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I think there is a standard, so as long your bank’s app supports it and more importantly the merchant actually provides a QR code to scan (which is unlikely).

Then again, I don’t see much need for that when I can just NFC pretty much everywhere (of course the merchant still ends up paying up to 1% on every transaction)

Tapping my phone on an NFC terminal seems much easier and more straightforward than having to scan a QR or install a third party app and having to figure out how to link it with my bank account. There is just probably not a lot of demand for a system like this in much of the west (in cases where you can’t use a card there is always SEPA instant payments)

Apple Pay (unless you use it to pay online) is just wallet app for debit/credit cards, Android has the same thing.

I guess in Europe there is just much less demand for systems like this because NFC terminals are you ubiquitous.

is it really that different from SEPA though?

I don’t see their point much different from what you described in your comment.

> the harsher reality we live in

as terrible as it is if we focus on the whole developed world “we” is just a tiny minority (even in the US, just unfortunately not as tiny…)

> unrealistic view of policing

so maybe they could do a separate version for Americans?

> 0.12 percent of world electricity

That seems a lot? I’d have guessed it’s a magnitude or two less

> Wireless charging is so wasteful

Just how wasteful is it? 70-80% vs 9X% considering how little power phones use on average is insignificant…

You’d save what? 1-2 kWh per year at the very most? Totally irrelevant..

> There's nothing obvious about this to me - how would you distinguish that from survivorship bias?

So success of companies is entirely random? That seems statistically unlikely…

I mean are you really saying that there are no decisions that CEOs regularly take due to which a company might lose/gains up to millions to billions of dollars? Why wouldn’t you pay a CEO whose actions can bring the company billions a 100m or so? Seems like a good deal..

e.g. if you put a random highly competent, educated and very hardworking person in charge of Apple back in 1997 is it more or less likely that he would have done better than Jobs?

I mean, yeah I agree with you in part. In most cases it’s hard to distinguish real impact (even after a few years) from survivorship bias which is why this whole process is so inefficient. I’m sure that quite a few companies are just as likely (if not more likely) to hire a 100+ mil CEO who’ll be a net negative on as one who’s action will bring 10x+ in additional revenue compared to what most other candidates would have.

I’m not that sure that a higher proportion of profits going to the shareholders would be a better outcome. Sure the money saved by paying the CEO less might result in lower prices or go to lower ranked employees but it’s not obvious to me that that’s necessarily what would happen.

> The boards, the CEOs, etc. these are not positions that truly need talent and shrewdness these are positions that exist for people to aspire to.

And yet depending on who’s the people in these positions are the company might earn up to hundreds of billions more or less over a few years.

The decisions Pichai does or does not make clearly can cost/bring in more than just 200-300 million.

> These can all be replaced with collective bodies coming from the firm itself.

Companies run by committees are generally notoriously bad at innovation (just look at Europe..)

Depends how you measure “earning”. If we look at Google’s stock price and growth in relation to its competitors he possibly cost significantly more money to the company than he was paid.

> How many people bought or used a tech product solely based on the CEO of the company? Virtually none

A lot bought it because of some decisions made by the CEO. They likely wouldn’t have bought it if he hadn’t made them (of course it varies a lot between industries).

By how much would you say a famous actor/athlete increases the revenue 10/20/50/100/1000%? A CEO can do that too.

Would Apple have become one if not the most successful companies of all time if they had all the other people who helped Jobs accomplish this but not him?

Probably not.

> Any moron knew it was time to invest in da Cloud once AWS was successful.

Yet Google doesn’t seem to be doing all that well at all in this area. At least relatively…