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Are There Dangers in a Cashless Society? (slate.com)
Slate asks why more businesses are refusing cash -- and investigates the downside. An anonymous reader quotes their report:
Stores are eliminating cash registers and coin rolls in pursuit of what they say is a safer, more streamlined payment process -- and one that most of their customers want to use anyway. At Dos Toros, co-founder Leo Kremer said that more than half of the shop's customers used cash when its first location opened in Manhattan in 2009. By the beginning of this year, that number had fallen to just 15 percent. At that point, the various hassles of dealing with cash -- employee training, banking fees, armored-truck pickups, and the occasional robbery -- outweighed the cost of credit card fees on those transactions. The shift wound up being more or less revenue-neutral, Kremer said, but saved a lot of time and trouble. Dos Toros' New York locations have been fully cash-free since the winter.... "After talking to the team and absorbing the flow at the register, we felt like almost everyone who used cash had a card. It just hasn't been an issue...."
But it would be hard to find anyone more gung-ho about the abolition of cash than credit card companies. Last summer, for example, Visa announced a $10,000 reward to 50 businesses that would give up cash entirely. "What concerns me about a cashless future is how much it benefits Wall Street," Stacy Mitchell, co-director of the Institute for Local Self-Reliance, wrote to me in an email. "They can charge swipe fees of two to three percent not because that's what the service actually costs, but because they have monopoly power."
Citing services like Square and Apple Pay, the article notes that 4 in 10 purchases used to involve cash, but between 2011 and 2016 it dropped to just 3 in 10 purchases (according to the San Francisco Fed). Yet the article's author also presents this counter-argument. "In Shanghai, the venture capitalist Eric Li told me a story about trying to get his morning coffee the morning after a storm had knocked out the internet on his block.
"No one could buy coffee, because no one was carrying cash."
But it would be hard to find anyone more gung-ho about the abolition of cash than credit card companies. Last summer, for example, Visa announced a $10,000 reward to 50 businesses that would give up cash entirely. "What concerns me about a cashless future is how much it benefits Wall Street," Stacy Mitchell, co-director of the Institute for Local Self-Reliance, wrote to me in an email. "They can charge swipe fees of two to three percent not because that's what the service actually costs, but because they have monopoly power."
Citing services like Square and Apple Pay, the article notes that 4 in 10 purchases used to involve cash, but between 2011 and 2016 it dropped to just 3 in 10 purchases (according to the San Francisco Fed). Yet the article's author also presents this counter-argument. "In Shanghai, the venture capitalist Eric Li told me a story about trying to get his morning coffee the morning after a storm had knocked out the internet on his block.
"No one could buy coffee, because no one was carrying cash."
There will always be something to trade if cash goes away.
During German occupation in World War II, folks around here used cigarettes as currency.
Someone gets uppity, freeze their ability to spend money. Want to know what someone is buying, where they are going, what their habits are? If they do it all with credit card, you can! Forget wall street, the prime beneficiaries are fascist governments.
Governments hate cash because they make it easy to do business they don't like without them knowing about it. The government you've got today may not be the government you've got tomorrow, so you shouldn't hand them that information.
Use cash whenever possible.
And this has actually happened.
Soon after Wikileaks released the gulf war information, including the "collateral murder" video, the credit companies froze their accounts, effectively cutting them off from donations and keeping $11 million in donations already in account.
Say what you will about Wikileaks, its activities are legal and it serves a valuable purpose in keeping certain governments in line.
At the time people kept saying "this isn't censorship, credit card companies are private companies and can choose who they do business with".
CCTV takes more work for the fucking pigs to match a name to a location. Credit card required zero work for the filth to do so.
Cash may have passed through ten sets of hands between withdrawal and deposit. A bit harder for the filth to track than credit card transactions.
I would love to see federal income tax reduced by 90% and if there are some things that still need to be done, let the local governments do it.
Look at this graph of federal government spending, and say what exactly are you going to cut? Even if you cut military spending to bare bones, you wouldn't succeed in closing the annual deficit. If you cut social security, you will be voted out of office. If you cut Medicare, you will be voted out of office. So what exactly are you planning on doing?
"First they came for the slanderers and i said nothing."
I think that you overestimate the quality of CCTV cameras of the sort typically installed in restaurants, shopping areas and other retail establishments. The typical business owner who decides to install cameras buys the cheapest piece of junk made in China cameras that he can find and then mounts them too high on the ceiling and too far away from the doors because he wants to "cover" as much area as possible with as few cameras as possible. The end result is video so grainy and poor that unless other information about a scene is available, from eye witnesses say, it's difficult or impossible to identify anyone based on the video alone. Did I also mention that these cameras really suck in low light conditions? These are the sorts of systems that you see a few hundred dollars at Costco. I suppose it's possible that bigger corporate stores invest in better cameras, but honestly that's not likely because again the video evidence is only there to corroborate other evidence. The chance that an unidentified stranger is going to be unmasked by careful analysis of the video recorded by these crappy cameras is laughable. The resolution is too low, the camera is too far away and the lighting sucks.
One exception to this rule: Casinos. These guys really do have ultra high resolution cameras that see well in low light with full coverage, telephoto zoom, years worth of recording capacity and expert analysis and advice on placement and analysis. Then again, they spent millions of dollars on their security systems whereas most other normal businesses did not because they cannot justify that level of expense.