You put paper filing and cash society on the “bad” list. It’s like it’s wrong for people without an internet connection or privacy conscious people to file stuff. “Pls use our brand-spanking new web UI that loads a shit ton of Javascript and steals your data on top of it!” Oh and cash society. No, why would anyone want to pay in a privacy-conscious way. Naw man, pay with a card…
With a way less harsh tone, I agree with your first point. Credit cards magical for the user but are full of deamons that they cant see just by using it. I’d prefer a cash only society to one where a private company controlls all access to money. Hybrid is alright but makes the situation maluable (in my country, because of the card, some compamies will make it hard or refuse to take legal tender).
“Pls use our brand-spanking new web UI that loads a shit ton of Javascript and steals your data on top of it!”
You derailed your point, biggest thing you can do right now is use ublock or noscript. Pull as much money as you need in cash and live off of it instead of using your card.
It’s not about having the option, I love having alternatives. It’s about 90s ways being the only choice when they could have better options. E.g. You need to send a form. It’s already a pdf file, send it by email, right? No, it has to be physical mail… or fax if they have a number. Oh, and you have to stamp on it. No pdf. Multiply that by time constraints and local bureaucracy mixed in.
Oh, another fan of living in a stone age.
It’s a downgrade if you can’t choose the stone age way. And with things like physical cash that downgrade is pretty bad. I don’t want a record of the 15€ my friend gave me for stealing the bathroom key last time we were at McDonald’s.
Cash is traceable for decades now. Don’t worry, everyone knows what you’re doing.
Japan has been in the year 2000 for the past 50 years.
Not the first time I see this, still makes me laugh
Germany is the same but without the bullet trains and the robots wiping your ass.
we have plenty of bullet trains - 367 last I checked, plus bullet trains from other countries - they’re just chronically late because of car-focused policies over the last decades causing the infrastructure to basically rot away.
still no ass-wiping robots though, maybe one day…
yeah we have a bunch of ICEs, but no transrapid for us. japan has a bunch of maglev trains.
Japan has one maglev line under construction with a completion date set for 2045.
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Yeah, when I think of Germany, I think of papers.
Germany doesn’t have bidets? France does.
Bidet as it may
Cash Society isn’t a bad thing imo.
Cash society is a bad thing since when
Psyop to make people think that electronic is superior.
Since forever.
That’s what I’m saying for a long time after being in Japan a couple of times.
30 years ago, Japan was 20 years in the future, and they liked it so much, they never changed since.
Cash is king, we shouldn’t be paying MasterCard and VISA for every purchase we make.
Case in point: when the UK left the EU, MC and VISA immediately increased their transaction fees from 0.3% to 1.5%.
Honestly there should be governmental electronic cash with the same advantages as cash, i.e. no fees & no traceability.
Just saw a sign in my bakery today begging people to pay by card because getting small coins from the bank is hard and expensive.
TBF here in Belgium Bancontact has a local monopoly (about 1 % flat fee, no fixed cost per transaction; that seems fair and intuitively cheaper than holding, insuring, depositing cash, dealing with employees skimming off the top, of the time lost counting bills).
Also the government heavily incentivizes electronic payments because those can’t be pocketed without paying VAT. That’s a MONUMENTAL amount of tax fraud being chipped at by the progressive disappearance of cash.
The people insisting on using cash are the ones with a big pile of it, with origin dubious to unknown. Anti tax evasion is the best part of digital banking. Threats to privacy is the other side of that coin unfortunately…
That’s the real crux, banks charge businesses to deposit cash. They do it in such a way that there’s no way to escape their ever-increasing fee percentage.
The mattress solution is more and more appealing, imo.
Also the government heavily incentivizes electronic payments because those can’t be pocketed without paying VAT. That’s a MONUMENTAL amount of tax fraud being chipped at by the progressive disappearance of cash.
Unfortunately I think the amount of cash tax fraud that exists is far more reasonable than the amount of straight up fraudulent, yet “legitimate”, expenditure that governments allow. See, for example, covid PPP loans.
Electronic is faster, more convenient, safer, easier to track, and doesn’t need a stupid purse to carry around.
Haven’t touched cash since 2020, couldn’t be happier.
If only there was some way of federating spending in a way that would make private credit card companies obsolete. I’m still confused how no one sees any future in block chain and just say “it’s all a scam”.
Block chain has become a buzz word, just like AI or NFT’s, but they sure as hell makes some people a chunk of money before everyone realises what it actually means.
because it doesn’t work. case in point: it hasn’t. It improves on one aspect, and regresses (very very badly) in every single other aspect.
Cash isn’t much use for making purchases online, which is also where an ever increasing amount of spending is done.
There’s no coin or note slot on my laptop, and contrary to the internet’s advice throwing money at my screen doesn’t seem to work either.
I used to be a big proponent of cash but with the bulk of my financial activity happening online now I can’t help it feeling a bit redundant.
Yes that’s fair enough, cash doesn’t work online - but bitcoin is a better solution for online transactions than cards.
I mean, we haven’t even got into the subject of data tracking. If you think Facebook is bad, consider for a moment how much your card provider knows about you. Banks and card companies have learned from Facebook, and data brokerage is now a trillion dollar industry - with only 8 billion people in the world (many of whom don’t use the internet or have data being traded), that means your data is worth roughly $1,000 a year. Surely, as the manufacturer of the data, you should be getting some of that?!
Lol Bitcoin is not better than cards for online shopping, the only thing it’s better for is buying whatever you’re smoking.
Objectively, bitcoin is better for online transactions. It’s not even all that safe for buying drugs - every transaction is recorded permanently in an open ledger, so it’s actually much easier to trace (at least up to the end points where traditional currency is exchanged).
It might be less widely accepted, but that’s only because of how insidiously endemic MasterCard and VISA are.
How is bitcoin objectively better? That’s a pretty bold statement that needs some backing arguments.
They both have pros and cons, but until BTC have garanteed near instanteneous transaction confirmation, I don’t see how that would work at the grocery store for example.
Bitcoin is objectively better based on the way it works. Subjectively, with the established infrastructure behind it, traditional card payments are artificially better - purely because of convenience. But on a level playing field bitcoin works better and is less susceptible to negative influences.
The grocery store is not typically an online transaction. I did specify online transactions. For buying groceries online, bitcoin would be better - there are no fees when trading bitcoin. When trading cash, there are no fees.
When putting cash into a business account, there are fees, and as almost all businesses put their money into an account they pay these fees. These cash deposit fees and card processing fees have grown in such a way as to entrap nearly all commercial transactions.
Objectively, it’s better if there aren’t fees, particularly when the fees are not proportional to the actual service the fees are supposed to represent.
No thanks
Cash society is good.
There’s nothing wrong with having/paying by cash though.
Any timeline without cash is not healthy.
Also they’ve been paying for stuff with their phones for years and years—on exactly what basis are they a cash society (though there’s nothing wrong with that)?
Yeah actually i think a steady flow of physical currency moving hands is a great thing. And with the large amount of cheap shops and vending machines they move cash around plenty.
But also i once bought groceries while waiting for a train in japan that involved selecting everything through an app paying ahead digitally and picking it up at a special location right outside the station.
Yeah like its literally the future we dream of complete with respect and re-use of goods that still work with a massive second hand market.
Japan is such an anomaly. They are certain ways that don’t exist anywhere else, that would be impossible anywhere else. If Japan didn’t exist, I wouldn’t have believed it could.
Yeah well you live on a small island that doesnt have much physical resources and has weird wildlife like murder lizards and glow in the dark jellyfish washing up on your beaches and see how your civilization turns out. LoL
Needing to ask your boss so he can ask his boss so he can ask his boss so he can verify if you can sharpen your pencil
Japan uses cards, it’s just that they love their trains so much, they put their money on their fare cards I stead of using credit cards.
I still have my Suica card, it’s got $50 on it still.
Don’t forget the impending population disaster (because they never feel the touch of another person these days, their government literally has to try and encourage them to drink just so they’ll fuck already- and can’t stand immigration) and all those depressed young people using seemingly everything from the slopes of Mount Fuji to their own apartments as log-off locations, and then nobody noticing their bodies for months.
Not to mention the impending massive economic crisis they’re about to go through - Japanese automotive industry is heavily in debt and watching China eat their lunch. While China was building battery plants and electric cars, Toyota was chasing hydrogen and other go-nowhere technologies.
And don’t forget how they treat homeless folks, either
I know it’s not technology, but with all those other achievements, there could be mountains of improvements
There are so few homeless in Japan that it’s not really worth talking about. I have seen maybe one homeless person there.
One average sized city in the US probably has more homeless people than the entire nation of Japan.
It is a lot of homeless people but they sleep in internet cafes instead https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Net_cafe_refugee
Better alternative than corner of street
Damn, you werent kidding! They had 3,992 homeless people in 2020. That’s 0.3 per 10k. The US were at 582,462, or 17.5 in 10k in 2022.
Living the casette futurism dream.
The future has way too much nationalism and misogyny.
