In the long term, I think this was actually really expensive. People talk and worry about this, and as a result of this (and similar developments) general consensus seems to have shifted towards preferring EU companies over US companies for tech. That used to be the exact opposite for as long as I can remember.

If you want to earn big money, you're better of in the US, for sure. Quality of life though, as a white collar worker?

That does probably have its effect on economic growth..

We'll start seeing government bodies moving away from US IT suppliers in a couple of years.

1. sounds nice though! But how do they verify that it's actually you? Just matching the photo manually? People are terrible at that. Or do they scan a fingerprint?

You're right, it does not. But it's a significant step towards that goal. In-store payments are next on the agenda.

Disputes between non-fraudulent entities happen of course. But I really don't like some algorithm somewhere taking seemingly arbitrary decisions on that. It usually just amounts to robbing merchants of their money, and adding some exorbitant refund fee to top it of. Settling disputes is what small claims court and dispute committees are for.

Of course, with iDeal now effectively becoming EU-wide, things may get more difficult.

Also, there a good technical reasons for inference being much more efficient at scale.

: Former prime minister Schoof was was not* a fascist, but basically just an independent bureaucrat hired to attempt to hold a very brittle coalition together. He failed at that miserably. Also, the 'main reason that stopped' was that the PVV party went from 23% of the votes to 17% of the votes in the next election, and none of the other parties was willing to work with them again in a coalition.