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Sweden's cashless society is no longer a utopia

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Re: Sweden's cashless society is no longer a utopia

#281

Post by clubm8 »

sethhochberg wrote: post #258
dorfsmay wrote: post #207

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Do you have a pin or something to verify the payment? Would a stolen bracelet be useable? How do they deal with tips?

You create a pin when you activate your card/wristband after walking in, yeah. At the Mirage, tips work just like a credit card transaction would - the bartender has an iPad sitting in front of them and you choose preset options or enter a custom one. Typically you place your order with the bartender, they'll ring it all up on the terminal, and by the time you've finished tapping your wristband on the reader and choo…

> You create a pin when you activate your card/wristband after walking in, yeah.

I wonder how many make theirs 1234

Re: Sweden's cashless society is no longer a utopia

#282

Post by protomyth »

angry_octet wrote: post #268
protomyth wrote: post #165

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I was at a gas station in Grand Forks, ND in the middle of winter at 2AM fueling up. I had traveled this route and stopped at this gas station at about the same time of night multiple times when I was going from ND to MN and back. The card (Citibank Visa) had a large open credit line, but it somehow got rejected because (and I quote) "they installed new software"[1]. This was a bit before I had a cellphone and luckil…

I remember as a kid how much money my parents would have to carry while on holiday, banks were closed and ATMs rare and often empty, shops in the country often wouldn't take cheques. Credit cards resulted in really slow vendor payment (remember paper credit card chunk clunk? those numbers are raised for a reason) and caused cash flow issues. Anyway, one of the major telcos had an outage of their EFT system the last h…

Its interesting the total difference in how people deal with commerce going from the 70's to today. I remember the get check, deposit check, write checks and maybe go get money from the bank cycle. Heck, even if you had a credit card quite a lot of places wouldn't take it (not to mention the carbon paper).

People trust technology will always work. Its not a bad bet where banks are concerned, but I too worry about the chaos of even a couple of hours down time. I wonder if there will be a push back. There probably would have been except the unbanked can get pre-paid cards and pretty much do everything at Walmart or through PayPal and its competitors.

Re: Sweden's cashless society is no longer a utopia

#284

Post by anoncoward111 »

Nition wrote: post #278
dmitriy_ko wrote: post #219

Earlier quoted context omitted.

That reminds me of Futurama episode where Bender finds a phone booth: "Now I don't need to carry my phone with me all the time!" Progress is sometimes a regress in disguise.

Plus a wired landline phone is always charged, with excellent reception.

And in the US can be had for like $10 a month as opposed to $30 minimum for verizon prepaid

Re: Sweden's cashless society is no longer a utopia

#285

Post by angry_octet »

mmirate wrote: post #232
protomyth wrote: post #214

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Granted, but even broken clocks are right twice a day. I doubt most Christians think the bible is a broken clock > Just because someone wrote a pre-scientific text which, today, supports antiauthoritarianism ... does not mean that antiauthoritarianism lacks its many other merits. Most of our culture and philosophy comes from pre-scientific texts. Authoritarianism didn't need science and the ability to stop certain…

> I doubt most Christians think the bible is a broken clock Their choice, and I'm sure it must be good for their pretty little stained-glass filter that they keep in-place between their eyes and reality. > Authoritarianism didn't need science and the ability to stop certain people from participating in commerce doesn't require computers. All the more reason to oppose the general centralization and empowerment of auth…

If you've going to display your disdain for sky fairies on HN, best to pick on a small religion, unpopular with HN readers. Bahá'í perhaps, which preaches mutual love and the inherent value of all religion, yet its adherents are mercilessly persecuted by co-religionists.

Re: Sweden's cashless society is no longer a utopia

#286

Post by MereInterest »

addicted wrote: post #273
wild_preference wrote: post #226

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Festivals I've been to will, say, require deposits of 100 peso increments and then the beers cost 80 pesos. And you can't get your money out. Even if you could get your money back, you're still waiting at lines to recharge the bracelet. It's a joke. With cash, you just come prepared and withdraw at any ATM long before the festival. Bracelets didn't solve any problem except disconnect the money handling event from the…

Why can’t you load the same amount of money on your bracelet before the festival as the cash you would be carrying? If that’s because the festival organizers don’t let you retrieve your money easily or without a cost, that’s an issue with the festival management and not with the idea of digital money. I’ve been to a festival which allowed us to withdraw money freely (I think they had some restrictions such as only 1…

> If that’s because the festival organizers don’t let you retrieve your money easily or without a cost, that’s an issue with the festival management and not with the idea of digital money.

The ability for poor implementations to exist is itself a strike against the general concept.

Re: Sweden's cashless society is no longer a utopia

#287

Post by gsich »

felipemnoa wrote: post #243
dmitriy_ko wrote: post #219

Earlier quoted context omitted.

That reminds me of Futurama episode where Bender finds a phone booth: "Now I don't need to carry my phone with me all the time!" Progress is sometimes a regress in disguise.

I've noticed this with mature technology. There comes a point where a product is perfect, no need to add anymore features. But the manufacturer still wants to continue adding new features so that they can use those as new selling points. Unfortunately the new features end up making the product worse.

Smartphones today.

Re: Sweden's cashless society is no longer a utopia

#288

Post by clubm8 »

avaika wrote: post #248
ploggingdev wrote: post #60

No mention about the privacy implications of having every transaction tracked? We're already at a point where pretty much every transaction is tracked and a cashless society makes being tracked a requirement to function in society. Is privacy even a topic of discussion with governments looking to go cashless? I still try and pay with cash wherever possible, but many offline/physical stores often require a phone numbe…

Good point. There is a rumor among my local IT fellows, that some banks who also run an insurance companies (or partner with some) share transaction information with insurance guys to help them identify whether discount is possible for a specific person or not. E.g. if someone frequently spends a lot of money in pubs, most likely that someone will have health issues sooner or later. So better to increase the insuranc…

>There is a rumor among my local IT fellows, that some banks who also run an insurance companies (or partner with some) share transaction information with insurance guys to help them identify whether discount is possible for a specific person or not. E.g. if someone frequently spends a lot of money in pubs, most likely that someone will have health issues sooner or later.

Or worse, what if they decide you had too much pub spending/fast food, so you can't get that new organ you need?

I keep my "entertainment" budget (pubs, eating out, etc) in cash for this reason.

Re: Sweden's cashless society is no longer a utopia

#290

Post by mmirate »

angry_octet wrote: post #285
mmirate wrote: post #232

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> I doubt most Christians think the bible is a broken clock Their choice, and I'm sure it must be good for their pretty little stained-glass filter that they keep in-place between their eyes and reality. > Authoritarianism didn't need science and the ability to stop certain people from participating in commerce doesn't require computers. All the more reason to oppose the general centralization and empowerment of auth…

If you've going to display your disdain for sky fairies on HN, best to pick on a small religion, unpopular with HN readers. Bahá'í perhaps, which preaches mutual love and the inherent value of all religion, yet its adherents are mercilessly persecuted by co-religionists.

Just because a particular brand of sky-fairy is popular, does not make it any better; on the contrary, the damage that a religion does is correlated positively with the number of its adherents.
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