Live data from Hacker News

Canada 'sleepwalking' into cashless society, consumer advocates warn

cbc.ca

131–140 of 325 posts

Re: Canada 'sleepwalking' into cashless society, consumer advocates warn

#131

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> It's often pretty hard to do public protest without breaking some kind of law, even if you do everything you're supposed to. All movements start small, and if you want to have your movement be a success it involves bringing more and more people over to your point of view / side. One can be disruptive in that you hold a rally or march to raise awareness, and be seen (in numbers) by folks on the street. Marches / par…

That argument was used (a lot) to decry suffragette protests and desegregation protests. I for one am glad that women and black people didn't take it too seriously. You may want to read some MLK - he had some very clear words about the liberal who demands civility in the face of oppression.

So MLK and the suffragettes blockaded the town square and blew truck horns all night. Got it.

Oh, wait, no, they voluntarily sacrificed their freedom and were arrested, beaten, and tortured for their beliefs. I guess you're confused.

Re: Canada 'sleepwalking' into cashless society, consumer advocates warn

#132
post #63

Earlier quoted context omitted.

They were blowing freight truck horns at all hours of the day and night. Tens of thousands of people's lives and sleep were disrupted for weeks on end. 90% of the stuff they were protesting literally wasn't real. Obviously there is a fine line between legitimate, legal protest and it should be taken very seriously. IMO that particular protest pushed that line too hard.

The stuff they were protesting was very real, and those measures specifically caused disruption to hundreds of thousands of people's lives and sleep for months on end. The government turning to wartime measures so that privileged Ottawans living in some of the most affluent areas around the nation's capital can withstand a few honks for a few weeks is absolutely preposterous.

[flagged]

Re: Canada 'sleepwalking' into cashless society, consumer advocates warn

#133

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> It's often pretty hard to do public protest without breaking some kind of law, even if you do everything you're supposed to. All movements start small, and if you want to have your movement be a success it involves bringing more and more people over to your point of view / side. One can be disruptive in that you hold a rally or march to raise awareness, and be seen (in numbers) by folks on the street. Marches / par…

That argument was used (a lot) to decry suffragette protests and desegregation protests. I for one am glad that women and black people didn't take it too seriously. You may want to read some MLK - he had some very clear words about the liberal who demands civility in the face of oppression.

> You may want to read some MLK - he had some very clear words about the liberal who demands civility in the face of oppression.

It is not about acting civilly. It is about messaging.

If non-movement people consider you as a bunch of jackasses, do you think they will join your cause, or even have sympathy towards it? You need to communicate your message—words and actions—so that, at the very least, people will have a neutral opinion. If you're actually good, then people will have a positive opinion of you and your goals.

> Days later, King was quietly bailed out and ejected from prison by Albany police chief Laurie Pritchett, who had studied the nonviolence protest method and released King to undermine it. In other cities, violence by police against peaceful demonstrators brought outcry and sympathy. But Pritchett met nonviolence with nonviolence. Within weeks, the protest fizzled out. For King, Albany was largely a failure, and his takeaway was for the movement to better pick its spots.

[…]

> It was far from total victory, but King had something more important: the attention of an outraged and rapt nation. The legacy of the water cannons and dogs, of callused feet and imprisoned children, would be incarnated in the Civil Rights Act of 1964, the Voting Rights Act and the Twenty-Fourth Amendment, which banned poll taxes. Montgomery and Birmingham also formed the script for peaceably countering injustice in a nation founded on protest. From antiwar protests during Vietnam to Occupy Wall Street and beyond, King’s commitment to nonviolent protest lives on.

* https://time.com/5101740/martin-luther-king-peaceful-protest...

It is why violence is usually such a bad idea: most non-members of a movement don't want to get into that, and would probably see the movement as a bunch of thugs. In a survey of 600 movements since 1900, Chenoweth et al found that those that used violence were successful ~25% of the time, but non-violence had a >40% success rate.

* https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/44096650-civil-resistanc...

* https://www.foreignaffairs.com/reviews/capsule-review/2021-1...

* https://www.hks.harvard.edu/behind-the-book/erica-chenoweth-...

* https://www.peacejusticestudies.org/chronicle/review-of-civi...

You almost double your chances of success by gaining sympathy versus 'acting out'. Do you think the race riots helped or hindered the civil rights movement?

> Let me say as I've always said, and I will always continue to say, that riots are socially destructive and self-defeating. I'm still convinced that nonviolence is the most potent weapon available to oppressed people in their struggle for freedom and justice. I feel that violence will only create more social problems than they will solve. That in a real sense it is impracticable for the Negro to even think of mounting a violent revolution in the United States. So I will continue to condemn riots, and continue to say to my brothers and sisters that this is not the way. And continue to affirm that there is another way.

* https://www.crmvet.org/docs/otheram.htm

If you want to actually achieve your goal(s) then non-violence and public opinion are important things to consider.

Re: Canada 'sleepwalking' into cashless society, consumer advocates warn

#134

Earlier quoted context omitted.

There's fees for handling cash as well. They're just less obvious. In the old days, those armoured vans used to have to go to stores every single day at peak times (Xmas, etc.). Plus you've got to pay for bags of change to be delivered. You've got to pay for a safe, insurance for your safe, plus a hard limit that safe is allowed to hold. If you're going to go over you need to request an on demand pickup from the cash…

I worked in a smaller, independent guitar store for a few years in the 90s. We received enough cash and checks that once a day someone would have to walk over to the “night deposit” slot and toss a bag in. Our cash handling cost was equal to my salary for the 30 minutes it took me to make that walk, plus the risk that I would get mugged ($0 lost over a few years.) Often the owner would rake out enough to cover his sp…

The owner was probably still paying fees for the cash deposits, even via the night deposit box.

Re: Canada 'sleepwalking' into cashless society, consumer advocates warn

#135
post #35

Earlier quoted context omitted.

What do you do when you go out to a restaurant, café, pub, etc?

If I am alone, I will still pay in cash (I will make sure to take as much money with me as I need or more). If I am going with someone else (which is more common), usually they will want to pay with a credit card (although I can still pay directly with cash, e.g. in case they do not have a credit card either or if they want me to pay for my own food instead), and if they want me to pay them back then I will.

As someone who doesn't use cash much, I'm curious about what happens when you enjoy some service like a restaurant, where you don't know that they don't take cash until you're done and they are waiting for you to pay? If they only take credit cards, and all you have is cash, what then? Return your food from your stomach? Surely they'd rather take your cash than have you walk out without paying. So at the end of they day, they aren't really no-cash companies...

Re: Canada 'sleepwalking' into cashless society, consumer advocates warn

#136

Governments really need to break the Visa and Mastercard Duopoly. Not mentioned in this article, but certainly related, was the Canadian governments unprecedented step to freeze hundreds of bank accounts of protestors during COVID protests using their Emergencies Act. While I couldn't be more politically removed from the protestors, using a legislative power envisioned for war like conditions to personally ruin prote…

Canada's credit cards work on Visa, MasterCard, or Amex networks. However, debit cards work on a domestic network called Interac. About half of card transactions in Canada are debit card transactions. https://payments.ca/sites/default/files/PaymentsCanada_Canad... page 7 EDIT: In the past few years, many Canadian banks have started issuing dual-network debit cards that bear both Visa and Interac logos (sometimes Mast…

The dual-network cards are Visa/Mastercard "debit" cards, which look like a credit card but sometimes don't work like one. I never had a problem with my dual-network card when physically visiting the States, but for whatever reason, some online payment systems (especially ones in Canada) have trouble with it. And vendors are clueless as to what the problem is when the debit CC number fails to go through.

Just recently I tried to pay at a parking kiosk with my dual-network card, and it repeatedly failed with a generic error. So I had to use my credit card (which I only got for this kind of situation) instead.

So often when trying to pay with a CC number, only a credit card will work. It's pretty dumb.

Re: Canada 'sleepwalking' into cashless society, consumer advocates warn

#137
post #107

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> I feel like it would be easy to just mandate stores to have to allow for cash transactions. While cards have fees, cash has overhead too: you need to go to the bank for deposits, make sure you have enough change, worry about people walking in robbing your till (thus traumatizing staff), keeping a balance (to reduce 'shrinkage' from employees). Yes, it is "easy" to mandate it, but that is adding a 'regulatory burden…

It's also problematic for the thousands of solo micro-businesses that operate in markets and pop-ups now (i.e. Etsy IRL). Most of them have a phone and a Square dongle, and that's it. Asking all those one-person shops and merchants to start carrying around a float and writing out paper receipts (or having some kind of battery-powered till+printer) is a pretty big burden.

Stores have been doing this since the dawn of...stores. Or at least when currency was first invented. There are very established processes and practices for this sort of thing. It's a cost of doing business, in the same way people pay for rent etc. for their stores.

Re: Canada 'sleepwalking' into cashless society, consumer advocates warn

#138
post #75

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Sorry are you trying to imply that the way various levels of US governments responded to recent left-wing protests has some conspiratorial parallel to the way the Canadian federal government responded to a right wing protest? The city of Ottawa's law enforcement officers were ordered to remove the protesters weeks before the federal government stepped in. The cops basically just didn't do their job. The emergency act…

Who said anything about the US government? Left wing protestors get plenty of leeway in Canada but right wing protestors get branded terrorists for being loud. Oh but it "wasn't done lightly", whatever that's meant to mean, so obviously it's kosher.

To what "leftist' protests are you referring, exactly?

Re: Canada 'sleepwalking' into cashless society, consumer advocates warn

#139

Earlier quoted context omitted.

No. We shouldn't make it easer for criminals to conduct terrorism, human trafficking, fraud etc just to make it slightly more economical for startups to compete with Visa/Mastercard.

When was the credit network used to finance terrorism? If we can't prevent terrorism then isn't it an advantage to have them move their funds on a network that can be completely traced and retroactively inspected? We'd prefer if terrorists use cash? Or we believe that if they can't use Amex it's impossible to use cash and therefore terrorism is defeated? Also, when the startups compete with Visa/Mastercard, they prov…

> We'd prefer if terrorists use cash

Yes. It is a million times easier to catch criminals trying to physically launder large volumes of cash than it is to track money flowing through multiple companies (on/off-shore, crypto, different owners, different jurisdictions etc).

Why do you think AML/KYC is such a priority ?

Re: Canada 'sleepwalking' into cashless society, consumer advocates warn

#140
It's frightening how many HN users will trade their freedom for just a bit of convenience. The dystopia is closer than you think. At the very least I hope the lurkers reading these comments are just shaking their heads in frustration and moving on to another post.
Post reply on HN