71–80 of 136 posts
Britain is not Britain in this regard. London has a ton of places that don't accept cash already. Go to smaller towns in the North and you'll hit minimum charges to use a card or broken machines.
Another problem is that no society is perfect. And even if it were, it won't stay that way. There is a need for a small grey area in any system to stay sane, where people can workaround the limitations of said system. Yes, it will be abused, and also used for nefarious purposes. But it's better than the alternative. You need people to sometimes be able to do things the state doesn't approve. You need children to be a…
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However, this is more complicated if you're not a UK national, and if the Home Office decides you're an illegal immigrant (a process with a deliberate high false positive rate) it can get closed. https://www.ukcisa.org.uk/blog/6538/Student-banking-Do-you-r... gives a decent overview of the process. It also mentions the unofficial national ID of the UK, household utility bills.
I take that to mean that the UK is not switching to e-billing for utilities any time soon.
Britain is not Britain in this regard. London has a ton of places that don't accept cash already. Go to smaller towns in the North and you'll hit minimum charges to use a card or broken machines.
Ironically, in 'the South' I believe a lot of card machines in cabs have a habit of being broken unless you're adamant that you don't have cash on you?
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The concept of not having your own private bank account that isn't shared with your significant other or anyone else baffles me.
Why? It baffles me that a husband and wife don't trust each other enough to pool their resources.
It's fine to have a joint account that you pool part of your income into. But there is no reason not to have a private account as well. And trusting someone doesn't mean having to completely expose everything to them. Just because I trust someone, I won't let them snoop through my phone, hand out all my passwords, or give them 100% access to my bank account.
Trust also means to trust someone enough to let them do their own thing.
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Not having the freedom to keep some money separately and use it as you see fit sounds so 1950. We have a joint credit card but I don't see why we'd ever need a joint bank account.
I'm curious; how do you decide who pays for what? If you're splitting the bills for everything anyway, and since you've dedicated your lives to each other (presumably, if you're married), it feels like a pointless exercise to keep separate finances.
We have separate bank accounts and credit cards and we split the bills most things, like groceries. But we don't look into what personal purchases we make, for example me buying Lego.
It's pretty easy to decide if we should pay together or not. At least for us.
The implications of a cashless society on privacy are terrifying
https://www.raspberrypi.org/raspberry-pi-store/
(Digressing, but I was also saddened that their tills are tablet EPOS systems and not home-brew with a Pi at their heart)
...BUT, for privacy and the unbanked, I suspect this necessarily needs to go along with credit-card-compatible "cash cards" that would have to be:
1) Anonymous (e.g. buy a card for $1 from any drugstore, swap them with friends, buy in bulk and give away, whatever -- don't need to show an ID)
2) Secure and robust (value stored on-card without the ability for the government to deactivate etc., or for transactions to be cancelled after-the-fact)
3) All ATM's and banks required by law to support transferring any reasonable value (e.g. For whatever reason, I rarely see the idea of anonymous cash cards discussed in these types of conversations.