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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

#231

Post by throwaway22032 »

rtpg wrote: post #183
throwaway22032 wrote: post #83

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Agree with this. I've always found that people throw around this word "inconvenience" without even defining it. It makes no sense to me. Both paying for and accepting payment for things in person are strictly easier for me to do in cash. It's literally just handing over a bit of paper. There's always some resort to "but I don't have cash". Well duh, that's a circular argument. If you don't use cash you don't have cas…

It's handing over multiple pieces of paper, getting back of mix of paper and coin, and then having to futz around with that. Compare with just tapping a single card against a machine, having records of the payment for yourself (for keeping track of spending, etc), etc. It's obviously not all "objectively better" but "strictly easier" is not true if you amortize across all usages of cash vs non-cash (going to ATMs aft…

Shrug.

I guess my note book is less "convenient" than notepad.exe. More moving parts.

We're just not on the same page here, sorry, I don't get it at all. It's like, are we counting the waves of the hands or what? I'm literally here now and I've just pressed about 300 buttons to write this message, are movements rationed?

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

#232

Post by patmorgan23 »

kyrra wrote: post #221
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.

WSJ opinion pages actually have a good opinion piece on this yesterday. The general take I got is that all money police or judiciary collect should go into the state's overall general fund, rather than going to the local government. https://www.wsj.com/articles/policing-for-profit-speed-trap-... Mirror: https://archive.fo/T4tgR

It should go to some completely unrelated dedicated fund. Like the University fund or state parks fund. Leaving it in the general fund means the state could just grant that money back to the departments.

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

#233

Post by adamrezich »

zdragnar wrote: post #193
adamrezich wrote: post #154

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

and all of this right as the Federal Reserve is looking at making a digital dollar, what're the odds

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

#234

Post by Quekid5 »

moralestapia wrote: post #134
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 to police corruption, sometimes called civil asset forfeiture. What a foolish strawman. As if people were to carry all their net worth in cash everywhere they go.

I'm not disagreeing that it's a straw man, but... some people do carry all their net worth in cash everywhere they go.

Not anyone with any substantial wealth, ofc. But I thought it was worth saying out loud.

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

#235

Post by tshaddox »

brendoelfrendo wrote: post #163
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…

> I've never heard of any bank offering that service. I'm not a cash person, but this is literally how cash deposits work (in the US). You fill out a deposit slip with your account information, hand the slip and the cash to the teller, and that's about it. If you own checks, your check book probably came with some deposit slips pre-filled with your account information.

It sounds like you're talking about taking cash to your bank and depositing it into your own bank account, which of course you can do. The original commenter was talking about taking cash to your bank and somehow very quickly distributing it to everyone you owe money to this month.

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

#236

Post by Supermancho »

walterbell wrote: post #213
mortenjorck wrote: post #206

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> The writing is on the wall; barring some sort of major social upheaval, cashless will be more dominant in the future. It's just too convenient. In classic HN fashion, everyone disagreeing with this is focused on their own solipsistic perception of the relative merits, technical and otherwise, of cash versus electronic payments. But convenience always wins. The not-yet-evenly-distributed future is represented by App…

> convenience always wins Until people discover that the next place they wave their watch has customized the transaction based on the previous place they waved their watch. It's all fun and games until a voice speaks behind the one-way mirror, shattering illusions of payment neutrality, e.g. the incident in Canada which prompted the original article.

> Until people discover that the next place they wave their watch

I'm not sure this has ever caused a reversal. There is a minority who speaks out, which sometimes gets traction enough to cause some sort of change, but the majority take the path of least resistance.

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

#237

Post by incompatible »

dragonwriter wrote: post #77
incompatible wrote: post #53

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The next step will be somebody who is in "digital jail" and can't pay taxes so ends up guilty of tax evasion too.

Inability to pay taxes is not tax evasion, of either of the recognized types in the US (evasion of assessment, i.e., concealment of facts that would indicate tax is due, or evasion of payment, i.e., concealment of or movement out of reach of taxing authorities of funds with which taxes that are due could be paid.)

Presumably, the US government still accepts payment of taxes in cash, so that cash-based businesses that can't get a bank account can still pay. Perhaps the situation could arise in other countries though.

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

#238

Post by devoutsalsa »

chowells wrote: post #59
throwaway22032 wrote: post #3

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…

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.

The only time I've ever been mugged was by some cops. They stopped me, searched me for drugs, and took cash out of my wallet.

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

#239

Post by pdonis »

brendoelfrendo wrote: post #163
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…

> I've never heard of any bank offering that service. I'm not a cash person, but this is literally how cash deposits work (in the US). You fill out a deposit slip with your account information, hand the slip and the cash to the teller, and that's about it. If you own checks, your check book probably came with some deposit slips pre-filled with your account information.

> this is literally how cash deposits work (in the US)

I wasn't talking about cash deposits. I was talking about paying bills. I can't go to my bank and give them the account numbers of all my bills and have the bank pay them for me. If I wanted to pay each bill in cash, I would have to schlep to each individual company I pay bills to and pay them.

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

#240

Post by Nathanael_M »

throw0101a wrote: post #138
noetic_techy wrote: post #39

Exactly correct. Anyone who is applauding this, just imagine the opposite political party in power using this against you or organizations you support. This is why no one should have been happy when executive orders became the norm in the US and congress did nothing. This is how you lose a senate and gain a Caesar, and look what happen to Rome eventually… Debanking someone who can now no longer pay for thier own defe…

> Anyone who is applauding this, just imagine the opposite political party in power using this against you or organizations you support. It was the opposite political party, the Conservative under PM Brian Mulroney, who wrote the Emergencies Act in the first place. * https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Emergencies_Act#Legislative_hi...

While this is technically true, it leaves out important contextual information and could lead people to get a very wrong picture of the situation. It almost feels like an attempted "gotcha".

It was legislated by the Conservative party to replace the War Measures Act (created in 1914 in response to WW1), which was deemed too easy to abuse if someone wished to suppress civil liberties.

Before the Emergencies Act, there was a broader Act. It was replaced with a stricter Act. It was not used by those replacing it. In combination, these two acts have now been used four times: - WW1 - WW2 - The October Crisis (also known as the FLQ Crisis) - The current convoy protest

Its use was also considered during the early stages of COVID-19, but was unanimously opposed.

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