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Sweden's cashless society is no longer a utopia

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Re: Sweden's cashless society is no longer a utopia

#491

Post by jordanbeiber »

scurvy wrote: post #456
ptr wrote: post #429

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Those that want help can get it — you can’t force help on everyone, and you need to be a legal citizen. Some are visiting from other EU countries.

Interesting that they can't force people into help. Some Western democracies have provisions for forcing people into help: UK with the previous ASBO laws, US with wards of the state, and even San Francisco targeting 100 "most hopeless homeless" to be forced into help. It's very odd to me that you need to be a citizen to get benefits. California takes care of everyone -- citizen or not.

I’m sorry for the irony in the following paragraphs, but here is how i read this post:

Thanks to the world renowned U.S social saftey net everyone get looked after!

This is why you for example never see any homeless people in SF or LA. If you happen to stumble upon a rare occurence of a person sleeping on the steets, you can be sure it’s at least a US citizen.

No, but seriously, it is true that Sweden (and social _democracy_ in general) is a way of forbidding citizens to live in extreme poverty, to the benefit of everyone.

This is not imposed on the citizens themselves but rather the state.

We do this by having the state make sure there are provisions in place to TRY to take care of everyone. You might have to be able to navigate the society to some extent though, something that can be especially hard for individuals with mental illnesses or drug addiction (in many ways these are ofc connected).

It can also be true if you are actually not a citizen.

Re: Sweden's cashless society is no longer a utopia

#492

Post by pyre »

aidenn0 wrote: post #472
angry_octet wrote: post #268

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I remember as a kid how much money my parents would have to carry while on holiday, banks were closed and ATMs rare and often empty, shops in the country often wouldn't take cheques. Credit cards resulted in really slow vendor payment (remember paper credit card chunk clunk? those numbers are raised for a reason) and caused cash flow issues. Anyway, one of the major telcos had an outage of their EFT system the last h…

I remember that too; my grandfather used to go on business trips to NYC, and after adjusting for inflation the amount he carried was almost 5000 USD. Very few people walk around with that amount of cash today.

> Very few people walk around with that amount of cash today.

... because the cops would stop him, insinuate that the money probably had something to do with crime, and then seize it to line their own pockets cough cough I mean "bolster their budgets."

Re: Sweden's cashless society is no longer a utopia

#493

Post by tedeh »

megaremote wrote: post #324
bouncycastle wrote: post #151

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Want to share about my experience about the "permission" part. I once travelled to Beijing and had dinner in a fancy dumpling restaurant. When I went to pay the bill, my European bank instantly flagged the transaction and blocked my card from further use. I had no idea what happened until I called the bank later that evening (had to wait until they opened). So yeah, what you said happened to me - revoked instantly, s…

Some banks require you to tell them when you are heading overseas. It helps to avoid this, and protect you from fraud.

It doesn't have to be like this though. One of my banks has an interface in the mobile app where I can unlock different continents for purchases and withdrawals for a set amount of time.

Re: Sweden's cashless society is no longer a utopia

#494

Post by flagfeedingusa »

Latteland wrote: post #253
gambiting wrote: post #212

Earlier quoted context omitted.

>>But the white people find the cashless society works well for them I suppose That's an extremely odd comment to make. What does being white have anything to do with this? There's loads of white immigrants in Sweden, they suffer from this exactly the same as everyone else.

The comment is probably sarcastically referring to white privilege. So the wealthy people who this works for (have money, a bank account, aren't living on the street, not a visitor or an immigrant) in Sweden are the equivalent of 'white privileged people' in the us, even though I don't think of Sweden as a racist state (but I don't know much about that there). To explain a little more, in the US, you are far less lik…

How do inflammatory bullshit comments like this continue to thrive on this site? How are you not banned?

This is pure lefty nonsense. Yes Ive been asked out of a car and frisked multiple times. Has nothing to do with race and everything to fo with class.

Take your lies elsewhere please, maybe a place like reddit is better for you and your white hating ways.

Re: Sweden's cashless society is no longer a utopia

#495

Post by mpweiher »

bouncycastle wrote: post #151
CPLX wrote: post #14

A society without cash is a society in which every person has no choice but to get the permission of someone they don’t know and will never meet each and every time they seek to obtain food, water, shelter, or transportation, and that permission can be revoked instantly, silently, and invisibly at any time.

Want to share about my experience about the "permission" part. I once travelled to Beijing and had dinner in a fancy dumpling restaurant. When I went to pay the bill, my European bank instantly flagged the transaction and blocked my card from further use. I had no idea what happened until I called the bank later that evening (had to wait until they opened). So yeah, what you said happened to me - revoked instantly, s…

Yep, I've had that happen to me every time I travelled back to Berlin when I was living in London. Every single time my Barclay's card would refuse to work.

So not even some exotic far away location (not that that's an excuse), but London/Berlin. From a customer that Barclay's knew came from Berlin.

Cash.

It works.

Re: Sweden's cashless society is no longer a utopia

#496

Post by atlasunshrugged »

eksemplar wrote: post #123
kristofferR wrote: post #97

I'm a Norwegian who went to a Swedish music festival last summer. I couldn't pay for a lot of things there, since the booths only accepted Swish (the only relevant Swedish mobile payment solution, it's a de facto monopoly). I couldn't sign up and use Swish on my phone, since it only accepts Swedish bank accounts. I couldn't borrow money from my Swedish friends either, since they didn't have cash (and it mostly wasn't…

That’s festival payment done wrong, but cashless can be really great at festivals. In Denmark we have a festival called Skanderborg festival, and they build both your ticket and your cashless payment into the festival bracelet. You use the bracelet to pay everywhere, and you can add money to it a range of payment methods, from using a visa or similar in their app, to visiting one of the cash places where you can use…

In Estonia we had something similar but instead of letting us top up via app or card remotely, you had to stand in line at a booth and give them the money and then register your bracelet online to get the refund of any additional funds left on at the end of the process. I get what they were going for but it felt like a ton of friction to me, all to eliminate a single swipe at the payment terminal?

Re: Sweden's cashless society is no longer a utopia

#497

Post by atlasunshrugged »

megaremote wrote: post #313
eksemplar wrote: post #123

Earlier quoted context omitted.

That’s festival payment done wrong, but cashless can be really great at festivals. In Denmark we have a festival called Skanderborg festival, and they build both your ticket and your cashless payment into the festival bracelet. You use the bracelet to pay everywhere, and you can add money to it a range of payment methods, from using a visa or similar in their app, to visiting one of the cash places where you can use…

How do you get money off the bracelet?

In my (limited) experience, you go to their website, enter your bank account details and some days/weeks after the festival when they've processed everything they send it via Swift to your bank (if in EU, haven't tried for a foreign account)

Re: Sweden's cashless society is no longer a utopia

#498

Post by lorenzhs »

uiri wrote: post #406
XorNot wrote: post #323

Earlier quoted context omitted.

No you have to visit a money exchanger in advance, exchange some money into local currency, then go to your destination. Which...is the same thing you need to do anyway to use your card in China.

If you're in the US or Europe, you'll probably get a better rate by exchanging cash into local currency at your destination.

For me, it’s always been cheapest to use an ATM at my destination, and let my bank do the currency conversion instead of using the rate offered by the ATM. My bank charges me something like max(5€, 1%), which is usually substantially cheaper than all the other options. I think this is more or less the same (or cheaper) for all German banks.

Re: Sweden's cashless society is no longer a utopia

#499

Post by wtdo »

Aeolun wrote: post #463
zmk_ wrote: post #448

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Cash is not one of those things though. Nor is the system of buying metro tickets with cash only and without an option to change language.

Metro tickets with cash only seem fine to me. What is your problem with that? I believe inside of Tokyo almost all the machines also support a variety of languages now, but there might be a scattered few with only Japanese.

I just left Osaka yesterday. I didn't use every machine, but I never found one that didn't support English.

Re: Sweden's cashless society is no longer a utopia

#500

Post by sandov »

mort96 wrote: post #251
gammateam wrote: post #215

Earlier quoted context omitted.

If only there was some sort of peer-to-peer version of electronic cash that would allow online payments to be sent directly from one party to another without going through a financial institution.

If only there was some sort of peer-to-peer version of electronic cash that would allow online payments to be sent directly from one party to another without going through a financial institution, yet had some recourse for fraudulent transactions, didn't require downloading hundreds of gigabytes of blockchain, processed more than a handful of transactions globally per ten minutes, and where you didn't lose all your m…

What kind of fraudulent transactions?
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