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There's already largely cashless societies such as Sweden, where less than 2% of transactions are in cash. All these hypothesis are testable. We can do materi
by kristopolous 3y ago
There's already largely cashless societies such as Sweden, where less than 2% of transactions are in cash. All these hypothesis are testable.
We can do material analysis. Observable reality matters, right?
- LtWorf 3y agoI live in sweden. All the Coop supermarkets closed for 3 days due to a cyberattack in the USA. Maestro circuit went down for 1-2 days occasionally. 3 days with no food, if it happens in winter, are no joke.
- thaumasiotes 3y ago> 3 days with no food, if it happens in winter, are no joke. Three days with no food will have no negative consequences of any kind. It isn't even possible that you'd be harmed by going without food for such a short period. I just recovered from pneumonia; one of the symptoms was a loss of appetite. The disease was not a joke; the fact that I didn't eat for three days was meaningless. (Lack of water can cause problems much more quickly than lack of food can.)
- FpUser 3y agoVery ignorant thinking. Tell it to people who are involved in hard physical job.
- staunton 3y agoBy that standard, almost any problem is a joke. There should be some space where something can be "no joke" without being life-threatening... It's also not an argument in the context of maintaining payment systems. Who even needs to pay for anything, right? People survived just fine before there was money.
- thaumasiotes 3y agoBreaking your leg is not life-threatening (given modern medical care), but it would be fairly described as "no joke". Going without food for three days has no negative consequences. There are no effects that will last beyond your next meal. And of the effects that occur before then, none are significant. You will not be stopped from doing anything you might otherwise have liked to do. You won't even be inconvenienced in the effort. "No joke" is much stronger language than it's reasonable to use for that circumstance.
- LtWorf 3y ago> Going without food for three days has no negative consequences I can clearly tell that you've never been in Sweden during the winter.
- CYHSM 3y agoOfftopic: Any recommendation how to get fit quickly? Currently battling thru it and also have lost all appetite
- thaumasiotes 3y agoMine presented as a very high fever along with loss of appetite and unwillingness to drink. The first and last of those combined to create severe problems related to dehydration, such as when I briefly passed out in the kitchen and had an uncontrolled fall into the furniture there. So my advice tends to be focused on that problem: force yourself to drink as much as you can (I was given a target of two liters a day which proved to be less than would have been ideal, but it was about all I could do to drink that much in a day), stock water or, better, sports drinks close to your bed so that you don't have to get up before rehydrating, and ideally have some people around you who can check on you and bring you things. When I did not appear to be getting any better after three days, and a splitting headache persisted through a fairly aggressive schedule of tylenol and ibuprofen, I visited an emergency room and was given antibiotics. That's when I learned I had pneumonia. Medical advice on loss of appetite was: don't worry about it; whether you eat or not doesn't matter at all (assuming you and your appetite recover on a reasonable time frame). Back on topic, this is true in general of formerly healthy people. Lack of food will not cause any problems in the present, because you were not suffering from it in the recent past. And unless it persists a long way into the future, it also won't cause any problems in the future, because you will regain access to food and start eating again.
- brvsft 3y agoConsidering you had pneumonia, your appetite was low on your list of problems. Try not eating for three days when you're otherwise healthy, and observe what it does to your body and mind.
- konart 3y agoI've been in a situation like this three times (twice in my youth and once about a year ago). Five days without any food, only water and herbal tea. Only the first 18 hours or so are a problem (depending on your eating habits) day 3-5 are the best, because your mind is really clean and you don't feel any usual discomforts from eating late or eating something you shouldn't. You do feel light and weak of course and I'd recommed avoding any hard work but otherwise 3-5 days without food is completely fine (assuming you don't have any conditions that require a stable intake of food).
- thaumasiotes 3y ago> Try not eating for three days when you're otherwise healthy, and observe what it does to your body and mind. That's the point here. It doesn't do anything to your body and mind. Both will continue functioning at the same level as before. Three days is not a significant period of time to go without food. This is like asking what happens to your car if you drive it for an hour without refueling. Nothing will happen unless it was already running on empty. There is a very common belief that missing meals for a single-digit number of days will hurt you, but this is not based on reality. Note that, if you assume that fasting has negative effects on your body and mind, the immediate implication is that eating is more important when you're sick (and need to be functioning well), not less important. The implication is false over the short-to-medium term, and this is possible because the premise is false.
- kristopolous 3y agoYou still had ICA, normal, lidl, hemkop, city gross, willys, convenience stores, food delivery and restaurants though, right or are you using that as a shorthand for "everything"? I was in Sweden for 2 weeks in September btw. Using cash was a challenge. The biggest pain was bill splitting at restaurants. That's so much easier with cash. Lovely country, btw, recommended. California-ish prices. Get your SIM from 7-11, they're cheaper and also get the 7-day public transit pass, totally worth it.
- LtWorf 3y agoWe did, but if you don't live in a big city that might mean quite a drive to reach. > Using cash was a challenge. Uh? Where did they not accept cash? > 7-day public transit pass This doesn't exist in every city. We don't have it for example.
- OfSanguineFire 3y ago> Uh? Where did they not accept cash? When I was in Stockholm and Uppsala in 2019, all supermarkets I visited had signs posted saying that they do not accept cash. Around the same time I read an article from an American newspaper (New York Times?) about how, for example, even Swedes selling coffee at events could easily get payment terminals and no longer wanted to take cash.
- LtWorf 3y agoI live in Göteborg, all supermarkets accept cash. People selling coffee and stuff will use swish, which no tourist ever will have.
- kristopolous 3y agoFirst, I was talking more towards the general readership than you specifically. Second to respond: "Uh? Where did they not accept cash?" As a tourist I mostly went to restaurants, cafes, and museums. The grocery stores still took cash but the other places not so much. I had to make a decent effort to get rid of the remainder of what I had prior to my departure. Tourists and locals often don't have significant cross-overs, so that might be the difference in our experience. I defer to you of course on the actual experience of cashlessness. I wish you the best.
- abenga 3y agoIsn't this problem solvable by having multiple redundant systems of payment available for use? The overarching question of freedom from surveillance is much more interesting. It sucks, but it seems for most of us the tedium of using cash is much more inconvenient than value of the perceived loss of freedom & privacy.
- marginalia_nu 3y agoIt would be, but there is no incentive to solve it. If anything, the move is toward outsourcing and centralizing inventory and payment systems meaning that if the provider goes out, multiple stores, even disparate chains may be affected.
- LtWorf 3y agoI would be in favour of creating a EU system and mandate it, and shops can decide to opt in into visa and mastercard if they want. I don't see why we must pay fees to foreign companies and give them all of our data. But the average swede doesn't care about privacy at all. We have a website where you can just look up the address of everyone.