Wero and Bizum mostly just associate phone numbers to IBANs and perform instant SEPA transfers underneath. The benefit is that you only need the other's phone number to send them money, usually already in your contact list, instead of them sharing you a twenty-something digit number.
That's not the point at all. Currently I'm using paypal to send money to friends when we split dinner or share other costs. I'd like to use a similar European service instead and not go through a ceremony to open my banking app, initiate transfer, write the recipient's IBAN, confirm and wait a day for the transfer to take place.
You shouldn't need to wait for a day, instant transfers have been a thing for a while now. Unless you're in terribly bad luck to be stuck with one of the few banks that are lagging behind.
International money transfers, even between currencies, now take seconds whenever I do them.
The "map phone number to bank account" services do make this whole thing a lot easier, but on the other hand I kind of don't want to help scammers by giving them the option to look up what bank they need to pretend to be before dialing a number.
> You can do it once, and save in in your bank app.
I try not to send or write my IBAN just anywhere. With things like Direct Debit, I treat it with care. Sharp contrast with Paypal, where you can use your email address or even have a paypal.me page that does not expose your email at all.
> Isn't instant SEPA required to be supported by all banks now?
Yes, and yet I think it's not supported by all banks. Especially those that are not in the Euro area. One more thing - many people including me are to this day not informed or aware if instant payments are charged by banks or not. I honestly don't know.
Ah yes, Pierre will surely have no issues paying for his baguette et croissant by filling in the boulangerie's IBAN on his mobile phone and waiting 15 minutes for them to check receipt.
But for real, Italian public administration digitalization isn’t as bad as people think when compared to other big countries. SPID (an electronic identity system, now deprecated) was years ahead of many other European countries (and easily, the US), and PEC (a certified email standard for official communications established in 2005, that can be used with standard email clients) is still more advanced than the often more complicated and closed systems used in many other places. The Italian standard also deeply influenced the EU standard: https://dl.acm.org/doi/fullHtml/10.1145/3560107.3560256
i know this is controversial in highly medicalized societies, but this is a good plan overall.
we still don't know why and how antidepressants work. we know they work, but we don't know why. and hell, to be honest, we still have a poor grasp of how depression works.
a priority is tho to limit reliance of the populace on "moms' little helpers", that might give dependency, and financial drain. and finding a humanist way to deal with depressions and its symptoms.
i feel american society is not ready for it, popping pills is way easier, but it is important to start somewhere.
we also don't know how your (or any) really brain works. But we know it does, otherwise you wouldn't have been able to write this comment. So should we just shut your brain down?
We should shut yours down since your comment reads like nothing more than a veiled ad hominem attack. If you disagree with this person, fine, but at the very least try to have a constructive back and forth without resorting to name calling.
I didn't call anyone anything. I was just pointing out that we accept lots of things working without understanding why. Biggest example being our very selves.
How you interpreted it as an ad hominem attack, I have no idea.
I need those to prevent panic attacks. Therapy is not effective against that.
And they are not expensive at all. They cost me €10 a month when I didn't get them subsidised in the past. Also RFK is not about humanist approaches at all. There's almost nothing human about him except the worst aspects like hate and bigotry.
I don't think anything that comes from him can be considered a good thing.
Have you used eBay in the last few years? It's awful for sellers and awful for buyers. This is coming from somebody who buys on eBay twice a month on average.
I try not to use it and then something will come up and I use it. Could be my market, or who knows what but there seems to be more scams.
It’s the only place someone can give you a fake tracking number (somehow people get these from UPS) get caught and other than a refund after weeks and a negative reputation ding, they get to keep on doing it. The fake tracking number scam has been going on for years too, it’s still happening. Permanently ban for people caught doing this, preferred shippers with eBay as a managed tracker or something like that.
I have never had this happen, but I don't buy from first-time eBay sellers. There are definitely scams on there, but they seem to be "too good to be true" prices with 0 reviews on the seller.
Surely you're not getting scammed by sellers with lots of reputational history?
I actually am more nervous as a seller, as their buyer protection almost always sides with buyers, at least in the US (and the fee is astronomical.)
Well, a month ago was my last use for about a year. A user with a 96% positive feedback and definitely a lot of sales slow played and then issued a fake UPS tracking number. The negatives in their history sounded mostly like communication issues so I assumed they were okay. They sell a lot of things in the $30-$90 range, this was a $200 item they had listed for $145, and they supposedly had a couple of them. A local store ran a sale around the same time that has it at $150 so it wasn't crazy. Upon deeper inspection of their reputation once things got fishy, they have 150+ sales, 4 negatives, 1 neutral. There are real looking positive feedbacks but about half are automated positive feedbacks. Not sure entirely what that means.
A refund has been granted but ebay's computers show that someone in my zipcode has also recieved a package (mine should have been 20lbs, the one sent was 2lbs and received by someone with a different name) so I'm kind of expecting a little more drama before it's all said and done. To be fully transparent, it was marked shipped without tracking and has an estimated arrival date of 10 days; after 10 days I asked if it had shipped and was told no and offered a refund and then it became marked shipped with a fake tracking number and "was delivered." The short of it is they're a somewhat prolific seller, I can't think of any reason it issue a fake tracking number and they had my money for about a month. I'm getting the money back but I'm back to square one. The sale at the local store ended.. It's not that big of a deal, just annoying.
It seems like there are sort of 2 classifications of bad experiences. There are poor descriptions, slow transactions, shipping mix-ups, mis-communications and things of that nature. A reputation ding is probably appropriate. Then there are more fraudulent things and ebay has chosen to not really punish those things and let them go, same way Amazon will gladly list and sell fake goods.
As a seller, the buyer can claim that the package they received was empty or just had a brick or whatever, and eBay will almost always side with them. I have multiple friends who were been hit by this.
It's not great for sellers either. I was banned during the time period before the Paypal divestment for having the galls to subpoena a nonpaying buyer's records. They take a cut from both sides. Sotheby's takes 10.5% (I think). eBay takes twice that for something comparable in value.
And yet, it's still the place to go to buy anything secondhand or used. I'd go so far as to say eBay could be nationalized under the Defense Production Act due to the critical role it plays in manufacturing by keeping obsolete manufacturing machines running.
the slop existed before AI and in every era (from the beatles to britney spears), and for some people, it's all they need. why demonize AI-generated music?
guys that work for military tech companies, or somehow involved in military anything: zoom in on the horse's mouth. zoom in on the eyes of the person on fire.
(it's a blog summary of a much longer, and rather esoteric, academic article)
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