Fair enough.

In several countries the mainstream party politicians (who are Neoliberals) have been slowly privatising healthcare by forcing the Public Healthcare System to outsource more and more of the work to the Private Sector and using the same technique as Thatcher in the UK used to privatise railroads (of which now, decades later, you can see the horrible results) - defund the Public Service and when the quality falls because of it claim that the Public Sector is always incompetent and the the Private is always competent so that’s why that Public Service had problems hence it needs to be privatised to improve.

On top of that there is the actual genuine problem (rather than artificial meddling with the Public Healthcare System to send more money into the hands of politician’s mates) that populations are aging and older people require much more Healthcare Services in average.

I’ve lived in a couple of countries in Europe and some have Universal Healthcare systems (such as the UK and Portugal) but others such as The Netherlands and Germany have Mixed Systems with Health Insurance but highly regulated and were some people can get Health Insurance from the state.

You’re not going to go bankrupt from the treatment or get treatment denied in countries with UHC.

However if you lose your job or never find a job in the first place due to illness related issues or disabilities you’ll almost certainly end up on benefits which again can be better or worse depending in the country.

I would say things have been getting worse all over Europe (personally I think it’s exactly because there’s been too much copying of shit from the US), especially when it comes to the level of benefits for poor people being sufficient (the house prices bubbles all over the place and the lack of building of social housing have made this a massive problem in most countries), but that’s not the same as simply going bankrupt from medical bills because you’ve had an accident, ended up in an emergency ward and got a life saving surgery.

So it’s literally something that’s not legally supposed to happen, unlike in the US.

Mate, as I’ve said it’s not one but TWO countries I lived in with Universal Healthcare, and you can’t be a Nationalist (as you’re trying to imply) for TWO countries.

If you’re comparing like to like - i.e. the average poor disabled person in both a country with Universal Healthcare and the US - you’re going to get some cases of those having insufficient treatment in countries with UHC (especially in those were neoliberal governments have been defunding their UHC systems to try and privatise Healthcare even against popular will, like the UK), whilst the vast majority of those people will be fucked in the US (unless they’re Veterans).

I’ve lived in several countries and it’s just an enormous peace of mind living in a country were you know that if you’re involved in an accident and end up getting costly treatement in an emergency ward, you’re not going to be ruined.

I think you’re seeing the problems relative to a specific baseline and you think that there are massive problems there (which I’m sure there are) but the thing with the US system is that the baseline itself is way worse and all those problem you see would also be problems there but much worse (or maybe not, as those people would die a lot faster, at which point no problem would be visible) and on top of that in the US there are way more people with even worse problems when it comes to Healthcare than the “poor disabled person” in a country with UHC.

For every case of a disabled persion on benefits having to wait 1.5 years for a non-urgent operation because they can’t afford private healthcare, there are a million of cases of people who get a common problem like Diabetes or Cardio-Vascular problems and get treated for free (down to getting the medicine for free, which for a person below the poverty line will be true even for the worst countries) rather than suddenly being faced with an extra monthly bill for medicine (which would be a massive hit for those poor people you cosplay as caring about for the sake of argument) or a massive bill for urgent surgery.

(Which reminds me: one thing that will NEVER happen in one of those countries, unlike in the US, is when one ends up in the emergency ward and requires an expensive treatment to save their life, they won’t get a massive bill at the end)

Oh, and even if you pay out of pocket for medicine, it’s way cheaper in those countries than the US, as governments have used their leverage to limit what Pharmaceutial companies can charge, unlike in the US.

The healthcare risks for the average individual in countries with Universal Healthcare aren’t even in the same universe as in the US.

Having lived in two countries with universal healthcare, that meme is absolutelly true and you’re the one bullshitting.

The most “extreme” it can get in such systems is that they won’t pay for very expensive treatments (i.e. the kind of stuff that costs a million dollars per shot) if a person can keep going with cheaper ones even if they’re not as good.

Even then, sometimes they will if it’s actually worth it (as in: for something that’s a cure, not for something that just keeps the patiet going and is only 10% better than the next best option whilst costing 1000x more).

That’s “your quality of life won’t be as good if you have a chronic disease that makes your life miserable and the best treatment in the market is insanelly expensive because they’ll only pay for a not as expensive one”, not “death panels”.

People in those countries absolutelly aren’t going bankrupt due to being denied life-saving treatment and having to pay for it from their own pocket.

As for any complains you might have heard from people in countries with universal healthcare, them complaining about it is like people in Scandinavia complaining about public services: relative to what they have there are bad parts, which is something altogether different than it being bad relative to the World and when it comes the healthcare the US is 3rd World when it comes to results delivered relative to the amount spent in it.

Well, I haven’t really made any large wire transfers to accounts outside the EU from that bank in over a decade so can’t really confirm or deny.

I do know that in past experience with banks in general, the people checking the validity of suspicious transations (and large transfers to accounts outside the EU tend to fall into that classification given the prevalence of online scams from countries were the Law is a bit of a joke) will actually call you, or at least they did in the UK some years ago (pre-Brexit) which was the last time I had experience with something like that.

(At one point I also worked in a company that made Fraud Detection software).

Maybe they switched to SMS to save money, I don’t know.

Ah, I see.

Your point is that the use of a secondary channel for a One Time Pass is still an insecure method versus the use of a time-based one time password (for example as generated in a mobile phone app or, even more secure, a dedicated device). Well, I did point out all the way back in my first post that SMS over GSM is insecure and SMS over GSM seems to be the secondary channel that all banks out there chose for their 2FA implementation.

So yeah, I agree with that.

Still, as I pointed out, challenge-response with smartchip signature is even safer (way harder to derive the key and the process can actually require the user to input elements that get added to the input challenge, such as the amount being paid on a transfer, so that the smartchip signs the whole thing and it all gets validated on the other side, which you can’t do with TOTP). Also as I said, from my experience with my bank in The Netherlands, a bank using that system doesn’t require 2FA, so clearly there is a bit more to the Revised Payment Systems Directive than a blanked requirement for dynamic linking.

It think you’re confusing security (in terms of how easy it is to impersonate you to access your bank account) with privacy and the level of requirements on the user that go with it - the impact on banking security of the bank having your phone number is basically zero since generally lots individuals and companies who are far less security conscious than banks have that number.

That said, I think you make a good point (people shouldn’t need a mobile phone to be able to use online banking and even if they do have one, they shouldn’t need to provide it to the bank) and I agree with that point, though it’s parallel to the point I’m making rather than going against it.

I certainly don’t see how that collides with the last paragraph of my original post which is about how the original thread poster has problems working with banks which “require a separate device that looks like a calculator to use online banking” which is an element of the most secure method of all (which I described in my original post) and is not at all 2FA but something altogether different and hence does not require providing a person’s phone to the bank. I mean, some banks might put 2FA on top of that challenge-response card authentication methods, but they’re not required to do so in Europe (I know, because one of the banks in Europe with which I have an account uses that method and has no 2FA, whilst a different one has 2FA instead of that method) - as far as I know (not sure, though) banks in Europe are only forced to use 2FA if all they had before that for “security” was something even worse such as username + password authentication, because without those regulations plenty of banks would still be using said even worse method (certainly that was the case with my second bank, who back in the late 2010s still used ridiculously insecure online authentication and only started using 2FA because they were forced to)

Yeah, even though that unit is a thousandth of an inch, it’s called mils rather than milli-inches.

There’s also a difference between imperial miles and nautical miles, though I’m not sure if British long distance ships use nautical miles or not.

Making money from merely owning things that others need and have to pay you to use as they can’t get them otherwise (because you and people like you took them first) - something know in Economics as rent seeking, though it doesn’t apply only to housing - is pure parasitism because that person is producing no value whatsoever, merely extorting money from others because they removed free access to a resource from them.

I literally said 2FA over SMS is not secure because of weaknesses in the GSM protocol.

It’s still more secure than username + password alone, but that’s it.

Whilst I would be wary of saying AirBnB is the main cause (more likely it’s a big one but not the only one), keep in mind that when realestate prices go up in major cities, that pushes out people who go to cheaper places, pushing prices up in those places which in turn might push some out from those places and into even cheaper places.

So housing bubbles centered in main cities do naturally spread out from there to places were the original causes of the bubble are not present.

Those little boxes are just a bit of hardware to let the smartchip on the smartcard do what’s called challenge-response authentication (in simple terms: get big long number, encode it with the key inside the smartchip, send encoded number out).

(Note that there are variants of the process were things like the amount of a transfer is added by the user to the input “big long number”).

That mechanism is the safest authentication method of all because the authentication key inside the smartchip in the bank card never leaves it and even the user PIN never gets provided to anything but that smartchip.

That means it can’t be eavesdropped over the network, nor can it be captured in the user’s PC (for example by a keylogger), so even people who execute files received on their e-mails or install any random software from the Internet on their PCs are safe from having their bank account authentication data captured by an attacker.

The far more common two-way-authentication edit: two-channel-authentication, aka two-factor-autentication (log in with a password, then get a number via SMS and enter it on the website to finalize authentication), whilst more secure that just username+password isn’t anywhere as safe as the method described above since GSM has security weaknesses and there are ways to redirected SMS messages to other devices.

(Source: amongst other things I worked in Smart Card Issuance software some years ago).

It’s funny that the original poster of this thread actually refuses to work with some banks because of them having the best and most secure bank access authentication in the industry, as it’s slightly inconvenient. Just another example of how, as it’s said in that domain, “users are the weakest link in IT Security”.

In my own Portugal, which is a very turistic country and also towards the bottom of the GDP-per-capita scale in the EU, things that would likely work very well would also be:

• Crack down on AirBnB
• Forbid ownership for non-residents.

Portugal currently has a massive house inflation problem (extra massive, because of how low average incomes are here) and a lot of it has to do with residential housing being removed from the housing market and turned into short term turist lets (for example, over 10% of housing in Lisbon has been turned into AirBnB lets) and foreign investors (not just big companies but also individuals, such as well off pensioneers from places like France) pulling prices up by being far less price sensitive than the locals as they’re buying residential housing as investments having far more money available than the average Portuguese.

Having lived in both Britain and Portugal during housing bubbles, what I’ve observed was that the politicians themselves purposefully inflate those bubbles, partly because they themselves are part of the upper middle class or even above (especially in the UK) who can afford to and have Realestate “investments” and hence stand to gain personally (as do their mates) from Realestate prices going up and partly because the way Official GDP (which is supposedly the Real GDP, which has Inflation effects removed) is calculated nowadays means that house price inflation appears as GDP “growth” since the effects of house price increases come in via the “inputted rent” mechanism but the Inflation Indexes used to create that GDP do not include house price inflation, so by sacrificing the lives of many if not most people in the country (especially the young, for example the average age for them to leave their parent’s home in Portugal is now above 34 years old and at this point half of all University graduates leave the country as soon as they graduate) they both enrich themselves and can harp in the news all about how they made the GDP go up.

All this has knock on effects on the rest of the Economy, from the braindrain as highly educated young adults leave and the even faster population aging as people can’t afford to have kids, to shops closing because most people have less money left over after paying rent or mortgage so spend less, plus the commercial realestate market is also in a bubble so shops too suffer from higher rents. However all this is slow to fully manifest itself plus those who bought their houses before when they were cheaper don’t feel directly like the rest, and they generally don’t really mentally link the more visible effects (such as more and more empty storefronts) to realestate inflation, much less do more complex analysis of predictable effects, such as how the braindrain and fall in birthrates will impact their pensions in a decade or two.

As somebody who was an EU immigrant in the UK for over a decade and also lived in other countries of Europe, lets just say that New Labour are plain Rightwing (so, not even Center-Left, although the original Labour definitelly were Leftwing) and the Liberal Democrats are pure rightwing (whislt the Tories have been Far Right since at least the Leave Referendum).

The ideology of “Thatcher’s Greatest Achievement” - a “relaxed about wealth” ideology which loves privatisation and derregulation - which took over Labour is not Left of center and the LibDems have always been even more Neolibs than that.

The Overtoon Window in England (not as much the other UK nations) is way to the Right of the rest of Europe, so its understandable that many there think that when they neither grew up back in the days when Labour was actually a party of the Working Class and never saw politics elsewhere in Europe.

At a Systemic level hey’re big fans of the only true Power being Money whilst the Vote is nothing more than a bit of loud Theatre & Clown Show that doesn’t actually control the managing of a country - or in other words, of Oligarchy rather than Democracy.

At a personal level they’re big fans of personal upside maximization with no legal, ethical or moral limits, aka Greed Is Good, or in other words, for sociopathy to be totally legal, socially aceptable and even celebrated.