Their payment processor (the people they rent the machine off of) offers them this oppurtunity to 'unlock hidden revenue for merchants'[1][2][3] and they are happy to do this.
Not sure about your bit of Europe but I’ve had branded credit cards from European airlines here in Europe for a long time. They’re definitely past ‘coming’.
Not as lucrative for me the holder as you’d get it the US, but I can’t really imagine being without one.
As I recall, that's because it's basically impossible to have a US rewards card in Europe. European authorities tightly cap interchange fees (the fees that come out of the merchant's end of the deal).
US issuers are much less regulated. In the US there are cheap cards that offer no perks and take a small (0.2-1%) cut from the merchant, and the perks cards that have lots of perks and take a bigger (3.5%) cut from the merchant. The CC companies, naturally, want more people to use perks cards so they get more of a cut, so to encourage consumers to use these cards they give some of it back to the users in the form of these rewards.
This model recently came under attack when a whole bunch of merchants brought an anti-trust lawsuit against Visa and MC for their requirement that if you wanted to accept the cheap cards you had to accept the expensive cards as well, merchants want to be able to accept the cheap cards and reject the higher tier cards. The negotiations about that settlement continue, so we'll have to see how it all shakes out, but it could result in a major limiting of American reward cards. Or maybe not, always in motion the future is.
The EU parliament passed a law capping interchange fees at 0.3% (for local personal cards, business has some other limit that I don't remember) so there is just no money to offer rewards to customers of European banks. Much better for merchants, lower prices overall mean probably better for poorer folks, worse deal for wealthy people with good credit who pay attention and pay their bills in full every month. Speaking as an American one of those people who benefit from rewards cards, I think that it is better for society to go with the European choices than the American.
From what I understand about North Korea - simply moving within (actual) NK itself is not really on the cards for a lot of people, so they might as well claim sovereignty over the whole peninsular.
Usually some state's passports grant the holder more privileges than those issued by another state precisley because of the perceived risk of them being (not) obtained by fraud. Your genuine Sealand passport is less practically useful than a genuine Finnish one for use in the context of international travel.
The cryptography aspect is basically preventing the corrupt Sealand government official from stamping out ones that might be confused for, for example, a Finnish one.
Sealand[1] being used as an example least likely to cause offense - but you can understand that most governments around the world really do want to ensure that they are the only ones issuing their passports, and hence what that means for their citizens.
You might have to show a passport when you enter France, and have your baggage and person (intrusively) scanned if you fly there, for much the same reason.
People, some of them in positions of government in some nation states want to cause harm to the services of other states. Cloudflare was probably the easiest tradeoff for balancing security of the service with accessibility and cost to the French/Parisian taxpayer.
Not that I'm happy about any of this, but I can understand it.
I moved to Finland from the UK and found exactly the same thing you mentioned in France. Plus extra layers of beauracracy (there's no national health service, there are public hospitals that send a bill to the public insurer and you get a bill for an excess unless you are absolutely down-and-out. Either way, a nice job program for public administrators). Prescriptions are far more expensive than the UK (your co-pay on them is something like €600 a year)
One nice perk though is that [private, corporate] jobs offer cushy health insurance as part of the deal as standard really so you can go and see one of the many private doctors in their offices at your choice and leisure.
But now we have amazing vibe coding tools that mean that you don’t need to be technical or whatever - you can just deliver results. After all, the best LinkedIn influencers and founders don’t care about how something is delivered, just what.
Yeah, we’ve finally, nearly, just got to the point where realizing that treating IT and security and such as simply a cost centre to be minimised maybe quite wasn’t leading to optimal security outcomes - to throwing it all away again.
Indeed - it reminds me of a story I heard about potential Lithium deposits being found in Sweden. Initially this would be a good thing because it would help Europeans build and drive more electric cars which are a good thing because they are less polluting and rely less on oil from unstable places.
Of course, it was swiftly pointed out that it would be impossible to mine it and meet the stringent environmental standards that we have in Europe, because we're good and care for the world.
Fine to trash the environment in China though.
Similarly, hands have been wrung in Finland because they banned importing Russian timber for obvious reasons, but this meant potentialy cutting down more Finnish wood and failing to meet environmental obligations. Aparently if you cut down trees a bit to the East it's ok for the environment.
With all due respect, there's not a huge shortage of programmers in Europe.
What is needed is capital, world leading expertise (yes, top of the field - the people who can command the famous $100M sign on bonuses we hear about), and more risk appetite. If you were, say, an investor ready to fund and grow companies with ready captial, I think your options would be more open.
Europe has lots of capital but when it comes to capital “Europe” is not a singular entity. Its surprisingly difficult for a fund in country A to invest in a privately held company of country B. The whole thing about the lack of big tech in Europe is partially caused by this fragmentation. In areas where the EU broke down those barriers (such as manufacturing) Europe is significantly more competitive than the US.
There is plenty of capital (eye watering amounts in most family offices in fact) and world leading expertise in many fields across Europe. The only factor here is more risk appetite and a culture for that risk in an effort to push industry forward. Europe is incredibly risk averse and is more interested in capital preservation than growth
> Europe is incredibly risk averse and is more interested in capital preservation than growth
There exist quite a lot of people in European countries who are risk-affine, but these are not necessarily good at handling the insane amount of red tape.
Believe me: in Germany, there exist quite a lot of people who would (assuming they could, and this criminal act will never be solved) immediately love to kill the politicians who made these red tape laws, and the bureacrats that enforce them.
I can believe this. I've spoken to many European entrepreneurial types that are really struggling with the red tape handcuffs in their countries, and those are people who actually have EU citizenship and for whom the red tape is as lightweight as possible. Being a non-EU in EU is a whole other ball game.
It's sad, because Europe really has a lot going for it. It also doesn't HAVE to go the US/China route of course, but if it does it will need to make some very serious changes that go beyond just preaching about doing it from the political pulpit
There kind of is, in my view. It's easier for me to hire and relocate an engineer from Eastern Europe than from France where I'm based now.
Most baffling to me are the 25 y.o. graduates of engineering universities who can't write five lines of code in a programming language of their choice. All right you want to be a developer, where the hell have you been all these years? You can get to the senior level by that age, let alone learn one programming language.
To be fair, I've had reasonably similar experiences here in Finland.
And I agree with your second point too - I don't really know what's going on with education, or more generally, the culture surrounding it these days (old man yells at cloud I know), I'd like to see that improved, because in a lot of Europe this is being (effectively) paid for by the public, and if it's producing people with no hope then what's the point?
Their payment processor (the people they rent the machine off of) offers them this oppurtunity to 'unlock hidden revenue for merchants'[1][2][3] and they are happy to do this.
Visa in fact tried to ban it: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dynamic_currency_conversion
Of course, there are regulations and agreements with various institutions that should be followed - but it's free money for the shop, nothing else.
[1] https://www.shift4.com/blog/dynamic-currency-conversion-unlo...
[2] https://www.fexco.com/payments-and-fx/currency-conversion-so...
[3] https://docs.adyen.com/point-of-sale/currency-conversion/
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