81–90 of 628 posts
A society without cash is a society in which every person has no choice but to get the permission of someone they don’t know and will never meet each and every time they seek to obtain food, water, shelter, or transportation, and that permission can be revoked instantly, silently, and invisibly at any time.
As a resident of Sweden, i can only say that this is the future for all western countries. Life is just better without cash. We don't pay the mental tax of always ensuring i have dollar bills on me to tip left, right, and center. Your phone is enough to get you through the day. The govt is still run by the people for the people here, so most people aren't worried about totalitarianism. Most beggars now have signs wit…
Often I do not want any record that I have purchased something, I will stick with cash. Thanks.
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With the spare cash I have at home. I don't have a spare phone at home, with a spare SIM card.
So... the logical conclusion is you would instead have a spare phone at home.
And do the same for car.
And the hotel room when you are travelling.
Doesn’t seem too logical.
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No. Self sufficiency is a continuum, not a boolean. Cash decentralizes permission for economic transactions.
I'm genuinely curious, what would be the rationale or incentive for a private payment processor (in a competitive payments market) to reject a legitimate transaction? The only reason I can think of would be false positive on fraud detection or system error or the such, all problems with the medium, not with centralization/permissions.
If a politically undesirable group wants to accept donations, is this legitimate?
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With the spare cash I have at home. I don't have a spare phone at home, with a spare SIM card.
So... the logical conclusion is you would instead have a spare phone at home.
As a bonus, phones sometimes explode and set fire to things - when they're not busy getting hacked :)
A society without cash is a society in which every person has no choice but to get the permission of someone they don’t know and will never meet each and every time they seek to obtain food, water, shelter, or transportation, and that permission can be revoked instantly, silently, and invisibly at any time.
You already live in a society where the food, water, and shelter you freely purchase has to be certified and authorized by faceless people you've never met and will never meet. Even your labor you are willing to give has to be certified at some level. That's why you don't have to worry about salmonella in your chicken sandwich or a steel beam falling onto your head at work. You're welcome.
You have to worry about both of those things. Why? Because instead of forcing the placement of every steel beam and the sale of every chicken sandwich to pass through the hands of an intermediary who both profits from and regulates the action, we just decided to regularly inspect places where problems were likely to occur, and to investigate reports of possible violations.
The argument you're making would work just as well for recording all human speech at all times, and processing it for suspicious topics - which is totally currently technologically possible. Even if it weren't, why not require that all conversations be had over a telephone? That's pretty much the same as having rules about the amount of arsenic allowed in salt...
Earlier quoted context omitted.
You already live in a society where the food, water, and shelter you freely purchase has to be certified and authorized by faceless people you've never met and will never meet. Even your labor you are willing to give has to be certified at some level. That's why you don't have to worry about salmonella in your chicken sandwich or a steel beam falling onto your head at work. You're welcome.
Another false comparison. There's a big difference between implementing society-wide regulations and unpersoning individuals.
Hell, even the USSR had paper cash in circulation allowing some privacy and trade between individuals.
Having solely account-based money under complete regulatory control amounts to a huge increase in what is practical to put under political control. It could drastically increase the incentives to ban and regulate trade in anything of interest to special interests. E.g. the pharmaceutical industry could finally get rid of herbal medicine.
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If you lose your wallet how do you pay for food with no wallet? This is a false line of argument.
With the spare cash I have at home. I don't have a spare phone at home, with a spare SIM card.
So you’d have to get an extra service line :S
As a resident of Sweden, i can only say that this is the future for all western countries. Life is just better without cash. We don't pay the mental tax of always ensuring i have dollar bills on me to tip left, right, and center. Your phone is enough to get you through the day. The govt is still run by the people for the people here, so most people aren't worried about totalitarianism. Most beggars now have signs wit…
> We don't pay the mental tax of always ensuring i have dollar bills on me to tip left, right, and center. Is this something you were doing before? If not, why did you bring it up? Who do you imagine is doing this?
If you use the "wrong" bill denominations or don't have the right coins, cashiers can get irked at you too. It's so backwards compared to not having to think about it.