At a dinner table, a chap complains about 9am meetings with team members on the other side of the country, and how these early morning meetings, every workday for a year, feel draining and endless. A women is indignant at the chap’s hardship, and mentions her hour long commute in the mornings, followed by an hour commute in the evenings, often working ten hour days. Yet another lad, not to be outdone in complaints about work, challenges them all with how he must be at the station yard, every morning at 5am, prepared to drive bus routes for the remainder of his day with its constant flow of thankless commuters. We often exemplify our hardships in regards to our careers, sometimes to the extent of suggesting that our friends don’t have it as bad as we do.

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I used to work at the University of Cincinnati and whenever I got frustrated at staff meetings, I’d threaten to move to Australia. After a $300 application fee and a surprisingly short approval process, I had holiday work visa which allowed me to live and work in Australia for a full year. My manager led me to our director’s office. With my resignation letter on his desk, my director simply asked, “Do you want more money?” to which I responded, “I’m moving to Australia.” There were confused looks from the two of them, awkward silence and finally, “No, really … I’m moving to Australia.” It was the first time I had left the relative security of a full-time position, and it wouldn’t be the last.

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In recent months, there has been considerable debate by videos creators on YouTube about the future of generating revenue through Google’s extremely popular streaming video service. Advertisers are backing away from more controversial content and YouTube has begun to demonetize several types of videos. Services like Flattr, which attempted to allow content consumers to fill the tip jars of creators, have slowly fizzled. Yet out of those ashes has come a new service known as Patreon, which allows fans to directly contribute to the continual production of many varieties of art.

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When I lived in Australia, sending money to an individual or business was as simple as knowing their Bank State Branch (BSB) number and account number. I could go through a web interface, or a phone app, and send $50 to a friend. It would show up the next morning in their account (or potentially the same day if we used the same bank). This transfer went through a government system known as the Australian Payments Clearing House (APCA), was completely free of fees for individuals and worked with all banks in Australia. Many countries have similar systems, some adding additional security with one-time use Transaction Authentication Numbers (TANs).

Although America has a means of electronic transfers between banks, it’s not available for individual person-to-person transfers. Automated Clearing House (ACH) transfers are only available to certain businesses and the means for verifying identity and exchanging money via it are slow and convoluted. I honestly hadn’t realized how far behind the American banking system was until I spent several years exposed to various foreign banking systems.

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