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Comment by workfromspace | Hacker News Reader

Obviously this sounds like such a US problem. Self checkout in the UK and Europe (Estonia and Barcelona) IME works perfectly:

- No thefts

- Many people with card payments

- Working self checkout machines

Also, recently I have been thinking how come the US is pioneering so many tech but fail to implement any, such as:

- Payments: No SWIFT/IBAN, still lots of cash usage, no e-invoices (ie for utility bills), still using paper checks, physical emails

- No national identification cards or numbers

- Very limited e-government services

And the argument I've been hearing the most is freedom; which also sounds oxymoron, coming from the country with the worlds strongest 3 letter agencies.

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You need to stop generalizing.

Plenty of large swathes of the U.S. have plastic cards, e-invoiced bills, and yes, even zero-cost non-drivers ID cards which work across state lines, along with several forms of national ID if one chooses. Hardly anyone writes checks or uses physical mail — a common joke is that you have to buy a pack of 50 envelopes to send 1 letter every few years. Widespread cash is a benefit, not a demerit, as it gives one purchasing power even if out in the countryside with zero internet — indeed the physical dollar is so powerful that I can take it nearly anywhere in the Americas and spend it directly, down to the poorest most remote villages.

You may be right about generalizing the US, but

> even if out in the countryside with zero internet

I think I can safely say even the remote countryside of any part of Europe has card payments now.

The US not only has SWIFT, the US government basically controls it; they’re the ones who cut off Russia. In my experience the US was probably slightly ahead of the UK in terms of cards being accepted everywhere rather than needing cash. All of my utility bills have been on electronic autopay for years along with all of my other bills and I write a paper check probably less than once a year.

I don’t know what a “physical email” is. I occasionally receive bills in the postal mail (mixed in with all the spam our postal service likes to deliver every day as some sort of sick and twisted jobs program) but they usually have a QR code I can scan to pay them online.

Social security numbers are de facto national identification numbers. The US is a federation of fifty states so photo ID cards are issued at the state level, similar to how your national ID in Europe will be issued by Spain or Estonia rather than the EU itself. But you can use a passport or even get a passport card instead if you really want to.

“E-government” is a broad subject. In some use cases (internet voting) I don’t trust it one bit. In other use cases (filing and paying taxes or instant background checks), we have it covered. And in yet other use cases (buying health insurance), it was actually easier to do online before the government took it over, at least in my experience. My previous state set up an online system to file for unemployment during COVID but then lost millions of taxpayer dollars to overseas scammers who would steal the identities of residents at random and file for unemployment in their names; a better system probably could have been implemented if it wasn’t done at the last minute and with zero verification.

> I don’t know what a “physical email” is

Sorry, it's embarrassingly my bad. I meant physical mail/postal mail/snail mail.

> The US is a federation of fifty states so photo ID cards are issued at the state level, similar to how your national ID in Europe will be issued by Spain or Estonia rather than the EU itself

I would argue against this. The EU is a continental union[1] and not the same as the US [2]. All european countries are fully soverign states (unlike US states) and most of them are unitary. A few of the EU/European states are federal states/governments, like the US. So I think it'd be more correct to compare the US with Germany, Switzerland or Spain. EU would be something more similar to African Union. And there's also an upcoming EU-ID project [3].

About the US "E-government" (and I'm don't even compare it to systems like Estonia's, but) the problems you described sounds like bad system design and lack of identification.

[1]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Continental_union [2]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Federation#Contemporary [3]: https://commission.europa.eu/strategy-and-policy/priorities-...

The EU is rapidly moving in a federalizing direction (one of the reasons the UK left, which will probably accelerate that movement). The phrase "United States of Europe" is part of the vision behind the creation and evolution of the EU in the first place. By adapting a common currency and the Schengen area the EU members have already given up significant parts of their sovereignty. It's not as federalized as the United States is now, but it's certainly an oversimplification to claim that EU members are "fully sovereign states".

Furthermore, EU member states are, in terms of population, much closer to individual US states in size than any of them are to the US as a whole. My state has three times the population of Switzerland.

> SWIFT/IBAN

You might be thinking about SEPA. SWIFT is slow, expensive and also available in the US.

One reason is that credit card fees are much higher than in Europe (up to 3% or so) due to lack of regulation (of course a significant proportion of those fees are returned to the card users as cashback, so it’s not like American companies are much more greedy, it’s still not a very efficient system of course..)

You're probably right about SWIFT/SEPA part. My bad, apologies.

And it's just not the credit cards. Many people here (including high school students) are provided and using debit cards for virtually everything.

The US has debit cards as well, the security assumptions regarding bank accounts are very different and there is also a culture of building a credit score that reduces debit card use.

I don't think it's got much to do with freedom (although it's commonly used as one reason to veto change).

To me, it seems like given the size, market maturity, but especially the legal and political environment of the US, any change requiring large-scale coordination between multiple actors, especially public and private, has become very hard.

Single-actor innovation requiring no cooperation of existing stakeholders has become the way to go: That (plus large existing car-based transport stakeholders) is why there is Uber instead of a working public transit system in most cities.

That's true for most systems you list: Anything payments related – the US has over 6000 banks; even given the population size, that's enormous! Identification cards – it's about immigration status at least as much as it's about people being skeptical of the federal government. E-government: Ok, that one is probably due to a lack of trust in the federal government's tech capabilities, which at this point has become a self-fulfilling prophecy.

Thank you for your analysis.

I don't think it's a numbers issue. Japan with 127 million has multi-provider solutions such as IC cards, and I've heard India has Aadhaar and China has similar services.

But I agree with the federal part. I guess it makes things harder as federal states of Europe (Germany, Switzerland, Spain) has some centralization and bureaucracy issues, but at least they still manage to get a national systems such as ID cards.

You're right, it's not a matter of size alone.

Japan is much more homogenous than the US, as far as I understand, and trust in government institutions also seems to be much higher. Both advantageous preconditions for establishing a national eID system!

Ignoring the question if USA is actually behind: there is a very strong technology catch-up effect. Some countries started mobile phones with 3G, and never wasted money on quickly outdated analogue/2G hardware. New banks created in 90s in Eastern Europe also benefited from not having 30 years old legacy mainframe systems running COBOL.

> Obviously this sounds like such a US problem. Self checkout in the UK and Europe (Estonia and Barcelona) IME works perfectly: > - No thefts

Source?

"Shop thefts have more than doubled in the past three years, and the boss of M&S says the reduction of service plays a crucial part"

https://www.theguardian.com/uk-news/2023/nov/21/middle-class...

You may be right about the UK, but most of Eastern Europe, Central Europe, Nordics are better than the US (or the UK) to my perception and these sources I could quickly find:

- https://www.economist.com/news/2013/11/11/shoplifters-of-the... - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=38129353 - https://www.numbeo.com/crime/

> Also, recently I have been thinking how come the US is pioneering so many tech but fail to implement any

> Estonia

    Population
    • 2024 estimate
        1,373,101[2]
    • 2021 census
        1,331,824[3]

You can do most of projects in Estonia in a week or two, just because their popcount is low.

China is also way ahead of the US in all the same stuff

You can say the same about individual US states more or less. Rolling out every innovation nation wide is not necessarily the optimal goal..

Of course comparing the entire US with tiny individual European countries is always silly.

Japan, India, China has a big population and yet better on this.

You're generalizing a bit too much saying "Europe"

You're right. But I've seen almost every country in Europe continent and lived in few of them, including non-EU (including WB-6, EFTA, UK), so I thought I could generalize Europe a bit to my experience.

UK is part of Europe.

A bunch of banks closing uk-nationals-with -eu-residencies accounts? Oh, and passport control? Remember Brexit?

EU is not Europe. Europe is a continent and passport control and brexit have nothing to do with geography.

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