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In our cashless society, we need to take digital jail seriously

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Re: In our cashless society, we need to take digital jail seriously

#191

Post by throwaway22032 »

commandlinefan wrote: post #189
chowells wrote: post #59

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

> Carrying cash is exactly how you lose it all If you can even put your hands on it in the first place. A $100,000/year salary is roughly ~$6000/month after taxes. Where are you going to go to get 60 $100 bills every month, even if you could protect them?

"Back in my day..."

Re: In our cashless society, we need to take digital jail seriously

#192

Post by throw_nbvc1234 »

dragonwriter wrote: post #112
throw_nbvc1234 wrote: post #95

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

> The people out number the military by nearly 300-1. 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.

Factors that push it in the other direction are desertion rates if we're talking domestic military occupation and fighting fitness -- how many police and reservists are actually able and willing to occupy a country with a likely insurgency for an undermined amount of time. Some percentage of that 2.9 mil number are not front line combatants. But also if the occupation is only in a single region then the denominator is much lower or if parts of the population side with the military.

Re: In our cashless society, we need to take digital jail seriously

#193

Post by zdragnar »

adamrezich wrote: post #154
zdragnar wrote: post #93

Earlier quoted context omitted.

No need for scare quotes; it was (still is?) a real thing. My local rural grocery store has had a hard time getting coins for making change basically since covid started.

they aren't scare quotes, we just never got a good explanation for why there was a shortage, aside from some vague hand-waving about covid.

A super quick search on google reveals two causes:

- The US mint slowed production to protect workers

- The shutdowns slowed circulation of existing coins

Given that a large percentage of coins are irredeemably damaged or lost each year (I once knew a particularly spoiled college student who would simply throw change away rather than deal with keeping them) it doesnt seem like much explanation is owed beyond that.

Re: In our cashless society, we need to take digital jail seriously

#194

Post by ripley12 »

mark_l_watson wrote: post #145

Excellent article and one that I wish my friends would read. Recently on a hike I mentioned how upsetting Trudeau’s actions are, and none of my friends had any idea what was happening up in Canada, except someone talked about a few things that I don’t believe are true: truckers were violent, few Canadians supported them, etc. - I think those things are not true. As other people here have pointed out, cashless society…

I think those things are true, and I live in Canada.

I strongly support Trudeau's actions on this, and I'm sad that the government took so long to crack down on the "truckers". It's deeply damaging to civil society when a few extremists can shut down a city without consequences.

Re: In our cashless society, we need to take digital jail seriously

#195

Post by JPKab »

adriand wrote: post #57

I agree that this needs to be taken very seriously. However, the author overstates his case significantly when he writes: > Doing this to someone—a small business owner in BC, a public servant in Winnipeg, a student in Halifax—who made a small donation to support the convoy is a clear abuse of power. However: > The RCMP, banking sector and federal government said Monday that account-freezing powers bestowed under the…

I think you are forgetting a few key details:

1.) You are taking a government's word for it. As a US citizen, I can tell you that you should never, ever do this. My attitude with any governing entity is to trust but verify. If they don't provide a way to verify, assume they are lying. I'm a former Department of Defense and intelligence contractor. My experience working with these entities hardened my attitude to never take their word for it.

2.) You are ignoring the complete lack of due process with the account-freezing powers. Any Canadian citizen is a mere accusation or mistake away from being labelled as "being involved" with the protests and having their accounts frozen, with no ability to defend yourself or correct an error.

The complete willingness and seal-clapping from the majority of the Canadian public about allowing a violation of democratic norms, purely because it's directed at a minority whom they have dehumanized for years, has completely changed my view of the Canadian public. I've travelled in Canada extensively, and I'm dismayed to now realize they are even easier to mislead than the US public is. The utter shortsightedness of this is mind-blowing, with it's supporters seemingly oblivious to how quickly they can find themselves on the receiving end of it.

Re: In our cashless society, we need to take digital jail seriously

#196

Post by guyzero »

Come on, this is a partisan hit piece. Which is too bad because it's a legitimate and serious issue, but any pretense of objectivity went out the door when we get to "Howard Anglin... was previously Deputy Chief of Staff to Prime Minister Stephen Harper, Principal Secretary to the Premier of Alberta, Jason Kenney"

Call me when he starts going after long-standing issues like civil forfeiture: https://www.cbc.ca/news/canada/british-columbia/bc-administr...

Re: In our cashless society, we need to take digital jail seriously

#197

Post by throwaway22032 »

csee wrote: post #166
chowells wrote: post #59

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

Carrying $50 in my wallet which gets seized with an extremely low probability is not how I "lose it all". It's how I "lose $50 maybe but most likely not". How I would lose it all is if we go to a digital currency and I get banned at the flick of a switch!

Yeah, it's super disingenuous.

Right now I can have any number of different assets and freely trade them in and out of cash. There is no off switch for that.

In digital currency land, once the account is turned off, that's it. If I can only pay via card, I can't barter at the local corner shop, I'm capital F fucked unless I can somehow convince a friend to buy everything for me. The end.

I'm convinced, utterly convinced, that these threads just attract propaganda bots or something. It's like they get stuck at the very top level of "but card means tap is save 0.1 seconds!" and that's it, all other executive function is disabled.

Re: In our cashless society, we need to take digital jail seriously

#198

Post by mike00632 »

This author is saying that we all need to 'accept the new reality' of digital money... but they won't accept the new reality of COVID and vaccinations. Seems like the author is just picking and choosing what aspects of reality to accept based on politics.

Re: In our cashless society, we need to take digital jail seriously

#199

Post by dylan604 »

commandlinefan wrote: post #189
chowells wrote: post #59

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

> Carrying cash is exactly how you lose it all If you can even put your hands on it in the first place. A $100,000/year salary is roughly ~$6000/month after taxes. Where are you going to go to get 60 $100 bills every month, even if you could protect them?

Getting detained police after receiving your weekly/monthly cash payment would look very suspicious to Officer Friendly as, surely everyone would agree, only criminals carry that kind of cash around. There are many twists and turns down the slippery slope.

Re: In our cashless society, we need to take digital jail seriously

#200

Post by bgirard »

throwaway22032 wrote: post #136
pdonis wrote: post #129

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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. I've never heard of any bank offering that service. > no-one is saying that literally every transaction has to be done in cash, just that it should be _possible_ to do so. Agreed. But it should also be recognized that there are many people who have good reasons to use payment…

Sure, if you sit at your desk all month, never visit a high street, and also can't use a postbox, this is an unsolvable problem. Got me. I'm out yo, physical interactions are better than this GPT-3 shite.

We don't have high streets here. All my adjacent banks are in the middle of a parking lot not near anything else I'd want to interact with during my precious Saturday except maybe the grocery store. Sure that's a bad design and I'd prefer to live near UK high streets but that's beyond my control here.

This has nothing to do with sitting at my desk. Using cash would mean spending my Saturday at one of the least interesting location I can think of.

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