If you want a healthy market, your standard cannot simply be: As long as there is more than one retailer in the space, retailers can place whatever restrictions they want on how you pay for their services. Businesses in one sector being able to directly affect consumer choices across sectors is how you end up with cross sector monopolies.
It is bizarre to bring up China here, this isn't about the state dictating the payment system but maintaining a healthy market. It's like a garden, you don't dictate exactly how the plants grow, but you prune them once they encroach onto other plants to maintain a healthy balance.
I brought up Amex because it is common for merchants to not accept it, due to it being a significantly worse deal for the merchants. I am fine with the argument for an even more expansive version of my argument, but I'm making a more narrow argument due to discover, visa, mastercard being so close in how they function that it is not a burden on merchants to accept one vs the others.
> What's the difference if they want to force customers to use cash or Visa.
I'll leave the cash option aside because the provider of cash is the US treasury. But yes, I do think it is wrong for a merchant to only allow mastercard or visa or discover. I understand merchants not taking Amex because their fees are significantly higher on the merchant side, but discover, mastercard, and visa are all similar for the merchant. I work in payment processing for a multi billion dollar company and we gladly accept all of these card types. My issue is with visa providing Costco with a kickback, so that Costco then pressures you to have an account with visa. It should be totally fine if someone just happens to have only mastercard cards and wants to shop at costco. I'm against kickback schemes.
As for the AML/KYC ineffectiveness argument, I'm reading through that 2018 study now.
> thing with credit cards is that you can have more than one. I have a Visa and a Mastercard and when I shop at Costco I use Visa. I don't see this reason stopping someone wanting to compete as though if they can't get the Costco dollars, they have no product.
I'm sorry, are we really saying that it's acceptable for the market to begin preferring one completely compatible payment network vs another? This is clearly an undue influence in the market due to monopolistic power being used as leverage. No one should have to open an account with visa just to shop at a retailer. Anti competitive and anti consumer to the core.
> But that really has to do with ridiculous regulations and things like KYC, but we're not ready to have that conversation yet.
Ahhh, fearmongering about KYC. Know your customer is an obviously good regulation for banks to know the type of business they are partnering with for both risk assessment and anti fraud protections. So, what scams are you in favor of allowing by removing KYC regulations?
We're talking about industry here so political boundaries matter not the geographic definition of Europe. Trade restrictions are in place between the UK and the EU, and thus place a wedge between the two.
All this talk about culture and the author doesn't talk about the fundamental issue: The EU created a European identity yes, but the amount of decentralization and universal consensus required to create the EU means it will never be a functioning state in and of itself. So there isn't a European tech industry, there are highly interconnected but distinct tech industries in Germany, France, Netherlands, Finland, Estonia, Ireland, Sweden. Only very recently has the EU began to try to consolidate pools of capital to facilitate large scale VC funding. There is a bright future I think, as America continues to rapidly decline, but this needs to be addressed. The ultimate irony? The author is English and moved back to London which is emphatically not European now. Going to be hard to cheerlead for the EU from the wreckage of brexit
Great tip! But it only remove's Google's terrible AI summary, not AI generated content from showing up in searches, which is what the OP wishes for. A combination of -ai and before:2022-01-01 is probably the closest we can get to that
> It's interesting because in some respects we are in the middle of a cultural and scientific Renaissance
I'm sorry to rebutt your very first assertion but we had been in a cultural and scientific Renaissance and the last 15 years have been the slow unwinding of that. We got lucky that the internet explosion overlapped with the tail end of publicly supported cultural and scientific production.
I hung out with physics majors in college, all of them smarter than us compsci chuds, and uniformly they are absolutely struggling to survive as post docs or in industry. One of my college buddies has worked at nasa for 4 different firms and has had to move to Texas, Kansas, and Maryland for these gigs and has once again landed on a project where the funding got cut and is looking for a new job. Another works in nano scale semiconducting and had to move to Finland to get project funding from the EU since the US has made basic research funding so scarce. And after several post doc roles he is leaving the field after his last grant wasn't renewed, with not an ounce of negative feedback. Just, sorry we don't have any money anymore. He's now going to go into failure analysis for a mobile phone manufacturer to pay the bills.
The woes of cultural production have also been well documented.
The US civil war is not the only time the US has been politically unstable. The civil rights movement, the labor disputes of the 1970s, the economic shocks every decade or so from market crashes all have been moments of instability.
What is January 6th if not a concrete example of recent political instability?
As for foreign policy consistency, 7 administrations takes us back to Reagan... The entire movement to sell out our industrial capacity to China and now the movement to try to reverse that have occurred in this time frame. This is just as important as our endless wars in the middle east, imo.
I don't disagree totally but I felt the need to put some nuance here.
We're already there. It's one of the causes of why all our physical infrastructure is failing. When we outsourced our manufacturing in the 90s-2010s, we lost all that talent.
I'm sorry but even if you manage to resolve the PIP, it is always there in the HR records as a black mark. It will always make it easier (not guaranteed, but easier) to get hit in the next round of layoffs
Quick question: How many years of industry exp do you have? I thought the same way until this year when the burnout got to me too. I thought I was too much of a high achiever to get burnout and yet I'm in the same boat as the author.
Also, once the people who speak up about a problem leave, all you are left with are idiot yes-men in management, old timers doing their job as minimally as possible to not to be noticed by management, and fresh new engineering grads ready to be grist for the mill. When those sorts of people are writing all of the code around you, no matter how good you are, you will be driven insane.
I really wish that Tech people would not go outside of our purview to comment on medicine. Knowledge about how to build and maintain software does not give us any useful intuitions or insights into medicine, but the gigantic egos in this industry turn us all into pundits about what other professions are doing wrong. Stop trying to second guess and cherry pick medical studies that you half read.