Governments really need to break the Visa and Mastercard Duopoly.
Not mentioned in this article, but certainly related, was the Canadian governments unprecedented step to freeze hundreds of bank accounts of protestors during COVID protests using their Emergencies Act. While I couldn't be more politically removed from the protestors, using a legislative power envisioned for war like conditions to personally ruin protestors financially is more than worrying.
Canada's credit cards work on Visa, MasterCard, or Amex networks. However, debit cards work on a domestic network called Interac. About half of card transactions in Canada are debit card transactions.
EDIT: In the past few years, many Canadian banks have started issuing dual-network debit cards that bear both Visa and Interac logos (sometimes MasterCard and Interac). These cards use the Interac network in Canada, but can also be used online and abroad using the second network. I just wanted to mention it for people who may be curious about the apparent shift in debit card networks.
Sounds like a mirror of the Girocard here in Germany. My bank card now has both girocard and visa on it, and works online.
Allegedly, Wero, coming from the banks of the EU, should in the next year or two, unite all the similar national systems across Europe in to one, I guess kind of like UnionPay.
Same in Norway, we've always had BankAxxept and Visa on debit cards and most credit cards have been Mastercard. BankAxxpet handles the vast majority of transactions.
The dual-network cards are Visa/Mastercard "debit" cards, which look like a credit card but sometimes don't work like one. I never had a problem with my dual-network card when physically visiting the States, but for whatever reason, some online payment systems (especially ones in Canada) have trouble with it. And vendors are clueless as to what the problem is when the debit CC number fails to go through.
Just recently I tried to pay at a parking kiosk with my dual-network card, and it repeatedly failed with a generic error. So I had to use my credit card (which I only got for this kind of situation) instead.
So often when trying to pay with a CC number, only a credit card will work. It's pretty dumb.
>some online payment systems (especially ones in Canada) have trouble with it.
it's not really anything technical that they "have trouble with", most gateways launched visa debit as an "opt-in" payment method for existing merchants, so if the merchant did not specifically enable it it never got enabled. newer merchant accounts have it enabled by default, so this should sort of work itself out over time. but yes, i don't understand why they made merchants opt in, it's pretty dumb.
EU/Finland has used debit+credit combination cards over 21 years.
20 years ago the card type caused confusion going abroad, especially US, but also some European countries that had not yet introduced the same card type. Some merchants were confused about the extra prompt about which card to use before the customer enters the pin.
But it has worked fine 99% of exotic places. I think the 3D secure caused much more trouble when shopping online when it was introduced compared to the choice of using either the debit vs credit variant online.
Fees are lower for the merchant. As a result it is less likely to see a 50c surcharge to use a card with debit. Places like convenience stores often only have debit.
Personally I use credit for anything major, for the protections.
People who have poor credit can use debit if they can’t get a credit card, or want to make a purchase above their limit.
I am not Canadian but I am irresponsible and a debit card lets me just spend in a relatively stateless fashion. Check online account, if money can spend, otherwise not. I change the card numbers pretty often so not too worried about fraud. I use PayPal for recurring payments/subscriptions.
I just want to pay for things. I'm not interested in spending money I don't have. And credit cards are obviously waiting to pounce on me if I forget to pay the balance, and charge an insane amount of interest. I don't need the added complication.
Sure, that's one way to look at it. But I set my credit card to pay off the entire balance every month so I don't worry about any of those concerns. But, I also get the benefits that most cards offer (automatic extended warranties, purchase protection, price protection, etc).
We are sleepwalking toward an absolute totalitarian panopticon in the name of convenience. The cashless thing is just a tiny part.
I had little to no sympathy with the protestors either but that definitely crossed a line, and do we really think that will only ever be used against those kinds of protestors. I’m sure it will happen at some point to indigenous people protesting an oil and gas project or something. It’s now a tool in the arsenal to crush protests.
It’s actually super easy to do but the public will hate it. Pass a law that credit card surcharges MUST be added onto the final price.
That 2% cashback you get for using your Amex isn’t due to Amex generosity. That’s literally what retailers pay.
Right now I will absolutely use my cc for anything I can. It’s literally cheaper than cash and users of cash subsidise all my purchases. The only way to fix this is to force the surcharges on the cc users so cash users aren’t subsidising the price. But good luck getting that passed as law. Everyone either doesn’t care or thinks they are getting an amazing deal from the 2% back. It’s got to the point where stores that add a cc surcharge will be called out on social media when all they are doing is preventing cash from subsidising credit cards.
That seems like it would get complicated fast. Doesn't cash have its own additional handling costs that don't apply to credit card users? I'm not sure it's as easy as saying cash users are subsidizing anyone else.
And the cost of staff pocketing some of it, and the cost times risk of it being stolen, and the psychological impact to employees of the store being worth robbing...
You forgot cash pickup and delivery costs for big stores or sending two employees to the bank with the day’s revenue (that’s the cost a lot of cash-only merchants in Germany usually don’t calculate for). Also don’t forget the counting of the day’s cash, two employees 30 minutes each.
Nope, in Australia this is now the law and it hasn't stopped the CC duopoly at all. In fact it seemed to benefit it, as small merchants who used to not accept cards for small payments now just don't care since they pass the fees on to the customer. It turns out that most people just don't care about a 1% surcharge.
edited: ignore this comment please, I totally misunderstood the comment!
> Pass a law that credit card surcharges MUST be added onto the final price.
You must be a rich person that supports monopolies! And clearly you know nothing about low margin retail businesses. If your profit margin is 5% and the credit card fees are 2.5% then you are saying profit should be split 50%/50% with Visa/Mastercard.
In New Zealand originally the contract between the credit card company and the marchandiser said that the marchandiser couldn't charge a different amount for cash - an indirect way to force retailers to soak up the credit card fees. That clause was eventually outlawed here, for good reason. Your suggestion is to write the opposite law!
The extra fees for credit cards are great. It is the customer's choice to pay them or not!
That’s exactly what I’m proposing though. Right now it’s cheaper to pay by credit card because I don’t pay the surcharge directly, it’s paid by all customers including cash customers. I have no choice but to pay by credit card. My proposal above is exactly what is required to make cash a choice.
Btw did you read some idea that the surcharge applies to all purchases? The idea of charging the credit cards a surcharge equal to the surcharge they take from the retailer is better for all except the big credit card companies. Customers can use cash without subsidising the credit card users, credit card users can still use credit cards but they won't get ahead vs cash, retailers don't have to absorb the surchage (and ultimately partially pass it on to cash customers).
Most countries should study the Brazilian system called Pix. It's faster than Interac, controlled by the central bank and very accessible to its population.
https://www.bcb.gov.br/en/financialstability/pix_en
The MOU was no more an overthrow than people proposing any policy.
IF protesters request the government set up a community oversight board for the police or build a playground, that wouldn't not be overthrow either.
I have seen the MOU linked several times, but nobody has ever made a coherent argument how it constitutes treason, overthrow, or anything else of that nature.
It is a simple list of demands from protesters, primarily that the government drop vaccine mandates and vaccine passports.
The protestors wanted the "Federal Government" to enforce their versions of laws in the MOU or they were to resign, and were prepared to take over by force if the MOU was not signed or their demands were not met. They wanted to have their own January 6 moment, but in Canada this time.
They just need to remove regulations. The reason there's a duopoly is that it's nearly impossible for a startup today to start a similar payment network.
Sounds like a great opportunity for a startup to fix!
In the country I live, there is a standard AML/KYC service that allows customers (banks, utilities) to easily perform ID verification in a few minutes.
No. We shouldn't make it easer for criminals to conduct terrorism, human trafficking, fraud etc just to make it slightly more economical for startups to compete with Visa/Mastercard.
When was the credit network used to finance terrorism? If we can't prevent terrorism then isn't it an advantage to have them move their funds on a network that can be completely traced and retroactively inspected? We'd prefer if terrorists use cash? Or we believe that if they can't use Amex it's impossible to use cash and therefore terrorism is defeated?
Also, when the startups compete with Visa/Mastercard, they provide that service to small businesses. So really, it's to make it massively more economical and easy for humans to start businesses that take credit.
Yes. It is a million times easier to catch criminals trying to physically launder large volumes of cash than it is to track money flowing through multiple companies (on/off-shore, crypto, different owners, different jurisdictions etc).
> It is a million times easier to catch criminals trying to physically launder large volumes of cash
Which is odd because all the arrests and cases I see published all catch the money laundering activity because it reached the banking system, not because an alert officer spotted large volumes of physical cash.
> Why do you think AML/KYC is such a priority ?
I honestly don't know. I can't see any evidence which suggested it needed to be made a priority generally. It looks like most of this fraud involves real estate.
To rephrase: we should make it harder for everyone to do stuff because of the tiny minority criminals we want law enforcement to catch (and whose job we need to make easier by way of crime-preempting hacks in every system criminals might use because otherwise it would be too difficult for law enforcement to do their job).
Break? It's practically enshrined in the law, seeing as any given bank can only have one credit card affiliated with it. So if I'm e.g. a normal National Bank client, I get to have a Visa card or no card at all.
I suppose online banks could change things a bit, but without that, introducing a new credit card provider is practically impossible.
> any given bank can only have one credit card affiliated with it.
Is that true? Is that an actual law, or some anticompetitive terms&conditions from Visa and Mastercard? If anything feels like the law should ban this kind of anti competitive behavior.
It doesn't appear to be true if you check websites of Canadian banks (e.g. CIBC, RBC, BMO, Scotia…) they all offer Visa and Mastercard, and Scotia even also offers Amex as well.
I feel like it would be easy to just mandate stores to have to allow for cash transactions. It seems simple to enforce too, just walk into a store and try and by something with cash. If not, report/fine.
As a Canadian, I also feel like there are so many more pressing issues right now, like housing, employment, inflation, immigration. Does this cash/cashless issue somehow affect one of these things?
> I feel like it would be easy to just mandate stores to have to allow for cash transactions.
While cards have fees, cash has overhead too: you need to go to the bank for deposits, make sure you have enough change, worry about people walking in robbing your till (thus traumatizing staff), keeping a balance (to reduce 'shrinkage' from employees).
Yes, it is "easy" to mandate it, but that is adding a 'regulatory burden' to business owners.
It's also problematic for the thousands of solo micro-businesses that operate in markets and pop-ups now (i.e. Etsy IRL). Most of them have a phone and a Square dongle, and that's it.
Asking all those one-person shops and merchants to start carrying around a float and writing out paper receipts (or having some kind of battery-powered till+printer) is a pretty big burden.
Stores have been doing this since the dawn of...stores. Or at least when currency was first invented. There are very established processes and practices for this sort of thing. It's a cost of doing business, in the same way people pay for rent etc. for their stores.
Right, but now there are more efficient systems (the aforementioned Square dongle). We usually welcome technological progress that reduces costs, why opppose it in this case? The colourful pieces of paper and specially squished lumps of metal have been obsoleted. The solution isn't to force people to keep using cash, it's to make an electronic money system that has the good properties cash has (issued and backed by the government; directly tranferable between payer and payee; mostly anonymous but theoretically traceable in case of massive theft/fraud).
TBH I don't see why the market sellers should have to pay for that. Like I said, the solution is to offer a privacy/freedom/etc-preserving electronic payment system that is a real successor to cash, but still has the low costs that make businesses want to go cashless and the convenience that makes consumers want to.
None of this solves the simple visual of "I'm running out of cash in my wallet, better slow spending down"
I could log in to my bank online and check, I could keep a mental tally of "I spent this here and that much there, I should have this much...", but both of those are decidely more work.
Furthermore, every time I switch back to cash (and my fiancee has independantly noticed), budgeting and saving gets easier. Once again, likely because of the visual and tactile nature of cash
Most damning of all, guess how well credit and debit worked during the multi-day Rogers outage a few years ago. You say "That was a once in a lifetime fuck-up", I'll say "That's not the only reason or time stores haven't been able to process cards"
I'm under 30, and I remember grocery stores around holiday time being unable to accept anything but cash.
Electronic systems aren't actually a solution here. We have a solution, it's called cash; it does not rely on what is essentially a duopoly (Visa/MC), it does not rely on asking permission from a handful of gatekeepers (for-profit banks you'd like to transfer to/from)
Credit unions aren't the solution to the latter either - you can use one, but anyone you're trying to pay is almost certainly with a bank.
Reading a number on my phone screen is a much easier way to measure how much money I have than staring into my wallet and counting up the notes and coins. It's literally a finger tap away.
You are also eliding all the positive features of electronic payments, like being theft-proof, being much quicker to pay with, and being trackable for my own benefit.
> for-profit banks
The banks run their retail banking businesses as a loss leader for their savings accounts (the "deposit franchise"). If all the banks were mutualised transaction costs would probably go up, not down. Also, doesn't exactly the same argument apply to cash? Where do you think businesses get their cash floats from? They get them from banks.
Adding regulatory burdens to voluntary transactions doesn't really seem to be in the spirit of expanding freedom to me.
There's certainly an argument to be made that the privacy benefits or the inclusionary benefits are worth the hit to people's economic freedom, but don't pretend there isn't a tradeoff here
> The right move here would be to force banks to accept them and/or as a society pay for a system where they get access to electronic money.
It's not just about forcing banks, but also about the people trusting banks and institutions, which have historically not been kind to (say) black people. Lots of folks could perhaps (e.g.) not be able to keep minimum balances that would avoid monthly service fees, then you get dinged for NSF, but of course you can pay for overdraft coverage.
It's why some suggest (government) post office accounts are a useful tool for dealing with this: profit is not a motive, so all of these hoops can hopefully be avoided.
On the trust of the institutions part, this is sadly true, there's a lot of baggage.
In this day and age I think that ship has sailed, in that it's hell to try to live without a smart phone and online payment. Missing a payment because they needed to go pay cash on friday evening and couldn't make it, phoning around to find on duty doctor on a saturday night etc. are things that will become more and more of a hurdle as vulnerable people make the move to the more beneficial online equivalents.
Too many critical things are already impractical to deal with the old ways.
Some EU countries force banks to provide minimum service to anyone with a valid identity.
The good part is these accounts have no checking service nor overdraft possibility (any action is done in real time towards the actual account balance, there's no payment coming it two days after the fact with no money to clear it, and anything that bounced is just unpaid, with no additional punishment on the bank side). The bad part is the service provided is really minimal and online banking will often not be included, and at best will be an extra fee depending on the bank.
The fact that many such businesses have become cashless suggests that the ROI of accepting cash is not worth the cost/burden. Therefore it’s not a fundamental “cost of doing business” and instead just a mechanism to reach a subset of customers that prefer cash.
I agree that mandating businesses to support cash is unnecessary regulatory burden. After all, shouldn’t it be the shopkeeper’s right to do business how they please?
They take away your freedom in one area X, and when they want to take away your freedom in another area Y you go, "it's ok, we have bigger problems like X".
Some US jurisdictions do require businesses accept cash. My company would love to stop taking cash, but because some locations are in those jurisdictions it's easier to just take it everywhere.
The comments and the article don't mention the positives of "cash"; Physical currency.
And really, it's more trouble than it's worth.
The number one benefit of going full cashless is just controlling inflation. It's MUCH easier to regulate supply if the supply isn't physical.
Also it's expensive to make and expensive to maintain for little real benefit.
And to solve the problem of vulnerable people not having economic access: Make accepting government cards required; It's the same argument for cash, but doesn't run into the difficulties of physical currency.
Piketty, T. (2014). Capital in the twenty-first century. Harvard University Press.
Not much at all. Most money has been just numbers on some ledger for a long time. And what people call money is just written promises on a piece of paper. The gold standard where those pieces of paper could be exchanged for that is also history at this point. And people physically moving lots of gold around as a means of payment of course stopped being a thing centuries ago.
Weren't the Chinese playing with two types of virtual currency? One that goes down in value quickly over time? So you get paid 'savings' and 'spending cash'.
Government cards often have complex requirements associated with them, for example what can be purchased. Some of the older processing specs only allow for a small number of purchased item classifications to be passed. Under those as long as someone purchased 20 approved items they could purchase whatever they wanted after that because the spec allowed 20 item specific segments.
> The number one benefit of going full cashless is just controlling inflation. It's MUCH easier to regulate supply if the supply isn't physical.
I don't think you appreciate the experiment you're enrolling yourself into here though. There are those who would rather not suffer negative interest rates and whatever else "for the greater good as seen fit by The Fed". Fiat currency was a great financial innovation, but it has sort of mixed results, and this is turning it up to 11.
It's kind of like saying, "It's going to be MUCH easier to catch criminals if the government has a live feed from everyone's visual cortex via microchip." And you're right, but...
I really hate paying by credit card (I don't like asking the bank for permission to spend my own money), but it's so convenient that I can't bring myself to carry cash any more.
I have a really nice small wallet that I can store a few notes in, but I need a compartment for < 5 EUR's worth of change to make it perfect.
That's literally the entire reason I pay by card nowadays, I just don't like carrying coins.
I do not have any credit cards, and I prefer to deal with cash as much as possible. When I am going out to buy something, I will take the money with me; I am OK with carrying coins. Even if anonymous payment is available, I will still prefer to deal with cash.
If I am alone, I will still pay in cash (I will make sure to take as much money with me as I need or more). If I am going with someone else (which is more common), usually they will want to pay with a credit card (although I can still pay directly with cash, e.g. in case they do not have a credit card either or if they want me to pay for my own food instead), and if they want me to pay them back then I will.
As someone who doesn't use cash much, I'm curious about what happens when you enjoy some service like a restaurant, where you don't know that they don't take cash until you're done and they are waiting for you to pay? If they only take credit cards, and all you have is cash, what then? Return your food from your stomach? Surely they'd rather take your cash than have you walk out without paying. So at the end of they day, they aren't really no-cash companies...
I hate paying by card because the bank sells all my transaction details to Oracle's pals. I go through an ATM every time I intend to spend cash.
2024 goals: disable and remove telematics and lender lo-jack units from soon-to-be paid off vehicle (I have VAG-COM and VCDS for it), find a pot shop which either accepts a pseudonym in their system or just doesn't use SaaS CRM hackable garbage like Meadows (goodbye TS/SCI if Beijing ever hacks one of those looking for glowboys to leverage) to manage sales.
My car doesn't have telematics, but I saw my sister's car's app reporting all her trips to Toyota and I'm going to disable it first thing when I get a new car.
Credit cards aren't very widespread here. When I say "credit" I mean "credit or debit", but it doesn't matter at all for this debate. If you don't exercise your right to pay cash, you'll lose it, and then it won't matter whose money it is, you won't be able to pay for anything without the bank letting you.
Some places I have visited here have a "no credit card" policy. They accept debit. Credit card transactions pay higher fees and are easier to chargeback
"No cards" is also spelled "cash only" ("Solo efectivo")
This is the main reason why card/phone payments are taking over. It isn't some grand conspiracy by banks/shadowy cabals/governments - it's just much more practical than to pay with cash. Also the fact that it costs less to accept card payments only than deal with cash for small places (coffe shops and the like).
The correct course of action here is government regulations ensuring an even playing field for payment providers, transaction fees caps, and strong privacy protections around them. Not luddite nonsense like forcing cash to be accepted everywhere.
If there's a guarantee that, within reason (by that I mean, if you're literally trafficking people or something of the like, that's not reasonable), you can spend your money, what's the issue?
What happened in Canada strongly indicates that a cashless society is as bad as it sounds. China did it and, well, we don't have to guess what happened next. Canada, a Western country with lots of "freedoms", did what it did because those truckers, etc... were a "threat" to "democracy".
I advocate for every form of payment to be conducted without restrictions: cash, deposits, debit, credit, crypto, etc... That's true freedom, not eliminate all options but credit/debit.
> Canada, a Western country with lots of "freedoms", did what it did because those truckers, etc... were a "threat" to "democracy".
Can you stop exaggerating for dramatic effect? You can agree with them all you want, but occupying public places for weeks in a highly disruptive normal is a threat, yes. Anywhere on the planet, try pulling the shit those people did (half of what they were protesting about didn't exist, and the other half was obviously misinformed nonsense fundamentally misunderstanding a pandemic; they were obviously fed, and quite publicly sponsored by, the American far-right nonsense politics), and you'll see what happens.
As members of society, we cannot condone a violent and disruptive occupation of public places for weeks on end. Even if we agree with the cause (and to be clear - nobody sane could agree with their cause).
Anarchy might be fine for you, but it isn't for most. Hell, many people can barely tolerate a regular protest, let alone a multi week aggressively disruptive one occupying a public space.
But there can't be any such guarantee, because a centralized system is too easy to take control of. If a government at some point wants to freeze your assets, you're done. With cash, at least you have some options.
The bad feeling I get from cashless is "what if some future political conflict will lower the status of my ethnicity to such a low position, so I'll be denied buying food and nobody will care?" or some similar scenario.
> The bad feeling I get from cashless is "what if some future political conflict will lower the status of my ethnicity to such a low position, so I'll be denied buying food and nobody will care?" or some similar scenario.
I don't mean to be obtuse, but how would cash solve this? If someone is bigoted against you and won't take cash from you, or marks up the price or engages in some other less obvious manipulation, and you're not in a position to rely on law enforcement, then what can you do about it?
For credit cards, my access can be disabled when the two networks are coerced into blacklisting me. For cash, the imaginary evil powers would have to convince tens of thousands of individual stores to do the same. And even then, it would be impossible to enforce, because with a cash payment, there is no record that could be checked to enforce compliance.
> For cash, the imaginary evil powers would have to convince tens of thousands of individual stores to do the same.
You seem to be implying that this is somewhat unlikely.
History is full of this exact thing happening.
Recent history.
Until the 1970s in the US it was legal, and common, for businesses to refuse to do business with a woman without a male's permission. There were only a precious few municipalities where this was not the norm.
Grocery stores until the mid-1900s did not actually sell products to women. Women would pick out and receive products and a bill would be sent to her male supervisor for his approval and payment. Even in large cities, this wasn't limited to the stereotypical geographic regions that seem to thrive on oppressing minorities (although the large coastal cities were the first to do away with it), it was very often illegal for a woman to live alone so single women would live in boarding houses with chaperones and curfews.
There seems to be a great cultural amnesia about all of this happening-- despite there being millions of people who are still alive to which it happened.
My mother joined the Women's Army Air Force in the early 1970s because she could not rent, open a bank account, use store credit, or obtain automobile insurance without her father's permission-- which he would have given but she being who she was (and still is) wouldn't ask for in a million years. Servicemember-associated organizations had no such compunction.
There is no functional difference in "opressivenessabilityivity" between cash and cards.
There is no nameless, faceless, "them" waiting to oppress you, oppression is a function of broader civil society.
> Grocery stores until the mid-1900s did not actually sell products to women. Women would pick out and receive products and a bill would be sent to her male supervisor for his approval and payment.
I find this hard to believe, how would that work in large and anonymous cities where nobody knows each other? If a woman went grocery shopping they would send the bill to where exactly, just a random address she gives them? What if she gives them fake address?
I doubt that shops would refuse for example a widow if she had money from military or inheritence, also men were often away and the women did not just starve to death.
Because it's not true. Maybe mid-1800s, but by mid-1900s women could totally use cash. Not credit cards though, 1974 is when women were allowed to get those. In other words, the exact opposite of what that comment is saying.
Up until the invention of the self-service supermarket you could not walk into a grocery store, pick out a can of Campbell's Chicken Noodle Soup, flip a dime to a cashier, and walk out with it.
The self-service grocery store did not exist until WWI.
They did not become common until some time around WWII.
They did not go extinct until the 70s.
My grandmothers could not (and did not) use cash to buy groceries because there were no cash-and-carrys near them. They needed an account, until the 60s-70s in rural Tennessee and Missouri where they lived.
Everything was paid by check. Drop off the order, pick up the order, bring home the bill, the husband sends in a check.
There was an exact and precise 0.0% chance in many parts of the United States of America of a single unwed woman getting an account at a grocery store without a male cosigner.
So the alternative is, what, you can spend whatever is left in your wallet, but the rest of your money is still frozen? The difference from maintaing physical cash seems very marginal. Or are you suggesting we all pull all our money out of bank accounts and store it in cash under the bed, just in case one day we get unpersoned? The costs of doing that vastly outweight the expected benefits.
This is a strawman argument: You've setup a scenario where cash isn't very beneficial, and then show why it's not beneficial.
Before the Equal Credit Opportunity Act, women could only use cash. Sure it would have been way cooler if they weren't discriminated against, but many women still only survived because of the cash option, and none of them would have said "Well since I might run out of money anyway go ahead and make it impossible for me to use what I have".
It's not a straw man, it's literally the scenario the guy I was replying to was talking about ("if your accounts are frozen"). If you had a bank account like a normal person, and then you are surprised by your account being frozen, you are going to be almost as screwed whether physical cash exists or not, because you won't be keeping that much cash on hand anyway.
Cash was the normal way to pay for things before the ECOA so I don't think it's comparable to today, where nobody uses cash anymore. You used to be able to be paid in cash, or in a cheque you could cash at the grocery store. Now you probably need to have your pay deposited into a bank account, which you may only be able to access electronically, so if your account is frozen you are far more screwed.
The risk is at the point of entry of your money, not the point of exit.
Find me an employer who will happily pay you cash directly in 2024. Find me a way to get your finances in order without a bank that then has to respect laws surrounding transactions.
The fact we can't obfuscate cash purchases does not reduce the ability of your government to deny you access to your money in a bank.
"They take away your freedom in one area X, and when they want to take away your freedom in another area Y you go, it's ok, we have bigger problems like X".
Japan has tap payments for public transit and restaurants for decades, while simultaneously being very cash driven. Will be interesting to see how the cash meta evolves with different countries and cultures.
An interesting facet of this that makes me feel somewhat more charitable to cashless payments in that context is that it's very easy to perform cashless payments in Japan pseudoanonymously, in that you can buy an IC card from a vending machine, load it with cash, and use it for payments all without explicit links to your KYC'd banking identity. Sure, if you attracted individualized security state attention they could probably pull security camera footage and figure it out, but that approach doesn't scale into turnkey tyrrany; sort of how like $5 wrench cryptanalysis doesn't prevent widespread strong cryptography fundamentally altering the envelope of what kinds of automated, at-scale privacy abuses are possible.
This is a fairly stark contrast with the West, where pseudoanonymous cashless payments basically don't exist. The closest thing (stuff like xmr aside, where the chance you can use it to buy a coffee is very low) are prepaid visa gift cards, but the UX on these is terrible for a lot of reasons and so aren't anywhere close to the practical usability of cash-charged IC cards in Japan.
Here in Canada, Metro Vancouver implemented a tap payment system with gates for its transit system about ten years ago.
They started by generating outrage about fare evaders (the previous system was an "honor" based proof of payment, at least for the train). They claimed to be losing ~3 million $CAD yearly to fare evasion.
Then they made a plan to retrofit all the train stations with fare gates, and get new machines for the buses. The cost of this work was ~100 million $CAD.
I thought, well that will take some time to amortize. Then I learned that the maintenance cost of all this extra crap in the stations was on the order of $3 million/year. Clearly it was never about fare evasion.
You can buy a card with cash, and charge it with cash at machines in the stations, but there are strong incentives to link your account with a credit card.
The truth was confirmed several years later when I read an article in a local paper quoting someone at Translink who said their policy is to share trip data with police on request, without a warrant.
53 stations with a couple dozen robotic fare gates each sounds like about $3mil/yr to me.
If they really did it to stop fare evasion, it was ideological, not pragmatic. They spent pounds to save pennies.
Mass surveillance, on the other hand, is a motivation that makes sense, just not something you can really sell to the public when looking to spend a hundred million of taxpayer money.
On the other other hand, the kind of government that attempts to stamp out petty crime, at any cost, is the same sort of government that tends to want to surveil everyone.
They were teeing up introducing a "road pricing" scheme that would have also happened to record every vehicle trip on the local highways when their government was defeated.
Cash is progressively disappearing, in particular as PayPay has gotten foothold.
The main gaps that were filled:
- interpersonal payment is now easy. 10 people eat together, splitting the bill is now sharing a QR code and 30s of operation for each, no exchange of contact, nothing finicky, and it can also be done later (no tap needed)
- phone networks are fast enough to make the transactions near instaneous. We're talking 3s at most in a sheet mobile environment. 1s with a wired POS.
- phone are secure enough, being already the central part of our electronic life.
All in all, cash will always be used somewhere, but even grandma's vegetable stands are starting to accept QR codes.
Japan’s government is also pushing towards cashless society right now. Younger generations are accepting it as well. My friends at PayPay and similar companies are pretty set on increasing their userbases YoY.
I live in Canada, and honestly, nobody in any of my circles carry cash. The only use cases I can think of ate casinos and drugs. All the comments about “privacy, freedom and etc.” sounds like noise, and highly unlikely for younger people to even care about.
Big ones, yeah, I bet. Venmo’s huge for the “retail” side. See John Mulaney’s bit in his recent post-rehab standup about (paraphrasing) being confused what all these straight-laced people are doing on his drug payment platform.
Nearly all of my cash use, by dollar count, is paying service folks (home repair stuff, cleaners) who prefer payment in cash to evade taxes. I very rarely use cash for any other reason, and it’s always tiny amounts when I do.
Yeah I mean I accommodate them when I can for a reason. The ones who want that don’t have real payroll or anything like that going on, so are never exactly rolling in dough.
XMR is probably your best bet for privacy digital currency.
That said XMR isn't stable like the USD is, but it also didn't have infinite printability as once market cap is reached then only tail emmisions are rewarded for mining....iirc that a set value of 20.
XMR is the best for privacy, is resistant to asic mining and GPU mining, and is a time proven crypto. That said if your just using it so you can gain money from price fluctuations and not because of the fiction the coin provides then your never going to realise it's true value.
> I wish there was a digital anonymous replacement.
There are, for instance GNU Taler: <https://taler.net/>. But what you want is an implemented system of digital anonymous cash. And that’s a whole other kettle of fish, since basically everybody actually in a position to implement such a system is incentivized to do it in a way which minimizes privacy.
Freedom is usually the opposite of cumbersome and annoying. And current payment tech does not rob us of freedom.
I can wire money to virtually anyone in the EU at no cost. I can pay any merchant in the world with a credit card, in any currency, with minimal spread. It's both convenient and greatly expands my options for engaging in commerce.
Cashless system operated by regulated banks certainly comes with a risk of being used as a tool of repression (like it was in Canada during the truckers protests) but as of now it's freeing (as in speech).
You will find out how easily you can wire money to someone in the EU if you decide to hold political opinions that are not in line with the ruling elite.
The truckers in Canada for sure found out how "free" the digits of their bank accounts were.
Their actions were Charter-protected freedom of expression and the freeze was a Charter-breaching unreasonable seizure.
>Justice Mosley ruled that “the decision to issue the Proclamation does not bear the hallmarks of reasonableness – justification, transparency and intelligibility – and was not justified in relation to the relevant factual and legal constraints that were required to be taken into consideration” [0]
I wasn't commenting on the legality of the asset freeze. I was responding to OP's attributing it to "if you decide to hold political opinions that are not in line with the ruling elite." As far as I'm aware, they did not survey the population and then take action against people with the wrong opinions.
A distinction without a difference. The ruling elite doesn't have to survey the population. They sandbagged the population into alignment with their own opinions, then strong-armed holdouts and specifically targeted them along every possible vector (social, legal, economic, etc.) for their adherence to wrong beliefs. I shudder at how much worse this could get in a fully cashless society.
So, everyone in the population of Canada who disagreed with the ruling elite's opinions was personally "strong-armed" and "targeted"? Or only a subset of them? If it was just a subset, could there have been anything that distinguished much of that subset apart from the rest of the people who weren't "targeted?" Maybe some event they took part in or helped?
Yes, everyone in all of Canada who disagreed with the ruling elite's opinions at the time saw themselves strong-armed and targeted by both legislation and vitriol from public officials. The greater the perceived threat to destabilizing belief in the elite opinion from any subset, the more severe the measures taken - as we saw, including unreasonable wartime actions to force compliance.
Well, since I don't live in Canada, I'm just going to have to hit the eject button and trust you that every single person in the country holding a particular political belief, likely tens of millions, were personally and directly targeted by the government with enforcement action, as ridiculous as that sounds.
In any country people are personally and directly affected by subjugation measures directed at their ingroup, I don't think that's particularly controversial.
If you give the government the power to block financing to anyone they declare a terrorist then they'll just declare anyone who opposes them to be terrorists.
Empirical evidence can suggest anything you want it to if you choose to ignore empirical evidence that's inconvenient to you.
The Canadian trucker protesters were not "terrorists" by any stretch of imagination, but sure let's assume otherwise because it helps us sleep better at night, right?
It has come to the point that I switched to a wallet that I can put 1 or 2 bills in at most before it becomes cumbersome. I just keep a $20 in it for the once or twice a month I don’t just use card.
I get the privacy issues, but in this particular case the convenience far outweighs it. I honestly sometimes get annoyed when I go to a cash only place and often just don’t go.
Money-less society with security to stop hoarders looting stores.
All digital security ends up security through obscurity; encrypt with noise the data along some algorithmic path to obscure what the data is, divide up go has admin and tier their access to obscure who is needed for what.
There still needs to be someone with full control over the AWS account or whatever to grant further permission. There’s no perfect system security and anonymity if someone out there can drill in and use admin/keys to unwrap things.
That’s why governments like CEOs and root nodes on such groups; keeps surface area for getting what they want small.
Cashless is convenient but effectively amounts to automatic inflation. Not just from the merchant fees but making it easier to slowly raise prices/fees/tip %. Plus whatever % of the population is dumb enough to revolve credit and get buried in debt.
There's fees for handling cash as well. They're just less obvious.
In the old days, those armoured vans used to have to go to stores every single day at peak times (Xmas, etc.). Plus you've got to pay for bags of change to be delivered. You've got to pay for a safe, insurance for your safe, plus a hard limit that safe is allowed to hold. If you're going to go over you need to request an on demand pickup from the cash people. You've got to have people in store collecting the cash, accounting it, trying to catch embezzlement, the cost of embezzlement, etc.
All those costs were added on to the cost of goods.
I used to work in the industry in the 90s, can't remember what any of that cost now, but I reckon it's comparable to the card merchant fees.
Yes, the present duopoly is taking the piss with their fees, but accepting cash is also expensive.
I worked in a smaller, independent guitar store for a few years in the 90s. We received enough cash and checks that once a day someone would have to walk over to the “night deposit” slot and toss a bag in. Our cash handling cost was equal to my salary for the 30 minutes it took me to make that walk, plus the risk that I would get mugged ($0 lost over a few years.) Often the owner would rake out enough to cover his spending needs, so there was an additional (slightly illegal) tax benefit to using cash. Armored cars and pickup only comes into play when you’re a big store doing loads of transactions, and then economies of scale probably keep the costs modest as a percentage.
Credit cards, on the other hand, can easily run you 30% on a $5 transaction here in the US, due to the unjustifiable fixed + percentage structure. Maybe it’s a little better in Canada.
Your bosses' bank would have been charging him a cash processing fee. Easy to forget!
A quick Google and found Danske UK's small business fees, 80p per £100 (or 0.8%). Without all the other costs associated that I mentioned that your boss took a lot of risks not handling. Obviously stores that 90% of transactions actually happen in can't take those risks.
And that 30% for a $5 is totally made up, that's not the fees charged.
I'm not from the US or Canada, but UK, so the first Google result is Square's fee that say 1.4% + 25p, so on £5 that's 32p, or about 6%.
I checked my local US bank (Bank of America business account) and for business accounts the processing fee appears to be 0.3% with the first $5,000-20,000 per statement period exempted. That is approximately 1/20th of the card fee for that 5 pound transaction you gave.
I think it’s easy to treat a factor of 20x as just another number. But at a certain point quantity is its own quality: the difference between 6% and 0.3% is so large that the second one might as well be zero.
> Credit cards, on the other hand, can easily run you 30% on a $5 transaction here in the US, due to the unjustifiable fixed + percentage structure. Maybe it’s a little better in Canada.
Are you sure it's 30%? Credit card fees are usually in the order of 3% + minimum fixed charge. Stripe is 2.9% + 30 cents.
There are some extra charges for manually entered cards, international cards, etc. but even if you max that out it's still only 11.2%, not 30%.
You’re absolutely right. I was thinking of smaller transactions. It’s “only” 11% for a cup of coffee. For comparison in my high sales tax city the tax rate is 6%, and that funds a huge fraction of our municipal infrastructure
Interestingly, in Australia there is a problem because the demand for cash has dropped so much that the remaining cash-transport monopoly is insolvent. The major banks and retailers just bailed it out: https://www.theaustralian.com.au/breaking-news/armaguard-to-...
cashless has higher tx costs, charged by the payment network. This puts upward pressure on prices, even for cash.
it is also much easier to spend $250.99 on a credit card than to count out 13 sheets of paper and 9 coins. People went from spending the cash in their pocket to cash in their bank account, increasing demand for products.
> People went from spending the cash in their pocket to cash in their bank account
No they didn't. In the olden days, you would get your paycheque, cash the whole thing, and then spend that money until next paycheque. That's no different to having your pay go directly to your account, and then spending directly out of your account by card.
>People went from spending the cash in their pocket to cash in their bank account, increasing demand for products.
I hate how so many just don't have the game theory of commerce in the forefront of their minds. It's always "Boy this stuff sure is super convenient," and "nevermind those crusty privacy kooks over there!"
A cashless society with NFC tap to pay or QR code-based mobile payments is much better. No need to carry around a heavy and bloated wallet full of physical coins, no need to touch dirty bank notes that have germs and even drugs on them [1]. As a child, my parents always made me wash my hands with soap whenever I touch money, since you never know where the note has been. It just seems so unsanitary to handle physical cash, especially in places like restaurants that deals with serving food to customers.
Somehow I don't agree that it is a good idea to succumb the entire population to a known disease vector and encumber society with the massive administration and physical costs of dealing with cash, just to spite a bogeyman that's "stealing your independence".
How will cash help against capital controls, exactly? Unless you are poor, you never have more than a tiny fraction of your wealth in cash anyway. So when capital controls are declared, you will still be screwed.
Well, cash helped me, because I had a good enough fraction of my wealth in cash to not be affected. It's not like things are just fine one day, and bam!, capital controls the next.
And panopticon surveillance and control over every move you make in life by corporations, small businesses, and governments. Want to tip the cashier or give money to the homeless window washer? No.
Also, AI social credit and precrime are just a nightmare away.
These are worst-case scenarios worth considering, but IMO an obvious one not being discussed enough: credit cards are great if you're wealthy, horrible if you're poor.
Between fees, absurd penalties for missed payments, and horrible rates if you don't have great credit- credit cards fleece the most vulnerable in our society while granting sweet perks to those with plenty.
This is happening in a lot of places, just a few days ago I went to a restaurant (California) that had a sign up front saying "We are now Cashless" and touting why this is better for the staff.
I predominately use credit for everything because its easier, faster, etc. But the 3% fees since time immemorial is screwed up. We need a better standard for payment that is digital but cash equivalent, aka not paying for the payment convenience.
If I, for example, would have been a regular guest in that place and they would go cashless, I would politely let the owner know that I won't be visiting them until they accept cash payments again.
My take (as an American) on the one reason why cashless sucks: exorbitant transaction fees. 3% plus 50 cents is ridiculous, it should be like 0.1% at most for payment processor infrastructure.
You Americans get a lot of it back via card reward programs (or, if your credit is bad, via lower interest rates). In Europe the CC fees are limited to 0.3%, but there is also basically no cashback.
I see a lot of people saying that cash increases freedom because the government / banks / card companies can't instantly shut off access. But, if you're being targeted and don't already have massive cash reserves, you're not going to be able to pull out cash from your account anyway.
If the authorities want you sanctioned and oppressed, they will use a method that transcends any specific technology or tangible item: the justice system.
A little context for Americans: Canada implemented chip and pin debit cards across the country in the 90s. Pretty much overnight, paying by check(cheque) disappeared and nearly all businesses took debit cards. So Canadians have been used to paying by card for decades now.
COVID put the nail in the coffin of any remaining cash-only businesses.
Canadian here, lots of business only take cash. We care about our privacy, although it's rare to find say a grocery store or gas station that doesn't accept cards too.
coincidentally during this time Canadian government has announced draconian ordinance to freeze bank accounts of citizens it deems unruly, destroy their credit history, call in loan payments.
Not only that new ordinances to stifle online speech it deems hateful retroactively meaning if you wrote nasty things about say Defense minister Sajjan that instructed special forces to rescue Afghan Sikhs during fall of Kabul leaving Canadians stranded, you could very well find yourself homeless in Canada.
Very scary and a big reason why Canadians young and old are creating US bank accounts and earning US dollars.
I think it’s more constructive to think about what risks are borne by each party in a transaction, how much it costs to take on each risk, and which party is better equipped to manage each risk. Then you can construct the thing that people actually want, and that thing is almost certainly not cash as we think of it today.
For example, if I order something and pay cash, I’m taking on very different risks than if I pay with a credit card. Similarly the risks to my privacy are very different with each one. Maybe we need a third option that sits somewhere between the two.
for businesses with slim margins, card and processing fees above whole percentage points are basically a private tax. the problem with cashlessness (and over-regulation and surveillance in general) is it mainly punishes normal people for a lack of enthusiasm in their compliance while ignoring (therefore rewarding) the total scofflaws. the economic and cultural effects of this are negative for everyone outside the funded or socialized sector.
the loss of legit businesses has come up in backyard conversations for years about how many of the neighbourhood retail storefront businesses are just money laundering fronts. it drives up rents for legit businesses, discourages entrepreneurialism, and turns highstreets into homogenous globalized airport strip malls without local character. the dominance of laundering and other criminal activity is the direct effect of over regulation that sets high compliance bars for any new business, and so entrepreneurs (mainly 1st gen immigrants) switch away from the legit economy into grey and black markets to survive, while legit ones are forced out.
black markets need prohibition and arbitrary regulation to exist, and all of canada's regulatory nonsense is exclusively creating conditions for those markets. the cities are starting to resemble 3rd world economies where political parties fund themselves through kickbacks from tolerating the black markets created by their own absurd policies, while preying on anyone trying to make their own way.
the solution is to roll back the regulatory culture to let new legit businesses have their natural advantage on criminal ones. any further moves toward cashlessness only empower the black market.
There are a lot of cashless options but many places still only take cash. There’s a bakery in building that opened right when COVID started and they’re strictly cash only. Whenever friends and relatives visit they’re always stunned.
How times change. Not a single comment mentions Bitcoin, and its potential in affecting the march towards a no-cash, centrally tracked and taxed, society.
Perhaps its legacy will be more about portraying human nature that largely saw it as an opportunity for scams, schemes, greed, speculation, money laundering, and other nefarious activities.
It's frightening how many HN users will trade their freedom for just a bit of convenience. The dystopia is closer than you think. At the very least I hope the lurkers reading these comments are just shaking their heads in frustration and moving on to another post.
My local coffee shop wont accept cards or digital payments, and they do it to help keep cash in society. We are too lazy with cards, but I guess it prevents another 'Northern Rock' style bank run, what's the point of rushing to take your cash out during the next financial crisis if you cant spend it. Already EUR cash transactions are limited to 1000. I often wonder how long before a bank account and smart phone become a legal requirement.
Clunky, annoying, inconvenient, borderline useless. Cash only place is a good way to lose my business, especially since the odds I have cash on me are close to zero.
Also one of the most expensive options for me as a consumer since I have to use my time to find an ABM, pay the ABM fee, etc.
Also one of the most expensive options for me as a merchant, since I have to physically go to a bank and jump through hoops to deposit it.
I'm the opposite. And I live in an opposite world.
Cash is the only way I pay in person. I have a prepaid card and amazon gift cards for online purchases. If I'm in a store, I have cash. If you don't take cash you don't get my business. I live in an area where many of not most businesses have a cash discount or outright don't take cards. I closed my bank account a while back.
To me, it's embarrassing that there are places that call themselves businesses that don't take money.
I used to be vehemently opposed to going cashless (as a society) because then how would I buy illegal drugs? But crypto seems plenty mature to handle that problem now and I'm running out of arguments for why physical currency is essential.
That presumes a household already has a large physical cash reserve, which I imagine few do. Besides, if you do want to store value, there are plenty of options like gold and silver and... crypto.
finally there is a reliable and effective service we all can rely on! I can only imagine how many people are having problems with crypto-related issues and are likely also unsure of their ability to find practical solutions. Easyreclaim is rightfully the best provider of recovery service and their ability to recover funds very fast. They helped me to recover 850,000 USD that I lost due to online cryptocurrency theft Get in touch with them on:easyreclaimer@gmailcom They are simply the best recovery company.
It's often pretty hard to do public protest without breaking some kind of law, even if you do everything you're supposed to.
I'm not a fan of the truckers (the loud horns were totally infuriating) but the fundamental problem was that the police didn't want to move them on, not that they were breaking the law.
> It's often pretty hard to do public protest without breaking some kind of law, even if you do everything you're supposed to.
All movements start small, and if you want to have your movement be a success it involves bringing more and more people over to your point of view / side.
One can be disruptive in that you hold a rally or march to raise awareness, and be seen (in numbers) by folks on the street. Marches / parades are disruptive to traffic but if you've planned it and told people about it then they can plan around it. One can also go in, cause some trouble, and then disperse so that you get in the news but also do not piss of non-involved people.
But being disruptive so that you piss people off is a way to not get more people onto your side of your movement. It is a way to inhibit further involvement of the public towards your side.
A movement must be aware of how its actions are perceived by non-members of the movement. Just because you interpret things a certain way does not mean that the general public won't view you as a jackass:
> “It’s a sign of independence,” he said. “I look at it as a rebel sign. In the biker community, a lot of people have the Confederate flag because we’re rebels.”
> But to many, the flag is a racist symbol and a disturbing reminder of the U.S. Confederacy’s fight to preserve slavery. Prime Minister Justin Trudeau denounced their display at the Ottawa protest, saying his government wouldn’t give in to “racist flags.”
> But being disruptive so that you piss people off is a way to not get more people onto your side of your movement. It is a way to inhibit further involvement of the public towards your side.
While I agree to some extent with your comment, I think there is some nuance needed.
For a movement to succeed you need to be disruptive and piss some people off. It just depends in what way disruptive and who you piss off.
For example take the women’s rights movements. Were they disruptive and did poss a lot of people off? Hell yeah they did.
Did they ultimately succeed and get the public opinion on their side. Also yes.
Another (horrifying) example is the nazi movement. They were extremely disruptive and pissed off a ton of people when they were still an extreme fringe group. Precisely because of that they became very successful.
There are many more examples like that.
A protest movement needs to be disruptive to some extent to be successful
> You may want to read some MLK - he had some very clear words about the liberal who demands civility in the face of oppression.
It is not about acting civilly. It is about messaging.
If non-movement people consider you as a bunch of jackasses, do you think they will join your cause, or even have sympathy towards it? You need to communicate your message—words and actions—so that, at the very least, people will have a neutral opinion. If you're actually good, then people will have a positive opinion of you and your goals.
> Days later, King was quietly bailed out and ejected from prison by Albany police chief Laurie Pritchett, who had studied the nonviolence protest method and released King to undermine it. In other cities, violence by police against peaceful demonstrators brought outcry and sympathy. But Pritchett met nonviolence with nonviolence. Within weeks, the protest fizzled out. For King, Albany was largely a failure, and his takeaway was for the movement to better pick its spots.
[…]
> It was far from total victory, but King had something more important: the attention of an outraged and rapt nation. The legacy of the water cannons and dogs, of callused feet and imprisoned children, would be incarnated in the Civil Rights Act of 1964, the Voting Rights Act and the Twenty-Fourth Amendment, which banned poll taxes. Montgomery and Birmingham also formed the script for peaceably countering injustice in a nation founded on protest. From antiwar protests during Vietnam to Occupy Wall Street and beyond, King’s commitment to nonviolent protest lives on.
It is why violence is usually such a bad idea: most non-members of a movement don't want to get into that, and would probably see the movement as a bunch of thugs. In a survey of 600 movements since 1900, Chenoweth et al found that those that used violence were successful ~25% of the time, but non-violence had a >40% success rate.
You almost double your chances of success by gaining sympathy versus 'acting out'. Do you think the race riots helped or hindered the civil rights movement?
> Let me say as I've always said, and I will always continue to say, that riots are socially destructive and self-defeating. I'm still convinced that nonviolence is the most potent weapon available to oppressed people in their struggle for freedom and justice. I feel that violence will only create more social problems than they will solve. That in a real sense it is impracticable for the Negro to even think of mounting a violent revolution in the United States. So I will continue to condemn riots, and continue to say to my brothers and sisters that this is not the way. And continue to affirm that there is another way.
You seem to be trying to conflate blocking a road and honking your horn with violence... In order to defend fucking with non-violent protesters bank accounts directly (and very illegally).
Lots of people claimed that anyone who didn't respect lockdowns and wear masks were being "violent" - is that what you're trying to do here?
> If you're actually good, then people will have a positive opinion of you and your goals.
Lol. I really don't know how anyone could say that with a straight face. Was MLK popular with people who thought segregation was cool and fun?
Or is your argument that he was wrong to act as he did...
Is Trump "actually good" because people love him?
That logic ain't logicing man. Idk where you got that idea but it isn't explaining reality very well is it.
> You seem to be trying to conflate blocking a road and honking your horn with violence... In order to defend fucking with non-violent protesters bank accounts directly (and very illegally).
Do you want your movement to succeed? If yes, then don't piss off the non-members / the general public, and try to get them on your side.
That is what MLK understood and did.
That is what Nelson Mandela did not understand when he was young (when he did acts that caused him to go to jail), but did understand when he was older.
It is also what Ghandi (who also spent in jail) understood.
What justice was the trucker convoy looking for? What injustice were they fighting against? What grave depravity had they long suffered against?
You are quoting from "Letter from a Birmingham Jail", which also states:
> In any nonviolent campaign there are four basic steps: collection of the facts to determine whether injustices exist; negotiation; self purification; and direct action.
While that can be your truth, it may be worth re-evaluating because it is not reflecting reality, then:
> In August 1963, Gallup found considerable public opposition to the now-famous civil rights march on Washington in which King delivered his "I Have a Dream" speech. The poll was conducted about two weeks before the march, at which time 71% were familiar with "the proposed mass civil rights rally to be held in Washington, D.C., on Aug. 28." Of those who were familiar, only 23% said they had a favorable view of "the rally"; 42% had an unfavorable view of it (including 7% who predicted violence would occur) and 18% said it wouldn't accomplish anything. [0]
> What is also clear is that sympathy with the movement is no longer at a point where the minority, which has been categorized as being on the fringes, is grossly overshadowed by the majority. A sizeable minority of Canadians (37%) agree (16% strongly/21% somewhat) that while they might not say it publicly, they agree with a lot of what the truck protestors are fighting for [1]
You posted many flamewar comments in this thread and appear to have done more than any other single account to spoil it. We ban accounts that do this, and your account has (it turns out) been doing it for a long long time:
That's excessive and abusive. We need you, same as any other user, to follow the site guidelines regardless of how right you are or feel you are, and regardless of how wrong others are or you feel they are.
Actually I think I'll stand by quite a few of those comments, Dan, including the ones I've posted in this thread. If you feel the need to ban my account, I won't stand in the way, but I will say I don't respect a lot of the objections you've gone back almost 10 years to dig up, especially when considered in the larger context of the threads in question.
Don't want flame wars? Don't post flamewar-inciting links, as many of those arguably are, then object selectively when some people take the bait you're dangling.
> Don't want flame wars? Don't post flamewar-inciting links
That's not how HN works. Commenters are responsible for how they react and whether or not they follow the rules. It's not as if you have zero choice in whether you get incited or not, although I know it sometimes feels that way (to me too).
To remove an entire topic to prevent some commenters from posting abusively would be to punish the ones who are following the rules just fine. I don't think that's how HN should operate. Here's another recent post in case it's of interest: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=40852027
Of course, not every story is on topic for HN, and indeed most provocative stories aren't—but that's a separate question. Some are, and the rules still apply in those cases. In fact, they apply especially then, as the guidelines make clear: "Comments should get more thoughtful and substantive, not less, as a topic gets more divisive."
I don't know: as I understood it, the trucker thing was basically about showing that they occupy a strategic position in the Canadian economy. It's like the old rail strike idea: it doesn't matter if everybody hates you, if the trains aren't running, then the government has to make a deal, otherwise the economy collapses.
I don't think they actually did hold that strategic position (if the police had, you know, done their jobs, they wouldn't be blocking the roads for long), but if you know that the police won't do that (because they always baby right wing protestors) it makes some sense. And that was a lot of the rhetoric from the truckers about themselves: I guess we'd just come out of the pandemic with all these sudden realizations about essential workers, which definitely included truckers, and there's often (but probably not in the trucker's case) a connection between being 'essential' and 'occupying a strategically advantageous position'.
If the convoy was anything but a bunch of anti-vaxxers, they failed to really convey that message from my perspective.
> And that was a lot of the rhetoric from the truckers about themselves: I guess we'd just come out of the pandemic with all these sudden realizations about essential workers […]
I have first-hand knowledge of essential workers because of family connections to nursing and retail (food/groceries). I also have family connections to people who actually run trucking companies, and do maintenance on rigs.
I personally got deemed an essential worker by my company because of my IT role, and got a letter on company letterhead stating as such for any time I had to come into the office, in case I should perhaps be stopped for breaking curfew (the organization I was with had connections with medical treatment).
I don't think anyone would reasonably deny truckers are often essential, but the number of truckers making a fuss about was a tiny majority that worked in the industry.
If you want your movement to succeed and goals achieve your goals you need to get the public on your side, not piss them off and consider you inconsiderate jackasses.
Also: is shutting an international border crossing (bridge), which affects the commutes and livelihood (via supply chains) of thousands of people every day, "peaceful"?
Sounds like we need some sort of Geneva Conventions around protesting, a set of rules that protestors & governments can agree on so that we differentiate between "legit protesting" vs not.
They were blowing freight truck horns at all hours of the day and night. Tens of thousands of people's lives and sleep were disrupted for weeks on end. 90% of the stuff they were protesting literally wasn't real.
Obviously there is a fine line between legitimate, legal protest and it should be taken very seriously. IMO that particular protest pushed that line too hard.
The stuff they were protesting was very real, and those measures specifically caused disruption to hundreds of thousands of people's lives and sleep for months on end. The government turning to wartime measures so that privileged Ottawans living in some of the most affluent areas around the nation's capital can withstand a few honks for a few weeks is absolutely preposterous.
The Glebe, Sandy Hill, Rockliffe, Island Park, etc.. All those parts of Ottawa's core have always been more afluent than the downtown by the Parliament.
The rise of new condos in that area has probably improved it somewhat in the last 10 years but it's still far from "afluent".
The point absolutely does not stand. You've retreated to "relative affluence". For your point to stand, it would also have to be a given that the acceptability of noise pollution correlates with how rich the population is. That doesn't stand either.
It means you can strike "some of the most" from my comment and the point remains unrebutted.
>The stuff they were protesting was very real, and those measures specifically caused disruption to hundreds of thousands of people's lives and sleep for months on end. The government turning to wartime measures so that privileged Ottawans living in ~~~~ ~~ ~~~ ~~~~ affluent areas around the nation's capital can withstand a few honks for a few weeks is absolutely preposterous.
I live in Toronto and have been to Ottawa many times, as well as tons of other Canadian and American cities. Downtown cores have some middle class folks in them, usually in somewhat luxurious condo buildings. But in no way does the interpretation of "where all the rich Canadians live" being downtown Ottawa make any sense.
* §3 For the purposes of this Act, a* national emergency is an urgent and critical situation of a temporary nature that (a) seriously endangers the lives, health or safety of Canadians and is of such proportions or nature as to exceed the capacity or authority of a province to deal with it, or, (b) seriously threatens the ability of the Government of Canada to preserve the sovereignty, security and territorial integrity of Canada, and that cannot be effectively dealt with under any other law of Canada.
War is the obvious example that meets 3(a) and 3(b), because the Emergencies Act replaced the War Measures Act, which was designed to give the government wide latitude for authoritarian actions desired in wartime.
>The Act mandates an inquiry be called after any invocation, and the inquiry in question found that the use of the Act was justified:
The inquiry in question (led by a longstanding party member) found reluctantly:
* I do not come to this conclusion easily, as I do not consider the factual basis for it to be overwhelming. Reasonable and informed people could reach a different conclusion than the one I have arrived at. [1]
In part, because the definition you cited is not the entry point for the federal proclamation, which is actually at s.16 of the act:
* §16 In this Part, declaration of a public order emergency means a proclamation issued pursuant to subsection 17(1); public order emergency means an emergency that arises from threats to the security of Canada and that is so serious as to be a national emergency; threats to the security of Canada has the meaning assigned by section 2 of the Canadian Security Intelligence Service (CSIS) Act.
Even though the Canadian government was told by CSIS at the time:
* Canada's intelligence agency didn't believe the self-styled Freedom Convoy constituted a threat to national security according to the definition in its enabling law [2]
And comparatively, the last time this level of power was invoked domestically it was in response to separatist terrorism culminating in the murder of a government official. [3]
>Was the "health or safety of Canadians" at risk? Did it "exceed the capacity or authority of a province" (Ontario under Ford)?
The criteria is not just "at risk" but "seriously endangered". The commission's report, in my opinion, takes a tortured approach to justifying the meeting of this threshold.
>Dennis: Think about it. She’s out in the middle of nowhere with some dude she barely knows. She looks around her, what does she see? Nothing but open ocean. “Oh, there’s nowhere for me to run, what am I gonna do, say no?”
>Mac: Okay…that seems really dark though.
>Dennis: No, no, it’s not dark. You’re misunderstanding me, bro.
>Mac: I think I am.
>Dennis: Yeah, you are. ‘Cause if the girl said no, then the answer obviously is no. The thing is that she’s not gonna say no, she’d never say no…because of the implication.
>Mac: Now, you said that word “implication” a couple of times. What implication?
>Dennis: The implication that things might go wrong for her if she refuses to sleep with me. Now, not that things are gonna go wrong for her, but she’s thinking that they will.
Sure, and at first the Canadian government didn't force indigenous children into residential schools - it just withheld resources and services and used a monopoly on violence to make resistance untenable. Believing that's acceptable behaviour from your government, is certainly... a position.
Respectfully, it is insane to not recognize the discrete similarities listed, and moreover, how many genocides have their roots in purported "public health measures".
I feel you are exemplifying the typical conspiratorial thinking patterns. You might as well have asked me to concede based on the fact that there are technically similarities between vaccine mandates and the Yellow Badge. I mean you must be insane not to recognize how they're basically the same thing, right? /s
This is the very essence of what real protesting is. It's meant to inconvenience people and be in their face. What do you think the word protest even means?
Honking is literally terrorism, haven't you heard? When lefties protest they're allowed to make huge mess but when right wingers make some noise (literally) that's a heckin war crime.
Can you cite an example of where Canadian protests by "lefties" took over a major public road for weeks on end, and disrupted the lives of thousands of citizens, harassing them, depriving them of sleep, preventing their ability to get to/from their homes and businesses?
I can tell you're already very convinced of who was right and wrong in this and you're trying to make this a left vs right thing, but there are limits to how many problems you can cause when you protest - no matter the cause - before civil society (via it's police force and/or government) says "ok, that's enough".
Either that, or civil society sides with you, and then major change happens.
And I guess no one wanted to side with the COVID-denying racists.
Not really "lefties" here, but this is a reasonable example...
I will say that First Nations issues in Canada are pretty complicated, particularly when it comes to unceded territories and the rights around those.
It's also worth mentioning that those rail line blockades in Ontario were done in support of other protests in BC where the government eventually sent cops in riot gear to dismantle the blockades by violence.
Something that didn't happen in Ottawa, and I'll let you figure out why.
> Why is it acceptable that the government by-pass the normal legal system in dealing with protestors?
I'm not going to debate whether it was legal or not with you because (I'm assuming) neither of us are lawyers.
I'll say that I don't particularly agree with the bank account shenanigans they pulled, but they only did that because the Ottawa police force completely failed to do their job in dealing with the blockade.
I definitely don't like the precedent that was set, but having seen the blockade first hand (it was not a "peaceful protest", it was an aggressive encampment that was regularly threatening to passerbys and locals) and the impact it had on the area - my parents live nearby - they had to do something.
I support the rights of citizens to protest but as I said, there's a limit.
The legality of the event is know. It was illegal, as deemed by a court of law.
The question I was after is if the concept is ever moral or reasonable to deal with protestors with methods outside the legal system. Common methods are the military, but also martial law, suspending bank accounts (without a court decision), and other methods.
Current in Sweden we had recent several demonstrations that lead to riots, and historically we had major ones including one that lead to several demonstrators getting shot. Every single time, researchers and government investigations has found that using anything other than the regular legal system is counter productive, and in some cases very deadly. If the police don't do their job you get more police from other regions. In a event just a few months ago, they even got police from nearby countries to help (despite massive demonstrations and influx of tourists, crime went significant down during that period).
In general, the problem of police not doing their job seems to stem from when they are afraid. Either because of being extremely outnumbered, or in combination with poor instruction (with can lead to being afraid of doing mistakes in a political hot situation). Both are problems that can be solved by politicians without going outside the framework of the legal system.
Please don't break the HN guidelines like this, and please don't perpetuate flamewars like this. It's not what this site is for, and destroys what it is for.
Translation: "I don't live anywhere near the affected area, so I didn't experience it. If I had, I could have just left town for a while and waited for the whole thing to blow over. I don't see the problem."
It's possible to be against the protesters and/or think that they're unacceptably annoying, without trying to compare your plight to innocent civilians who were killed/raped by enemy soldiers.
Truckers take over the city and make life a living hell for thousands of innocent residents? Lock their bank accounts and starve them out, and (ideally) prosecute the perpetrators alongside anyone who donated to them.
Soldiers raping and killing civilians? Blow them to kingdom come if possible (it's a war, after all). Otherwise, identify them, convene a tribunal after the war, and hang those found guilty.
If someone is non-violent protesting in a location they arent allowed to be, the appropriate response it to arrest and move them, not lock their bank accounts and starve their families.
Locking someone in a cell and keeping them awake for the purpose if inflicting suffering is torture. Making noise so that someone in the freedom of their own home has to put ear plugs in is not.
conflating them ignores the clear differences and stretches the meaning of the word. You might as well say an ice cream display in the super market is torture.
Sorry are you trying to imply that the way various levels of US governments responded to recent left-wing protests has some conspiratorial parallel to the way the Canadian federal government responded to a right wing protest?
The city of Ottawa's law enforcement officers were ordered to remove the protesters weeks before the federal government stepped in. The cops basically just didn't do their job. The emergency act was not invoked lightly.
Who said anything about the US government? Left wing protestors get plenty of leeway in Canada but right wing protestors get branded terrorists for being loud. Oh but it "wasn't done lightly", whatever that's meant to mean, so obviously it's kosher.
> Payments Canada, found that a majority of respondents were worried about the prospect of cashless stores and want to maintain the option to use cash — which is free from bank fees
I mean, that is the problem right there. We don't generally have that problem in Europe because we don't rely on credit cards.
Here's there no extra fee for using Apple Pay or Google Wallet. Pay with cash, your card, NFC... it's all the same.
Stop using credit cards might be a good step for the USA. I don't know much about Canada to be honest and how it works over there, and if it's CC centric like the USA.
There's a debit card system in Canada called Interac that should be free, but depending on the bank and account type, the bank will give you a very limited number of transactions per month (like 10 or 20). After that, every time you use your card you get charged a significant fee.
Canadians get ridiculously nickel-and-dimed by banks, telecoms, retail, etc, compared to most other countries, which is part of why our cost of living is ridiculously high.
This is weird. I've never been charged a fee for using Interac. Sure, there are accounts for which you are discouraged from transacting daily, but this is true in the United States as well, in my experience. No one is being forced to use an inappropriate account type as a daily driver. Most accounts have a minimum balance requirement, which is usually pretty low, to avoid any fees. ATM fees on the other hand are a different story.
In other words, it's trivial to maintain an account and use Interac for... everything. I know of many folks who do not even have, and have never had, a credit card.
This is mostly a problem that affects poorer people, I suspect. I know people living paycheck-to-paycheck, who can't leave thousands of dollars lying around in their checking account, who are hesitant to use Interac because of the fees. Also, most people don't go to the trouble to shop around banks looking for a better deal.
I looked and you're right, and I was wrong. It looks like most accounts have huge minimums and limited transactions. The student and senior accounts are the only real winners.
Not credit card fees, bank fees. Almost every bank account in Canada has some sort of monthly service fees associated with them. You need to have a considerable amount of wealth accumulated in order for those fees to be waived. If my understanding of how Europeans bank is correct, such fees aren't as common.
to expand on the parent's comment a little bit as well, most of these canadian bank accounts also have fees per interac transaction depending on the account. The richer the person, the more money in your account and more fees you can get waived. until recently I would not send interac e-transfers because it would cost me $.50 per transaction after the first 5.
The comments here are truly bizarre. It seems like a few commenters here feel that this is an opportunity to derail on-topic discussion in order to forward some political agenda.
The truth is Canada is already a cashless society. Cities, rural areas, farmers markets, country fairs... I haven't carried cash for years and I can't remember the last time I needed to.
Earlier this year I went on a vacation to a remote tropical island and took out cash only to discover that nowhere even accepted cash! I was stunned.
Not mentioned in this article, but certainly related, was the Canadian governments unprecedented step to freeze hundreds of bank accounts of protestors during COVID protests using their Emergencies Act. While I couldn't be more politically removed from the protestors, using a legislative power envisioned for war like conditions to personally ruin protestors financially is more than worrying.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Emergencies_Act