Dude. They are technologies

You can make your own damn cloud if you want to. I think you missed the point entirely

I do

I mean slow in terms of innovation, which they stagnate on

But also performance actually

Their TCP\IP stack is one such consequence. It doesn't have any of the massive changes that happened in the last few decades

Open source stacks picked those up immediately. Windows, and other older platforms still use a much slower and more poorly designed stack

That's one such example. Plenty of others

It's not that they can't solve problems. They can.

Steam engines can solve everything too. But they are not the best at every task and these days it's hard to find anything that couldn't be beaten otherwise

Mostly these systems ONLY exist because of legacy

It is why none of the big compute players have touched any of that in decades. Because it is dead technology and a dead end

I know right!

I think this is another case where even the engineers got sold into the marketing

Because they heard three decades ago that this was the fastest best technology, and IBM sold it to them

... The reality is, these technologies nobody uses for anything new and there's a reason why. They are just too ancient and stagnating

Plus, other technologies are open and you can see how much more innovation happens when you allow that. Mainframe never had that and that's why it sat around

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.

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.

Same thing in France with CB. I’ve only recently understood why I was asked to choose between "CB" and "Visa" when paying by card online, when both were written on my card. Actually, when I got my first card as a teenager, I was a bit nervous about that, I was scared of “making the wrong choice” when paying online; I rememberd asking adults around me what that was about and how to choose which one to select, and not one of them could give me an explanation, they told me that there was no difference and that I should just pick one at random. Now I feel kinda bad about all the times that I chose Visa, because from what I understand their fees are generally higher for the seller.

The standard bank transfer takes at least a day as you said, but the instant one is regulated to take less than 10 seconds in total (in practice, it feels instant). Apparently introduced in 2017. I've had it on my home banking (app too) since then I think, but from my previous bank account they cost a whooping 7€, with my current bank the instant transfers are just as free as the normal ones so I use them all the time. I recently bought a used motorcycle within a morning thanks to this.

Wero itself is likely based on SEPA Instant Payments.

I was comparing them to the services used to send money to other people, but of course as you said the big thing we're still missing is a unified point of sale payment network in all of the eurozone, maybe Wero will be the one, in that case I'll be happy to use it, but IMHO we should have a standard public one based on SEPA Instant payments.

Wero is an added step on top, still much better than the competition, but they're currently a convenient alternative to bank transfers (for people who didn't discover the instant SEPA ones), and also as you noted unfortunately based on apps that run solely on American platforms. It's mentioned on their wikipedia page too. I'll keep an eye on them though, they could still work for me, we'll see.

I think this is more that American exceptionalism makes them incapable of getting inspiration from other countries, so they end up doing something entirely different. If it's better, the rest of the world adopts it as well, and if it's inferior, the rest of the world points and laughs.

E-check is definitely in the point and laugh category, while payment apps based on phone number or email like Venmo are getting copied by various other countries. Granted, I don't think the US was first with phone-based payments, various developing countries in Africa have had it for ages. But I do think they came up with it independently, because they habitually ignore innovation done anywhere else.