The problem isn't just getting something that works across all European countries. It's getting something that works globally.
While we may make most of our payments within EU, basically everyone still occasionally pays for something outside of EU, either online or when they travel. This means if the new thing only works in EU, every European will still need and have a MasterCard/Visa even if they use it less often than before.
This is still a massive amount of leverage - MC/Visa still have the ability to block payments made from EU citizens/companies to outside.
You can buy things from your local Amazon or national equivalent that come from outside using this systems, so, you are not so restricted to EU sellers.
I suppose the most problematic would be traveling. I recently when outside the EU and was surprise how smooth the process was using my Visa card, to the point I didn't use any local currency.
On the other hand, I recently buy books from the UK and it get stuck for two weeks in customs, and it had nothing to do with the payment platform. I had not realized how difficult is to import something from outside the EU, even for personal use.
Many (most? all?) of the payment systems I’ve used over the years can interop with Visa or Maestro. Case in point: my Bancontact cards can pay in any Belgian business even if they can’t afford the better machines that do VISA, but my card also has the VISA logo. Same in Portugal and Germany.
Internal transactions all over the world are routed through US companies. I have paid using Visa or Mastercard at some point in Australia, Indonesia, India, Frnce, Sri Lanka, Singapore, Dubai.....
its not exclusive, but there is a problem with network effects. From the point of view of a business why should they add support for a new payment system no one users, from the point of view of consumers why should they sign up to a new system that no one accepts?
As I said in another comment the most likely alternative is a more decentralised system that all countries/currency blocks that want sovereign payments can get behind.
It's a problem for two reasons. First of all it means American companies get access to a lot of privileged information. Secondly, them pushing foreign morals eg sexual content or services being blocked.
If there were an EU card system id certainly sign up for it and demand from vendors that they support it. I don't want my data ending up in America especially these days.
The network effect will work out fine because we have reasons to want it.
Sounds similar to ignoring clearly fraudulent DMCAs. Technically you are not allowed to ignore one no matter how clearly fraudulent it is, but in practice no one would follow up on those.
> Sounds similar to ignoring clearly fraudulent DMCAs. Technically you are not allowed to ignore one no matter how clearly fraudulent it is
Not true.
Technically, you are allowed to ignore ANY DMCA takedown. However, if you don't ignore it, and if you otherwise would have been guilty of copyright infringement for hosting the user-provided content at issue, then following the DMCA takedown request will immunize you (that's why it is called a "safe harbor" provision), so, if you aren't 100% certain that it's not wrong, you have a strong motive to respect it.
If the DMCA takedown request was actually fraudulent, then either there was no potentially violating material or the requester wasn't the copyright holder or their agent, so you had no liability to them to immunize against. So you absolute can ignore it as much as you want.
As I understand, there is also a rule that you must be able to buy an exact amount of premium currency for a specific thing you want. So if that's also enforced, clearly the price shown would have to be how much it costs to buy that exact amount of premium currency.
The hard part about ditching Visa and Mastercard is keeping the ability to make international payments even outside of EU. If you still need Visa or Mastercard to buy anything from outside of EU, including any non-EU digital service, most people would still have a Visa or Mastercard.
Russia did it because they're blocked from everywhere anyway and can't get Visa or Mastercard anyway. So this isn't really a concern. For an EU credit card to be successful and actually displace Visa/Mastercard among EU citizens, we would have to convince every merchant from Philippines to Argentina to South Africa to accept it.
If Visa works everywhere, and Eurocard would work only in Europe, your options would be to have either only Visa or have both. And few people would would want to get multiple cards if one works universally already.
Vector operations like AVX512 will not magically make common software faster. The number of applications that deal with regular operations on large blocks of data is pretty much limited to graphical applications, neural networks and bulk cryptographic operations. Even audio processing doesn't benefit that much from vector operations because a codec's variable-size packets do not allow for efficient vectorization (the main exception being multi-channel effects processing as used in DAW).
Thanks for the correction. I hadn't considered bulk memory operations to be part of SIMD operation but it makes sense -- they operate on a larger grain than word-size so they can do the same operation with less micro-ops overhead.
Saying that something that has ~40% market share "doesn't matter" and the other thing that has ~60% is suddenly orders of magnitude more relevant sounds ridiculous.
Piracy isn't even the main use case of yt-dlp. It's archival of videos that you want to keep a copy of in case something happens to the video. There is literally no way to get that "feature" by paying Google. But you are correct that yt-dlp would not be necessary if Google offered an option to download videos (also in an automated way because many people have something set up to archive certain videos automatically).
Even entertaining the idea is extremely disturbing and dystopian. Having control over what we watch and what we listen to should be basic human rights. And those are inalienable, meaning we can't sign away those rights, not in a contract, not in any terms of service.
People who accept that as something a company should be allowed to do are a massive problem. Because of you, they might actually do it. It will start by making sure you cannot mute the sound in any way, designing hardware in a way to enforce that - devices will start overriding the use of external speakers and play ads from internal ones to make absolutely sure you haven't muted it. Next they will force always-on cameras on us which will make sure our eyes are open and looking at the ad. Next we will have brain implants to make sure you're actually paying attention and not thinking about something else.
I find it extremely disturbing that you don't feel disgusted about even thinking of "yes".
This is like saying you have the rights to mute your work meetings. Sure you do, but you just won't be employed anymore. I don't see that as a problem, because being employed and watching YouTube are not essential services nor human rights.
Then the correct solution would be to allow everyone just pay $1 per month for watching Youtube without any ads. Youtube will be funded and users will see no ads. But I suspect that even in that case Youtube will still want to show ads - even though the users would be paying for NOT seeing ads ...
Why is this correct? Youtube is a private company. It's very much allowed to charge $200 per month while playing tons of ads for you. Youtube sets the price and its policy, not the users.
While we may make most of our payments within EU, basically everyone still occasionally pays for something outside of EU, either online or when they travel. This means if the new thing only works in EU, every European will still need and have a MasterCard/Visa even if they use it less often than before.
This is still a massive amount of leverage - MC/Visa still have the ability to block payments made from EU citizens/companies to outside.
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