Canadians with Interac E-Transfer like "What the fuck is wrong with you people"

The evil trinity of American excellence:

Healthcare System
Banking System
Temperature Units

I didn't know just how fucked up it all was until I moved to Canada.

Also:
Car dependency
Tax filing companies
As an European I never understood what's wrong with Fahrenheit besides no one else using it. Unlike feet/miles/pounds there is no need to convert them to anything else so.. why?
Water freezing/boiling point being 0 and 100 is neat but nowhere near being fucked like American distance units
- American here raised on the Fahrenheit. My rational mind knows that we should all use SI and/or metric units for everything (using Celsius over Kelvin is a pretty easy sell). And there are other units of measure like energy that depend on how big a "degree" is, so your reasoning doesn't even apply in all situations.
  However, living in a temperate northern US climate where we get a full dose of all four seasons, it IS pretty damn neat that 0-100 F is basically the scale of the outdoor temperature I can expect to see in a given year. It can get colder than 0F or about -18C, but that is an insanely cold winter day. Likewise, it can get above 100F or about 38C, but that is an insanely hot summer day.
  Insanely hot or cold for this area, of course. Somebody who lives in Dubai or Greenland might not think it makes so much sense.
  Actually, for hot places like Dubai, a 0-50C scale for temperature extremes probably makes more sense!
  edit: used to say "but that is an insanely hot winter day" which I guess IS true...
- Check out Chicago: where you can ask for directions and 'a couple blocks' could mean 500 feet or 3/4s of a mile, depending on what part of town you're in .
  I'll still take a fairly straightforward grid over the spaghetti road map that many East Coast/European cities have.

Floorp is actually my browser of choice, it’s kind of like the Vivaldi of firefox

I accidentally floorped my underwear the other day when I sneezed too hard.
Love that Floorp!
- Sounds like something from Rick and Morty, don't Floor your plumbus!

Don't worry. GNU Taler will be the standard that fixes this.

(Seriously, though, I'm pretty excited for GNU Taler, and I hope it gets adoption so I can use it with my bank and my favorite merchants and such.)

Second time I've heard about taler in two months. A new record. I'd have to look into it again, but I can say is that if it soceeds, I hope it brings gnunet with it (except gns. It sucks and doesn't make sense

Serious question to Americans: why don't you pay your friends in cash instead of dealing with this bullshit?

I do. It's literally the only reason I carry cash around. I'm not comfortable banking on my phone.
We don't usually work with cash. Most people I know don't carry cash at all, and it's a pain to get, since most paychecks are direct deposit. You've gotta head to an ATM or the bank, or ask for cash at checkout at the store.
- It’s the same in Europe (salary being bank transfer), but ATMs are ubiquitous and if you use cash when buying e.g groceries at the local farmer's market, the seller doesn’t have to file it (I mean legally they have to, but let people enjoy life a little). Nice thing to do with ultra small businesses where the owner is the only employee or maybe they have like 1-2 other people. Same with small garages and such, they may even give you a discount if you pay cash - and some won’t even have a card terminal. All things considered, if I’m paying 40 euros to get my tires changed and the guy pays himself a salary, about 25 euros to the tax man. If I give him 40 euros cash, he keeps all of it.
  Am I advocating tax evasion? Maybe. Well, I’m advocating letting ultra small businesses decide how much income they’re gonna claim. So I like to carry a little bit of cash for that. Grocery stores and such, I just tap my phone or card.
Not American, but cash is annoying af to deal with and I'm not gonna try and figure out how to pay a 5€ bill with a 20€ note.
- You give them the 20 and they give 15 back?
Record of payment is one of the pros of electronic transfers
Can't deny that you receive the money when the other person can pull out receipts.
- Banks love it too, because then they can sell your purchase history records to the big data surveillance capitalism companies, they also have a really good idea of who your family and close circle of friends are due to repeat small payments - valuable data for the same data companies.
Exact payments, no making change. Jimmy paid for your lunch it was $12.35 after tip, he got back 12.35, no overpyament, no underpayment nothing owed or borrowed.
Nobody gets mugged because no one has any cash on them. ATMs have cameras, and phones are as good as dead once they're stolen and reported.
You can collect a small amount to hold an item you're selling online to make sure they'll pick it up. Pay them without being there.
The same thing that leads to dealing with all the other kinds of bullshit & enshittification: convenient and free! Just sign here and tell us about yourself!
Honestly though once you're set up it seems like it's pretty simple. I don't actually use any of them, but my wife uses Venmo and Paypal for some stuff. There's a small business that I order my hobby supplies from, and I just ask my wife to send whatever dollar amount to the guy who runs the place when I text him about what I need. He could just invoice me and I could pay like you would on any online store, but this is somebody I've worked with for years so I'm not worried about preemptively sending the money over.
Sometimes it is a large amount of cash, like settling up at the end of a vacation. At that point, it is better to electronically transfer the money.
Also, I may not see those friends all the time. If they want their money immediately, they can get it electronically.
Finally, some friends don't use cash a lot. At that point, the money is more useful if I send it electronically.

Too bad there's never been some sort of federated infrastructure for managing monetary transactions. It would be an awesome thing if it existed, and people definitely wouldn't just naively bandwagon against it and simply call it a scam if it did.

There is, it's called SEPA instant payment, and every single bank uses it. The tiny catch is that you have to be in Europe for it.
- Also called payid. Instant payment, every single bank supports it, can register your phone number, email address, business number to your account so anyone with one of the Jose details can pay you. Tiny catch is you have to be in Australia
- Cries in Swedish.
Heh, while crypto itself isn't federated like email, the means of running it is. Lots of seperate people/orgs running blockchain ledgers.
Unfortunately, it's more or less a persistent pyramid scam that we're just riding around on the currents of... But I'm not sure that national currency is that far off that description either. We're riding on the ripples from the oligarchs in power.

I'm harping on my friends to set up autodeposit. There is no reason to manually accept money, just let people give you money when they want.

If you need to log in, it's because you are giving somebody money. Way harder for people to scam if that's the case for everybody.

I do like that banking apps warn you that your payment might be a scam, but the number one rule I have after 25 years in computers is that nobody reads anything. Ever.
If they've opened that app and it's a scam then they're getting scammed. No amount of scary messages is going to stop that. They think the FBI takes iTunes vouchers ffs.

It can be paid over Poob. Poob pays it for you.

paid over Boob
At first I misread it this way, and I was like "ah yes, the world's oldest payment system"
- I can see the memetic advertisement by now! "Tested with ur mom", etc.

Easier to just give your friend a BJ and call it even. Several if it’s a big bill.

I've gotta quit hanging out with ducks.

Just use a bank? Why all these regulation dodging strange alternatives. Most banks even do email/mobile/tap transfers these days.

My guess is that USAian banks charge stupid fees for any sort of transfer between different banks
Bank transfer wouldn't be instant. A lot of banks incorporate Zelle, so that's kind of the bank's third-party etransfer. Unless your bank is not one of the ones who has it, or you prefer to use CashApp because that's what your friends all use, etc.
- cash app is only "instant" because its an internal transfer. Internal transfers within banks are generally instant and interbank is still pretty quick these days. I think its hourly.

Brazilians laughing in PIX

Made a trip to LA with the kids this summer and the surfing lessons guy made me pay extra for paying him on PayPal because that's the only payment app I can use as a Canadian.

This is everything now lol. Impossible to move people off existing platforms because of choice overload. I feel this is why linux gets held up too, 6000 distros to choose makes it hard vs "its windoze I use nao"

Mfw the rest of the world just has bank transfers

nearly every bank in the US uses Zelle which lets you send money to another persons account with no fees, just using their phone number. for some reason people just prefer to use stupid shit like venmo.
- But it's a fucking 3rd party app that skims. Nothing in the USA is just straight forward. There's always someone making a buck off of your service.
  Saunt Neal Stephenson predicted this and so it has come to pass.
- Nearly....but some don't. And that is the problem. Other countries have bank transfer figured out and not dependent on voluntary adoption from a 3rd party service. I was very surprised when I learned how behind the US is on banking, even compared with some "3rd word" countries.
Right, I'd just get their account number and sort code, and can transfer securely for free, normally immediately or at least within 2 hours if their bank also uses SWIFT, which they all do.
- If I understand correctly your account number is kinda of a big deal and a security risk to share it. But I may be wrong, nothing in US banking is straightforward or makes sense.

Actual question: why don't Americans just transfer money using a normal baning app? I just have to open the app of my bank. Enter the IBAN, name and amount, confirm and the money will be sent pretty fast. No need for either party to use any third party app.

We don’t have IBAN. Worse, we have routing and account numbers that CAN be used for an ACH transfer but many banks are disabling this functionality on personal accounts because people kept falling for scams.
- And now you shouldn't zelle someone unless you've met this person in real life and not online. And when you zelle you enter their phone number and then you get a one verification code sent to your phone number. They really like to complicate things. Where is the fucking cash anymore? I would rather slide someone a round $5 and expect no change than zelle someone $4.50 for the coffee.
  Edit: the reason is because of scammers using people personal phone numbers and hacking their carriers (or sending via their phone line idk how they do it tbh) my mother got a text from a friend and bought them $500 in apple gift cards. I heard they now copy speech and can mimic your voice for calls so have a passphrase with your grandma so she doesn't send you the $100 from her ss check
American banks use ACH, and requires both a routing number (a bank identifier) and the account number.
But theres a reason to prefer a transaction service over direct ACH. And that is settlement time. A service like zelle, the transaction is done in real time as in the money will appear in your account within an hour. But ACH does batch settlements, and that can take up to 3 days (though its ussually a day) before the money appears in your account.
- Europe manages it instantly, or in rare cases that I've never seen in under 10 seconds. Honestly, three days is sad, its 2025, do they print it and put the boxes on a plane?
- This is madness. Im Australian banking with CBA (a popular bank) and I can send 20k to my mum's bank account at ANZ (another big bank) and she receives it in her account in 30 seconds or less.
  We even have a thing called PayID which links your account deets to a mobile number or email address, and so if I go out to dinner with friends and we want to split the bill, I just tell them to PayID my mobile number and I get it within 30 seconds, no 3rd party FinTech required.
- There's also the issue that every check you've sent has enough information on it to do an ACH. There's no way to verify unless you're in person at the bank.
  Transaction services at the very least try to verify you're who you are.
Zelle is the official method of electronic transfer between different people (transfering to your own accounts doesn't seem to involve zelle tho)
A surprising number of people don't have a bank.
That's not a thing here.
I'm an American who doesn't transfer through my banking account because I don't trust or use banks. You can use our banking apps for that iirc via zelle which is built in to those but I don't know anyone who likes it.

Laughs in PIX

Visa and mastercard are actively trying to shut pix down, fuck those guys, I only use pix now
- So true though. I used to prefer card but now I'm using PIX much more frequently out of pure spite

you dont need to install zelle it came free with your fucking bank account

tell that to my credit union. no zelle support.
no, it did not
Annoyingly my credit union doesn’t use Zelle.
- Nor does mine, nor does my secondary bank.

How much of this stuff is made up? I know Venmo is real, but a lot of the rest sounds like parody names.

Parody names drive more engagement than serious ones, so even real things are given parody names now
Everything after Zelle is made up
- Floorp is real but irrelevant in this context.
Zelle and CashApp are real.

I hope this isn’t advocating for consolidation or a duopoly in the fintech space.

It best be advocating for interoperable standards that are not controlled and profited from by a limited number of rent seeking corporations.

Have a unified protocol for this doesn't mean a monopoly or consolidation.
Look up the implementation of UPI in India. We have thousands of services providing UPI payments to any other UPI recipient (no matter which app they use as long as it supports UPI)
Even WhatsApp has a UPI payment button in India. It's that easy to implement.
I might be terribly oversimplifying it (and deviating from the facts a bit), but think of it as email - a protocol - and the thousands of services that let you send/recv emails to anyone, no matter their domain or service.
It is a meme.
- I don’t underestimate the power of memes. None of us should.
  A meme lord recently went ham on the government with a chainsaw.

I just go into my bank app and use their phone number for a transfer ¯⁠\⁠_⁠(⁠ツ⁠)⁠_⁠/⁠¯ takes like 15 seconds from me opening the app to them having the money

Here everyone just uses revolut

Everyone? I know it's a thing here in Germany too, but most people here are still at the older banks with offices in many towns. Though the neo brokers and banks are seemingly becoming more relevant, which is good I think?