421–430 of 717 posts
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The real cop-out is that HSBC and friends launder more money for terrorists and human traffickers on a bad day than your typical local racket does in a year, and they only ever receive a token fine and slap on the wrist.
Also true, but not germane to this discussion.
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> Even with cash, you can't buy a plane ticket without handing over all your info. Which is a good thing! Why is that a good thing? You used to be able to walk into the airport, pay cash at the ticket counter for a ticket, and get on the plane. Compared to the fantastic level of nonsense we put up with today?
In the 1974 political thriller The Parallax View, one of the characters boards a plane at LAX, and then purchases a ticket from the stewardess. It is the most jarring scene in the entire film.
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.
I mean it's not like businesses can refuse to take cash as payment - it's legal tender ! (The inconvenient bit is that they are not required to give change.)
It doesn't matter that cash is "legal tender" if the business can just refuse to enter into the transaction in the first place.
Cash is great. Can't be tracked, credit card companies don't get to discriminate against the poor and create negative feedback loop traps that they can't out of, it's easier to be financially responsible with it. Bit unfortunate too that paying with cash just adds a tax onto the poor since the fees are basically priced into goods sold at stores, typically regardless of whether or not cash is used. But yeah, nice to h…
There is a cost to handling cash too. Don't know how it compares to cards but with the latter you don't need to have fleets of armored trucks to move money around and robbers can only steal stock.
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Are these really inconveniences? Most of the times I've had trouble paying for stuff were usually at supermarkets or gas stations where the credit card reader would refuse to acknowledge my card. Swiping/inserting/touching, not even cursing worked so without cash on hand I'd have had to surrender my ID to the clerk, take a cab to the closest ATM and return with cash.
I've been using cards nearly exclusively my entire adult life, and I can only think of one time that my card had an issue, and it turned out my whole bank was down for ~1 hour. Inconvenient, but I can think of more times I've forgotten to have enough cash with me, and I barely use cash at all now. In the UK and Australia where I normally am, card infrastructure is just so entirely universal and reliable that it's not…
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> Any impropriety in the process would have almost certainly toppled the government and led to an immediate election. Didn't they just have an election that resulted in the minority government? Meaning all parties knew their chances of overthrowing the current admin were slim. > Paul Rouleau Weird. He was nominated by a Liberal administration and found no wrongdoings in the actions of... a Liberal administration! > T…
> Weird. He was nominated by a Liberal administration and found no wrongdoings in the actions of... a Liberal administration! This was a public inquiry that was participated in by members of all major parties. [0] > By who? Who nominates those people? The leader of the party in power at the time, which historically alternates between Liberals and Conservatives. In lifetime appointments. Generally, though, the nominat…
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.
is due process applicable?
has the supreme court established if a vendor is free to turn down business? (i do not claim to know the answer, but i believe there was some recent such issue they saw)
In the US it is catching on, particularly outside of the population dense centers of cities. You see signs now charging surcharges on card payments to cover the processing fees, thus disincentivizing card payments. Personally I do everything in my day to day life with cash. I don't want to use a card, ever, if I can avoid it.
I do tend to see "card transactions under $X will have a Y¢ surcharge" handwritten signs in smaller businesses. I don't know if that's permitted or if MegaGloboCorp simply hasn't cared that the dive bar or taqueria isn't holding to their contract.
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I personally feel if the business is legal, then CC issuers should have to process it. If they want to be the top 3 or 4 gate keepers, they absolutely need to be completely neutral as long as the payment is legal.
While I understand that, how do you square that with one category of business causing way more chargebacks than average? Do they just have to eat it? Or can they charge higher fees to those merchants? If the latter they could quickly use that to discriminate. $100/tx fee would kill most any normal business. Perhaps the problem is the government doesn’t provide a non-cash lowest common denominator, so people are basic…