A shame that this took the threat of war to be taken seriously, rather than the reality of disenfranchisement faced by the elderly, immigrants, the homeless and the unbanked for whom cash remains a lifeline.
It is of great convenience to governments that digital payments require registered accounts on easily-tracked systems.
Just let people buy vegetables without becoming a cell in a Borgesian spreadsheet.
I live in a country with sky high tax evasion where cashless is conveniently out of order / broken most of the time. Despite the drawbacks you highlight, I really really really wish for a cashless society, so the evaders are forced to declare EVERYTHING. The net benefit would be incredible, for everyone.
The tax service here takes money laundering quite seriously so there's been a lot of regulation added for businesses handling cash, most affecting is probably the requirements of "certified tellers" that shot up the price for many smaller businesses (some even closing down or just switching to Swish).
Not entirely sure if those rules were relaxed, but the state and banks with higher cash handling fees did have a fair share in pushing cash out.
The rules for laundering - know your customer - are ridiculous, governments don't need to turn banks in quasi-state actors to squash laundering if they really wanted to stop it.
Good on Sweden for going against the trend of ever increasing digitisation which is only going to be used against their citizens in bad ways.
> the reality of disenfranchisement faced by the elderly, immigrants, the homeless and the unbanked for whom cash remains a lifeline
On the one hand the disenfranchisement is real. On the other hand many of these people are able to learn lots of new technologies if properly incentivized. It's generally an opt-out of society that's enabled by workarounds being available.
Should we forego on convenience because we have a bunch of naysayers?
Forget about cash, try living life in de Randstad area without a smartphone and half a dozen apps setup, configured and tuned for you life. It's definitely possible, but you will be living at a different level of velocity than if you have all the tools at your disposal.
Sweden still feels very cashless in practice. My barber went back from swish to cash because of the charges for businesses but that is the only non-swish/non-card shopping I do these days and my haircut is literally the only thing I’ve paid cash for since well before covid. Even market stalls etc take swish. I never carry cash on me normally. It has made life much better. There is a small number - less in real life than on the comments on the internet to be honest - people lamenting the decline of cash but the vast vast majority completely don’t miss cash.
"An ongoing audit of the hairdressing industry that the Swedish Tax Agency is currently conducting shows that virtually all hairdressing companies audited by the authority are involved in some form of tax evasion [...] The most common tax avoidance discovered in the audits of around fifty hairdressing companies so far is undeclared income"
Might also be easier for money laundering when you can claim you're a cash-only business, and thus have no digital proof of where these 30 million in monthly car washes comes from.
Any "central payment system"(like e.g. obsession with Paypal)
is a single-point-of-failure vulnerability. Cash is decentralized
and independent of any technology failing.
people find this the hard way during electric blackouts,
that credit cards are useless without electricity, but somehow
still think "electronic payment" is worth completely switching over.
So there's no electricity. But you were prepared, you have cash. You go to the shop to buy something with cash, and their cash register doesn't work, they can't record your purchase or calculate taxes, so you cannot buy anything anyway.
It is helping a little bit, but the benefits of this kind of preparedness are overstated.
Where I live, any taxes are built-in to the sticker retail price.
In a shorter term crisis, I can absolutely imagine smaller grocery stores near me using a cashbox for takings and recording purchases with a pen and paper. Any government would be highly supportive of this as it would be essential to prevent anarchy.
This doesn't help that much because cash today is also useless without electricity. You can't go to a bank anymore to get cash from an actual person. The machines run on electricity.
Just because it wouldn’t help with a long-term crisis, there’s no need to overlook the benefit for a short-term crisis. Especially as the latter is far more likely.
To say cash today is "independent of any technology" which is what I replied to simply isn't true anymore. Read more carefully what the discussion is about please.
You are arguing something I did not discuss. The post I replied to made a general case that cash is decentralized and immune to issues like missing electricity. My entire point was only this: while true and thus having some cash is smart for short term issues (e.g. I am now traveling and took cash with me I am unlikely to use, but don't want to be stranded without money away from home), cash itself is long term not immune because today we need electricity to get the actual cash. True btw even if you could walk into a bank and ask for money because without a working computer they're not giving you any money. So overall the ship on cash is sailing, it's not really a solution anymore.
That's a fair point to make that for 90% of us we get cash from a machine that requires electricity.
It's not a fair characterisation that cash is useless without electricity because once you have it(presumably before the electricity stops) then you can still transact with it.
In Germany we like to mimic things from other western countries a lot. Especially the nordics (including Sweden) and the US. Problem, we do this with a delay of 5-10 years. Right now we are in the transformation process of becoming cashless.. Like our role model Sweden. Hmm, something feels wrong.. :-)
This isn't the worst practice, however. Wait for the early adopters to test new ideas and implement the best ones. Maybe the cashless rollout in Germany might be curbed now.
Sure, that would be good, but that's not how Germany does it. Germany looks at the early adopters, doesn't wait, but needs 5-10 years for execution and then cannot revert it anymore, because so many parties are involved implementing this.
Germany is also still waiting if 4G or Fibre internet to homes are a good thing... Or if the government should use the internet to make things easier for their citizens.
If that means businesses will accept a card without grumbling (or at all) I'm all for it. Feels strange to come from a supposedly less-developed country to Germany and having to pay cash.
It isn't mimicking as such, it's your federal government signing up to various international agreements on everything under the sun. The international agreement in question here is called "the Fourth Industrial Revolution", and you can bet they're all in on it. Just like they are with Digital ID, ID gated internet and so on.
Western governments have a tendency to try and change their publics rather than be changed by the public. They even have a name for it, "psychological nudging".
Imagine becoming a dissident in a totalitarian society where you can be cut off from all commercial transactions with the click of a button (i.e. cash has a broader purpose).
You don’t have to imagine; it has been done many times now against dissidents in the USA through the never before crossed lines of “debanking” in the partial digital currency American economy, the tyrannical cases of the EU sanctioning and effectively turning Jacques Baud and Hüseyin Doğru into 1984 style unpersons, the even more abusive and seemingly tyrants’ template in the targeting of Martin Sellner, where the EU has been targeting him personally across even non-member states in the most tyrannical way. And there are several other smaller, less prominent cases.
As you described, one click cut off from commercial transactions and in the cases of the EU sanctioning its own citizens where even helping them feed themselves or their children is an illegal act.
And most people are totally oblivious to most of these massive shifts in the fundamental assumptions of democratic society, and may even support the tyranny they presumably must believe will never be turned on them, even though no one knows more what a loathsome person a traitor is than those who the traitor has served in his betrayal.
The ICC is just a made up organization - it only has power, like any international entity, to the extent that it can utilize that power. With countries such as China, Russia, and the United States not being signatories to the ICC if the ICC were to, oh, idk, prosecute Xi Jingping for the genocide of Uighur Muslims China would also execute similar actions as the US or Israel.
And even in cases like Maduro who is a wanted criminal and I believe would be easily proven to have committed crimes against humanity, the lack of public indictment and backlash against the United States for bringing that piece of shit to justice discredits the ICC. It can’t be an organization where it applies universal human rights declarations only when Israel is involved. That’s stupid and that’s exactly why the organization is a failure.
Funny thing is, a good way of making someone hover their finger over that button is to try to deposit any significant amount of cash to your bank account. One part of the system says "Use cash!", another part says "What is this cash? How did you get it? From whom? Did you give them a receipt? Can you prove that?"
If "the electronics" break down, shops usually can't accept any form of payment at all, because that would be illegal with their on-line cash registers being offline...
Say, hypothetically, I'm a farmer with 2,000ha of barley at 3.3 tonne per ha, are you actually planning on paying $2 million in cash for 6,600 tonne to make beer?
Or are you thinking more of a "farmer" as someone selling individual artisan carrots?
But if we are going to view the government as the enemy in this context and thus cash is a way to avoid “control” it also follows that the same are espousing avoidance of paying taxes and the control government and taxes have over you as well.
It’s interesting to see folks talking about the “disadvantaged” such as immigrants (presumably illegal because legal immigrants have varying levels of bank access) who of course deserve to use cash as a moral imperative against the totalitarian government but then if someone says well I disagree with and don’t want to pay taxes (give me cash) because of that same anti-totalitarian point of view they’d be labeled all sorts of negative things like being a non-contributor or something similar.
We have to align on consistent moral claims. If you want to argue well so and so is part of the totalitarian government apparatus then all you are doing is creating an “other” who uses cash to avoid “totalitarianism” and in which case the so-called “totalitarian” apparatus is justified in its hostility toward entities which seek to destroy it.
Sorry I will decline to provide specific examples. This is common knowledge. You can read about things that the Chinese authoritarian government does, you can search in Google for things like China’s social credit score, and more.
I was debanked about 26 years ago. I had one too many issues with returned bad checks, and a report was filed with an agency called ChexSystems. For years afterwards, I was prohibited from holding a legitimate checking account anywhere in the US.
Col. Jacques Baud is living it right now. He's been cut off from his pension and bank accounts completely in Belgium and is prohibited from crossing borders.
how can you be prohibited from crossing schengen border when there is nobody to check you? he should have no problem to get to switzerland/germany border crossing
also article you link:
"It is unclear if Baud is a resident of Switzerland."
so not sure why he should be returning to switzerland
It is happening in the EU right now. Martin Sellner has denied or closed by 109 banks for his opinion that Europe should stay European.
Prophecy: some people here may argue that's a good thing, and we should differentiate between a good and bad debanking.
Edit: as expected, if you want to push for more autocracy and control, you need to find the right bogeyman. And suddenly, people claiming they are liberal and pro freedom will start supporting authoritarian policies, but "just in some cases", whether those people are terrorists, "far rights" or paedophiles.
A cursory look up of the dude very quickly turned up links with far-right terrorist and Christchurch shooter Brenton Tarrant, including receiving money from him, so I don't think it's the "opinion" that's the issue.
Replying to your edit: this is not a discussion about whether debanking or state control of the financial system is good or bad in general. I don't have a much opinion on such a complex topic (though I do hope that your principled opposition to state debanking also extends to muslims). What I replied to is your allegation of that he was debanked for his "opinions", which is categorically false. He was put on some sort of list, rightly or wrongly, because he had links with a far-right terrorist* who shot and killed dozens of people at a mosque. You omitting that fact and crying about authoritarianism when confronted leads me to think that you are not arguing in good faith.
*in the strictest definition of the word: openly subscribing (and self-describing) to far-right ideologies, and committing acts of terror
I don't have a horse in this race and didn't even know who this noname Austrian firebrand was prior to this discussion but the evidence is not exactly hard to find. By all means feel free to deny, shoot the messenger, call me names, etc. Won't change anything, people can just fact check stuff themselves
banks declined to do business with him (and/or with the movement he is associated with) not for "his opinion", but for his actions
IMHO it's obvious that there should be a limited minimum/basic account provided by the state unconditionally, and that the current practice of using AML regulations to effectively ban people from having bank cards and bank accounts goes against the spirit of due process.
it's quite farcical that private banks are used as mandatory designated sin-eaters (scapegoats) for this. they don't want to and mostly can't comment on the specifics (because SAR - suspicious activity reporting - and the various national equivalents, usually immediately triggers the requirement to play dumb, since that's the only way to ensure that the bank cannot be later dragged in front of whatever authority for not cooperating with the investigation) but everyone knows it, since it's in the fucking news.
and the actual legal actions tend to be overturned.
all of which in total end up helping these organizations (and these politicians) to farm reputation.
It is rather ironic that you excuse and rationalize the tyrannical state.
You think that “actual legal actions tend to be overturned” is an acceptable state of affairs?? Think about what you said right there? Read it again. And then again!
It’s astonishing you would say such a thing. You think you would somehow be immune from the tyrant you support?
i am using that as support for my claim that this extralegal proscription of access to financial services would likely also not survive the courts.
my position on this is simple. if the state claims there's something illegal then they should charge him/them, if not then pressuring private parties to stop exercising their freedom of assembly and association obviously goes against the spirit of civil rights and the rule of law.
(and I know the problem is convoluted, hard and obviously a realpolitik minefield, but ... again, obviously whatever the last 20 years of elected governments were/are doing did not solve the problems.)
Banks are also afraid of repercussions from US if they have customers that are on some US list, refer to case of Karim Khan, the Chief Prosecutor for the International Criminal Court (ICC)
That's the whole point, which you obviously didn't understand.
It's unfortunate that many people, including you, would support authoritarian methods and reducing of human rights like free speech, privacy, etc, as long as that is framed against "bad" people, and not "good".
Of course, that same totalitarian regime may tomorrow decide you are "bad", or at least not "good enough".
I'm not arguing about Sellner, I picked him because I knew it would provoke this kind of response.
But if he did something illegal, state should arrest him, bring him to court, and put him in jail. Legally and fine, that's why we pay taxes.
But since he is not convinced, and not jailed, harassing him because some people don't like him is pure tyranny. Approved by the people who think they are better than North Korea.
> It's unfortunate that many people, including you, would support authoritarian methods and reducing of human rights like free speech, privacy, etc, as long as that is framed against "bad" people, and not "good".
This would only be unfortunate if I believed that free speech is an absolute right, which I definitely don't. And reducing it to an authoritarian view is not going to advance this discussion.
I view society as a compromise. By living in a society I actively choose to curtail many freedoms that I would (or should) otherwise have. Some of those are imposed by the state as laws and regulations, some are imposed by societal norms. In other words, if I show up for a job interview wearing only a thong, I will not get that job.
Following your rationale, any law or regulation is tyrannical as it curtails freedom. Whether this is true or not, that is not something I am willing to settle. I would still prefer to live in a tyrannical society (by what you seem to believe is tyranny) than in a chaotic anarchy.
And part of that compromise that society enforces is limitations on speech. If a racist freak is allowed to spread his advocacy for ethinical cleansing, is it a slippery slope to believe he might succeed in his goals? Let us remember that the Final Solution of Nazi Germany was final because it was the not the original solution. Initially the idea was a mass deportation based on ethnicity. Should we allow those seeds to root again based on some misguided idea of "it will be tyrannical to not allow this bullshit to be advocated for freely"?
Perhaps he should be trialed and properly convicted for his advocacy. If the laws are not in place for it, I am fine with debanking this asshole.
How have we even arrived to a point where all payments go through Visa/Mastercard duopoly and to pay people hectically unlock, reconnect, and reinstall stuff on their smartphones?
Cashless society in Sweden is very much built around a Swish, a local service that I don't think has much to do with Visa/Mastercard as it communicates directly with your bank.
The bank still charges 2 SEK / transaction (~$0.2). This is a free handout to the banks, which already profit from keeping your money in their books. It's also a fee that affects mostly small vendors.
On the other hand, the closest equivalent in the rest of the Nordics (Denmark/Norway/Finland) is Vipps/MobilePay, and you must have a Visa or Mastercard card to use it.
You must have a debit card, but most of these cards are BankAxept cards that happens to be dual-branded with Visa or Mastercard. At least in Norway Vipps payments go over the BankAxept network (Vipps owns BankAxept which handles 80%+ of Norwegian in-store payments and an even higher proportion of Norwegian debit card payments), not over Visa or Mastercard.
Well, I envy that. It's more depressing than in the US. Trump does "she's a nasty woman!", whereas Bolsonaro senior's level is "I would never rape you because you don’t deserve it". The son is not better. And yet they have supporters.
I am not in the US. I don't pay attention to any politics anymore. I have no ability to influence anything (I don't believe voting achieves anything) and ultimately it does no good paying attention to it.
Most EU countries have widely used alternatives. In Poland you can pay with Blik in basically every card terminal and use it intead of your card at ATM, and for online payments it serves 70% of transactions.
And before Blik most people used online direct transfers for online payments, not cards anyway. It is funny how the leapfrogging works.
The only reason I need a debit card is paying subscription to American companies. I really wish they integrated better.
And to the extent that even when you pay with cards with a Visa/Mastercard logo odds are high that it will go via a national network domestically.
E.g. in Norway, BankAxept handles 80% of in-store card payments in Norway - essentially nearly all debit card payments, despite the fact most debit cards are also Visa cards. The Visa/Mastercard part typically only gets used outside of Norway.
BankAxept is also owned by the same group of banks that owns Vipps, and MobilePay that dominate the mobile payments market in Norway and Denmark as well, with smaller user bases in Sweden and Finland.
And many of these European payment providers (including Blik and Vipps/MobilePay) are moving towards being part of the European Payments Alliance to make these systems interoperable across Europe as well, which would take Visa and Mastercard out of a significantly larger proportion of European payments. Some of those cross border payments are already in place.
Yeah Poland had national electronic direct transfers system across all banks since 90s. In 1989 we had to build the banking sector from scratch after communism so we had a chance to design it right.
Quote from article: 'It all changed when Russia launched its invasion of Ukraine. Realising that reliance on an electronic payment system left Sweden vulnerable to blackouts or sabotage, the Riksbank – Sweden's central bank – urged civilians to keep 1,000 Swedish kronor (£80) per adult at home. The government issued a brochure entitled "If Crisis or War Comes" to every household, advising Swedes to use cash regularly to "strengthen preparedness".'
Netherlands recommends 70 euro per adult and 30 euro per child. There's probably some coordination going on between countries that they all land on roughly the same ammount of money.
They co-ordinate most things now, rightly or wrongly.
Either way these are small change, and thanks to the slow but persistent reduction, many places refuse to accept cash and/or don't even have the facilities to deal with it!
You should have cash in a drawer somewhere just in case you lose your card / wallet / phone. A lot of people talk about totalitarian societies and being cut off from payment at a click of a switch, but the reality is more mundane.
Cash is a good backup and is easy to give to someone else e.g. I recently moved house and my brother was driving my car (while I drove the moving van). I left £60 in cash in the cubby box, so he could refill. No need to mess around with apps/bank transfers, just leave the notes/coins in the compartment.
Being cut off from payment at a click of a switch is already happening. I can name at least 3 people off the top of my head that have been de-banked in western countries (USA, UK, Italy) simply for speaking out in favour of the "wrong" cause.
Democratic states need to constitutionally enshrine the right to banking, if they insist on being called democratic.
I used to pay attention to politics and freedom of speech issues etc. While there is a problem with democratic societies (any society really) curtailing freedom of speech. That often isn't what is happening with "debanking". Often banks have to apply different rules/laws to people that are politically exposed and/or these people are doing something shady etc.
I wouldn't believe any of the poltical grifters (left/right/whateveR) online when they said they are debanked/cancelled unless they show definitive proof that is what happened.
It seems melodramatic right until Russia blows up your bank's data center, and their digital payment system goes down for days or weeks just as you're out buying groceries.
The headline is preposterous. The article itself says less than 5 percent people used cash last year compared to 10% 2023. How is that abandoning its cashless society? The only thing is the government asking people to have roughly a $100 worth of cash at home for emergencies like total blackouts.
Yup, its nonsense, nobody to very few is going back to cash but may keep some cash at home as recommended. I've actually had $100 in my wallet for 3 years that I haven't used because I never pay with cash, sold a table to an american couple and they didn't have Swish.
Interesting because I have read that Germans traveling to Ukraine are amazed at how cashless daily life is even close to the front lines. Now Germany is a famously cash-centric society, so I am not sure what to make of that comparison.
Nevertheless it is certainly a good idea to think about fallbacks tho.
Ukraine's admin life is extremely well digitized, moreso than most developed countries. You can do pretty much anything with the Dia app. Most amazingly it's a very recent development
I think China is cashless society but not relying on internet servers. Beggars and street vendor have printed-out QR-code and no phone. You scan the code with Alipay-app and show the confirmation screen to the seller. This is not a real-time transaction. It is executed when the server is available.
Youtube-girl Qingyunji bought some water on remote mountain road using QR-on-cardboard and this is what I assume happened.
Funny that Sweden abandoned its 200-year neutrality and joined NATO in the name of security and yet security situation for Sweden has only deteriorated since then. Shows how short sighted and brainwashed Swedish politicians are.
To the extent the security situation has deteriorated, it has deteriorated because of a continuation of the same situation that made them join NATO. They'd not be in any better position without it.
Sweden had no problem remaining neutral through all the previous wars involving both sides, including those fought in Europe. This conflict is no different, yet for reasons that remain unclear, Sweden has chosen to make a dramatic departure from its longstanding policy of neutrality. Whether this turns out to have been a gigantic strategic blunder or the result of NATO pressure that Sweden simply couldn’t withstand remains to be seen.
The notion that Putin would care about neutrality is comically naive.
EDIT: crazybonkersai: Your comment below has been flagged (not by me), so I'll reply here: At no point have I suggested there is nothing strategic about Putins decisions - that is entirely a strawman. That does not mean there isn't reason for neighbours to be concerned for their safety. A full scale invasion of Finland or Sweden would've been unlikely even without NATO membership (not least given how Finland did last time), but Russia has an extensive and recent history of testing and probing the readiness of their neighbours, and not being concerned about infringing on their sovereignty if they believe it serves their other interests. The more likely scenario affecting Finland and Sweden would be if Putin decided he wanted to attempt going into the Baltic states, and saw a need to impose control over the Baltic Sea as part of the process.
The Republic of Ireland has faced similar issues because of a potential EU military. It has had pressure to join NATO for a long while, and has had rendition flights. If you watch JFK's speeches in Ireland, he hints at it several times.
A shame that this took the threat of war to be taken seriously, rather than the reality of disenfranchisement faced by the elderly, immigrants, the homeless and the unbanked for whom cash remains a lifeline.
It is of great convenience to governments that digital payments require registered accounts on easily-tracked systems.
Just let people buy vegetables without becoming a cell in a Borgesian spreadsheet.
I live in a country with sky high tax evasion where cashless is conveniently out of order / broken most of the time. Despite the drawbacks you highlight, I really really really wish for a cashless society, so the evaders are forced to declare EVERYTHING. The net benefit would be incredible, for everyone.
Still cashless in practice, and largely has been for 20+ years so its not a surprise for the elderly.
The tax service here takes money laundering quite seriously so there's been a lot of regulation added for businesses handling cash, most affecting is probably the requirements of "certified tellers" that shot up the price for many smaller businesses (some even closing down or just switching to Swish).
Not entirely sure if those rules were relaxed, but the state and banks with higher cash handling fees did have a fair share in pushing cash out.
The rules for laundering - know your customer - are ridiculous, governments don't need to turn banks in quasi-state actors to squash laundering if they really wanted to stop it.
Good on Sweden for going against the trend of ever increasing digitisation which is only going to be used against their citizens in bad ways.
> the reality of disenfranchisement faced by the elderly, immigrants, the homeless and the unbanked for whom cash remains a lifeline
On the one hand the disenfranchisement is real. On the other hand many of these people are able to learn lots of new technologies if properly incentivized. It's generally an opt-out of society that's enabled by workarounds being available.
Should we forego on convenience because we have a bunch of naysayers?
Forget about cash, try living life in de Randstad area without a smartphone and half a dozen apps setup, configured and tuned for you life. It's definitely possible, but you will be living at a different level of velocity than if you have all the tools at your disposal.
> Should we forego on convenience because we have a bunch of naysayers?
It wasn’t so convenient during the Iberian power blackout last year when all the electronic payment machines were out of action.
Cyberattacks on infrastructure are increasing.
National resilience/contingency is worth thinking about too.
Sweden still feels very cashless in practice. My barber went back from swish to cash because of the charges for businesses but that is the only non-swish/non-card shopping I do these days and my haircut is literally the only thing I’ve paid cash for since well before covid. Even market stalls etc take swish. I never carry cash on me normally. It has made life much better. There is a small number - less in real life than on the comments on the internet to be honest - people lamenting the decline of cash but the vast vast majority completely don’t miss cash.
> My barber went back from swish to cash because of the charges for businesses
A little too trusting believing that, no? Hairdressers are famous for cheating on their taxes, and cash is an excellent way to do it.
https://www.sverigesradio.se/artikel/hairdressers-evading-ta...
"An ongoing audit of the hairdressing industry that the Swedish Tax Agency is currently conducting shows that virtually all hairdressing companies audited by the authority are involved in some form of tax evasion [...] The most common tax avoidance discovered in the audits of around fifty hairdressing companies so far is undeclared income"
I am very mindful of this but my barber is one who seems truly honest. Perhaps the exception that proves the rule :)
same thing goes for taxis
Not Swedish, but where I live I only carry cash on me because the place where I speed wash my car only takes cash (probably for tax avoidance).
I don't miss cash at all, and in many ways I will be happy if I never have to carry it on me again.
Might also be easier for money laundering when you can claim you're a cash-only business, and thus have no digital proof of where these 30 million in monthly car washes comes from.
Any "central payment system"(like e.g. obsession with Paypal) is a single-point-of-failure vulnerability. Cash is decentralized and independent of any technology failing. people find this the hard way during electric blackouts, that credit cards are useless without electricity, but somehow still think "electronic payment" is worth completely switching over.
I think it is important to distinguish between major credit cards banks (visa, MasterCard etc.) and payment method like GiroPay, EFTPOS , Wero, etc.
So there's no electricity. But you were prepared, you have cash. You go to the shop to buy something with cash, and their cash register doesn't work, they can't record your purchase or calculate taxes, so you cannot buy anything anyway.
It is helping a little bit, but the benefits of this kind of preparedness are overstated.
Where I live, any taxes are built-in to the sticker retail price.
In a shorter term crisis, I can absolutely imagine smaller grocery stores near me using a cashbox for takings and recording purchases with a pen and paper. Any government would be highly supportive of this as it would be essential to prevent anarchy.
This doesn't help that much because cash today is also useless without electricity. You can't go to a bank anymore to get cash from an actual person. The machines run on electricity.
Just because it wouldn’t help with a long-term crisis, there’s no need to overlook the benefit for a short-term crisis. Especially as the latter is far more likely.
This is why you keep some cash in a safe place, like your wallet, purse or dwelling.
To say cash today is "independent of any technology" which is what I replied to simply isn't true anymore. Read more carefully what the discussion is about please.
I live in Canada where not all that long ago, Rogers took out digital payments at most places for ~48 hours.
I had cash and zero problems. Many had no cash and many problems.
You specifically mentioned banking as a problem and I mentioned a specific solution. Based in real life, not fantasy.
I am arguing your point and you are attacking me rather than making a point of your own.
You are arguing something I did not discuss. The post I replied to made a general case that cash is decentralized and immune to issues like missing electricity. My entire point was only this: while true and thus having some cash is smart for short term issues (e.g. I am now traveling and took cash with me I am unlikely to use, but don't want to be stranded without money away from home), cash itself is long term not immune because today we need electricity to get the actual cash. True btw even if you could walk into a bank and ask for money because without a working computer they're not giving you any money. So overall the ship on cash is sailing, it's not really a solution anymore.
That's a fair point to make that for 90% of us we get cash from a machine that requires electricity.
It's not a fair characterisation that cash is useless without electricity because once you have it(presumably before the electricity stops) then you can still transact with it.
In Germany we like to mimic things from other western countries a lot. Especially the nordics (including Sweden) and the US. Problem, we do this with a delay of 5-10 years. Right now we are in the transformation process of becoming cashless.. Like our role model Sweden. Hmm, something feels wrong.. :-)
This isn't the worst practice, however. Wait for the early adopters to test new ideas and implement the best ones. Maybe the cashless rollout in Germany might be curbed now.
Sure, that would be good, but that's not how Germany does it. Germany looks at the early adopters, doesn't wait, but needs 5-10 years for execution and then cannot revert it anymore, because so many parties are involved implementing this.
Germany is also still waiting if 4G or Fibre internet to homes are a good thing... Or if the government should use the internet to make things easier for their citizens.
If that means businesses will accept a card without grumbling (or at all) I'm all for it. Feels strange to come from a supposedly less-developed country to Germany and having to pay cash.
It isn't mimicking as such, it's your federal government signing up to various international agreements on everything under the sun. The international agreement in question here is called "the Fourth Industrial Revolution", and you can bet they're all in on it. Just like they are with Digital ID, ID gated internet and so on.
Western governments have a tendency to try and change their publics rather than be changed by the public. They even have a name for it, "psychological nudging".
Imagine becoming a dissident in a totalitarian society where you can be cut off from all commercial transactions with the click of a button (i.e. cash has a broader purpose).
You don’t have to imagine; it has been done many times now against dissidents in the USA through the never before crossed lines of “debanking” in the partial digital currency American economy, the tyrannical cases of the EU sanctioning and effectively turning Jacques Baud and Hüseyin Doğru into 1984 style unpersons, the even more abusive and seemingly tyrants’ template in the targeting of Martin Sellner, where the EU has been targeting him personally across even non-member states in the most tyrannical way. And there are several other smaller, less prominent cases.
As you described, one click cut off from commercial transactions and in the cases of the EU sanctioning its own citizens where even helping them feed themselves or their children is an illegal act.
And most people are totally oblivious to most of these massive shifts in the fundamental assumptions of democratic society, and may even support the tyranny they presumably must believe will never be turned on them, even though no one knows more what a loathsome person a traitor is than those who the traitor has served in his betrayal.
Isn't that what happened with International Criminal Court judge who dared to oppose Israel?
The ICC is just a made up organization - it only has power, like any international entity, to the extent that it can utilize that power. With countries such as China, Russia, and the United States not being signatories to the ICC if the ICC were to, oh, idk, prosecute Xi Jingping for the genocide of Uighur Muslims China would also execute similar actions as the US or Israel.
And even in cases like Maduro who is a wanted criminal and I believe would be easily proven to have committed crimes against humanity, the lack of public indictment and backlash against the United States for bringing that piece of shit to justice discredits the ICC. It can’t be an organization where it applies universal human rights declarations only when Israel is involved. That’s stupid and that’s exactly why the organization is a failure.
>The ICC is just a made up organization
All organisations are made up.
Of course - the point is that we don’t need to put it on a pedestal. We especially don’t need to because it has big sounding words in its name.
FYI, countries are made up too.
Sure so what is your point?
Funny thing is, a good way of making someone hover their finger over that button is to try to deposit any significant amount of cash to your bank account. One part of the system says "Use cash!", another part says "What is this cash? How did you get it? From whom? Did you give them a receipt? Can you prove that?"
If "the electronics" break down, shops usually can't accept any form of payment at all, because that would be illegal with their on-line cash registers being offline...
The farmer on the market will likely accept it.
Only if they have a cash register with a control unit that can handle offline operation. Without that, they would be committing a crime.
Say, hypothetically, I'm a farmer with 2,000ha of barley at 3.3 tonne per ha, are you actually planning on paying $2 million in cash for 6,600 tonne to make beer?
Or are you thinking more of a "farmer" as someone selling individual artisan carrots?
The first scenario is done on account & settled later, an established customer/supplier relationship would easily handle a power outage.
Right like in China.
But if we are going to view the government as the enemy in this context and thus cash is a way to avoid “control” it also follows that the same are espousing avoidance of paying taxes and the control government and taxes have over you as well.
It’s interesting to see folks talking about the “disadvantaged” such as immigrants (presumably illegal because legal immigrants have varying levels of bank access) who of course deserve to use cash as a moral imperative against the totalitarian government but then if someone says well I disagree with and don’t want to pay taxes (give me cash) because of that same anti-totalitarian point of view they’d be labeled all sorts of negative things like being a non-contributor or something similar.
We have to align on consistent moral claims. If you want to argue well so and so is part of the totalitarian government apparatus then all you are doing is creating an “other” who uses cash to avoid “totalitarianism” and in which case the so-called “totalitarian” apparatus is justified in its hostility toward entities which seek to destroy it.
Do you mind providing some specific examples of that from China? I’m just not aware of any, as I’m aware of specific cases in the USA and Europe.
Sorry I will decline to provide specific examples. This is common knowledge. You can read about things that the Chinese authoritarian government does, you can search in Google for things like China’s social credit score, and more.
I was debanked about 26 years ago. I had one too many issues with returned bad checks, and a report was filed with an agency called ChexSystems. For years afterwards, I was prohibited from holding a legitimate checking account anywhere in the US.
You don't have to imagine it.
Col. Jacques Baud is living it right now. He's been cut off from his pension and bank accounts completely in Belgium and is prohibited from crossing borders.
So he can't even return to Switzerland.
https://www.swissinfo.ch/eng/foreign-affairs/former-swiss-in...
how can you be prohibited from crossing schengen border when there is nobody to check you? he should have no problem to get to switzerland/germany border crossing
also article you link: "It is unclear if Baud is a resident of Switzerland."
so not sure why he should be returning to switzerland
yup, like what they did in Canada when you supported someone gov doesn't like
NYT: https://archive.ph/pkJYp
It is happening in the EU right now. Martin Sellner has denied or closed by 109 banks for his opinion that Europe should stay European.
Prophecy: some people here may argue that's a good thing, and we should differentiate between a good and bad debanking.
Edit: as expected, if you want to push for more autocracy and control, you need to find the right bogeyman. And suddenly, people claiming they are liberal and pro freedom will start supporting authoritarian policies, but "just in some cases", whether those people are terrorists, "far rights" or paedophiles.
A cursory look up of the dude very quickly turned up links with far-right terrorist and Christchurch shooter Brenton Tarrant, including receiving money from him, so I don't think it's the "opinion" that's the issue.
Replying to your edit: this is not a discussion about whether debanking or state control of the financial system is good or bad in general. I don't have a much opinion on such a complex topic (though I do hope that your principled opposition to state debanking also extends to muslims). What I replied to is your allegation of that he was debanked for his "opinions", which is categorically false. He was put on some sort of list, rightly or wrongly, because he had links with a far-right terrorist* who shot and killed dozens of people at a mosque. You omitting that fact and crying about authoritarianism when confronted leads me to think that you are not arguing in good faith.
*in the strictest definition of the word: openly subscribing (and self-describing) to far-right ideologies, and committing acts of terror
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https://www.parlament.gv.at/dokument/XXVI/J/3563/fnameorig_7...
https://www.spiegel.de/politik/deutschland/christchurch-atte...
I don't have a horse in this race and didn't even know who this noname Austrian firebrand was prior to this discussion but the evidence is not exactly hard to find. By all means feel free to deny, shoot the messenger, call me names, etc. Won't change anything, people can just fact check stuff themselves
banks declined to do business with him (and/or with the movement he is associated with) not for "his opinion", but for his actions
IMHO it's obvious that there should be a limited minimum/basic account provided by the state unconditionally, and that the current practice of using AML regulations to effectively ban people from having bank cards and bank accounts goes against the spirit of due process.
it's quite farcical that private banks are used as mandatory designated sin-eaters (scapegoats) for this. they don't want to and mostly can't comment on the specifics (because SAR - suspicious activity reporting - and the various national equivalents, usually immediately triggers the requirement to play dumb, since that's the only way to ensure that the bank cannot be later dragged in front of whatever authority for not cooperating with the investigation) but everyone knows it, since it's in the fucking news.
and the actual legal actions tend to be overturned.
all of which in total end up helping these organizations (and these politicians) to farm reputation.
https://www.swissinfo.ch/eng/various/entry-ban-for-austrian-...
It is rather ironic that you excuse and rationalize the tyrannical state.
You think that “actual legal actions tend to be overturned” is an acceptable state of affairs?? Think about what you said right there? Read it again. And then again!
It’s astonishing you would say such a thing. You think you would somehow be immune from the tyrant you support?
you misinterpret my comment.
i am using that as support for my claim that this extralegal proscription of access to financial services would likely also not survive the courts.
my position on this is simple. if the state claims there's something illegal then they should charge him/them, if not then pressuring private parties to stop exercising their freedom of assembly and association obviously goes against the spirit of civil rights and the rule of law.
(and I know the problem is convoluted, hard and obviously a realpolitik minefield, but ... again, obviously whatever the last 20 years of elected governments were/are doing did not solve the problems.)
Banks are also afraid of repercussions from US if they have customers that are on some US list, refer to case of Karim Khan, the Chief Prosecutor for the International Criminal Court (ICC)
> Martin Sellner has denied or closed by 109 banks
Are you really trying to point at some racist freak that advocates for ethnical cleansing via mass deportations as an example of debanking being bad?
Because you are actually convincing me of the opposite.
That's the whole point, which you obviously didn't understand.
It's unfortunate that many people, including you, would support authoritarian methods and reducing of human rights like free speech, privacy, etc, as long as that is framed against "bad" people, and not "good".
Of course, that same totalitarian regime may tomorrow decide you are "bad", or at least not "good enough".
I'm not arguing about Sellner, I picked him because I knew it would provoke this kind of response.
But if he did something illegal, state should arrest him, bring him to court, and put him in jail. Legally and fine, that's why we pay taxes.
But since he is not convinced, and not jailed, harassing him because some people don't like him is pure tyranny. Approved by the people who think they are better than North Korea.
> It's unfortunate that many people, including you, would support authoritarian methods and reducing of human rights like free speech, privacy, etc, as long as that is framed against "bad" people, and not "good".
This would only be unfortunate if I believed that free speech is an absolute right, which I definitely don't. And reducing it to an authoritarian view is not going to advance this discussion.
I view society as a compromise. By living in a society I actively choose to curtail many freedoms that I would (or should) otherwise have. Some of those are imposed by the state as laws and regulations, some are imposed by societal norms. In other words, if I show up for a job interview wearing only a thong, I will not get that job.
Following your rationale, any law or regulation is tyrannical as it curtails freedom. Whether this is true or not, that is not something I am willing to settle. I would still prefer to live in a tyrannical society (by what you seem to believe is tyranny) than in a chaotic anarchy.
And part of that compromise that society enforces is limitations on speech. If a racist freak is allowed to spread his advocacy for ethinical cleansing, is it a slippery slope to believe he might succeed in his goals? Let us remember that the Final Solution of Nazi Germany was final because it was the not the original solution. Initially the idea was a mass deportation based on ethnicity. Should we allow those seeds to root again based on some misguided idea of "it will be tyrannical to not allow this bullshit to be advocated for freely"?
Perhaps he should be trialed and properly convicted for his advocacy. If the laws are not in place for it, I am fine with debanking this asshole.
I read it and I knew it was going to be Russia.
How have we even arrived to a point where all payments go through Visa/Mastercard duopoly and to pay people hectically unlock, reconnect, and reinstall stuff on their smartphones?
Cashless society in Sweden is very much built around a Swish, a local service that I don't think has much to do with Visa/Mastercard as it communicates directly with your bank.
The bank still charges 2 SEK / transaction (~$0.2). This is a free handout to the banks, which already profit from keeping your money in their books. It's also a fee that affects mostly small vendors.
why don't vendors forward that price on customers who decide to use that payment method?
Sweden specifically has Swish, though.
Brazil has Pix. Though if Bolsonaro wins the election he'll sell the financial system to the US, even though Brazilians love Pix.
These are not fringe payment systems, either. They're really big where they are.
EU is working on something similar, and I think it's launched in a couple of countries.
On the other hand, the closest equivalent in the rest of the Nordics (Denmark/Norway/Finland) is Vipps/MobilePay, and you must have a Visa or Mastercard card to use it.
You must have a debit card, but most of these cards are BankAxept cards that happens to be dual-branded with Visa or Mastercard. At least in Norway Vipps payments go over the BankAxept network (Vipps owns BankAxept which handles 80%+ of Norwegian in-store payments and an even higher proportion of Norwegian debit card payments), not over Visa or Mastercard.
Bolsonaro can't win the election as he can't legally run again.
You do know Bolsonaro jr is in the lead and will likely win the second (aka final) round, right?
We're literally in the middle of the election Bolsonaro is winning.
I assumed you meant Senior. I haven't kept up with Brazilian politics in quite some time.
Well, I envy that. It's more depressing than in the US. Trump does "she's a nasty woman!", whereas Bolsonaro senior's level is "I would never rape you because you don’t deserve it". The son is not better. And yet they have supporters.
I am not in the US. I don't pay attention to any politics anymore. I have no ability to influence anything (I don't believe voting achieves anything) and ultimately it does no good paying attention to it.
Most EU countries have widely used alternatives. In Poland you can pay with Blik in basically every card terminal and use it intead of your card at ATM, and for online payments it serves 70% of transactions.
And before Blik most people used online direct transfers for online payments, not cards anyway. It is funny how the leapfrogging works.
The only reason I need a debit card is paying subscription to American companies. I really wish they integrated better.
And to the extent that even when you pay with cards with a Visa/Mastercard logo odds are high that it will go via a national network domestically.
E.g. in Norway, BankAxept handles 80% of in-store card payments in Norway - essentially nearly all debit card payments, despite the fact most debit cards are also Visa cards. The Visa/Mastercard part typically only gets used outside of Norway.
BankAxept is also owned by the same group of banks that owns Vipps, and MobilePay that dominate the mobile payments market in Norway and Denmark as well, with smaller user bases in Sweden and Finland.
And many of these European payment providers (including Blik and Vipps/MobilePay) are moving towards being part of the European Payments Alliance to make these systems interoperable across Europe as well, which would take Visa and Mastercard out of a significantly larger proportion of European payments. Some of those cross border payments are already in place.
Yeah Poland had national electronic direct transfers system across all banks since 90s. In 1989 we had to build the banking sector from scratch after communism so we had a chance to design it right.
But you know that the biggest advantage of paying by card is the chargeback option? BLIK doesn't have that feature, which is why it's useless to me.
Chargeback is also one of the reasons why you pay (directly or indirectly) for Visa or Mastercard.
Because dealing with cash sucks for both businesses and clients.
Only barter is viable during wartime.
Quote from article: 'It all changed when Russia launched its invasion of Ukraine. Realising that reliance on an electronic payment system left Sweden vulnerable to blackouts or sabotage, the Riksbank – Sweden's central bank – urged civilians to keep 1,000 Swedish kronor (£80) per adult at home. The government issued a brochure entitled "If Crisis or War Comes" to every household, advising Swedes to use cash regularly to "strengthen preparedness".'
there's a level of "naiveté" that's borderline criminal to have been moving on with the previous plan without considering a war could be possible
For the curious, you can download the English version here: https://www.mcf.se/sv/publikationer/om-krisen-eller-kriget-k...
Denmark has the same suggestion from the Government, although I can't remember if the amount is the same or less (also considering exchange rate)
Netherlands recommends 70 euro per adult and 30 euro per child. There's probably some coordination going on between countries that they all land on roughly the same ammount of money.
They co-ordinate most things now, rightly or wrongly.
Either way these are small change, and thanks to the slow but persistent reduction, many places refuse to accept cash and/or don't even have the facilities to deal with it!
A blessing in disguise.
You should have cash in a drawer somewhere just in case you lose your card / wallet / phone. A lot of people talk about totalitarian societies and being cut off from payment at a click of a switch, but the reality is more mundane.
Cash is a good backup and is easy to give to someone else e.g. I recently moved house and my brother was driving my car (while I drove the moving van). I left £60 in cash in the cubby box, so he could refill. No need to mess around with apps/bank transfers, just leave the notes/coins in the compartment.
Being cut off from payment at a click of a switch is already happening. I can name at least 3 people off the top of my head that have been de-banked in western countries (USA, UK, Italy) simply for speaking out in favour of the "wrong" cause.
Democratic states need to constitutionally enshrine the right to banking, if they insist on being called democratic.
I used to pay attention to politics and freedom of speech issues etc. While there is a problem with democratic societies (any society really) curtailing freedom of speech. That often isn't what is happening with "debanking". Often banks have to apply different rules/laws to people that are politically exposed and/or these people are doing something shady etc.
I wouldn't believe any of the poltical grifters (left/right/whateveR) online when they said they are debanked/cancelled unless they show definitive proof that is what happened.
Very melodramatic.
Nope, just a smart move from the government to have some preparedness in case of a crisis.
Sweden hasn't seen war in more than two hundred years, it's good to be reminded what to do just in case.
It seems melodramatic right until Russia blows up your bank's data center, and their digital payment system goes down for days or weeks just as you're out buying groceries.
The headline is preposterous. The article itself says less than 5 percent people used cash last year compared to 10% 2023. How is that abandoning its cashless society? The only thing is the government asking people to have roughly a $100 worth of cash at home for emergencies like total blackouts.
Yup, its nonsense, nobody to very few is going back to cash but may keep some cash at home as recommended. I've actually had $100 in my wallet for 3 years that I haven't used because I never pay with cash, sold a table to an american couple and they didn't have Swish.
Interesting because I have read that Germans traveling to Ukraine are amazed at how cashless daily life is even close to the front lines. Now Germany is a famously cash-centric society, so I am not sure what to make of that comparison.
Nevertheless it is certainly a good idea to think about fallbacks tho.
Ukraine's admin life is extremely well digitized, moreso than most developed countries. You can do pretty much anything with the Dia app. Most amazingly it's a very recent development
I think China is cashless society but not relying on internet servers. Beggars and street vendor have printed-out QR-code and no phone. You scan the code with Alipay-app and show the confirmation screen to the seller. This is not a real-time transaction. It is executed when the server is available.
Youtube-girl Qingyunji bought some water on remote mountain road using QR-on-cardboard and this is what I assume happened.
Funny that Sweden abandoned its 200-year neutrality and joined NATO in the name of security and yet security situation for Sweden has only deteriorated since then. Shows how short sighted and brainwashed Swedish politicians are.
To the extent the security situation has deteriorated, it has deteriorated because of a continuation of the same situation that made them join NATO. They'd not be in any better position without it.
Sweden had no problem remaining neutral through all the previous wars involving both sides, including those fought in Europe. This conflict is no different, yet for reasons that remain unclear, Sweden has chosen to make a dramatic departure from its longstanding policy of neutrality. Whether this turns out to have been a gigantic strategic blunder or the result of NATO pressure that Sweden simply couldn’t withstand remains to be seen.
The notion that Putin would care about neutrality is comically naive.
EDIT: crazybonkersai: Your comment below has been flagged (not by me), so I'll reply here: At no point have I suggested there is nothing strategic about Putins decisions - that is entirely a strawman. That does not mean there isn't reason for neighbours to be concerned for their safety. A full scale invasion of Finland or Sweden would've been unlikely even without NATO membership (not least given how Finland did last time), but Russia has an extensive and recent history of testing and probing the readiness of their neighbours, and not being concerned about infringing on their sovereignty if they believe it serves their other interests. The more likely scenario affecting Finland and Sweden would be if Putin decided he wanted to attempt going into the Baltic states, and saw a need to impose control over the Baltic Sea as part of the process.
The Republic of Ireland has faced similar issues because of a potential EU military. It has had pressure to join NATO for a long while, and has had rendition flights. If you watch JFK's speeches in Ireland, he hints at it several times.
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Don't you think it's more short sighted to look away when there is aggressive behavior happening around you