to actually keep actual notes and coins around. And the ECB is very aware of this which is why they’re talking so much about limiting how many digital Euros you can hold at one time so the current banking system doesn’t get completely up-ended over night.
…if that doesn’t really answer anything then that’s because money is fucking complex, and how our system works is completely unintuitive. But, essentially, Digital Euros are the same stuff as money under the mattress, just digitally.
