111–120 of 849 posts
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Can you pay taxes in cash? I don't think it's possible in my country.
Sending a check in the mail is not the same as having a digital currency. You can add cash to the bank account and write the check.
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It is called war and it isn't the police doing it then, it is the military.
The people out number the military by nearly 300-1. If you think a million soldiers are going to occupy the USA without resorting to obscene levels of violence (such that money is not your concern) you're a bit mistaken.
Armed military and paramilitary government agents, including active and reserve military and internal security services are about .9%,of US population, not the .3% you suggest: 1.4 million active, 800k reserve, 700k police, for 2.9 million of 330 million.
We do, and frankly need to reject the cashless society. Cash is pretty great. I am a fan, and have all the usual, ordinary reasons most people do. Cashless seems like a goal others want, but most people probably don't.
The simple answer is to reject the cashless society. In the medium to long term it's simply incompatible with any reasonable definition of freedom. Surveillance is bad enough, but a system that allows governments to arbitrarily "turn off" thousands or millions of people at the push of a button is too powerful to not be abused. Even the mere existence of such a system has a chilling effect. Which I suspect is precisel…
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Yeah, it's a driver's license that's a privilege not a right. Own all the cars you want. Create a car museum if that's your thing and you've got the funds. But behave if you want to actually legally drive any of them.
No license is required to operate a vehicle on private land... it is only on public roadways (which are public land) and public accomodations (privately owned parking lots that are publicly accessible) that a license is required.
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We can fix that, and it is being addressed. Cash is a great answer to a whole lot of basic commerce, small scale, freedom style, between adults just adulting. The problem IS businesses refusing cash. The public really does not benefit and we have not shown we are able to avoid abusing electronics. One day maybe. Right now? Not a chance. Cash remains necessary and the costs are not crazy enough to warrant all the abus…
> The problem IS businesses refusing cash. The public really does not benefit I benefit quite a lot from not having to use cash. I pay all my bills with credit cards. That means I can do it remotely, taking a few minutes a month, without having to leave my house. Having to pay each bill in person, in cash, would be a huge cost to me in time and effort. And if the companies I'm paying those bills to had to have the pe…
Trivial solution: I walk to bank some day once a month, give them cash, give them account numbers, sent. It'd be done in all of ten minutes.
Does it exist where you live? Maybe, maybe not. Hell, if I knew you I'd do it for you, I'd enjoy obfuscating my accounts.
And no-one is saying that literally every transaction has to be done in cash, just that it should be _possible_ to do so.
The idea that cash is this hilariously inconvenient thing is a complete fabrication and I frankly tire of that discussion. You're talking about moving small physical things, it's a solved problem, everything around you right now is a small physical thing.
edit: posters are responding about the businesses that exist in their area. by this token it's "inconvenient" for me to use cash because the japanese place down the road doesn't take it. well no, they're just being dicks, there's no _fundamental_ inconvenience.
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> The simple answer is to reject the cashless society. No, that battle is lost. Cashless is easier and more convenient, it's hard to beat that. We need more constitutional human rights. It's not okay to take or freeze somebody's money/property without any court decision. Edit: some of the answers assume that I'm against cash or that by saying "battle is lost" I mean cash is gone; My point of "cashless winning" is tha…
As long as bitcoin exists, the battle is not lost.
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Carrying cash is exactly how you lose it all to police corruption, sometimes called civil asset forfeiture. Cash is no answer without sufficient legal protections. And if you have sufficient legal protections, cash mostly just buys you inconvenience. The problem isn't businesses going cashless. The problem is leaving structural control over money to profit-seeking enterprises.
We can fix that, and it is being addressed. Cash is a great answer to a whole lot of basic commerce, small scale, freedom style, between adults just adulting. The problem IS businesses refusing cash. The public really does not benefit and we have not shown we are able to avoid abusing electronics. One day maybe. Right now? Not a chance. Cash remains necessary and the costs are not crazy enough to warrant all the abus…
Previously: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=30435383 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=30408611
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If you base your life purely around some nebulous definition of convenience, then you are not living, you are following the path of least resistance. In a few short years or decades it will be more convenient to simply plug yourself into the wall. What then? "We" simply accept that the real world is too inconvenient? Too resource intensive, too difficult, too ugly? You do you, boo, I ain't down for that.
Well, considering the "real world" too inconvenient and seeking ways to make it less so is what humanity has been doing for millennia, right? Most people use a washing machine rather than washing their clothes in the river, because indeed, the latter is too resource intensive, difficult and ugly if you have an alternative. Of course, this doesn't mean that a technology that provides convenience can't come with hidden…
Using cash is not actually inconvenient though.
I often find that people use the term "convenient" to mean "more pleasing to me" which is completely different.
It's not more convenient for me to buy milk from Amazon than it is for me to get it from my corner shop, it might be more pleasing if I didn't like seeing or talking to people. Those are two different things.
By contrast if I had to wash my clothes in a river it would take me literally hours of manual labour every week and they wouldn't be as clean.