Interesting. There's a children's book published in America where the house of oddball people (sleep on the lawn! paint the house orange! Wear party clothes all the time!) are persecuted by 'the General' who won't allow any fun. Can't quite remember the name, something about 'Libertyville' which was ironic I think.
fully agree! but i push it even further: i'm for electronic cash, but i'm against some american company (visa, mastercard) to know every transaction of mine. I want public electronic cash. A public, national, non for profit infrastructure that manage cash.
I agree with your opinion about corporations tracking every transaction but I also dread the same situation but with government in place of these corps.
Ending up with useless coins is also super prevalent in the states because tax isn't included in list price and everyone prices things as $X.99 so you always end up with useless change. Super annoying and I wish they would change the law to force list prices to be the final price all things included (no hidden fees either).
That law would have the drawback of making tax increases invisible.
Only if the law forbids also showing the proportion of the total cost that is tax.
I live in Germany and routinely use one and two cent coins when paying exact amounts. Still have to experience someone laughing in my face for doing so.
Holding up the queue, eh? I use € coins for tips or cereal bar purchases. In my country you'd get odd looks if you did that, because we have a bill that's roughly equivalent to 1€. But in Germany or Austria you'll get smiles and herzlichen grüßen because sparing-inclined citizens of the aforementioned countries only tip small change like 10 or 20 cents. Doing it often enough at a Greek tavern gets you freebies.
I didn't keep all my coins in the coin pouch at once. Instead, if I'm going out for just one shopping trip, I'd bring only the minimum number of small coins to make approximately any amount (eg, 1x1¢, 2x2¢, 1x5¢, 4x20¢). As long as you get the last digit right, it doesn't matter if you're some multiple of 10¢ over, and it's easier to get the last digit right when you have fewer coins to sort through to find the one you need.
I'm Swedish and this stuff makes me really worried. Especially since the main way for two people to exchange small amounts of money is through a proprietary app that uses a proprietary ID system (owned by a for-profit company) that only runs on iOS, Android, Windows and Mac. I really hope this trend dies off, a cash-less society is a terrible idea. I will say, however, that buses not taking cash is perfectly fine. Th…
I think you underestimate how easily you can be identified from your spending on that card
More people should, even if they don't go to the same extreme as me. I've come to a point where I feel like it's my responsibility to do whatever I can, and getting a card or phone with Swish would make it too easy. There's some serious programming going on, it's sort of a Swedish tradition to brainwash people into policing each other.
Can you say more about what you see as the Swedish tradition of brainwashing people into policing each other? Sweden has a reputation for extreme political correctness, which I guess could be framed as a more polite way to express the same thing, but the way you put it sounds far more exciting!
Well, the way I put it is how it works :)
Extreme political correctness is not something people are born with, it's conditioning via media and from observing how people who dare to question anything are treated.
I recently moved back to Sweden after living 4 years in Germany. I don't have any cards, and I don't carry a "smart"phone anymore; in Germany this didn't cause any trouble at all and I was far from alone. Much of the current Swedish society is currently closed to me, I know of three shops and one cafe in the (200k people) city center that accept cash. Some of it has been gradual but it changed dramatically during the…
I'm quite interested in your setup. You walk around with a feature phone and some bills? Sounds really Zen. I would like to get to that point. How do you navigate without Maps, Uber, etc.? Do your friends know you won't reply to texts? Maybe I'll buy a separate flip phone and leave the smart phone and credit cards at home just in case.
Yep, that's pretty much what I've been doing for the past 5 years or so.
I ask people, you'd be surprised how much easier it is to find your way somewhere by getting directions from a real live human with local knowledge. And they're generally more than happy to help someone out.
There's still SMS, even if it's a bit more expensive and less convenient.