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Pro-cash movement warns that people could be losing more than they bargained for

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Re: Pro-cash movement warns that people could be losing more than they bargained for

#181
post #107

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Any proposal that requires companies to ignore signs of fraud is Dead-On-Arrival.

I literally said 'lawful' transactions. Fraud is not lawful.

Then it wouldn't have protected Pornhub. The payment processors pulled out due to CSAM, revenge porn, and copyright infringement, none of which are legal.

Re: Pro-cash movement warns that people could be losing more than they bargained for

#182
post #8
post #5

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I'd never heard of that before, interesting, thanks; Rich people speak a foreign language ...

It's also used in other contexts, e.g. cash vs. stock compensation (and I wouldn't necessarily call everybody offered that choice "rich" these days).

I would. People in the tech bubble don't understand their privilege. If everybody you interact with daily makes less than you then you are rich. Or how does you total compensation compare to that of the Walmart worker, the guy behind the McD counter, you hair dresser, the lady cleaning your office toilets or the waiter at your lunch restaurant or staffer at the bouldering gym? You think they get stocks?

Re: Pro-cash movement warns that people could be losing more than they bargained for

#183
post #131

Earlier quoted context omitted.

How would you handle chargeback claims? Should all users of the system share in the fraud risk?

Same way it's handled now, you charge a higher processing fee proportional to the chargeback risk in the industry. My only argument is that networks shouldn't be able to capriciously deny transactions that are legal, even if I disagree with them. I don't believe in the 2nd amendment, but to the extent it is lawful to buy a gun, you should be able to buy it with your Visa card, imo, and a lot of payment acquirers do n…

The reason the networks started denying service to firearms dealers is that the (Obama-era) Department of Justice pressured them to. They also went after pornography and marijuana dealers.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Operation_Choke_Point

Re: Pro-cash movement warns that people could be losing more than they bargained for

#184

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> what are the main benefits of going fully cashless One piece of advice I got a long time ago, from a family member in politics: Don't put your groceries on a credit card. Especially if you buy junk food or alcohol. Obviously the same goes for bars, tobacco, strip clubs, gun purchases[0], and lots of other perfectly legal things that you might not want being counted up if you ever run for office. At the systemic lev…

What's the basis for this advice? Personally I'd be far more interested to learn that someone running for office refuses to use a credit card to buy groceries because they fear having that information collected and used against them... than that they once spent $500 in a single month on Twinkies. If someone wants to use your spending history against you they don't actually need your credit card bills these days, they…

Because three letter agencies have a huge incentive to trawl through politicians' private lives through credit card purchase data, and use that against them if they don't want to toe the line of these agencies, whose ex-employees are guests on the main stream media. Just leak enough to derail any politician.

Re: Pro-cash movement warns that people could be losing more than they bargained for

#185

My concerns about a cashless society are the power it hands to a few oligopolistic credit card processors. Look at what happened to Pornhub. Regardless of whether you think Pornhub was in the wrong, it is striking that a business was cut off from global financial system by a small number of credit card companies. This was done without due process and under no countries laws. That should scare us at least a little.

How could a website function with cash payments at all?

cdnow.com or Amazon used to accept money orders. You'd place your order and they would give you a slip to print and send with your money order. Once the payment made it there, they would ship your item.

Re: Pro-cash movement warns that people could be losing more than they bargained for

#186

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> what are the main benefits of going fully cashless One piece of advice I got a long time ago, from a family member in politics: Don't put your groceries on a credit card. Especially if you buy junk food or alcohol. Obviously the same goes for bars, tobacco, strip clubs, gun purchases[0], and lots of other perfectly legal things that you might not want being counted up if you ever run for office. At the systemic lev…

> Don't put your groceries on a credit card. ...huh? "Don't use store membership cards that track your specific purchases" is one thing, but in what world does your credit card processor get info about the individual goods on your receipt?

If you apply for a loan, especially a mortgage, the lender could ask to see your outgoing cash flow statements. Which wouldn’t get into receipt-level detail, but could still potentially allow the lender to discriminate against you.

A person with habitual transactions at a casino or liquor store could be perceived as high risk and the lender could jack up the interest rate for that person. I have no clue if lenders _actually_ do this, but they could since they do ask for your outgoing transactions.

Re: Pro-cash movement warns that people could be losing more than they bargained for

#187

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> the power it hands to a few oligopolistic credit card processors And the government. In Canada the government suspended the constitution (because that's a thing over there?) because of some peaceful, free-speech protected, protests in the capital and started arbitrary freezing protester's bank accounts. Of course, without any due process (remember, constitutional rights were suspended!).

Yep, and hat tip to the government for a job well done. There's a right and a wrong way to protest, they were given time to choose to do it right. Now that the threat is over and dispersed they're welcome to come back and protest peacefully. For an end to the vaccine mandates, that ended already. Silly sausages. For reference, the Emergencies Act doesn't 'suspend the constitution' it suspends certain Charter rights f…

> the threat

You can see here how wrong and violent these protests were. The bouncy castle and hot tub were a danger to society!

[0] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=P74pbbhCZng

[1] https://www.youtube.com/shorts/hzfwaSVIvoA

Re: Pro-cash movement warns that people could be losing more than they bargained for

#190

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> The primary benefit of cashless is pretty much just the ability to be lazy. By this logic, the primary benefit of just about every technological development in human history is the ability to be lazy. The wheel is just a crutch for those too lazy to drag their loads on sleds. The downsides of a cashless marketplace are indisputable, but “laziness” is a reductive view of the upsides.

Using your example, the wheel allows us to perform more work per unit of time. I think it would be good for discourse to identify that within society there is the general consumer public and then there is education, government, research, etc. Could you argue that the wheel allows an individual to be lazy? Definitely. Is it correct to argue that a wheel is a crutch and makes every individual that uses it lazy? Definit…

That question of "does this allow for more work per unit of time" is honestly a pretty interesting way to stratefy whether an innovation is actually innovative imo. For example, the first iPhone? Sure, you can email and video chat on the go and conceivably do more work over time. But the 14th compared to the 13th? No, all that effort spent didn't really unlock more work per unit of time. If anything you are doing the same work, at the cost of more resources because the hardware is more overpowered, the screen has more pixels, and the bulk of the resource load on the hardware is from rendering stuff like sexy window dressing instead of the actual functional process, like checking your email.

Pretty interesting parallels to biology too, like in some birds there's the race towards sexually selecting ever fancier tail feathers that might cause more female birds to ooh and aah perhaps, but hurt your chances of flying away from a hawk, and lead to an overall reduction in fitness in the species as the hawks start finding more success and expanding their population size at the expense of yours.

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