Nitpick: Credit Card volume is on the order of 4-5 trillion (depending on source) in the US. Add in debit and prepaid cards on card payment rails and it is around 10 trillion.
Appreciate recent numbers. FedNow (us instant payments) has not been around long, growth will take time. My point was you don’t need Venmo or CashApp, almost any bank or credit union will do today and the volume is substantial.
I expect it to take at least 5-10 years for instant payments to replace Zelle, credit, and debit cards in the US.
> Brazil’s card industry seems to have already come to terms with the loss of market share to Pix. For 2024, Abecs sees the debit card “moving sideways,” growing only between 0.4% and 0.7% compared to the previous year. This trend is consistent globally: Visa earnings reports reveal that its debit volume has been in monthly decline since February 2024.
> The numbers around Brazil’s RTP [Pix] are indeed superlative. Central Bank data shows that over 40% of all payments in the country are currently made through Pix. The system is used by more than 90 percent of the adult population, has over 15 million businesses and moves 20% of the country’s total transactional volume.
> As it gains new features, Pix will continue to cut into banks’ interchange revenues and compete with the card industry, not only in terms of ‘stealing’ transactions from these legacy players but by allowing a new stack of solutions to be built on top of its scheme. What the Brazilian Central Bank created is a new payment rail that allows for fewer intermediaries and, therefore, for cheaper solutions.
It conveys an informality and casualness inappropriate to situation of declaring that you are about to disrupt a few thousand people's life in a massive way. Even posting it to Twitter before everyone has been notified is... a choice.
Some people won't perceive that, but plenty will, and appropriately so.
I severely doubt if the hiring teams at this company would take someone seriously if their application was sent in in this style. I severely doubt that they communicate with their clients and investors this way.
This is a financial services company, it goes with the territory that they should project careful attention to detail.
Even if this was a company in a much less serious industry, this is just not the kind of announcement that a CEO should send out without fixing all the squigly lines that helpfully tell you when you are about to come across as uneducated or unserious.
Wheelchair users are a subset of pedestrians. If your pedestrian infra is shit, your wheelchain infra can't be much better. (Sure, only if you count whatever remains of pedestrians infra, it might look acceptable).
On public transport this does not seem to be the case at all. Low floor buses, trams and trains are much, much more common in Europe. And bike lanes and better overall pedestrian infrastructure is much better.
So I really interested how you are getting to this 'wheelchair accessibility' is better in the US. I would love to see some data, and not just 'we have X more ramps', but actual people in wheelchair going into their experience.
I've never been on a city bus where the driver waits for people to be seated. Hell, when I lived in Vancouver, they would start moving before everyone had even paid their fare, basically as soon as the door was closed.
That would be true if busses didn't have to accelerate, decelerate, open doors, kneel and go through the many parts of stopping that aren't strictly people getting on or off.
The counterpoint is any bus route that has an express option that runs in parallel. Every time I have taken the express route, the bus can be full to the gills, but is always faster than the non-express bus.
Can you clarify what you mean by dirty? Or why that would be any more dirty than anything else in public? European buses frequently have stop buttons, not sure how those would be any cleaner than a plastic covered cord.
Also not sure what is old-fashioned about a pull cord compared to a bunch of buttons. Just a different way of activating an electrical circuit.
You need to clarify what you mean by "here" and what part of the US you are talking about. The US and Europe are big places and the transit systems are as different inter as they are intra.
The Paris Metro is an absolute run-down antique compared to the trains in Seattle. It would be silly for me to declare that all European metro systems are therefore run down and tatty. If I compare the Barcelona metro to New York, it makes Europe look great. Meanwhile the London Tube is cramped, frequently dilapidated and has its own species of mosquito.
I've seen it work pretty well in a number of places in the form of privately owned minibuses/vans that can rapidly go where the demand is needed.
As an example, all throughout the Eastern Caribbean this system works really well (in my experience better than most centrally planned bus systems in large cities). On any given island you can go to any main road and within a few minutes a minibus will come along. Most of the time if your aren't familiar with the geography, you just tell the conductor where you are trying to get to, and they will make sure that you get off in the right spot to get where you are going or connect to another minibus. Typical cost was ~$2.
Predictability was pretty low, but because of the small size of busses, there were a lot of them roaming around, I don't think I ever waited more than 15 minutes, and that was in very out of the way places.
It's really not ideal. Similar systems are common in Central Asia. They make it difficult for travelers to predict journey times, it's unfriendly to tourists, and it's much less accessible to other populations (e.g. the disabled). They also don't scale well to large urban environments or out of the way journeys in my experience.
Yes, like all systems, it has tradeoffs. Although I would argue that some of the downsides you highlight are worse with traditional bus systems (e.g. the Caribbean bus conductors will happily guide tourists, and I have seen them go off-route frequently to drop off someone with limited mobility. Large cities in other parts of the world have managed to scale the system out to fill in gaps with other forms of transit like Lima, Peru)
The GP was arguing that it NEVER works out, and I'm just pointing out that it does work in many places.
I would much rather rely on the Caribbean minibus systems than try to rely on transit in cities like Phoenix.
To standardize a journey time in a scheduled system, you subtract the origin scheduled arrival from the destination scheduled arrival. Map apps will even do this for you automatically. If the bus is unreliable, you add error margin. A demand shuttle system usually has a much larger variance, which means you can't predict that the journey time will be acceptable and you'll find some other way to get around.
How do buses fair in this regard?
You look at the route map and the schedule to decide? Again, map apps make this trivial for regularly scheduled services.
The fed was very intentionally set up to be resistant to tampering from political forces, and especially the executive. The entire governance structure is so that they can take actions that may be painful in the short term without being stopped by politicians.
Before Trump it was, for good reason, incredibly taboo to place pressure on the fed or even hint at interfering. Most economists are pretty horrified that particular barrier has been crossed.
The fed has a pretty big stick, and a mandate to try to balance inflation with unemployment. Throwing politics into the mix is a very bad idea since politicians worry about very different things, and adhere to election timelines.
The president has no business getting involved here.
Then what about banking & finance pre central bank era are you nostalgic for?
Because if the current system favors the bankers, the previous system sure as hell favored the bankers. Is it the bank runs?
I guess I should say this is all academic now, since we're about a month an a half away from Weimarizing the dollar lmfao. We've been kicking the institutional legs out from the stool for a while and we will discover the virtue of an independent central bank whether we like it or not.
Bankers have been a problem as long as there have been banks with fractionally reserved deposits. The Fed just stabilized the appropriation of surplus value by the banking system through the issuance of credit. There is nothing independent about it: it will preserve the large banks come hell or high water, and soon enough we'll get both.
I would prefer a social credit system (not the Chinese kind, the other kind) where the money supply is managed for the public good via a citizens dividend tied to the productive capacity of the economy, coupled with making gold buying/selling tax free as a savings (and monetary disciplinary) mechanism.
I have the advantage that this system will never be tried, and therefore I can never be proved wrong.
Ok. We'll see how that shakes out in a year or so. Most folks in the west have never lived in a country where a dictator controls the money supply. It's REAL easy to shit talk the US or even european central banks are when you have no idea what the alternative is.
Yes, there will always be someone willing to buy on price alone, but that doesn't mean that there aren't also people who will pay more for better service. To wit: Spirit is financially fucked, mainline carriers are in better condition. The existence
I think the real thing is that - in North America at least - there is a pretty good chance that a mainline carrier will treat you poorly, hit you with unexpected fees, jam you into a tiny seat, etc.
For many people, the difference between an ultra-low cost carrier and a mainline carrier is whether they have to walk through first class on the way to their seats. If you are going to get treated like cattle and upsold on everything anyway, might as well save a few bucks.
Given the choice between Singapore Airlines and United, I'll pay extra for SingAir because I KNOW the service will be better. Given the choice between United and Southwest, I'll just get whichever flight makes the most sense since I don't really expect United to offer better service.
> For many people, the difference between an ultra-low cost carrier and a mainline carrier is whether they have to walk through first class on the way to their seats. If you are going to get treated like cattle and upsold on everything anyway, might as well save a few bucks.
That goes beyond airlines and extends to everything. The trend I've been observing in every product and service category is the hollowing out of the middle: the market bifurcates, one part serving the cost-sensitive customers and getting stuck in a race to the bottom, the other serving premium clientele with highest-quality or bespoke goods/services, gravitating towards few customers and "if you have to ask, you can't afford it pricing".
Multiplying volume by margin, "lots of cheap shit" and "few pricey sales" are both sustainable, but the middle segment - "reasonable quality for reasonable price" - is not.
I would argue this is because the middle class itself has been largely hollowed out. Everyone is either a millionaire or on the edge of bankruptcy, no in-between.
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