Sweden Tries To Halt Its March To Total Cashlessness (bloomberg.com)

An anonymous reader quotes a report from Bloomberg: A key committee of Swedish lawmakers wants to force the country's biggest banks to handle cash in an effort to halt the nation's march toward complete cashlessness. Parliament's Riksbank committee, which is in the process of reviewing the central bank law, proposed making it mandatory for banks to offer cash withdrawals and handle daily receipts. The requirement would apply to banks that provide checking accounts and have more than 70 billion kronor ($8 billion) in deposits from the Swedish public, according to a report.

The lawmakers said there needs to be "reasonable access to those services in all of Sweden," and that 99 percent of Swedes should have a maximum distance of 25 kilometers (16 miles) to the nearest cash withdrawal. The requirement doesn't state how banks should offer those services, and lenders can choose whether to use a third party, machines or over-the-counter services. The move is a response to Sweden's rapid transformation as it becomes one of the most cashless societies in the world. That's led to concerns that some people are finding it increasingly difficult to cope without access to mobile phones or bank cards. There are also fears around what would happen if the digital payments systems suddenly crashed.

Comments

Re:Check it

[vlad30]

This is prudent considering that for instance Australia has had several large outages including one that took out the Nataional Austalia Bank EFTPOS system leaving many business unable to trade and people unable to purchase in fact we have a page to help with wether a company is up or not aussieoutages.com and not just blocked with the government site blocks.

I wonder if it's hard to get a hooker

[Anonymous Coward]

How do prostitutes handle a cashless economy?

Re:I wonder if it's hard to get a hooker

[youngone]

How do prostitutes handle a cashless economy?

In civilised countries where we don't bother criminalising prositutes, they accept electronic payments like any other business.
I suspect you are confusing the US with a modern country.

Re:I wonder if it's hard to get a hooker

[TheInternetGuy]

But would the clients (who are criminalized) be hesitant to use a card for this? That can't be good for business.

Re:I wonder if it's hard to get a hooker

[LostMyBeaver]

I don't think that's really a problem. How hard is it to use something like Paypal or the Swedish similar service.

In Norway, I gave a homeless person about $50 the other day hoping that she would go find someplace to take a shower and clean herself up a little. I paid it to her using a telephone payment system from the bank.

Of course, if that wouldn't have worked, I could go to any convenience store and buy a relatively anonymous prepaid credit card.

Now I have no idea what form of payments prostitutes here take, I would imagine they've sorted that out by now.

But to be honest... I have 500NOK in my wallet, it's been there over a year. I've traveled to 15+ countries this past year and other than in Qatar where I thought the money looked cool and took some out, I haven't used cash at all.

What's really amazing is that you can actually function pretty well without cash in America these days... at least it Seattle and Tampa. I was really shocked since the U.S. is basically a 2nd or 3rd world country (this is based on how the wealthy and middle class treat their poor)

Re:I wonder if it's hard to get a hooker

[tinkerton]

That touches on my main worry about cashless: power concentration. You don't feel it until a bit later when this concentrated power decides to use it .
- Let's introduce negative interest rates
- from now on we don't want you to pay to fund organisations of type X
- from now on it is impossible to do trade with person Y

Checks and balances, there's a reason for it.

Re:I wonder if it's hard to get a hooker

[fafalone]

How's about a better example then. Since your 'civilised' country still has backwards, barbaric drug policies that increase the level of harm, because they're unwilling to accept science and reason because of moral judgements, how do drug dealers handle a cashless economy?

(No country has acknowleged the failure of the War on Drugs and eliminated prohibition as their policy for drugs beyond pot. Only Portugal has even decriminalized personal possession of tiny quantities, still miles away from what a civilized, rational country would do if their interest actually was minimizing the harm of hard drugs; limited-access heroin maintenance programs are similarly far too narrow in scope to count. More civilized than the US != civilized)

Re:I wonder if it's hard to get a hooker

[elrous0]

I live in a working class area in the U.S. where most people still use cash. Still, the only thing I really have to use cash for now are tips and donations. I wish more charities would offer some sort of credit card scanner when they're having a drive. And any place where you are expected to tip should offer an option to include your tip as part of payment (most restaurants do now, but there are still a few holdouts). The only business I've run into around here that still absolutely requires cash is this one Asian dry-cleaners that I stopped going to because I got tired of having to go to an ATM just for them. They're probably losing half their business just to save 2% on CC processing fees.

Re:I wonder if it's hard to get a hooker

[mjwx]

How do prostitutes handle a cashless economy?

In civilised countries where we don't bother criminalising prositutes, they accept electronic payments like any other business.
I suspect you are confusing the US with a modern country.

What he means is "how are you going to pay a prostitute without your wife finding out sans cash"?

But seriously, the cheapest countries I've been to have been cash based. Without banks putting their sticky fingers over everything, business make more profit whilst customers get lower prices. Getting a pint in Central London is €6-10 and a prossie €3-500. In Central Amsterdam its €3-7 for a pint and some brass can be had for as little as €50.

You can usually tell if a business prefers cash because they price their products in whole numbers to reduce change, in Amsterdam it was about €5 or €5.20 for a pint, in central London, bars often priced things at £5.99.

Re:I wonder if it's hard to get a hooker

[cayenne8]

You could do even better using a fallback system that allows for personal transactions even if there is no network at the moment

Err....something like CASH?

Re:I wonder if it's hard to get a hooker

[Malc]

You're confusing different issues here.

There's no reason why a cashless society should be cheaper given that they start incurring transaction charges. Once cash has gone, who's to stop those charges going up? The recent change in the EU that ended separate credit card fees is even worse because this helps hide these fees. Personally I think card fees should be charged directly to the card holder rather than hiding it in the merchant's prices. This might introduce competition and an incencitve to shop around for card providers.

I always thought that prices that end .99 were playing a psychological trick that they appear at first glance a whole currency unit less. When it comes to pints, this is silly - who shops around for a pint? Pick a pub and order a drink. Change the scene if it's offensively expensive like £2/pint more than everywhere else around there. To be honest though, as a Londoner, I've rarely seen a pint ending .99. I think it's more expensive than Amersterdam because the cost of living is so much higher anyway.

Re:I wonder if it's hard to get a hooker

[mjwx]

You're confusing different issues here.

I would disagree, yes there are two issues at play, but I'm not confusing one with the other.

There's no reason why a cashless society should be cheaper given that they start incurring transaction charges. Once cash has gone, who's to stop those charges going up? The recent change in the EU that ended separate credit card fees is even worse because this helps hide these fees. Personally I think card fees should be charged directly to the card holder rather than hiding it in the merchant's prices. This might introduce competition and an incencitve to shop around for card providers.

I couldn't agree with this more. Charges applied to merchants should be directly passed onto the customer. However banks and credit networks (Visa/MC/AMEX) explicitly do not permit it and are doing everything they can to get credit card surcharges banned by law in many countries so merchants have to hide how much cards are costing them (in the form of higher prices).

I'm not anti-credit mind you, all forms of payment have their place. If we lost cash, we'd definitely miss it. I treat credit like sugar, a little is OK but you don't want your diet being 95% sugar.

I always thought that prices that end .99 were playing a psychological trick that they appear at first glance a whole currency unit less. When it comes to pints, this is silly - who shops around for a pint? Pick a pub and order a drink. Change the scene if it's offensively expensive like £2/pint more than everywhere else around there. To be honest though, as a Londoner, I've rarely seen a pint ending .99. I think it's more expensive than Amersterdam because the cost of living is so much higher anyway.

Yes, that 99p is psychological pricing. Most people just look at the £5 and ignore the numbers after it. Even though everyone knows about it, it's still stupidly effective.

Although it's rare to see an actual .99 at a pub, plenty of Wetherspoons I've been to have had numbers like 3.25 or 3.72 to make them slightly cheaper than the pub round the corner owned by a bloke named Dave who charges 3.50 or 4 quid a pint (personally, I'd rather give the extra 30p to Dave, owner-operated pubs are one of the best things about England).

I compared Amsterdam to London because the COL is similar for many things, the Dutch pay more tax, but have more subsidised services so I think it evens out (they pay €0.72 for a 5p bag, so swings and roundabouts).

Re:I wonder if it's hard to get a hooker

[kilfarsnar]

That touches on my main worry about cashless: power concentration. You don't feel it until a bit later when this concentrated power decides to use it . - Let's introduce negative interest rates - from now on we don't want you to pay to fund organisations of type X - from now on it is impossible to do trade with person Y

Checks and balances, there's a reason for it.

Yes, and these reasons are why, once you go cashless, they have you by the balls. No more private or anonymous transactions. You will be forced to keep your money in the bank; where else could it be? There will be a record of every transaction; data mining on steroids. Unfortunately, most people only see the convenience, and don't have the foresight or imagination to understand all of the implications.

Re:I wonder if it's hard to get a hooker

[judoguy]

What's really amazing is that you can actually function pretty well without cash in America these days... at least it Seattle and Tampa. I was really shocked ...

Being able to function without cash (most of the time) doesn't preclude the usfullness of cash in other situations.

I was really shocked since the U.S. is basically a 2nd or 3rd world country (this is based on how the wealthy and middle class treat their poor)

And yet poor people are literally dying to get here and native poor people aren't trying to leave. Just shows how stupid poor people are, eh?

Re:I wonder if it's hard to get a hooker

[kilfarsnar]

How's about a better example then. Since your 'civilised' country still has backwards, barbaric drug policies that increase the level of harm, because they're unwilling to accept science and reason because of moral judgements, how do drug dealers handle a cashless economy? (No country has acknowleged the failure of the War on Drugs and eliminated prohibition as their policy for drugs beyond pot. Only Portugal has even decriminalized personal possession of tiny quantities, still miles away from what a civilized, rational country would do if their interest actually was minimizing the harm of hard drugs; limited-access heroin maintenance programs are similarly far too narrow in scope to count. More civilized than the US != civilized)

The American War on Drugs, as you may know, is a political monster; not a scientific one. It was begun so that the Nixon administration could go after the leaders of the civil rights movement and the anti-war left. It is no surprise that it doesn't achieve its stated goals. It was never designed to. It has however somewhat achieved its actual goals, in that black people are over-represented in American prisons. It is a national disgrace that America has yet to come to terms with.

Re: I wonder if it's hard to get a hooker

[kilfarsnar]

Our poor in the US are far and away better off than regular citizens in many other countries so your claims are clearly unfounded and nothing more than a arrogant cheap shot.

-geekpoet

This is what people in America tell themselves so that they don't have to readjust their rosy view. 7.4% of the people in the US don't necessarily know where their next meal is coming from. You think that's the case for "regular citizens" of other countries?

Re:I wonder if it's hard to get a hooker

[tinkerton]

The checks and balances mean you're required to think from an attitude of distrust, even if it's artificial distrust. Instead people simply just trust the system until they distrust it. Institutions in the meantime never see harm in concentrating more power if it allows them to do their job better. I'm being as nice as possible here in my formulation.

Re:I wonder if it's hard to get a hooker

[Impy the Impiuos Imp]

It's much more serious than that. It is one of the major cogs in a dictatorial panopticon -- tracking all financial transactions. Of what good is being "secure in your papers" if everything meaningful is open for government inspection.

The point against giving government this power is to deny wannabe kings the ability to begin with. If you don't build it, it can never be abused.

Re:I wonder if it's hard to get a hooker

[fafalone]

The origins of prohibition as a policy long predate the crackdown launched by Nixon, going all the way back to 1914 and the Harrison Narcotics Tax Act. And whatever the origin, the claims for the continuation of it now are entirely centered on false claims about it being necessary to prevent a large increase in abuse.

I do like calling SJWs racist when they support the WoD though.

Re:I wonder if it's hard to get a hooker

[tinkerton]

I agree.

Re:I wonder if it's hard to get a hooker

[h4ck7h3p14n37]

Sex Workers are Using Crypto to Save for Retirement

Re: I wonder if it's hard to get a hooker

[LostMyBeaver]

And yet, you allow companies like Walmart to intentionally and legally pay their employees wages clearly marked as poverty and then additionally allow them to have departments to help them apply for government subsidy effectively making employed people beggars. All the while, the shareholders of that same company is paying dividends equal to approximately the same value they force the people to beg for.

Oh... and there's a minimum wage which allows systematical impoverishment of the working person. Anyone working in a minimum wage career is worth precisely that value... the government regulated and mandated minimum wage which is a way the employer can say
"If the government will legally allow me to pay you less, I will"
and also says
"There's no point in me treating you well, you don't even respect yourself to get a job working for someone who respects you"
followed by
"There's no point in you changing jobs, you're a minimum wage worker today and every other job you'd get is also minimum wage or close to it."
and also
"Of course I respect you... I don't want you to suffer, instead of $7.15 an hour, we'll pay you $9 and hour! Yes, I know that's still way below poverty levels, but you're worth it!"

Oh... should we talk about overdraft fees that banks place on poor people to exploit them. It's a systematical means of attacking the poor and exploiting them.

How about the justice and prison system which takes Americans who don't seem to live up to the standards of "we think he'll be an asset to the country" and then fosters to the systematic production of career criminals and prisoners since the poor people are basically not worth anything other than a means to provide jobs in former coal towns at prisons.

Dude... not a pot shot... America is a second world possibly third world country. You treat your poor worse than you treat your live stock. And the funny part is, it's so important that you do that it would be almost impossible to change it now. Just imagine how completely screwed the entire country would be if the U.S. actually converted their penal facilities to correctional facilities. The job market would be flooded, the millions of people employed directly or indirectly by the prison systems would be out of work. Then there would be the fact that places like Dairy Queen wouldn't be legally allowed to turn people down for jobs.

The entire U.S. economy would collapse if you didn't treat your poor people so badly. It's disgusting.

As for you not needing to carry cash... I'm very excited for you. In fact, many poor people don't need to any more since they now have fancy cards that let them buy food without having to use paper food stamps anymore. Isn't that nifty!!! This way, a Walmart employee can work a 12 hour shift desperately hoping to make ends-meet and then use their food-stamp benefit card on their way out to buy frozen food with so many preservatives that they'll get fat just smelling it while it's still frozen.

Of course then you have to consider that those people have to use cash because the overdraft fee they got nail by for seeing whether they have money or not is still lingering on their bank account from last week and if they transfer money into their bank account, the fee will eat it up. So when they go to the "Pay day loan" shop which will legally loan you money for the week at only 30% interest, they need to ask for it in cash because of that looming $75 fee they paid because they were down to $0.50 and they used the ATM in the mall to check whether they had enough money before using it and the machine charged $2 to check.

Yeh... it must be nice to be wealthy enough to be the father of 5 in the mid-west where you can go to Walmart and see the minimum wage beggars as if they were in a zoo. It must also be nice to be a father of 5 in the mid-west where you bring your kids to eat happy meals and play on the play ground while the an

Re: I wonder if it's hard to get a hooker

[dcw3]

Having been to 50+ countries and living in a few, I'd argue that the GP is correct. I have to question your "7.4%"...where's that figure from? Yes, we do have a homeless problem in many cities now, but I think that's also mixed in with the poor way in which we handle our mentally ill. Certainly with the current unemployment rates, if they wanted work, they should be able to find it. You might argue that minimum wage isn't enough, but it certainly would feed them. And, FWIW, there are lots of shelters and soup kitchens that help out.

Re:I wonder if it's hard to get a hooker

[dcw3]

But isn't it still standard practice for servers to underreport tips on their taxes? I would imagine that there's resistance to non cash payments for that reason.

Re:I wonder if it's hard to get a hooker

[ebvwfbw]

How do prostitutes handle a cashless economy?

In civilised countries where we don't bother criminalising prositutes, they accept electronic payments like any other business.

I suspect you are confusing the US with a modern country.

The US is modern enough to be the world leader again, surpassing China recently. So where does that put your country? Don't believe what the main stream media tells you to believe. Just remember, if you go to college and flunk out of everything else, you can still be a news reporter. Dumbest of the dumb.

Re:I wonder if it's hard to get a hooker

[youngone]

The US is modern enough to be the world leader again, surpassing China recently...

In what? Number of motorcycles?
Go to bed Donald, your meds have kicked in.

Re:I wonder if it's hard to get a hooker

[ebvwfbw]

The US is modern enough to be the world leader again, surpassing China recently...

In what? Number of motorcycles?

Go to bed Donald, your meds have kicked in.

Only a fool would say the leader in GDP isn't modern. Who knows, maybe I've found that fool?

Add up the bottom 5 out of top 10 and you're still not up to the US. Here, let me give you a link, based on the international money fund since you don't seem to know how to use google or maybe you don't even know what to look for or are familiar with international finances and modernization. Your comment was really that ignorant. Clueless I think is what I'm looking for. You're clueless.

https://www.weforum.org/agenda...

So I have a feeling your "modern" countries are way behind the US. In fact they barely even belong in the same list. Socialist polices have taken a big toll on Europe. Really big toll. It holds them back.

Just google world economies if that site isn't to your liking. I know crazy people love to say - oh well that's your site or some other BS so they can stay in their little fantasy world. They avoid reality best they can. Read fake news and believe it. I bet you still believe the collusion delusion.

Go to bed Hillary, you're meds have kicked in.

Re:I wonder if it's hard to get a hooker

[youngone]

...Here, let me give you a link, based on the international money fund...

The what? Oh, you mean the International Monetary Fund.

Of course, the only thing that matters is the size of your (ahem) economy. I get it now.

Go to bed Hillary, you're meds have kicked in.

Ha ha ha! You tried to copy my wee joke and exposed your illiteracy.

Fuckwit.

Re:Why does this article have the DEC logo!?

[Narcocide]

Nothing, other than apparently that the new Slashdot ownership isn't old enough to remember them.

What's the plan when the banks go dark?

[schwit1]

Less than month ago Sweden told its people to prepare for disasters, including possible war with Russia. One of the first thing the Ruskies will do is cyber attacks on infrastructure, which includes the financial system.

Re:What's the plan when the banks go dark?

[dave420]

Followed, very quickly, by a full military attack, at which point popping down the shops for some haribos and milk is probably off the cards.

Sweden Tries To Halt Its March To Total Cashless..

[Tablizer]

Is it just me, or is there somebody odd about the /. headline? Is Sweden a Siamese twin?

The leading Swedish cashless app just got sold

[gawdonblue]

The leading (near monopoly) Swedish cashless app just got sold to foreigners. Very much time to revert to cash if you don't want your economy held to ransom by incremental fee increases.

Re:The leading Swedish cashless app just got sold

[Anonymous Coward]

Not true, the leading app would be Swish ( https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/... ) and that is owned jointly by the large nordic banks. It has not been sold.

Re:The leading Swedish cashless app just got sold

[BadDreamer]

Which cashless app is that? The one everyone uses here in Sweden is Swish, and it is Swedish owned.

Re:The leading Swedish cashless app just got sold

[gawdonblue]

My apologies.
A month or two ago I read about some foreign (non-Swedish, maybe American?) entity buying something Swedish that I thought was the leading mobile payments platform (at least that is how it was headlined) and thought to myself "Well that's another f'*ing stupid move by Sweden; still falling for the promise of Globalization even in the face of all the evidence to the contrary". Now I cannot find any evidence of any relevant article, only suggestions on Wikipedia that now that Swish is dominant that banks are considering introducing fees for the buyer as well - which is along the lines of what I was suggesting would happen in my original post (yes it's hard for me to say I'm wrong).
I will try to provide links to my sources in future and this should prevent similar stupidity on my part.

Re:An advanced nation

[Anonymous Coward]

Yes it's great when it WORKS.

But really dumbfuck, I've experienced more than once that there been a system failure and you can't even purchase a fucking package of milk because there is NO fallback what so ever in Sweden, they don't process debitcards offline AT ALL.

Minors, legal immigrants, and swipe fees

[tepples]

An average person in Sweden should be expected to be able to legally open and use a bank account?

Including an average child?

So every bank account would be connected to a real Swedish citizen. A person allowed to be in Sweden who has the correct ID.

In addition to Swedish citizens, "persons allowed to be in Sweden" include citizens of other EU countries and immigrants on a work visa.

No low amount of spending would be blocked.

Good luck with that when both the EFT and credit networks charge several cents per transaction.

Is Sweden expecting the lack of grid power?

This can happen and has happened.

Re:Minors, legal immigrants, and swipe fees

[fahrbot-bot]

So every bank account would be connected to a real Swedish citizen. A person allowed to be in Sweden who has the correct ID.

In addition to Swedish citizens, "persons allowed to be in Sweden" include citizens of other EU countries and immigrants on a work visa.

... and tourists.

Re:Minors, legal immigrants, and swipe fees

[AHuxley]

Re "Including an average ...?"
A person would get some packet money as they do cash now...
They would have to learn to use a bank card as they do cash now. Not that much of an extra educational step for an average person who can be expected to understand and use cash. Prove citizenship, add a bank account. The banks can support many new types of bank services for pocket money saving and spending.
Re "include citizens of other EU countries and immigrants on a work visa"
Who would all now have to prove to the gov and their bank they are allowed to stay and work for a set time. Photo ID connected to every account.
When the work visa is not correct, their bank account stops.
No more easy cash and hidden economy with random people overstaying and using cash to hide their spending.
Re "Good luck with that when both the EFT and credit networks charge several cents per transaction."
Banks would have to follow banking laws and support the movement of many amount of currency. Down to "cents" as thats would be a legal network transaction that has to be supported.
Re "This can happen and has happened."
Take some of that collected tax and pay some engineers to look at the grid.

Re:Minors, legal immigrants, and swipe fees

[AHuxley]

Re "and tourists."
Who legally exchange their funds for ... another nations digital currency. A new card with a given amount connected to their photo ID vs getting cash to the same amount...
Tourists might feel more happy to spend more knowing their funds are now digitally protected and can only be used by them.
Another bonus with moving to a digital currency and a win for tourists shopping.
That spending can then be tracked and taxed back to the tourists. Still winning.

Re:Minors, legal immigrants, and swipe fees

[tepples]

They would have to learn to use a bank card as they do cash now. Not that much of an extra educational step

Good luck counting the money associated with your card without having to buy, carry without breaking, and keep charged a card reader and subscribe to cellular data service for its connection to the payment network.

The banks can support many new types of bank services for pocket money saving and spending.

At what ballpark level of fees to the individual end user?

Banks would have to follow banking laws and support the movement of many amount of currency. Down to "cents" as thats would be a legal network transaction that has to be supported.

Watch most banks go out of business as they no longer have a source of revenue to handle the computational load of processing a small transaction. Or what means of compensating the payment networks would you propose?

Take some of that collected tax and pay some engineers to look at the grid.

For decades, engineers have concluded, based on having looked at the grid, that especially severe weather is an excuse for an occasional unscheduled failure. How would you propose to design a grid to survive something of a scale comparable to Hurricane Maria that hit Puerto Rico in 2017?

Re:Minors, legal immigrants, and swipe fees

[AHuxley]

Re "Good luck counting the money associated with your card without having to buy, carry without breaking, and keep charged a card reader and subscribe to cellular data service for its connection to the payment network."
Nations with banks, electrical power and an ID system have had that working for their citizens for some years now.
The card readers work, the cards read. Lost cards are replaced as banks know who is using their accounts and services.
At what ballpark level of fees to the individual end user?
Banks would have to support a national currency. Some basic card would be "free" to use as getting cash is from a bank account is now.
So the end user would not see any change to a cost to use the card as they do cash now.
Re "Watch most banks go out of business"..
Most advance nations have governments that will step in to ensure all their nations banks savings accounts are protected and their citizens accounts don't go "out of business".
Re a nordic hurricane
Sweden would understand its climate over generations. Generations of engineering education with the skills to work with and keep design a working electrical grid.
Working with a nuclear power grid, hydro, solar, wind kind ensures a good grid design and good engineering standards.
Should a town stop having power a "shop" can be powered with a "generator". Banking services can then be supported in that town by bank workers. A bank card with be accepted and the payment will be made. Trucks can bring in needed supplies and diesel until grid power is reported.
Food would be on sale and the shop owner would be selling food. Digital payments would also track any sudden local price changes :)

Re:Minors, legal immigrants, and swipe fees

[AHuxley]

Instant duty free.

Re:Minors, legal immigrants, and swipe fees

[LostMyBeaver]

Yes... the average child in 1st world countries can open a bank account. We trust them.

There is also Visa, Paypal, Apple Pay, Google Pay, several local options, prepaid visa cards, etc... there is no shortage of options. If you only have cash, go to a local currency exchange and convert your cash to a prepaid bank card.

In Norway and Sweden, when using locally issued cards, there is no transaction fee. The smallest currency is a single Krone or Crown which is $0.12. The cheapest thing I know you can buy in either Sweden or Norway is a type of gum which costs 2.5NOK/SEK which is about $0.31. Even with a transaction fee, it would be covered. Besides, if they raised the price to 5NOK/SEK no one would notice the difference.

Outages happen, but typically not for long. Though with more electric cars burdening the grid, it could get worse. That said, there is always a diesel or gas car somewhere to be found. Those are generators by definition. Biltema, Kjell & Co and many other stores in Sweden sell cheap 12v to 220v converters. Even if power is down for a few hours which I've never heard of, it is generally possible to charge a phone. And the phone network will easily handle more than an hour of power loss. As such, there is always a way to pay in Scandinavia.

If people want to be anonymous about it, there are many many many different anonymous forms of payment as well.

Re: Minors, legal immigrants, and swipe fees

[houghi]

Not sure about Sweden, but in Belgium kuds mostly will have their own bank acvount with the supervision from their parents.
Why do banks like this? Because those kids will rarely if ever change banks.

Also I do not pay anything for money transfers throughout Europe, cash withdrawels from any bank in Belgium or most in Europe. The micro cost is a cost for the bank, just like the paper is that they need to send me every month or the card with pincode that they send me when it needs replacement for free.

Look up SEPA and understand that cashless us used successfully in e.g. Europe and China. If that is a good thing or not is another issue.

Just because it is different from what you know does not mean it does not work.

Re:Minors, legal immigrants, and swipe fees

[Zontar The Mindless]

Good luck counting the money associated with your card without having to buy, carry without breaking, and keep charged a card reader and subscribe to cellular data service for its connection to the payment network.

Who needs a card reader? I can get my balance in about 30 seconds on my phone using either a Web browser or my bank's customer app (both use 2FA, BTW).

If charges for the miniscule amount of data consumed by this are such a concern for you, then I suggest you find a more reasonable carrier.

Re:Minors, legal immigrants, and swipe fees

[Zontar The Mindless]

AFAIK öre/øre are still a thing, they just don't bother minting the coins anymore, at least in Sweden, although last time I was in Denmark (~1 year ago), they still used them.

Re:Minors, legal immigrants, and swipe fees

[rtb61]

Every citizen would be required to seek approval from a private for profit corporation, to be allowed access to all the essentials of life based upon paying the required corporate for profit taxes for life, stop paying and die of starvation in the cold on the street.

Any citizen, who challenges any protected corporation at any time, will have their permission to access to all the essentials of life withdrawn. Zero means of survival with the approval of a for profit corporation. Cashless in a capitalist society is a close as practicable to slavery without crossing some imaginary line, lean right over sure, the citizen is now a corporate slave who must pay corporate taxes or be denied access to any of the essentials of life.

Imagine a dispute with the corporation that controls your finances. There start from the point of cutting off your access to your money, because it is no longer yours, it is theirs. Your phone dies because you can no longer pay and the telecom corporation has been informed. You can not catch a taxi, you can not even pay for public transport. Oh yeah, your negotiations with that controlling corporation are going to go really well. Think for a second you will be safe with more than one account with more that one group, fuck off, the first thing they will do is notify each other to make sure you are fucked from the get go.

Any government that pushes cash free in capitalist society is betraying it citizens and those politicians are straight traitors, and should be investigated and prosecuted as such. Cashless in capitalism is slavery, straight up.

Re:Minors, legal immigrants, and swipe fees

[tepples]

The average person in Sweden is 40.9 years old. You picked out a subset of it just to be dense.

I picked a subset through which the average person will have passed. The demographic shift creating too few workers per pensioner is a separate problem.

You are mixing up credit cards and debit cards. One uses a fixed fee and one a percent of the transaction.

Debit cards take a fixed fee and no percentage. But for small transactions (under say 2 USD or 16 SEK), this fixed fee alone can cause the seller to lose money on the transaction.

Also, the cost of handling coins is more than the transaction fee anyway.

I'd be interested to see data backing this up, especially for transactions between individuals. Last I checked, transaction fees were on the order of 0.30 USD, which would be about 2.5 SEK.

The cash-registry required by law to be used to ensure that stores doesn't cheat with their taxes

I was unaware that this existed in Sweden. Are parents required to use this when giving, say, a child an allowance?

Re:Minors, legal immigrants, and swipe fees

[thegarbz]

Including an average child?

I don't understand your comment. I had a bank account and a debit card when I was 7. What's wrong with that? I needed a parental signature but that's about it. The only thing that changed is when I turned 18 they spammed me with offers for credit cards.

Good luck with that when both the EFT and credit networks charge several cents per transaction.

Again I don't understand. I haven't used cash in ... well days (but I was in Germany). Back at home I have no problem swiping my debit card for a stick of gum.

This can happen and has happened.

I have also experienced this. The world didn't implode when I couldn't pay for petrol. They took my details and told me to return and clear the debt when the power was back.

Re:Minors, legal immigrants, and swipe fees

[Cinnamon Beige]

It's that in a socialist society, as well. You don't want it to be possible for somebody to be locked out completely from being capable of doing financial transactions--not from being able to spend money, nor from being able to be given money. And no, having anonymous means doesn't fix this. It's a bad kludge, if nothing else because you are using the present existence of such to pretend that a proper fix is not necessary.

Re:Minors, legal immigrants, and swipe fees

[tepples]

I had a bank account and a debit card when I was 7. What's wrong with that? I needed a parental signature but that's about it.

What's wrong is parents who say "I'm busy; we'll set up your bank account sometime next week" every week, and until then, use the child's lack of a bank account to keep the child in a bubble with no access to earn or spend money. I have seen this happen to a member of a chat server that I'm in.

Back at home I have no problem swiping my debit card for a stick of gum.

When you bought that stick of gum, how much of the transaction did the banks keep as their fee?

[A petrol station] took my details and told me to return and clear the debt when the power was back.

Then perhaps petrol station customers where you live have shown themselves more trustworthy than petrol station customers where I live.

Re: Minors, legal immigrants, and swipe fees

[tepples]

The micro cost is a cost for the bank, just like the paper is that they need to send me every month or the card with pincode that they send me when it needs replacement for free.

Where I live, many banks and other businesses charge a monthly surcharge for paper statements as opposed to electronic statements, and banks charge for more than one replacement card per year.

Re:Minors, legal immigrants, and swipe fees

[LostMyBeaver]

They are still part of the calculation system. For example, if I were to order resistors from Elfa in Sweden, each on would cost about 0.03SEK. But the smallest purchasable unit of anything is far less than that. Even then, at the grocery store today, my bill was 500.21NOK for a bag of groceries. Since I paid by card, the .21 could be charged. But you can't possibly buy anything in the store for less than a few crowns... as such, the transaction fee would certainly be covered.

Re:Minors, legal immigrants, and swipe fees

[thegarbz]

What's wrong is parents who say "I'm busy; we'll set up your bank account sometime next week" every week, and until then, use the child's lack of a bank account to keep the child in a bubble

Stupid arguement. A parent that is too busy to help a child to set up a bank account is too busy to bring up a child in a general case. Speaking of children, do you typically see young underage entrepeneurs running large businesses or more likely, the parents who are "too busy" to have children are "too busy" to give them pocket money. As for the bubble? I can't remember needing cash to play as a child. How incredibly bubbled I must have been.

When you bought that stick of gum, how much of the transaction did the banks keep as their fee?

There's a very clear answe to this: Don't give a shit. I paid for the cost of the gum as shown on the price tag (a concept foreign to Americans I know). If there was an additional cost to the business that's not my problem. However in a cashless world the additional cost to the business is greatly offset by not having to deal with cash, the accoutning and managing of which is a significant expence.

Then perhaps petrol station customers where you live have shown themselves more trustworthy than petrol station customers where I live.

Maybe, maybe not. Details were taken down and I'm sure a few people got reported to the police as a result. A large portion of the things you will do in your life will be paid for after the fact. Not every transaction is cleared at the point of purchase, so why do you suddenly have a trust issue in this one example?

Re:Minors, legal immigrants, and swipe fees

[tepples]

I paid for the cost of the gum as shown on the price tag (a concept foreign to Americans I know).

Is it permissible for a merchant to write "Plus x.xx for small orders" on each price tag, with x.xx being the swipe fee translated into whatever currency is in use? Because that's what merchants will have to add to each price tag as cashless transactions become more common.

Re:Minors, legal immigrants, and swipe fees

[thegarbz]

It is permissible for merchants to merchants to put whatever the heck they want on their price tags providing that's the price paid on the way out. It's also permissible for merchants to have a minimum order for using card. It's also permissible to charge a surcharge.

They do none of that though because there's actual cost savings in reducing the amount of cash you handle, not just in time, but also at the banks which are increasingly charging for cash deposits around here.

Re:Minors, legal immigrants, and swipe fees

[dcw3]

I have also experienced this. The world didn't implode when I couldn't pay for petrol. They took my details and told me to return and clear the debt when the power was back.

How would that have worked for someone on a road trip? I'm on the road several times a year, and w/o plans for a return. Are they going to trust someone with an out of state address to pay up?...I think it's doubtful.

Re:Minors, legal immigrants, and swipe fees

[thegarbz]

How would that have worked for someone on a road trip?

You tell me, you Americans are the ones who still fantasise about writing numbers in a little book, signing a sheet of paper, tearing out the stub and then sending things in the mail.

Re:Minors, legal immigrants, and swipe fees

[dcw3]

Us Yanks appreciate your kind words, but we'll all be please to do away with checks, thank you very much. Personally, I normally carry only credit cards, and enough cash for emergencies. The checkbook remains in my desk, and was used almost exclusively for my former lawn care guy, who couldn't take a card, and wasn't good about keeping track of when he'd been paid with cash, so I had to keep record of it, so the checks made that simple. Once he retired, I've moved on to a new company and online pymts.

But, clearly, you couldn't answer my original question, so that leaves cash or a check as the options.

Re:Minors, legal immigrants, and swipe fees

[thegarbz]

But, clearly, you couldn't answer my original question, so that leaves cash or a check as the options.

Check, bank transfer, payment services, online portals, after the fact credit transactions, it's like you've never done business with someone before. Transferring money after the fact is simple, and it is in fact how most businesses operate when not typing little numbers into a cash machine for someone standing directly in front of them, or do you think the coke man stocks up the fridge and then takes $200 in cash back to his mothership?

I didn't answer your question because I didn't think you were serious when you asked it.

Re:Minors, legal immigrants, and swipe fees

[dcw3]

it's like you've never done business with someone before

Snippy to the end.

Kinda difficult to pay for gas out of town, as my original question mentioned, and get the proprietor to allow you to go get a bank transfer. I suppose if you're lucky, they might have an ATM, or you may have a online banking on your smart phone (available, but not commonly used yet here)

I'm out.

Re:Minors, legal immigrants, and swipe fees

[thegarbz]

Kinda difficult to pay for gas out of town, as my original question mentioned, and get the proprietor to allow you to go get a bank transfer.

It's called business continuity plan. Have one.

I'm out.

Ciao.

Re:An advanced nation

[PPH]

So lets see if I understand your argument:

Yadda, yadda, tax. Mumble, tax, mumble, mumble. Something, something, tax.

How about you put your hands back in your own pockets. The paramount goal of an economy is not to feed the bureaucrats.

Re:An advanced nation

[AHuxley]

Find out why the power is not working?
Hire more engineers to work on a better design of power grid?
More big batteries, wind, solar, nuclear, hydro?
Have engineers use computers to map out what part of the grid is under constant repair and make payments to redesign and upgrade that part of the grid?
Then the banks, networks and shops will have the grid power needed to keep supporting cards and digital banking services all over Sweden.

Sweden can then enjoy the good side of no cash.
A set tax base that can extract all the funds from bank accounts every year to cover all the gov spending.
Every citizen will have to have some interaction with a bank in person to set up an account. That removes the once very easy path of using cash to pay for non citizens getting paid cash for years.
Every profession can pay tax, pay into a pension and enjoy a fair wage for the work done.
Spending habits can be tracked.
Sweden can save up for a better power grid to support its banking network.

Re:Why does this article have the DEC logo!?

[Trailer Trash]

It's 8:55PM CDT on June 11, 2018, and the DEC logo is still up there.

Re:An advanced nation

[tepples]

Find out why the power is not working?

In the most common case, they know why: severe weather or natural disaster broke an unusual number of power lines at once. It may take days, however, for crews to reconnect the lines.

Spending habits can be tracked.

Tracked by whom, and serving what legitimate interest, in the era of General Data Protection Regulation (GDPR)?

Dear BeauHD

[ArchieBunker]

Please google Digital Equipment Corporation.

Re:Why does this article have the DEC logo!?

[Darinbob]

I still see the DEC logo (hint, it's the one that says "digital").

Re:An advanced nation

[Darinbob]

It's basically a case of national security. When the electronics fail then how does society manage?

Re:An advanced nation

[b0s0z0ku]

I'm guessing you're trolling considering your signature? :D Well played.

Re:An advanced nation

[AHuxley]

The government to see if the money is getting spent legally.
To see if any gov support payment is going to one person with a photo ID.
For tax rates. So the person working is getting the right tax rate, the correct wage and that their savings and spending fit around their reported work history.
Banks also like to consider their loans and who has the ability to make loan payments. Given a digital history of every past transaction with their bank.

Re:An advanced nation

[AHuxley]

Most advanced nations can get engineers on site.
If power is such a constant problem the locals would be ready for such events going back generations. With their own supplies set aside.
Grid down thats going to take a while?
Power the food "shops" with a generators and have a bank move in staff with their own network, power and payment system for that town.
The shop has power, the bank is working. People have payments to buy food and their cards work.
All a matter of having planning in place for longer loss of power and engineers to work on the grid.
Grid power is not new to any advance nation. Sweden has been using an electrical grid for a while now. Even nuclear power is connected to the grid..
Should a town or community need more time to restore power, banks should be able to move support services in too.
As the banks would have to fully support a national digital currency under all conditions.

Re:An advanced nation

[tepples]

Should a town or community need more time to restore power, banks should be able to move support services in too.
As the banks would have to fully support a national digital currency under all conditions.

Sticking with cash as a backup is presumably cheaper for the national government than subsidizing the banks to roll trucks every time there is severe weather.

Re:An advanced nation

[AHuxley]

Not trolling. Just trying to see who is pushing to go back to cash and why.
Digital banking would be a huge win for tax collection, gov payment tracking, as a national ID system for citizenship.
Who in Sweden cant cope with a banking system that would need photo ID and a back account?
Who has the political power to make cash a currency again and why?

Re:An advanced nation

[b0s0z0ku]

Who cares? It's a good thing that there's pushback against an evil trend.

Some of us don't want to be tracked like cattle, have our spending 100% controlled, and taxed to death.

Checks and balances

[tepples]

The government to see if the money is getting spent legally.

Cash acts as a check on the government's power to shrink over time the set of things on which money can be "spent legally." With the threat of a black market eliminated, what keeps countries from adding 666% more totalitarian restrictions on what can be bought and sold?

In addition, even without electronic payment countries can restrict and have restricted what each part of a paycheck can be used for: see Cuban convertible and non-convertible pesos. That's as if the vast majority of most people's paycheck was paid in scrip (like food stamps) instead of dollars. A shift to completely electronic payment would give the government even more fine-grained (read: intrusive) control over private citizens' private lives. Why is this outcome desirable?

Re:An advanced nation

[AHuxley]

A photo ID and citizenship would all be digital. So would networking of that photo to see if that person has more than one legal account, another "real" Swedish/EU ID in use.
Instant stop to a lot of easy cash funded fraud and people get discovered with a lot of fake paperwork.
Gets more tricky to use the same face again and again all with different names and details.

Re:An advanced nation

[AHuxley]

Re "Who cares?"
My questions are not for people who have freedom and enjoy freedom.
Something made Sweden start and enjoy this cashless method of banking. Everything needed was in place and working.
A society on average that likes new tech and has fast networks. Electrical power and an advanced delivery system for goods and services.
An advanced nation and most things gov network and can support such photo ID tracking and taxation.

What did Sweden find in its collection of ID, bank accounts and the use of cash that now has it questioning its change to digital banking?
Who needs so much cash that cant be traced in such large amounts in Sweden? That has the power to make the gov revert to cash again?
Too many people cant use a bank card in 2018? Has education slipped that much?
Too many people don't want a bank to photo ID them in 2018?

Re:An advanced nation

[AHuxley]

Average as in able to use cash as they are now...
The ability to learn how to use a bank card. Most of a nations productive citizens do fit into that average.

Re:Check it

[Zontar The Mindless]

and how do merchants verify funds when accepting them?

That is an extremely recent innovation. Merchants accepted cheques for a century prior to that without any such system.

Re:Check it

[Zontar The Mindless]

Nobody in Sweden has written a cheque in at least 20 years. The banks here cannot even process them any more, basically.

Re:An advanced nation

[b0s0z0ku]

Whoever it is, they're doing the cause of privacy a service! Cheers to them!

Re:Sweden Tries To Halt Its March To Total Cashles

[Zontar The Mindless]

The headline seems perfectly sensible to me.

Re:Our Swedish cust can't pay import tax even w ca

[Zontar The Mindless]

Nobody is forced to get a credit card here. Where did you hear this nonsense?

Re:An advanced nation

[Luckyo]

You're missing the point by projecting US values on Sweden. There are major differences:

1. Government isn't the enemy of the people, nor is it seen as one. It's overwhelmingly seen as organisation for the people, by the people. This is common in Nordics because here it isn't the government that was the major oppressive force on people. It was the extremely harsh climate. Government was the means to counter this major oppressive force, and actually survive to modernity.
2. Things like tax collection are widely seen primarily as civic duty, not as a burden. That's why we have "omg your tax rate is WHAT?!?!?!" reaction from North Americans migrating here. As well as "your government fully funds WHAT?!?!?!?!" when they have to go to the hospital, take their children to daycare, or take a university class while living on their own.

This however makes the reality of not being able to handle payments while living in the rural areas a reality during things like winter storms, when it's really critical for survival that payment is possible. Reminder of the historic reasons for #1 applies here. So government has noticed that there is a genuine problem in rural areas with cashlessness, and is now acting within its primary mandate of ensuring that backup systems work regardless of how it disadvantages the bureaucracy in Stockholm.

It is how Nordic government works as a matter of principle, and the main reason why most people from other cultures have such massive hurdles comprehending just why many things they're used to "being left to their own devices" "just work" here. It's the way citizenry and state interact with one another in a region where both had to support one another against the primary common enemy that is Nordic winter.

Re:Check it

[LostMyBeaver]

What is a cheque?

Re:An advanced nation

[LostMyBeaver]

Really? Over here in Norway, the machine would just go "beep beep beep" and then make you sign a receipt instead. I think I've actually done that for a 1500NOK dinner.

I can understand why you guys are struggling. But would it really be that big of a problem in Sweden? I always imagined Sweden, Norway and Denmark were pretty much the same when it comes to trusting that people are generally honest.

Re:Solution: UBI for all in cash envelopes!

[BlueStrat]

UBI, whether a left-wing concept or a right-wing concept, is fundamentally barbaric because it treats individuals as property of the state.

There's already a name for a system in which the government is the provider/controller of life-sustaining essentials like income, food, housing, etc.

Prison.

The "cashless society" types are simply prisons without physical walls.

Strat

Re:An advanced nation

[LostMyBeaver]

Nope... in Norway at least, we can just go to a website and setup a bank account. You need a national ID number and you need the government two factor authentication to do so, but no interaction with the bank in person. In fact, we setup our kids when they were 8 and 10 years old and they didn't even need to be there. Now, for the rest of their lives, they can perform all banking transactions including taking loans for a house online.

Norway and Sweden have power grids which... well they don't really go down. Checking my power monitoring software at my house, I had one power outage 6 years ago and I remember we were warned about that because of grid upgrades. Additionally, I saw a mild brownout 10 years ago. The power grids in this part of the world pretty much just work. It's called being in a first world country.

All banking outages I'm aware of in Norway for the past 6 years (since I've been involved) have been due to negligence in failed changes during outage windows. It's been things like failed certificate renewals and such. This is very common.

The problem boils down to one simple thing. Banks tend to use more IT people and less IS people. As a result you get a whole lot more stupid people running systems.

Re:An advanced nation

[LostMyBeaver]

When the electronics fail, we have far deeper rooted problems to deal with. Money is barely the start of it.

Money has value because we trust the issuer of that money. This is why for some time we wouldn't want Iceland crowns in our pockets.

If we lose the electronics, it will be due to a failure by the issuer of that currency to do their jobs. This means that even if the paper theoretically has some value to it, that paper's value would collapse quickly because the country issuing it would no longer be able to manage their debts to other countries. As such, the market would collapse the money would be useless anyway. The paper money would only buy a few days of relief before the absolute downfall.

This is why it's nice to have things like Paypal and other services which could also collapse, but if for example the entire Norwegian economy collapsed, I always have a few hundred bucks in my Paypal account and I have some prepaid credit cards here and there as well.

People who would keep cash around to be prepared are also people who would keep alternative payment forms around. My in-laws have a few bars of silver in a safe somewhere. People who aren't prepared would be purely at the mercy of support from the national guards.

Re:Check it

[Anonymous Coward]

Actually, it is quite a bit more than just that. Due to AML regulations and other things, cheques have to be verified and this process can take several weeks. Last time I personally cashed a cheque was when I received a tax refund from the IRS in 2013. It took my bank 4 weeks to clear it and it cost me about $50. So, while yes they can process cheques, they don't want to because of all the work involved.

Re: Check it

[bn-7bc]

Allmost no one in sweedn has a cheque. Book anymore, I suspect it is due to the cost of using said cheques and the fac that any place you mght want to use them (with the posibuility of the local bank branch) probably had not seen a cheque in years and somost if not all emploees probably has little to no idea how to deal with them, another issue is that the pos probably dose not have sn easely accesable way to register a cheque payment

Re: Check it

[bn-7bc]

Holy s*** are cheques that slow or do you/the IRS youse a crappy bank, or is it a combo? And why does the irs not just simply depossit what they owe you into your a bank account of your choosing? It might be wrong for me to speculste, but might this jus be anotherbexample uf the US not realy keepinhg up with the times, in poth Sweden and borway (and my guess is the most of rest of western europe) prople get refund deposeted directly, what makes this so hard in the us? Hmm Iâ(TM)ve heard a roumer thst in the us it is the reciver of funds rather than the payer that needs to initiate a transfer, is this correct and if so why?

Re: Check it

[Zontar The Mindless]

This wasn't just any local branch, it was Nordea's main office on Sveavägen in downtown Stockholm.

Re: Minors, legal immigrants, and swipe feesyk

[bn-7bc]

Are not a thing here any more ok visa and probsbly mastercard (not thst I know as i never use them)) take a 2% margin on the exchange rate wen used abrosd other thsn thst no fees thst iI see directly, As for minors thay can get atm catd for the young from adge 13, before that i think (not thst I have checked) their parrents can buy them pre payed visa debit cards,the need for non ekecrronic cash is dissapeering faster tgan you mwy rhing, incidently if the pos goes down for any reason no ne is alliwed to process any sale what sonever not even cash omnes due to new reguukations (at least in norway, but i suspect ir is the same in sweden)

Re: Check it

[Dog-Cow]

The IRS also won't do DD for previous-year filings. I have no idea, why not, though. When I got my refund check, I used a currency exchange which deposited the amount directly in my local account. I don't know if they had to sit on the check until it cleared, but I had my money in a couple hours.

Re: An advanced nation

[Anonymous Coward]

It's not "paranoia" when their subs keep showing up in the harbour of your capital city.

Re:An advanced nation

[Zontar The Mindless]

It's AHuxley, who seems to have mistaken this article for his journal.

Re:An advanced nation

[Dog-Cow]

Ironically, you seem to have the stereotypical American education. No one is going to lose faith in a government-issued currency because weather takes out power for a week. But it will still play hell with people's lives if they cannot purchase anything for that length of time. When you live in a tiny place, you might find that getting the power back doesn't take too long. Now extend that to the entire north-east sector of the US. Things take longer when you have 1000s more km2 to cover.

Re: An advanced nation

[houghi]

Can anybody point to a severe power outage in Europe that lasted for, say, a week? The longest I heard on the news was not even a day.

Re:Check it

[Zontar The Mindless]

Something to confound the clueless with.

You can go back to watching the Kardashians now.

Re: Check it

[Zontar The Mindless]

You evidently missed my point, then, which was: This wasn't some kid fresh out of school in Luleå, it was one of the managers at the bank's largest customer-facing office in the nation's capital.

Re:DEC?

[Zontar The Mindless]

You're talking to someone who thinks that, because he's cleverly appended a number encased in parens to someone else's username, he's fooling anyone other than himself.

You'll get better results talking to your hand.

Prostitution not exactly legal in Sweden

[Frankie70]

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

The laws on prostitution in Sweden make it illegal to buy sex, but not to sell the use of one's own body for such services. Procuring and operating a brothel remain illegal.

Re:Why does this article have the DEC logo!?

[Zontar The Mindless]

Look carefully. He's not BeauHD, and he has nothing to do with running this site.

Re:An advanced nation

[Zontar The Mindless]

Let me endeavour to ameliorate your ignorance just a bit with a few fun facts about Norway:

North to south, Norway's about 1200 miles long--roughly the same distance as from NYC to Key West.

It's almost all rugged mountains and ragged coast. (Unlike the US East Coast, which is generally pretty flat going hundreds of miles inland.)

Roughly half the country lies above the Arctic Circle. (Unlike the US East Coast, which lies entirely within the temperate zone.)

When you're speaking about building and maintaining nationwide power and transport networks, those features are *quite* significant.

Re:An advanced nation

[Zontar The Mindless]

That's exactly what happened the only time I've ever encountered that situation in Sweden. They asked if I could pay in cash, and when I didn't have enough, they just pulled out one of the old card machines that takes an impression of the card, took one, filled in the price/sales tax/total, had me sign the receipt, and my purchase and I were on our merry way.

The payment showed up on my account ledger a day or two later, so I'm guessing they had little or no trouble running the transaction manually once their system came back up.

Just like they do in the US, oddly enough!

What about?

[AndyKron]

And what about people snooping in on your purchases?

Re:What about?

[thegarbz]

Just buy your tinfoil hat with bitcoins like everyone else.

Re:Check it

[Joce640k]

Merchants accepted cheques for a century prior to that without any such system.

Sure, but only because the plebs didn't have cheque books.

(or even bank accounts)

Re:An advanced nation

[Zontar The Mindless]

I suspect that you're a worthless troll.

Re:JEWS

[Zontar The Mindless]

About 10% of the population of Sweden is either foreign-born or has at least one foreign-born parent. In lots of different colours, from lots of different places.

There are probably more Russians here than non-whites.

Ursula Haverbeck is an unrepentant Nazi. Her husband was NSDAP Party Leader, and her best friend is Heinrich Himmler's daughter.

Knew a Polish fellow in the States who worked for my father and grandfather. Had a long number tattooed on one arm. He acquired it in Treblinka.

Knew another fellow, a retired US Army officer whose unit liberated Buchenwald. He told me how General Eisenhower made sure to get the press there as quickly as possible to document what they found, so no-one could say later that they were making stuff up.

There's a place in the Czech Republic that you should visit, a village called Lidice, not far from Prague. I have. It's of interest because it's not there any more--the Nazis demolished it and murdered all its inhabitants in 1942. Including the children, about 80 of them.

Any more "questions", troll-boy?

Re:Going cashless would fight crime

[Beeftopia]

When I hear law enforcement officials from a plurality of countries state this, instead of central bankers and economic pundits, I'll be more inclined to believe it's a significant factor.

Here is the actual reality: central bankers crave a cashless society so they can impose negative interest rates. That's literally it.

If you want a pretty good overview of the big topics in monetary policy (and everyone should be interested because monetary policy involves the redistribution of purchasing power - it's interested in you regardless of whether you're interested in it), here's a very good overview of the current state of the art, at an established Washington DC think tank, with the former head of the central bank, and several established high level policy makers and pundits.

*Sweeden* : not like most civilised countries

[DrYak]

Sweeden is one of the country where the nordic model of prostitution was developed (hence the "nordic" moniker).
It's not completely legal as in some other European countries (DE, CH, NL, etc.)

Although the prostitutes themselves aren't considered criminals, every one around them is (e.g.: Amnesty mentions land lord being harassed for "pimping" if one of their rentee happens to work in prostitution). As such in nordic countries, according to findings of Amnesty, prostitute tend to try to keep hidden, and they probably prefer anonymous transaction (so mainly cash). (I might suspect that any financial intermediate accepting to collaborate with prostitutes could be similarly harassed)

But in other European countries (again, like Germany, Switzerland, Netherland, etc.) it's just a legitimate job like any other with everything that entails with it (taxation, social security and welfare, ...)
Most sex workers should be easily able charge your debit/credit cards (there was a salon around making street advertisement that they've introduced even bitcoins. - Yes here around making ads for a sex salon is just as normal as advertisements for any other business, as long as the practical visuals aren't indecent).
as long as they give you the necessary VAT-receipt slip.

Re:*Sweeden* : not like most civilised countries

[davek]

> as long as they give you the necessary VAT-receipt slip.

In what universe does a hooker add value to anything?

Re: *Sweeden* : not like most civilised countries

[Type44Q]

In what universe does a hooker add value to anything?

Any universe in which you're not required to marry them.

Re: *Sweeden* : not like most civilised countries

[dcw3]

^^^ My new hero

Price difference between zero and minuscule data

[tepples]

If charges for the miniscule amount of data consumed by this are such a concern for you, then I suggest you find a more reasonable carrier.

I currently pay Comcast for 1000 GB/mo of wired Internet at home and T-Mobile USA for zero cellular data. My current cellular plan allows for 30 minutes or texts per month, with overages billed at 10 cents per. This works in many but not all places, as I get data anywhere that has a Comcast hotspot. But for use outside Comcast's Wi-Fi footprint, switching from zero to minuscule would require a substantial cost, which I've estimated at hundreds of dollars per year, to upgrade my plan. Do Swedish carriers have a smaller price difference between zero and minuscule?

Re:An advanced nation

[currently_awake]

So you cross a border and open a bank account in a more permissive country. Now you can use your (foreign) bank card in Sweden for your needs, and the government only knows a bank account number and transaction records. In theory a foreign bank could have a banking app for your phone (crypto secured), and the local government wouldn't even know the transaction happened.

The shirt on my back...

[coofercat]

I rather of like the idea that if one day I found myself in a ditch with nothing but the shirt on my back that I could actually rebuild my life. That is, wander about a bit and find some casual work on a farm, building site or some such and collect some cash* at the end of the day. Then spend said cash to get some sort of accommodation and food.

I understand the farmer could pop down the local convenience shop and get a pre-paid card for me to pay me, but realistically, they won't as it's not worth their while. Conversely I can understand that the local hostel probably gets 80-90% of its trade electronically, so if I rock up with my small notes and try to get a room for the night, they probably won't have the obvious means to deal with my cash, give me change, etc.

As at least something of a guarantee though, it would be nice to know that (say) the all banks were legally obliged to accept cash and could turn it into a pre-paid card or whatever. It doesn't seem like that creates too much of a burden on them, and means a sort of 'human right' is maintained.

* Cash needn't specifically be paper and metal money. It could be some form of tokens, or electronic money that doesn't require the recipient has anything to 'receive' it, other than an outstretched hand or cap.

Re:The shirt on my back...

[davek]

You sound like me about 20 years ago.

The space under Pont Neuf is surprisingly comfortable, if you can convince the local Romani to let you stay there.

Re:Check it

[Anonymous Coward]

Do you remember the 1980s? Pretty much everyone had checkbooks and the system worked just fine.

Re:Check it

[terrycarlino]

In the U.S. the Expedited Funds Availability Act requires that checks be cleared in three business days unless it is a new account or there is a power failure. (Yes the last one is a specific exemption.) In that case it must still be cleared in a week.

There are other exceptions to the law, but they are in the customer's favor. Cashier's checks, Postal money orders, U.S. Treasury checks or checks drawn against a Federal Reserve Bank or any local government must be cleared in a day, based on the premise that such checks will never bounce.

This law was passed specifically to prevent banks from sitting on checks in an age when computers make it possible for a bank to check with another bank anywhere in the world in just seconds. I would have thought that consumer friendly Europe would have taken care of this problem years ago.

Privacy and Freedom

[ytene]

Let's not forget, actual physical cash is essential, in a modern society, as back-stops to underpin two of the things we tell eachother we value: privacy and freedom.

Without cash, we are forced to compromise our privacy. Want to buy a birthday gift for a loved one that cannot be traced? Want to make a donation to a cause you care about, but do so anonymously? What to give something to that homeless person so they can get a hot meal? You need cash for all of these things.

Without cash, we are forced to compromise our freedom. [ And yes, I know this is a large chunk of "The Net", but it doesn't make it less true]. Want to be able to function in the face of a technological meltdown at your bank? [ Just look at what has just been happening to TSB customers in the UK recently ].

Any attempt to take away cash is an attempt to take away both privacy and freedom. It is the beginning of a slippery slope that leads to a very dark place indeed...

Re:Privacy and Freedom

[thegarbz]

Want to buy a birthday gift for a loved one that cannot be traced?

I don't understand why everyone automatically links the concept of cashless with the idea of a single joint bank account. My wife doesn't see my transactions just because I don't use cash, and you can achieve this grand feat too!

Re: An advanced nation

[terrycarlino]

Just because you're paranoid doesn't mean somebody isn't out to get you.

Re: An advanced nation

[terrycarlino]

We're all going to be F^%$ when that solar EMP hits the Earth and everything goes down. With luck some stuff might be back in a month or so, but by then we'll have lost most everyone in the cities and suburbs.

Re:Why does this article have the DEC logo!?

[kilfarsnar]

Shut up, gramps. It was fixed b4 u put the comment in.

Ah, the impetuousness of youth.

Re:Check it

[cayenne8]

What is a cheque?

I think it is something similar and related to a "check"....

I've often used a check book to write a check, but I've never heard of a cheque book before...?

I guess another one of those unique European misspellings.

;)

Re:An advanced nation

[terrycarlino]

Who and why is easy. A cash society benefits anyone who doesn't want to be tracked. That extends from everyone who wants to break the law to those who don't want the government to have absolute control over them.

The fact is though that people with bad intentions are the ones most likely to actually have the power to prevent a cashless society. Specifically people in government positions who don't want bribes to be tracked, for example. No matter how enlightened you might think a society is there will always be things that are against the law to have. Criminals who deal in these products need untraceable cash. They often will be on the other side of the bribe of government officials. Likewise there will always be corporations, companies, individuals who have bad intentions and want to escape scrutiny or consequences for their actions. They also to need untraceable cash.

Re:Check it

[dave420]

Apart from the rampant, rampant fraud the cards were brought in to mitigate, they were perfect!

Re:hmm

[gwjgwj]

Yes, they are.

Re:An advanced nation

[terrycarlino]

One of the greatest forces preventing government misuse is the commonality of culture. It is easy to trust a government made up of people who all have similar values. Monocultural societies are generally less violent, have lower crime rates and are more civil.

As Sweden becomes more multicultural I expect that they will see a great change in many things. Time will tell

Re:Solution: UBI for all in cash envelopes!

[kilfarsnar]

UBI, whether a left-wing concept or a right-wing concept, is fundamentally barbaric because it treats individuals as property of the state. I'd be more interested in a libertarian-style UBI, i.e. one that is opt-in and driven purely by charity, but that's because I put justice above the various notions of "fairness" invented by statists of both wings.

If charity were sufficient, we wouldn't be having this discussion.

Re:An advanced nation

[dave420]

How do you manage to keep safe from these imaginary brown people?? You poor snowflake!

Re:Check it

[dargaud]

Huh? How do you give someone (not a business) a large amount of money ? Say for renting a vacation place ? Even more so, how do you give a warranty cheque, you know, the kind that you can tear up at the end ?

Why the DEC logo?

[menkhaura]

Millenials these days... The "DIGITAL" logo atop the story is the logo of a corporation called DEC (Digital Equipment Corporation), who made PDPs and VAXen computers, and Alpha processors. Get off my lawn, and get your history straight!

Re:Why the DEC logo?

[Carewolf]

Millenials these days... The "DIGITAL" logo atop the story is the logo of a corporation called DEC (Digital Equipment Corporation), who made PDPs and VAXen computers, and Alpha processors. Get off my lawn, and get your history straight!

Why not? it is Qt to see the old logos again. Perhaps we could also find a use for the old Borg Bill Gates logo?

Re:Check it

[Rhipf]

It was rather difficult even in the 80s to find a place that accepted out of town checks (excluding mailed checks but those usually had to clear before items shipped).

Re:Check it

[Rhipf]

It is not related to a "check" at all. Although you could check your cheque book I suppose.

8-)

Re: Check it

[pnutjam]

Do you have kids in school? In American schools I need to write checks for everything. School lunch, spirit wear, book fees, field trip fees, yearbooks, etc.. Sometimes there is an online payment portal, but often it has additional fees to use.

amazing new technology!!!

[mad7777]

I have a great idea for a fabulous new technology! Here are some of its features:

• Transactions are unhackable. No need to worry about who stole your credit card info every time a retailer suffers a security breach.
• Transactions are not stored in any bank's database forever, to be sold to unknown third parties at any time in the future, for any purpose.
• No middleman taking a percentage of every transaction, cleverly hidden from the consumer, generating a 2-3% drain on the economy.
• Does not rely on any network or other technology - works even when the internet goes down, or even the whole electrical grid!
• Allows the user to know exactly how much money he has and how much he is spending, and never to be in debt.
• Fast as pulling a bill out of your wallet. Never wait for an overloaded network.
• And finally, it is private and anonymous. Your transactions are nobody's business but yours and your counterparty's.

I'm calling my invention cash. Can I patent it??

Re: An advanced nation

[Cro Magnon]

I could have said that in my city, until we got hit with The Great Ice Storm. My power was out a week, and I heard of people waiting 2-4 weeks for their's.

Re:An advanced nation

[Anonymous Coward]

Did you know that, at one time, the British had property tax assessed based on how many windows their homes had.

Why?

Because it was deemed too much of an invasion of privacy for assessors to have access to the interior of a home, thus they taxed the only thing they could be certain of from the outside. This is why it is common in old English homes to have windows that have been walled up.

Imagine, people that cared enough about privacy to keep assessors out of their homes rather than letting them sift through everyone's bank accounts.

Re:An advanced nation

[Luckyo]

Spin doctors will spin facts to whatever they want them to show.

I'm merely listing the facts of the matter. I don't really care about spin.

Re:An advanced nation

[Luckyo]

This goes to the time of Vikings. You're almost a millenia off.

Re:An advanced nation

[Luckyo]

Yes, in Dark Souls modded super hard mode.

Play co-op or die horribly.

Re:An advanced nation

[Luckyo]

You're speaking of political leanings of the moment.

I'm talking about long term cultural foundation of the bureaucracy.

We're talking about completely different things.

Re: Check it

[nitehawk214]

Writing a personal check is giving anyone that sees it the ability to drain your account. All you need is the account and routing number. The name on the check does not need to match.

One stolen / fake drivers license later, free money!

Re: An advanced nation

[nitehawk214]

Serious question. Does the gpdr apply to governments?

Re: Check it

[Type44Q]

"Warranty" in this case is clearly referring to a deposit.

Re:Check it

[Carewolf]

Huh? How do you give someone (not a business) a large amount of money ? Say for renting a vacation place ? Even more so, how do you give a warranty cheque, you know, the kind that you can tear up at the end ?

The same way you do it all of the civilized world, with a bank transfer. Why write cheques? Most people under 60 have ever had a checking account outside of the US, because the rest of the world is not stuck with WW2 banking technology.

Re:An advanced nation

[Raenex]

It deserves to be brushed off. It's not real. Notice how you had 4 easily accesible links for your first claim and zero for that second one?

I don't know what you're talking about. If, by "second claim", you mean, "the real "rape culture" being imported into Europe and other Western countries", that was supported by the, "4 easily accesible links". I'm responding to a post about "imaginary brown people". Were 1,500 women sexually assaulted, in public by gangs of men, during New Year's Eve in Cologne by "imaginary brown people"?

I've told you this before, you're nothing more than a standard, run of the mill racist.

Have you? How would I know? You're just a typical Anonymous Coward, talking from the shadows, making stupid arguments, and calling me "racist".

Re: An advanced nation

[tepples]

Based on this article and other results of Google Search for gdpr public sector, parts of GDPR apply to government agencies; other parts do not. The requirement for entities outside the EU that do business in the EU to hire a representative in the EU pursuant to article 27 is among those that do not apply to the public sector.

If you have backup power, your ISP might not

[tepples]

Even if your petrol station has a backup generator or a Tesla Powerwall UPS, the ISP's refrigerator box (DSLAM, etc.) might not, or its battery backup might be limited to voice service as opposed to data. I've seen times when my laptop (with its built-in UPS) and my cable modem (connected to an external UPS) stay on during a power outage, but the signal is lost.

Re:An advanced nation

[AHuxley]

AC re 'so that people can buy things without the government having the capacity to know who sold what to whom."
What are people in Sweden buying and selling in such large amounts that a government should not know about?
Where is all this cash in Sweden moving to and from AC? Out of Sweden? To other nations to do what AC? Is the cash staying in Sweden to buy what products and services in great amounts AC?

Re:Check it

[Anonymous Coward]

Most people under 60 have ever had a checking account outside of the US, because the rest of the world is not stuck with WW2 banking technology.

Translation: Most sheeple under 60 are so brainwashed as to turn every single transaction between two people into an orgy of intermediaries and middle-men, each charging a tithe on every bit of wealth changing hands along the way. Bonus points for giving various local Authoritarians full access to the history of each an every penny spent and a complete power to instantly remove all wealth from the said suckers with a click of a button.

The most amazing thing is that the slaves in question are actually proud of their idiocy and deride everyone else who does not have that nifty digital (with cool led blinkers and a touchscreen) slave collar on. Cause "convenience" at all costs ... or something.

The future is truly hopeless with all self-preservation instincts apparently successfully bred out and replaced with gleeful and self-righteous rush toward total brainless subservience to the top 0.1%

Re:An advanced nation

[LostMyBeaver]

Nope... not an issue of where I got my education. The reason things like Bitcoin gained value is because people were able to market it to the masses through crowd sourcing (or modern day mob mentality) and as people began to have faith in its inherent value, they were willing to exchange other currencies for it.

Scandinavia can not suffer a one-week power outage except in a war time catastrophe and even that would be exceptional. Unlike third-world countries like the American north-east, the power grids are highly redundant and highly distributed. It is possible for small areas to suffer outages, but in Norway and Sweden which are about as big as the entire American east, they are extremely well built.

There are occasional pressures placed on the grids which are a little humorous. For example, Brønnøysund Norway which houses the national business registry and is located in one of the most impressively difficult locations geographically on Norway's west coast can see brown outs when the ovens for metal production in Mo i Rana fire up. This is because of the absolutely immense load placed on the grid by that process and because it's very difficult to extend other segments of the grid into the area.

That said, in Norway or Sweden unless there is a war, even if it's the middle of winter in the mountains, a one week power outage would be extremely unlikely. Even in a war, it would be surprising if there was a long term power outage. In my neighborhood for example, if we suffered a long term power outage, within 100 meters of my house is enough sources of energy to begin a long term production of energy within a few days. It would take years to consume more fuel than I could produce and I'm within Oslo. And it would take very little time to get local stores up and running as well.

So, we're back to what would cause the electronics to fail. That would mean that the national clearing houses would lack the ability to process their payments and perform transactions. This would make the money limited in its scope and it would retain local value. But in countries like Sweden and Norway which are not self-sufficient or even close to it, trade is critical. If you can't pay for what you're importing, you'll need to be extended credit. If you can't process payments with your national clearing houses, you'll have to exchange alternative forms of payments. The government may have these means, but Sweden and Norway have their own currencies and therefore would be required at a national level to negotiate Euro or Dollars because their own money can't be consumed.

So if money is not able to be used, people will in fact lost faith in it.

That said, I'm internally familiar with the national clearing houses in Norway, Sweden and Denmark. There are some weaknesses which could be exploited in their systems because of IT people being idiots. But to give an example of Scandinavian thinking. I was teaching a networking fundamentals course to a major Scandinavian tier-1 telecom provider and they told me I could skip the chapter on security because no one would want to do any harm to them.

Also, in Scandinavia let me make it clear... it would take something truly and absolutely massive to make it impossible to accept electronic payments. This is not the U.S.. This is not the Third World. If there's a disaster which needs to be handled, it get's handled. People don't stand around looking stupid talking to the BBC or CNN. I think it would take a nuclear bomb or an EMP on that scale to even cause a hiccough to Scandinavia. I think that here in Norway, if there was a major incident, engineers and makers will start converging enmass on city center and quickly start planning on how to bring systems back up.

Norway has more knowledge in power production than most any other country in the world. Sweden is generally within the top three countries world wide in building telecommunication networks. Now consider the humans the US waste on things like their military and the TSA. Scandinavia

Re:An advanced nation

[LostMyBeaver]

Strange, over here, the bank simply extends credit from the machine and stores the transaction. I think if it's a large transaction, it may be necessary to call the bank and get an approval code though. As I mentioned I've never encountered it over 1500NOK

Re:An advanced nation

[bingoUV]

Ok, break your country's power grid into Geographically Norway sized countries' grids , and ensure all of them have the power reliability that of Norway. Problem solved.

Learn induction - it may or may not work for fixing your electric power grids but mathematically very powerful.

Re:Check it

[dargaud]

A bank transfer ?!? My banks block those by default. The only accounts I use are on a whitelist, and that whitelist gets changed only when I physically go to the bank to change it. A cheque is a LOT more convenient. And my accounts don't get hacked every other day by Nigerians asking for a bank transfer by phone.

Re:An advanced nation

[bingoUV]

because here it isn't the government that was the major oppressive force on people

It is true that it was so, and I have no problem believing that Nordic governments today are among the best in the world. However :

1. Past experience gives no guarantee about future

2. Most people have never run into a road accident close to their home. When they return close to home after long drives, they start "feeling" safe around their home. Which is a very false feeling - as most road accidents happen around the homes of people involved in the accident.

3. Power corrupts, and absolute power corrupts absolutely. Cashless gives an incredible power to governments - the power to almost deny the right to exist. There is no history of anyone in the history having such a power - so any conclusions about how corrupt this power will make the Nordic governments are premature.

However, in this instance, the Sweden government trying to ameliorate cashlessness problems deserves praise.

Re: An advanced nation

[houghi]

So what city or if that is too specific, state or country?

Re: An advanced nation

[Cro Magnon]

Kansas City, Mo. This was back in 2002, so admittedly such outages are rare, but they do happen.

Re:Check it

[dcw3]

Not believing the AC here. First of all, it's never taken a bank that long to clear a check. Secondly, how often do you find Americans (assuming he's claiming to be so since he mentioned the IRS) who spell it "cheques"?

I cashed a check at my credit union just two days ago, and it's already cleared.

Re: Check it

[dcw3]

What school district is this? My kid graduated nine years ago, and I was rarely ever writing checks back when she was in high school.

Re:An advanced nation

[dcw3]

Who needs cash if they are a citizen and have a legal bank account? People who cannot prove to a bank they are legally able to open a bank account?

Waiting to hear from our left wing on how this would be racist to require ID.

Re: Minors, legal immigrants, and swipe feesyk

[dcw3]

I'm not usually one to be a grammar Nazi, but goddamn, that hurt the eyes.

Re:An advanced nation

[dcw3]

Yeah, your utopian ideas might sound fine on paper, but you clearly have no real world experience in these matters.

Cashy Money

[Stubbyfingers]

Is GREAT when the network goes down.

Re:An advanced nation

[Luckyo]

Again, you're arguing from completely divergent cultural base, and attempting to jury rig conclusions. When conclusions in this case concretely show that you are wrong - government is doing the exact opposite of what you suggest it would.

In fact, Nordic model shows that #3 is opposite of truth. The more power government gets here, the less it is abused. For example, here in Finland police can search your house without a warrant for any suspicion of offence for which you can get 6 months in prison or more. It's almost never abused, because police understands that to abuse this would immediately cause backlash among populace.

It's why we have ethics standards for government bureaucrats being higher than for average citizens enshrined in law. They are expected to behave better than citizenry and be punished more harshly for illegal activity because they represent the state to the people.

Re:An advanced nation

[Luckyo]

Household has to do with Nordic culture. Here honouring your debt is considered your duty, to the point where private bankruptcy is not available. This has little to nothing to do with government.

I have no idea what you mean by "black market participation".

Immigrants, as I note above are an issue of political zeitgeist, which is a completely different topic from how state bureaucracy works.

Re: An advanced nation

[bingoUV]

Future. Guarantee.

Re:An advanced nation

[Luckyo]

Russian climate is actually very different as far as primary inhabited regions go. To make the claim you're making is to be utterly ignorant of demographic maps of the region.

Re: An advanced nation

[Luckyo]

Which is an irrelevant point, because an asteroid can hit Earth tomorrow and end all life on it within days. There are indeed no guarantees of the future.

On the other hand, existing actions most certainly impact future, and to claim otherwise would be to admit to being either severely mentally retarded, or just a dumb agenda pusher. Which considering that you tried to spin this aspect as "guaranteeing the future" is likely what you're doing.

Seriously, yours is a low quality trolling. Up your game.

Re: An advanced nation

[bingoUV]

All the doubts my post was raising were about the future. I agreed about the present anyway, and quite explicitly.

Your reply was only about the present.

It is possible that you don't understand future tense very well. So I reminded you about it.

There are indeed no guarantees of the future.

Your earlier posts do not indicate that you understand this very well. The topic is about giving powers to a government that

1. are not strictly necessary
2. are difficult to revoke
3. have never been tested in this country about future impact
4. have never been tested anywhere else about future impact

Here, by not even talking about future impact when the subject is broached betrays your lack of understanding of this subject. You indeed memorized / Googled the maxim "There are indeed no guarantees of the future"; how about showing an understanding of it in your posts ?

The reminder of "Guarantee" was for broaching the subject of probabilities in absence of guarantees, and things that affect it. In one country or another.

Re: An advanced nation

[Luckyo]

Much better. Ad hominem, combined with a lot of pointless citations of irrelevant points. Enjoyable read. Much higher quality trolling.

Shame it's still trolling.

Re: An advanced nation

[bingoUV]

If you understood the point, you could have made a constructive point instead of name calling.

Re: Check it

[pnutjam]

Hamilton Southeastern.
I generally try to avoid writing checks because the take forever to cash them, so I use cash, or cc when I can.

Re: Check it

[dcw3]

Oh, I agree, I rarely ever use checks, though I did need to for my lawn care guy (stopped mowing my own when I was working 6-7 day workweeks, and never looked back) until he retired last year.

Re:Check it

[KingBenny]

i always felt part of the middle to lower class poverty rates has always been directly connected to the attacks and neutralization of the lower black labour market ... since they cracked down on that, people simply have less money to spend on nikes and snickers ... the 'official' wage is used for saving and getting loans for large purchases but most of that off-the books money, from about EVERYONE i know and have ever known is actually daily living money which means it benefits the retail at the very least, very much indeed, so without it, its no wonder you see about only 25% of stores and cafes as you did 15 years ago, its not just the large chainstores there's just no money to spend, only money to save

Re:Check it

[Zontar The Mindless]

I would have thought that consumer friendly Europe would have taken care of this problem years ago.

The "problem" is nobody was writing many if any cheques that needed to be cleared. But I can send/receive money to/from just about anybody in Europe more or less instantly, if I know their bank and account number/tell them mine. In fact, I can make direct payments to bank accounts in most countries in a couple of minutes right in my online banking. And these things have been true for at least 15 years (since I came here).

Since it's still basically not possible to do these things in the US, I'd say it's not Europe that's needing to catch up in this regard.

Re:Check it

[Zontar The Mindless]

Australia, actually, though I'm originally from the US.

Re: Check it

[Zontar The Mindless]

As someone who shops almost daily in Swedish grocery stores, I'm here to inform you that this basically never happens.

Why would anyone need *three* cards? Most people here have one bank card, issued by the bank where their salary or pension gets deposited.

Re:Check it

[Zontar The Mindless]

I've lived in Stockholm for over ten years and I've no reason to lie about banking or anything else here, thanks very much.

Re:Check it

[Zontar The Mindless]

If your bank can't tell the difference between something that puts money *into* your account and something that removes money *from* your account, they're doing it wrong.

Re:Check it

[Zontar The Mindless]

Because you're very special and the NSA really does care about what brand of toilet paper you prefer.

Re: An advanced nation

[Luckyo]

I have in fact understood the point, that being trolling.

Re: An advanced nation

[bingoUV]

Then why don't you address the original point on which I replied ?

Re:Check it

[Zontar The Mindless]

... oligarchic USA with its NSA secret police or the Theocratic Iranian Ayatollahs with their secret police or Communist China with their secret police ...

All three of those régimes resulted from the hard work of ... revolutionaries.

Be careful what you wish for, friend.