In a Cashless World, You'd Better Pray the Power Never Goes Out (mises.org) 453
schwit1 quotes the Mises Institue: When Hurricane Maria knocked out power in Puerto Rico, residents there realized they were going to need physical cash — and a lot of it. Bloomberg reported that the Fed was forced to fly a planeload of cash to the Island to help avert disaster. "William Dudley, the New York Fed president, put the word out within minutes, and ultimately a jet loaded with an undisclosed amount of cash landed on the stricken island. [Business executives in Puerto Rico] described corporate clients' urgent requests for hundreds of thousands in cash to meet payrolls, and the challenge of finding enough armored cars to satisfy endless demand at ATMs... As early as the day after the storm, the Fed began working to get money onto the island."
For a time, unless one had a hoard of cash stored up in ones home, it was impossible to get cash at all. 85 percent of Puerto Rico is still without power... Bloomberg continues: "When some generator-powered ATMs finally opened, lines stretched hours long, with people camping out in beach chairs and holding umbrellas against the sun." In an earlier article from September 25, Bloomberg noted how, without cash, necessities were simply unavailable:
For a time, unless one had a hoard of cash stored up in ones home, it was impossible to get cash at all. 85 percent of Puerto Rico is still without power... Bloomberg continues: "When some generator-powered ATMs finally opened, lines stretched hours long, with people camping out in beach chairs and holding umbrellas against the sun." In an earlier article from September 25, Bloomberg noted how, without cash, necessities were simply unavailable:
"Cash only," said Abraham Lebron, the store manager standing guard at Supermax, a supermarket in San Juan's Plaza de las Armas. He was in a well-policed area, but admitted feeling like a sitting duck with so many bills on hand. "The system is down, so we can't process the cards. It's tough, but one finds a way to make it work."
Another reason why bitcoin is garbage (Score:5, Insightful)
The second you lose power, you're fucked. This is why cash is king, always has been, always will be.
Another reason why cash is garbage (Score:4, Insightful)
The second you lose power, you're fucked unless you already have cash on hand and until superinflation happens it which case it's only worth something as toilet paper. That's why gold doubloon is king, always has been, always will be.
Re:Another reason why cash is garbage (Score:5, Funny)
Try buying a loaf of bread with a gold Doubloon. What are you expecting in change, Reales and Maravedis?
There is a reason why Charlemagne took Europe off of the Gold Standard for ~500 years. Gold was, at best, a Currency Of Account and kept in vaults, and utterly impractical for normal trade.
Re:Another reason why cash is garbage (Score:5, Funny)
Try buying a loaf of bread with a gold Doubloon.
You can buy one from me, anytime.
Re:Another reason why cash is garbage (Score:5, Interesting)
That's why gold doubloon is king, always has been, always will be.
Nah. If you're planning for the collapse of civilisation - even temporary - bottled water, canned food, gasoline etc, are king. When the lights go out, gold will suffer just as much from superinflation as anything, but a can of beans will always be worth a day's food.
No point in planning for an apocalypse after which Walmart is still open, but only takes Krugerrand.
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And a well-preserved shotgun shell will let you defend your cans of beans, assuming you have a shotgun to shoot it out of.
Oops. No shotgun, but a P8 and a 7mm deer rifle would suffice as well. And on top of that, the rifle would be useful for acquiring fresh meat from the local deer if the situation ever got to the point where backup food sources need to be tapped into in spite of fish and game laws.
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Re: Another reason why cash is garbage (Score:4, Funny)
I'm going to flip this on its head. A credit card is fully usable without power.
No, I'm going to flip this on its head. In times of despair, the mathematician is king. Why? Because he can manually calculate and verify your beloved BTC transactions.
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Guns can, believe it or not, be used for hunting non-human animals.
Look at the areas of the world where there have been great humanitarian catastrophes. People with guns almost invariably use them against fellow man. It's far less work to use a gun to bully the food from someone else than it is to hunt.
And even if you use it to hunt, there will be someone else with a gun who goes for the far less work option. And because you have a gun too, they team up to outgun individuals like you.
If you have a gun, the real choice is between joining a militia that exploits people,
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Re: Another reason why cash is garbage (Score:5, Informative)
Re:Another reason why cash is garbage (Score:5, Insightful)
Always found this to be an illogical and frankly dumb point of view, because somehow you think that in a world where the society has collapsed enough to worry about "someone with more guns and henchmen", you are somehow safer without a weapon. I think history pretty much says you're full of shit. I can't think of any chaotic time or circumstance when someone thought "I wish I were more defenseless."
Re: Another reason why cash is garbage (Score:5, Insightful)
Not to mention that in the absence of a functioning bullet manufacturing company (or at least a large supply of black powder, primer caps, and material to make new bullets), a gun is a very short-term tool for survival. It's smarter in the long run to buy a crossbow, materials to repair it when it breaks, and lots of reusable arrows. With that combination, you'll still be hunting decades after the guy with the gun ran out of bullets and died of starvation (unless he used the gun to steal your crossbow, of course).
But the better strategy, really, is to have a group of people who trust and help one another. That way, one of you has the gun just in case people with a gun come to try to steal your crossbows, and the rest of you have crossbows and can be out getting food. There's strength in diversity.
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Here in the US, guns are king. Ammo is king. With 300,000,000 guns in private hands, if the power goes out for any extended period of time, the guy who runs the crematorium will be king.
Re:Another reason why cash is garbage (Score:5, Insightful)
"After stealing the world's biggest diamond, you flee into the desert to evade capture. Two days later, parched and about to die of thirst, you come upon a man who offers you a glass of water in exchange for the diamond you stole. What do you say?"
Re:Another reason why cash is garbage (Score:5, Interesting)
Make the trade, drink the water quickly, then attack the guy to get my diamond back.
If he was particularly smart, he would have waited for me to collapse and take the diamond. If he was particularly strong, he'd attack me and take it.
Re: Another reason why cash is garbage (Score:2, Funny)
That guy is a witness, he must die. I quickly shoot him with my gun, then take any good/water he had on him.
You're not very good at these questions.
Lesson to be learned (Score:2)
Next time to steal a diamond of such value, make sure you have an escape plan ;)
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People don't seem to understand "dying of thirst", though I'm not sure two days would be enough unless it was a very hot desert.
When you're dying of thirst you're too weak to stand up, much less assault someone who isn't. And you don't recover immediately after drinking, either.
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That's why gold doubloon is king, always has been, always will be.
Nah. If you're planning for the collapse of civilisation - even temporary - bottled water, canned food, gasoline etc, are king. When the lights go out, gold will suffer just as much from superinflation as anything, but a can of beans will always be worth a day's food.
No point in planning for an apocalypse after which Walmart is still open, but only takes Krugerrand.
In states where it is legal for us to do our own growing; at that point weed will continue to be one of the big local currencies, as will physical labor and other favors (CGA is the order of the day, where C is cash, G is grass, and A is Ass (which can refer to other useful skills in trade in addition to giggity).
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I wouldn't be so sure on the water. It's not difficult to make. Boil and filter is usually good enough in a crisis, and if you really need pure you can use the same home-made still for making moonshine.
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I come from a small town with somewhat unreliable power. All the merchants know that if the power goes out, you can take a credit card impression (with some carbon paper and a hard object to rub it, if necessary) and write down the transaction. Some even have cash registers that you can hand crank if necessary. You can also write out a cheque with a pen and any scrap of paper.
I find it hard to believe that in the US, which is thirty years late to the chip and PIN party, you can't use an impression in eme
Re: Another reason why bitcoin is garbage (Score:2)
Re: Another reason why bitcoin is garbage (Score:5, Insightful)
What do you think happened before every corner store had an electronic terminal? Credit cards still existed. You put all your cash, credit slips and cheques in a bag and hotfooted them over to the bank. Someone at the bank looked through them, reconciled the accounts, and gave you a (paper) statement telling you if any of the cheques bounced. If someone blew their limit on their card, that's between them and their CC company.
Yeah, cash is pretty handy when there's no power. It's not the only option.
It's quite funny to see these dire stories about what happens when you lose power. As if credit cards and cheques didn't exist before electronic banking terminals in every store.
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We still have the indents on the credit cards. You could have taken the credit card numbers then punched them in at a later time. There is even an device that take the indents of the card and with carbon paper creates a receipt with the card number on it.
Before the days of credit card, stores kept a Tab on their customers, so they can get goods and services even if they didn't have the cash on hand at the time.
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Yeah, I withdrew about $500 in cash as the storms approached, but more importantly I secured supplies of water, gasoline, and non-perishable food.
Even though we could have driven out the morning after the storm (we were lucky, the 1/2 mile of old trees along our road didn't block us in), we didn't have to. Even though the gas stations were still pumping, we didn't need them. Even though we were able to run the generator to keep the freezer going for a month with the stockpiled gasoline, that wasn't really
Try to get change for a gold coin (Score:2)
Silver coins have small enough value to be useful in small transactions. Heck pure copper coins might even be useful.
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> The problem with this: gold and silver can change their relative value to each other and that screws up
> the exchange rate. This can lead to hoarding of the coins that are appreciating in value (Gresham's law).
Who is going to tell this AC that all fiat currencies change their relative value to each other today/everyday and really blow his/her/xer mind?
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You don't have to use multiple fiat currencies to make change.
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That wasnâ(TM)t his point
The point is this really is not a problem. You can have exchanges without problematic hoarding, even if the relative value is changin by the second in 24 hour/day currency markets. People will pay wth 500 silver coins and keep their gold coins when silver is in sort supply and valued too high relative to gold. This is called a healthy, self correcting market
Sometimes the gold humbugs are even sillier than the gold bugs they mock
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Have you tried buying anything at a store with gold?
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Tide [businessinsider.com]
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Not in Canada, it's not paper anymore.
The more efficent the more brittle (Score:5, Insightful)
The fact is that the more tightly integrated our society become the more brittle it gets. Specialization is more efficient but it also means "no man is an island."
Skipping intermediary exchange mechanisms like cash and doing direct transfers between accounts is faster but it also means you can't conduct exchanges when the machines that handle the accounting are not available. With cash, and even paper checks, you pay me now and I have some reasonable assurance that the money will be available for my use some time in the future.
Here is the thing though. If we have another 3-7 day blackout like the 2003 one, cash and checks will let everyone muddle thru. Where as all electronic payments being the only means would basically cause the economy to grind to a halt. If the mainland US experienced devastation like Puerto Rico just did and it was national not regional. I don't know super volcano, DPRK EMP delivery, some kind of freak mega storm, than nobody smart is going to be interested in cash!
Face it we would NOT come back from those events as a nation. No matter how big government gets there is no way a coordinated response could be manged on that scale, which means people would have to take matters entirely into their own hands. At that point its barter system at best and that is assuming local leadership/law enforcement can keep some kind of order. I actually think there is a possibility that would occur in a lot places. I suspect most sensible folks would realize that our survival is best served by at least regional cooperation. On the other hand I can see things going pretty mad max too.
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That is if things remain as they are...but with advancement come advanced means.
Tiny solar panels that can have your phone operate and transact anything is very realistic. A small foot drive generator to produce enough electricity for a minute woth of computing power is all you really need. Crude but in a situation in which electricity is out for weeks it's amazingly useful.
The more tightly society becomes the more likely we are to cross-specialise or know many shallow details from various fields.
When
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> Tiny solar panels that can have your phone operate and transact anything is very realistic.
Your phone, in turn, would need to connect to a cell tower... which will *NOT* run off of "tiny solar panels". And if it did, you're assuming that the phone network is up and running, and the computers at the banks are also connected, and up and running.
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"In the post pocalyptic world cash and computers might actually be irrelevant. Knowledge will the most precious resource as all the vaules that contain it would possibly be lost."
The past offers a solution here: Libraries. Knowledge is valuable enough that any reasonably sized settlement after the collapse would certainly want a school and/or library, which would include a few laptops and solar panels to run them, and people searching through the ruins would have no problem finding vast numbers of hard driv
Here's a crazy idea (Score:4, Insightful)
Save coins. (Score:5, Insightful)
Since when you get to a situation where you don't have any choice anymore but cash then coins are the best alternative. It's tough to get change from the shop keepers if the power goes out.
But also realize that shops can't even do anything when the power goes out because everything has barcodes, a carton of milk and a loaf of bread will be impossible to buy.
Re:Save coins. (Score:5, Insightful)
Shops will still have price labels, if not on the goods themselves then at least on the shelves.
Electronic shelf labels with LCD's or e-paper run on batteries - not the grid - and battery lifetime is on the scale of five to ten years.
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Won't help you at the checkout.
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It will, because the store will have the possibility of making hand-written price lists of every item in the store for all checkouts.
Hey, nobody said it would be easy or quick.
Re:Save coins. (Score:5, Funny)
Let's face it, this had to happen eventually: Millennial slashdotters. Wait until they discover that you can listen to music without internet.
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I was listening to music before 8-bit home computers came out. Try again.
Think of what I said. Writing down, by hand, the price of EVERY item in a grocery store. Multiple times, as many as you have checkouts at the store. You'd have to shut down the store just to wait for those lists to be ready.
Then every single item people purchase would have to be checked on those long hand-written lists. It could take what, up to a minute to locate an item on the list? Average 15 items per customer, that's 15 minutes to
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If you're as old as you claim, you remember the proper solution. Get a labeler and individually price items.
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And those e-paper labels only need power to change the image being displayed.
Re:Save coins. (Score:5, Insightful)
With cash and coins in circulation, it does not matter whether shopkeepers have coins or not, they can request them from their customers. Last week the guy ahead of me in line tried to pay with a 100 dollar bill, but the store keeper did not have change. I gave the guy 5 $20 bills and took the $100. He paid and left, as did I.
People have been selling milk and bread for thousands of years without barcodes or machines that read them. You just have to know the approximate price of the item, and take the money. It's not rocket science.
Re: Save coins. (Score:3)
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The power went out for a week in my area a few years back during a winter storm. I could only find one store open, a convenience store, where the guy was entering transactions in a notebook. I bought some very expensive D cell batteries (with cash) that day.
After sticking it out for a day I had to leave my home because I (normally) have electric heat. Luckily I had enough gas in my car. I'd be shit out of luck if I didn't because no gas stations were open. All the pumps now depend on electricity to operate.
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Just wait until all of our cars are electric only. Can you imagine Florida after a hurricane or California after the next big earthquake? Are the California legislators going to allow exemptions to the electric only car mandate to government agencies?
Or fiber lines (Score:5, Informative)
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I've found you can reliably run a low/moderate magstripe transaction flow (10 txn/minute) over even a 2G EDGE modem. Remember, these technologies were designed and deployed when everything was "trunked" via ISDN or even 14.4Kbps modem.
The statement that you can't run a credit or ATM transaction when the fiber is out is like saying you can't light a candle because you don't have a flamethrower and it would be ridiculous to have a "backup flamethrower".
Generator-powered ATMs? (Score:3)
So... they were connected to generator-powered networks?
Credit Cards Existed Long Before CC Terminals (Score:5, Informative)
Has nobody seen Home Alone 2? Using electricity to process a CC purchase is relatively new. This is a solved problem.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?... [youtube.com]
The problem is not with credit cards, but incompetent cashiers and owners who cannot handle changing situations.
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I'm not that old and I remember a time when credit cards were always processed by hand, with that little credit card mimeo machine. I still run into that every once in a long while when someplace's credit card scanner is down.
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The issue is not about credit cards - but about debit cards.
A debit card does not imply credit. You can have a debit card linked to your bank account without being eligible for credit.
But yes, people often say "credit card" when they refer to any kind of payment card in general.
Many countries have never had the manual slip system -- they have only ever used electronic transactions. Some cards are even chip-and-pin only, where the only type of card transaction available is a secure payment.
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no problem. only do business with your known customers, all the cashiers at the stores I visit regulary recognize me, even the assistants at the hardware store. if you want to be a little more generous and risky, have unknown people show multiple ID, take down their address and drivers license number.
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Under normal situations (power outages don't count), Visa and Mastercard rules prohibit asking for ID as part of credit card transactions. Such ID may only be required if it's required to complete the transaction itself, not because they use the card.
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Paying employees is not even close to an issue. If you are a public facing business, you are still going to have one of the biggest cash reserves around. The problem is not your lack of cash, but everyone elses. People will still pay in cash (you will probably have a big discount for them doing so). And if you run an important business, that supplies the necessities of a post-electrical society you can pay them in said necessities.
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actually, I've noticed more than half of customers don't pay with cash. and of course the business runs to the bank at night and deposits the day's revenue. so I'd expect not enough on hand to meet payroll. even so, checks and credit cards can be taken without power, just require ID and write down addresses, heck even write physical description of unknown person (most customers will be known regulars)
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I don't know how it is where you live, but here, imprints can't fail no matter the amount on the account it tries to draw from. It's one of the fail-safes of doing business that way since it's not an immediate draw. It's on the buyer to keep enough cash on the account to not go over limit.
Judging by the new CC and debit cards I just got from one of my credit unions, imprints may go the way of the dodo soon. The numbers on them are just printed instead of raised, so the old style payulators (term learned in the Sniglets days for CC imprint devices) won't work then.
Granted, merchants can just write all that info down in a notebook for transcribing later when the system is back online; but that would make transactions drag out much longer and well, annoy all the other customers who have been w
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The problem is not with credit cards, but incompetent cashiers and owners who cannot handle changing situations.
The raised letters on CC's are going away. About half my CC's have eliminated them.
Also, most retailers don't even HAVE those things anymore. Why would they? I've had a retailer use them exactly once in the past 20 years, and that's when the retailers CC processing went out.
And off I go to the Slow Typists' Corner(tm). ;)
Far worse than electricity (Score:5, Insightful)
>"In a Cashless World, You'd Better Pray the Power Never Goes Out"
Or malware. Or a network problem. Or ID theft puts a freeze on your accounts. Or someone maliciously attacks your records. Or your device/card/whatever dies for some reason. Or you need to transact with someone who just doesn't have the necessary technology.
In a cashless world, you also give up every last bit of privacy left, because you can neither sell nor buy without the mark of the b..... I mean, without the tools and permission of the government and big business. Everything you buy and sell will be recorded and available for review immediately and any time in the future- revealing not only what you buy, but from whom, when, and where you have been. It also makes it easier for someone to tamper with those records to assist in framing you.
Don't be quick to give allow cash to disappear, you might regret it and there will be no going back.
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>"Don't be afraid to swing by your favourite ATM and take out a few bill now and then.
I am fascinated by young people who not only carry no cash at all, and often think cash is outdated and stupid, but also have absolutely no idea why that premise is potentially dangerous and why/how cash can be a good thing.
You can't use cash with no power (Score:2)
Cash registers need electricity, and cashiers won't do transactions if they're not working.
Maybe you could go to a yard sale or something?
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amazing news for all you young-un's, most credit cards can be used as payment with no power! when I was a kid that's the only way they were taken. number, security code on back, customer's signature...you're good to go and get your money from the payment processor
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True, so cashless + no power could still work! But then they still won't let you if they can't get an official record for the good or calculate the proper price/tax. I can't remember the last time someone actually pulled out a binder with the appropriate info and did an on-paper tabulation with carbon copy. Lately I've just been refused and told to go to another outlet with power if that happens. Haven't seen it in 10 years, that's just anecdotal though, anyone else have any experiences they can share?
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I did have my credit card taken manually a couple years ago at a ethnic grocery store when computer system down, those chinese merchants aren't going to pass up chance to collect money. hey they even had little hardware and housewares section...might be useful to remember
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So the ones who are willing to bring out the old school binders and pencils when the shit hits the fan will be the ones who survive and thrive during the emergency.
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kids today are amazing, aren't they? as in clueless. you can take cash, checks, credit card...all without power. of course, there is the problem of not being able to verify whether card or account is valid and can take the charge, but in a neighborhood busniess where you know most your customers that largely wouldn't be problem. and of course you could ask for ID and take down address
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their loss and the mom & pop shops gain. we still have small stores around me, like ethnic grocery stores. I did hve my credit card number taken manually a couple years ago by some store, can't remember why but it showed up in my bill, no problem
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They do this to cover any extras (Room service etc), or damage that you might do to the room. And virtually all hotels do the same thing, as do car rental companies and many other places.
If you use a credit card instead of a debit card then it's not a problem as it's only a pre-auth it comes off your credit limit but is never actually billed so you don't have to pay it.
Many hotels actually warn you *not* to use a debit card because of this.
So always use a credit card in situations like this, it saves you a
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Yeah but they still won't do it, it doesn't keep an electronic record nor calculate any prices/fees. They just refuse, I've tried.
Amazon shut-ins (Score:3)
Visa/MC get 2.5% of the economy (Score:5, Insightful)
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In a world that is creditcard-only, yes. In a country with saner financial regulation, I've got a debit card that costs a fixed amount per month (actually the bank account it's linked to has a fixed price for debit card+internet banking+all other features of the account) instead of having to pay a % per transaction.
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For debit card transactions in .nl, the banks don't take 2.5%, they take a flat fee per transaction that can be as low as E0.02 [www.ing.nl].
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So US need better banks with reasonable prices. What else is new.
But when that it said, The cost of handling cash for a business is around 2% when you include handling, storage and security.
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No they don't. According to this Federal Reserve Survey [federalreserve.gov], they get a lot less than that. And that fee is only on card transactions, which are a small fraction of the "entire economy" [federalreserve.gov].
Why are you lying to people about it? That's the more important question.
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And those studies show that card usage is through the roof. I don't know what point you're trying to make here.
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Dude, that's just one debit fee. There are more fees on top of that one. Cards run as "credit" have an average 2.5% interchange base rate.
Visa and MasterCard don’t get the other fees. And the fees don’t average 2.5% of the total of all card transactions.
And those studies show that card usage is through the roof.
"Through the roof" notwithstanding, card transactions remain a small fraction of the "entire economy".
I don't know what point you're trying to make here.
My main point is: stop lying to people.
Probably not all that different (Score:5, Interesting)
Back before ATM's and the Internet, banks would run out of cash in times of unexpected demand. And in a disaster situation, people sure as hell aren't making bank deposits. The situation would have been a little better back then than it is now with 'electronic money', but probably not a lot. There still would have been a shortage of the means to exchange 'abstractions of value'.
Arguably, we COULD have it better today, with sufficient backup and redundancy - generators and batteries, radio data links, etc. - but haven't invested enough to make it happen. Then again, given a few massive EMP's, all bets are off.
Just Goes To Show (Score:2)
It just goes to show that...
Cash is still king.
Grass is keen.
Ass is queen.
So instead of building infrastructure (Score:2)
At the risk of getting down modded into oblivion I'll say this: This is less a real problem and more a symptom of the current ruling party not providing aid to Pu
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Not exactly (Score:2)
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Normalcy of economic interaction keeps law and order alive. You can't immediately switch the entire distribution system on the Island to being charity based.
It's a symptom of people still having some common sense ... so maybe it is a symptom of your current ruling party.
Puerto Rico (Score:2)
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Unfortunately many of the PR hospitals were non-operational. Even with backup generators, they had trouble getting fuel to run them. I am not sure if they are all back up yet. I suspect not since the island is still without power in most places and road access to deliver fuel is still spotty.
Re: I pray the power never goes out PERIOD (Score:5, Interesting)
Post-Irma, at least half of the GAS STATIONS in South Florida were closed for at least a few days. Why? No (working) backup power. By law, they're required to have generators, but apparently the state doesn't require them to test, maintain, and certify them as operational. So gas stations grudgingly installed generators after Hurricane Wilma, then didn't do jack shit to maintain them for the next 12 years. Irma came & went, and lots of those generators didn't work.
For Dade & Broward counties, Irma side-swiped us as a weak category 1 hurricane. Our power grid & stores were dysfunctional to some degree for a week. If we'd gotten directly hit by a *major* (cat-3 or above) hurricane, we'd be in AT LEAST as fucked as San Juan is now.
The REAL danger in future storms is going to be people who remember what happened to gas stations after Irma, and to make sure it doesn't happen to them again, go into the next storm with 20 5-gallon cans of gas in their garage. Guaranteed, we'll have at least one news story of a *horrific* fire caused by someone storing EGREGIOUSLY unsafe quantities of gas in an even MORE unsafe location.
As a matter of public safety, local governments need to MAKE SURE that gas will be abundantly and readily available at most 8 hours after the last hurricane-force winds, convince the public that gas WILL be readily available, and actually pull it off. Otherwise, people will do *really* unsafe things because it seems like a lesser evil compared to being unable to buy stuff they need.
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the reason why "a cashless world" hasn't happened decades ago is that the U.S. government needs its global currency to be anonymous for the purposes of funding wars, insurrections, selling narcotics to fund operations that congress won't (CIA), etc.
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Forget Power...just wait until the computer crash (Score:3)
Just one day ago my credit union suffered a comm outage of some kind (they are very secretive about it).
As a result, none of their cards would work (Debit or Credit). I had to leave a bunch of groceries at the check out stand and looked like an idiot.
I ended up getting cash from the local branch so I could get groceries.
But, the power was on!
Re: (Score:2)
Which is why it pays to...
a, always have multiple cards from multiple suppliers (multiple banks as well as multiple types of card visa/amex/etc)
b, always carry enough cash for emergencies
Although the laws vary from place to place... If a place claims to accept cards, and then fails to do so through no fault of yours, who's liable?
What if you've already consumed the goods (eg in a restaurant, or already pumped some gas) and then their card machine is faulty?