>Hi Terry.
>
>what do you think of the statement "The US became the most advanced society in the world because the framework of the country turbocharged invention and innovation, that's why"?
>
>This statement is typical for someone coming from a country where they still use personal checks, and have paper money as small as 1USD. Let's sit down and laugh at their ignorance and arrogance. They will never understand what is meant by advanced technology. I can send you money in a few seconds, in the US "the check is in the mail"...! Ha-ha!

Now you got me started.

Even during the worst years of Miloshevich, the then FR of Yugoslavia had an instant payment system. A business-to-business payment took about two minutes using 2400 baud modems, through a local branch of the system. Or you could send your courier to the branch and get all your payments processed in about two minutes each. Any checks you (even as an individual) received were equal to cash, no hold. The economy was bad, nobody had money, and every business owed any other business a lot, and was owed a lot as well. Periodically, the service demanded lists of debts from all companies, and ran so-called "multilateral compensations", which had your debts and debts to you cancel each other out, sometimes involving longish chains - they had coders who were able to pull such a thing. Sometimes companies would do this among themselves - A pays to B, B pays to C... and eventually G gets the money. Their couriers would come together to the branch with their payment slips, and the whole sixfold transaction would be finished in 30 minutes.

Fast forward 15 years to XXI century USA. I get a check, deposit it at the credit union service center, 15 minutes later I see it online on credit union's website. Except that the money becomes available about 11 days later. I figure it's the issuer's bank simply holding that money so long, thus artificially building its loan base with my money. This used to be 5 days (and in some cases I see as little as 3 days - but those are few and far between). We as programmers know that clearing a check takes a network packet no longer than a kilobyte, which can go and return within two seconds. There's no excuse for this, other than that the system ALLOWS banks to do this.

How many balls does a good juggler juggle at a time?