171–180 of 294 posts
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What if you get arrested because you buy a pride flag? Or if you get killed because you use a service? What if you get arrested because you sold a train ticket to someone who doesn't have enough "social credit" to buy said train ticket?
Then your society has bigger problems than how purchases are carried out.
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It's an exceptionally flexible and convenient method of control. Earlier this year, donors to the truck convey protest in Canada had their bank accounts frozen. This wasn't a targeted list of "these 37 people have broken a law"--rather, it was a broad mandate to freeze accounts assocated with the protests, operationalized a bit differently by each bank. In a society where most businesses don't take cash anymore, this…
And that is something that I hope Canada has a moral reckoning with, that's absolutely astounding to me. Cash doesn't prevent this entirely though, unless you have all your cash under a mattress.
Yes, but it's "not being able to buy a car" vs "not being able to buy bread".
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And the next time there's a major network outage, whether because of incompetence (like the recent national outage in Canada), natural disaster, sabotage, or even war, access to all of those conveniences will be frozen solid. One won't be able to purchase so much as a stick of gum. James Burke, in the series Connections , warns of the "technology trap", where our dependence on various high-tech systems becomes so hea…
newsflash: point of sales transactions can usually be processed offline, and settled at a later point in time. Merchant A might be unable to process while offline, while Merchant B next door will have no such issue.
I think a cashless society can work perfectly well. There's a single place that I still use cash with because they don't take card (probably avoiding tax) so every time I go there, I come back with change to tip to delivery people when I order food. Everything from my rent to my grocery shopping is done digitally and I honestly think it's great. However, that's probably because I live in a debit-based country. Debit…
You are creating a log of "everything you do", available to third parties, both statal and private. «That's probably» more because of lack of sense of "creepy".
And «that's probably» also because you are not considering the infrastructure required, such as that time in spring the shop owner in front of me was having a nervous breakdown as a blackout had his transaction equipment off. In normal times you give a banknote, take change and the fiscal registration will be postponed to after the blackout. In cretinous times, there will be no purchase. I was there to buy water.
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I think that's a solution looking for a problem. Payment via bank transfer is also a contract, the dispute resolution is no different. I don't see how a promise note on a piece of paper somehow protects you better than an electronic transfer that is visible to you, the other party, the bank, and to authorities.
Agree. It's like Stockholm Syndrome. It comes across the same as when someone from the US tries to argue that putting the month before the day actually makes sense in dates because then the max values go from lowest to highest (12/31/9999+).
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Australia is not cashless. New notes and coins are minted regularly. I still pay using cash, and increasingly so. Never once, ever, has there been a problem paying with cash, nor do I expect there to be. For those online services that only accept cards, you can buy a gift card from the local post office or a few other locations & use that. What you describe is my dystopian nightmare.
Can you please tell me why it is your dystopian nightmare? I had the opposite feeling.
You are living somewhere where your actions are logged and made available to parties, and where people around you do not notice.
If you think losing access to your Google account for unspecified terms violations is bad, what about a payment processing computer malfunctioning?
A few years ago my debit card refused checkout at a supermarket. After the cashier rebooted the card reader machine, it ate a hundred bucks from my account without confirming the purchase. When I called my bank they said it's all automated, couldn't do anything about it, and would fix itself in two weeks. If that hundred bucks would've been my last food money, I'd gone hungry for half a month while the entirely humanless, supportless, automated, blackbox financial system "sorts itself out".
Cashless over my dead body.
This twitter thread might be a bit extreme, but it raises interesting points ( https://twitter.com/punk6529/status/1494444624630403083?lang... ). Basically, if you are not allowed to spend money (transact) then you are really not able to exercise your other rights. And if everything was cashless there is an actual risk of Gov or BigBank having the power to stop you transacting completely. It has happened in 1st world…
then go cashless & don't encroach nor impose your wishes on others