While we may make most of our payments within EU, basically everyone still occasionally pays for something outside of EU, either online or when they travel. This means if the new thing only works in EU, every European will still need and have a MasterCard/Visa even if they use it less often than before.

This is still a massive amount of leverage - MC/Visa still have the ability to block payments made from EU citizens/companies to outside.

Russia did it because they're blocked from everywhere anyway and can't get Visa or Mastercard anyway. So this isn't really a concern. For an EU credit card to be successful and actually displace Visa/Mastercard among EU citizens, we would have to convince every merchant from Philippines to Argentina to South Africa to accept it.

If Visa works everywhere, and Eurocard would work only in Europe, your options would be to have either only Visa or have both. And few people would would want to get multiple cards if one works universally already.

People who accept that as something a company should be allowed to do are a massive problem. Because of you, they might actually do it. It will start by making sure you cannot mute the sound in any way, designing hardware in a way to enforce that - devices will start overriding the use of external speakers and play ads from internal ones to make absolutely sure you haven't muted it. Next they will force always-on cameras on us which will make sure our eyes are open and looking at the ad. Next we will have brain implants to make sure you're actually paying attention and not thinking about something else.

I find it extremely disturbing that you don't feel disgusted about even thinking of "yes".

Due to many people doing this, all important notifications that are actually actionable are now sent via Slack as well. So far these notifications are only for things where I actually need to urgently respond or do something, so none of the spam has yet reached Slack.

Also, no one ever seems to personally send an email to another employee because Slack is always the better option, and people actually respond on Slack, unlike via email.