"A male GP has been prevented from donating blood to the Scottish NHS after he refused to confirm whether or not he was pregnant.
Steffen McAndrew, who works in Prestwick, South Ayrshire, said he had been turned away from a blood donation centre in nearby Ayr after he refused to answer a “bonkers” question about if he was carrying a baby."
I'm as antiwoke as the next man, but I'll allow that that might fall into the category of a slightly lazily designed form rather than anyone pushing the trans agenda, even if they wanted to. One form for everyone is bound to create some redundancy. That said, I was quite taken aback to be asked if I was pregnant when filling in the forms when I went for a vasectomy. (I was also asked about my sexuality, which again seemed redundant - vasectomies being pretty much by definition a procedure for heterosexual men.)
This isn't the first time it's happened. This report is from June last year.
It feels like performative "being turned away", tbh - we'll no doubt see a lot more of that in 3 weeks time.
Also - gay men and heterosexual men are not mutually exclusive, hence being snipped does not in itself obviate a sexuality question. Think of the numbers of married men who have been gay on the side.
Wouldn't that be bisexuality ?
I once asked a friend of mine if he was a biphobe.
He said he wouldn't go that far but he wasn't sold on it.
ONtopic, AI generated porn is getting better by the day. As some of us predicted. And this IS a betting website
The best of it is basically indistinguishable from real porn, except perhaps it might be better? I did a test this morning when I "toggled" between one and the other, Real porn and AI porn. It was a properly difficult decision as to which was more arousing. Real porn just about won, because real porn has videos and AI porn doesn't yet - but it will
At that point no one will ever have actual sex again
You have really led a sheltered life.
I have been credibly accused of many things. "Sheltered life" is not one of them
If you get excited by porn you might need a real life girlfriend/partner other than Madam Palm and her five sisters.
Porn is tremendously profitable, even when it is given away free. You may be indifferent to it - but clearly many people find it quite an appealing use of their time. I think Leon is engaging in slight hyperbole about no-one ever having sex again - though better porn will no doubt chip into the time and effort spent on that particular leisure activity. It also has the potential to eat substantially into the time spent on other activities - not least if WFH continues to be a thing…
At that point it will be necessary to redefine that acronym.
Interestingly, if you pump the word "British" into your AI porn generator, the girl often has slightly goofy teeth - but goofy in an adorable and also sexy way, because it actually makes them more believable as images - because there is a flaw. Too many of the fake AI girls are simply too perfect to be credible
Leon, your man on the spot
That's true in real life too. Many Americans have teeth too perfect to be credible. A bit of a gap between the front teeth or an overbite can be quite attractive.
Yeah, real life American porn is often off-putting for that reason. Glossy but somehow unbelievable
AI porn knows this, and is cleverly heading for "slightly flawed", as it is supercharged by ten million bored men working hard on their prompts
(Don't worry, I'm going out for a meeting in a minute)
There is one guy who is dedicating his life, it seems, to producing the PERFECT image of a naked British girl on a grass tennis court. You can see him honing his prompts over time. He is getting there. Eventually - if he continues on trend - he will produce a better, sexier image of a naked British girl on a grass tennis court than anything that real porn could produce, thus putting a tiny tiny niche genre of real porn out of business
At the risk of being, er, a bit graphic for the mid afternoon session, I personally find my pleasure to be, uhm, considerably enhanced when reviewing sexy pictures or videos sent to me by various partners and former partners than just some generic porn star getting her kit off.
It's as I was saying the other week - you can make the "perfect" image but it can't replace the human connection you feel with a specific person, which is why onlyfans is so profitable - people pay for the interaction with the girl, which is scarce, not the nude photo, which is not. People will choose real relations over AI porn for the same reason.
Now I am aware that the tech is good enough to take a perfectly innocent mug shot of an old flame and digitally create as much porn based on her likeness as possible, but that raises insurmountable ethical issues and probably legal ones too. But my point is that it's the connection, not the image, that most people seek.
By the way, I recently upgraded to GPT4, and while its responses are still full of caveats and dubious moral guardrails, it's strikingly similar to the way GPT3 used to be back in December, which leads me to think a lot of the 'dumbing down' of GPT3 is less its guardrails and more that the GPT3 model has been pruned to prioritise speed over depth.
The GPT4 experience is smarter and much less "beige" even with minimal prompting, although it still feels more limited than the December iteration of ChatGPT.
King Charles could be the last monarch on a banknote as cash loses its crown
Digital payments dominate amid increasing obsolescence of cash
Halfway through 2024, King Charles III will become only the second monarch to see his portrait launched into circulation on British banknotes. It is feasible that his likeness will be the last one on a banknote that is ever actually used.
The use of cash is collapsing around the world. De La Rue, a firm which designs a third of the world’s banknotes, says global demand for physical currency has hit a 20-year low. Card, mobile and digital wallet payments are replacing traditional payment methods at a swift rate.
Globally, between 2018 and 2022, the value of global cash transactions fell from $11.6 trillion (£9.3 trillion) to $7.7 trillion, a drop of a third, according to financial services firm FIS.
Last year, cash accounted for just 16pc of transactions worldwide. By 2026, global cash transactions will be worth only $6 trillion, making up just one in 10 payments, FIS has forecast.
By this measure, the UK is ahead of the curve: last year, cash already accounted for only a tenth of point of sale transactions.
In the 10 years to 2031, cash payments will slump by another 52pc, according to UK Finance, the lender trade body. Debit card payments, already the dominant method for settling up, will have surged by nearly a quarter in that time.
“We are going to have to start preparing for a very, very low cash society,” says John Howells, chief executive of Link, the UK’s cash machine network.
“Cash will be a store for safety, but as a means of payment it is already dropping fast, and that is going to continue. I think in 15 or 20 years’ time that could have virtually disappeared.”
Re: cash, someone said to me the other day, have you seen the 'new' 50pm coin?
I replied that I hadn't seen it, nor a 50p coin of any kind, old, middle-aged or new, for about a decade.
Really?
Up until 2020, I had a coin jar, which accumulated change through the year and was periodically taken to the bank - it used to get about £400 a year in change. Since the pandemic, it no longer builds up ,and I have to go out of my way from time to time to get change to keep it stocked. But I do still need coins, for reasons including, er: - transactions with children (the tooth fairy doesn't bring plastic) - tips in restaurants (I want my money to go to the specific waiter/waitress who provided the service) - buskers - parking (most car parks accept payment by app but that is a massive pain in the arse, particularly if I don't have my glasses with me) - filling a pint glass with, then pissing in it and throwing it from on high at 15 year old girls who have a different favourite football team to me (joking - I'm not a Liverpool fan).
It's not a massive list. But cash isn't dead yet.
EDIT: All that said, upon meeting a colleague for the first time in 2 years recently, I was shocked to find he no longer even carries a wallet - just does everything on his phone. Does he not worry about running out of battery? Does he not worry about losing his phone? Does he not worry about having his phone but not his glasses? Apparently not. Not for me, Clive.
I haven't carried a wallet for nearly two years. Both my watch and phone make payments so what exactly is the point of carting around a load of pointless plastic and paper?
Prosecutors bringing the conspiracy wire fraud case, if it happens, will have had most of their legwork done for them already, since is took place in plain sight. And was, and continues to be, extensively reported.
Alex Wagner just broadcast audio of a Trump campaign official acknowledging during a phone call with a Fox News producer in December 2020 that there was no evidence of physical issues with Dominion voting machines https://twitter.com/atrupar/status/1646321015276937216
Re: cash, someone said to me the other day, have you seen the 'new' 50pm coin?
I replied that I hadn't seen it, nor a 50p coin of any kind, old, middle-aged or new, for about a decade.
Really?
Up until 2020, I had a coin jar, which accumulated change through the year and was periodically taken to the bank - it used to get about £400 a year in change. Since the pandemic, it no longer builds up ,and I have to go out of my way from time to time to get change to keep it stocked. But I do still need coins, for reasons including, er: - transactions with children (the tooth fairy doesn't bring plastic) - tips in restaurants (I want my money to go to the specific waiter/waitress who provided the service) - buskers - parking (most car parks accept payment by app but that is a massive pain in the arse, particularly if I don't have my glasses with me) - filling a pint glass with, then pissing in it and throwing it from on high at 15 year old girls who have a different favourite football team to me (joking - I'm not a Liverpool fan).
It's not a massive list. But cash isn't dead yet.
EDIT: All that said, upon meeting a colleague for the first time in 2 years recently, I was shocked to find he no longer even carries a wallet - just does everything on his phone. Does he not worry about running out of battery? Does he not worry about losing his phone? Does he not worry about having his phone but not his glasses? Apparently not. Not for me, Clive.
I haven't carried a wallet for nearly two years. Both my watch and phone make payments so what exactly is the point of carting around a load of pointless plastic and paper?
Re: cash, someone said to me the other day, have you seen the 'new' 50pm coin?
I replied that I hadn't seen it, nor a 50p coin of any kind, old, middle-aged or new, for about a decade.
Really?
Up until 2020, I had a coin jar, which accumulated change through the year and was periodically taken to the bank - it used to get about £400 a year in change. Since the pandemic, it no longer builds up ,and I have to go out of my way from time to time to get change to keep it stocked. But I do still need coins, for reasons including, er: - transactions with children (the tooth fairy doesn't bring plastic) - tips in restaurants (I want my money to go to the specific waiter/waitress who provided the service) - buskers - parking (most car parks accept payment by app but that is a massive pain in the arse, particularly if I don't have my glasses with me) - filling a pint glass with, then pissing in it and throwing it from on high at 15 year old girls who have a different favourite football team to me (joking - I'm not a Liverpool fan).
It's not a massive list. But cash isn't dead yet.
Agree with this. Kids like coins and notes too, and the implicit value of a physical item is important in teaching the value of a thing, which is harder to do with digital money.
Side note, but car park apps can get in the sea, in a bin, sealed in concrete and covered in warnings to prevent future generations from ever repeating our mistakes.
Wrong.
Give them a bank account and let them see how their cashless transfers rack up.
Cash just burns a whole in their pocket – sweets tokens.
Re: cash, someone said to me the other day, have you seen the 'new' 50pm coin?
I replied that I hadn't seen it, nor a 50p coin of any kind, old, middle-aged or new, for about a decade.
Really?
Up until 2020, I had a coin jar, which accumulated change through the year and was periodically taken to the bank - it used to get about £400 a year in change. Since the pandemic, it no longer builds up ,and I have to go out of my way from time to time to get change to keep it stocked. But I do still need coins, for reasons including, er: - transactions with children (the tooth fairy doesn't bring plastic) - tips in restaurants (I want my money to go to the specific waiter/waitress who provided the service) - buskers - parking (most car parks accept payment by app but that is a massive pain in the arse, particularly if I don't have my glasses with me) - filling a pint glass with, then pissing in it and throwing it from on high at 15 year old girls who have a different favourite football team to me (joking - I'm not a Liverpool fan).
It's not a massive list. But cash isn't dead yet.
Agree with this. Kids like coins and notes too, and the implicit value of a physical item is important in teaching the value of a thing, which is harder to do with digital money.
Side note, but car park apps can get in the sea, in a bin, sealed in concrete and covered in warnings to prevent future generations from ever repeating our mistakes.
Wrong.
Give them a bank account and let them see how their cashless transfers rack up.
Cash just burns a whole in their pocket – sweets tokens.
(Don't worry, I'm going out for a meeting in a minute)
There is one guy who is dedicating his life, it seems, to producing the PERFECT image of a naked British girl on a grass tennis court. You can see him honing his prompts over time. He is getting there. Eventually - if he continues on trend - he will produce a better, sexier image of a naked British girl on a grass tennis court than anything that real porn could produce, thus putting a tiny tiny niche genre of real porn out of business
At the risk of being, er, a bit graphic for the mid afternoon session, I personally find my pleasure to be, uhm, considerably enhanced when reviewing sexy pictures or videos sent to me by various partners and former partners than just some generic porn star getting her kit off.
It's as I was saying the other week - you can make the "perfect" image but it can't replace the human connection you feel with a specific person, which is why onlyfans is so profitable - people pay for the interaction with the girl, which is scarce, not the nude photo, which is not. People will choose real relations over AI porn for the same reason.
Now I am aware that the tech is good enough to take a perfectly innocent mug shot of an old flame and digitally create as much porn based on her likeness as possible, but that raises insurmountable ethical issues and probably legal ones too. But my point is that it's the connection, not the image, that most people seek.
By the way, I recently upgraded to GPT4, and while its responses are still full of caveats and dubious moral guardrails, it's strikingly similar to the way GPT3 used to be back in December, which leads me to think a lot of the 'dumbing down' of GPT3 is less its guardrails and more that the GPT3 model has been pruned to prioritise speed over depth.
The GPT4 experience is smarter and much less "beige" even with minimal prompting, although it still feels more limited than the December iteration of ChatGPT.
But with real relations you risk rejection and you need the relations in the first place. There is a serious risk - indeed a near certain risk - AI porn will get so good - so perfectly curated for YOUR personal kinks and desires - people won't bother with the real thing. Then add in VR and sexbots and the rest
Plus of course AI could fake real girls on OnlyFans very very easily. Indeed there are rumours that some people are doing just that, already
Then we come to deepfake vids and pics of real girlfriends, boyfriends, models, actresses, and you can make them do anything you want. On an elephant in the snow, wearing a tam o shanter
Council round here has moved to phone apps entirely for parking, even though they had machines available which could take contactless payments. Bonkers.
Contactless is great. Phone apps for carparking just shouldn't be allowed. For one thing your debit card won't go out of battery for that 1% of time your phone is out of juice and you can't phone tap the contactless.
If there's contactless (hell, even chip and pin) then I'm not too bothered about what else is available. Cash for those who prefer/need that should also be provided, I think.
The frustrating thing is that any halfway decent parking app standard would be more convenient for most. Car reg(s) stored in app. Location services pinpoint the car park (or some NFC thing to swipe at worst). Choose your time and go, automatic payment. Extendable without returning to the car park. No queues. Many benefits. The current shit-show is not necessary.
Why? Would you allow people to pay in postal orders or cheques or similarly obsolete payments?
How much would that matter, though ? Presumably it would be possible to constitute a new pro-independence party. It might even do them a favour by clearing out those implicated, and distancing the new party from the mess.
Re: cash, someone said to me the other day, have you seen the 'new' 50pm coin?
I replied that I hadn't seen it, nor a 50p coin of any kind, old, middle-aged or new, for about a decade.
Really?
Up until 2020, I had a coin jar, which accumulated change through the year and was periodically taken to the bank - it used to get about £400 a year in change. Since the pandemic, it no longer builds up ,and I have to go out of my way from time to time to get change to keep it stocked. But I do still need coins, for reasons including, er: - transactions with children (the tooth fairy doesn't bring plastic) - tips in restaurants (I want my money to go to the specific waiter/waitress who provided the service) - buskers - parking (most car parks accept payment by app but that is a massive pain in the arse, particularly if I don't have my glasses with me) - filling a pint glass with, then pissing in it and throwing it from on high at 15 year old girls who have a different favourite football team to me (joking - I'm not a Liverpool fan).
It's not a massive list. But cash isn't dead yet.
EDIT: All that said, upon meeting a colleague for the first time in 2 years recently, I was shocked to find he no longer even carries a wallet - just does everything on his phone. Does he not worry about running out of battery? Does he not worry about losing his phone? Does he not worry about having his phone but not his glasses? Apparently not. Not for me, Clive.
I haven't carried a wallet for nearly two years. Both my watch and phone make payments so what exactly is the point of carting around a load of pointless plastic and paper?
In Thailand it is still 80% cash at least. It is really quite annoying have to go back to paper wads (let alone meaningless coins). It made me realise that cash is definitely doomed. Cash is a total pain
Council round here has moved to phone apps entirely for parking, even though they had machines available which could take contactless payments. Bonkers.
Contactless is great. Phone apps for carparking just shouldn't be allowed. For one thing your debit card won't go out of battery for that 1% of time your phone is out of juice and you can't phone tap the contactless.
If there's contactless (hell, even chip and pin) then I'm not too bothered about what else is available. Cash for those who prefer/need that should also be provided, I think.
The frustrating thing is that any halfway decent parking app standard would be more convenient for most. Car reg(s) stored in app. Location services pinpoint the car park (or some NFC thing to swipe at worst). Choose your time and go, automatic payment. Extendable without returning to the car park. No queues. Many benefits. The current shit-show is not necessary.
Why? Would you allow people to pay in postal orders or cheques or similarly obsolete payments?
How much would that matter, though ? Presumably it would be possible to constitute a new pro-independence party. It might even do them a favour by clearing out those implicated, and distancing the new party from the mess.
The new party would lose all it's Westminster (and Scottish Parliament?) money however... Which would make funding the preparation of the next campaign a problem.
How much would that matter, though ? Presumably it would be possible to constitute a new pro-independence party. It might even do them a favour by clearing out those implicated, and distancing the new party from the mess.
The new party would lose all it's Westminster (and Scottish Parliament?) money however... Which would make funding the preparation of the next campaign a problem.
I don't think that would matter. The main pro-independence party can rely on 40-odd % of the vote before they've blinked. The trick will be to establish who is the *main* one.
How much would that matter, though ? Presumably it would be possible to constitute a new pro-independence party. It might even do them a favour by clearing out those implicated, and distancing the new party from the mess.
Well, it would be enormously entertaining, for a start. So there's that?
Also, there would surely be a real risk of a split if they had to start a new party. It is already obvious that the Woke Nats should not be in the same party as Forbes and her supporters. A reboot would give them a chance to make the split formal
Actually, I believe that would be better for the long term prospects of indy
(Don't worry, I'm going out for a meeting in a minute)
There is one guy who is dedicating his life, it seems, to producing the PERFECT image of a naked British girl on a grass tennis court. You can see him honing his prompts over time. He is getting there. Eventually - if he continues on trend - he will produce a better, sexier image of a naked British girl on a grass tennis court than anything that real porn could produce, thus putting a tiny tiny niche genre of real porn out of business
At the risk of being, er, a bit graphic for the mid afternoon session, I personally find my pleasure to be, uhm, considerably enhanced when reviewing sexy pictures or videos sent to me by various partners and former partners than just some generic porn star getting her kit off.
It's as I was saying the other week - you can make the "perfect" image but it can't replace the human connection you feel with a specific person, which is why onlyfans is so profitable - people pay for the interaction with the girl, which is scarce, not the nude photo, which is not. People will choose real relations over AI porn for the same reason.
Now I am aware that the tech is good enough to take a perfectly innocent mug shot of an old flame and digitally create as much porn based on her likeness as possible, but that raises insurmountable ethical issues and probably legal ones too. But my point is that it's the connection, not the image, that most people seek.
By the way, I recently upgraded to GPT4, and while its responses are still full of caveats and dubious moral guardrails, it's strikingly similar to the way GPT3 used to be back in December, which leads me to think a lot of the 'dumbing down' of GPT3 is less its guardrails and more that the GPT3 model has been pruned to prioritise speed over depth.
The GPT4 experience is smarter and much less "beige" even with minimal prompting, although it still feels more limited than the December iteration of ChatGPT.
But with real relations you risk rejection and you need the relations in the first place. There is a serious risk - indeed a near certain risk - AI porn will get so good - so perfectly curated for YOUR personal kinks and desires - people won't bother with the real thing. Then add in VR and sexbots and the rest
Plus of course AI could fake real girls on OnlyFans very very easily. Indeed there are rumours that some people are doing just that, already
Then we come to deepfake vids and pics of real girlfriends, boyfriends, models, actresses, and you can make them do anything you want. On an elephant in the snow, wearing a tam o shanter
I must investigate GPT4 more thoroughly
Time to repost this from yesterday.
プロ驚き屋 ("a professional surprised man", New Slang) = a person who excitedly shares state-of-the-art tools/technologies like ChatGPT on social media with hyperbole like 神/最強/ヤバすぎ, as well as with hallucination/overstatement at times based on a few cherry-picked examples https://mobile.twitter.com/takashionary/status/1645371251236503553O
Council round here has moved to phone apps entirely for parking, even though they had machines available which could take contactless payments. Bonkers.
Contactless is great. Phone apps for carparking just shouldn't be allowed. For one thing your debit card won't go out of battery for that 1% of time your phone is out of juice and you can't phone tap the contactless.
If there's contactless (hell, even chip and pin) then I'm not too bothered about what else is available. Cash for those who prefer/need that should also be provided, I think.
The frustrating thing is that any halfway decent parking app standard would be more convenient for most. Car reg(s) stored in app. Location services pinpoint the car park (or some NFC thing to swipe at worst). Choose your time and go, automatic payment. Extendable without returning to the car park. No queues. Many benefits. The current shit-show is not necessary.
Why? Would you allow people to pay in postal orders or cheques or similarly obsolete payments?
Because there will always be a proportion of the population that require cash as they are unable to deal with more modern ways of budgeting.
My wife had a very severe stroke 5 years ago and has left her with tremendous mental issues, she cannot understand the difference between up or down, left or right, forwards or backwards. She cannot unlock doors, she cannot leave the house alone.
But she does have a level of financial independence as each month we take some money out of her bank and over the month she manages her spend as she can touch, feel and see her money.
My wife could not deal with a card (if nothing else her eye sight is so poor she cannot see the numbers on the keypads), take away cash and you take away about the only thing in her life that she has any level of independence over.
My wife may be a very extreme case, but there are probably far more people at that end of the spectrum than you would imagine.
Council round here has moved to phone apps entirely for parking, even though they had machines available which could take contactless payments. Bonkers.
Contactless is great. Phone apps for carparking just shouldn't be allowed. For one thing your debit card won't go out of battery for that 1% of time your phone is out of juice and you can't phone tap the contactless.
If there's contactless (hell, even chip and pin) then I'm not too bothered about what else is available. Cash for those who prefer/need that should also be provided, I think.
The frustrating thing is that any halfway decent parking app standard would be more convenient for most. Car reg(s) stored in app. Location services pinpoint the car park (or some NFC thing to swipe at worst). Choose your time and go, automatic payment. Extendable without returning to the car park. No queues. Many benefits. The current shit-show is not necessary.
Why? Would you allow people to pay in postal orders or cheques or similarly obsolete payments?
Because there will always be a proportion of the population that require cash as they are unable to deal with more modern ways of budgeting.
My wife had a very severe stroke 5 years ago and has left her with tremendous mental issues, she cannot understand the difference between up or down, left or right, forwards or backwards. She cannot unlock doors, she cannot leave the house alone.
But she does have a level of financial independence as each month we take some money out of her bank and over the month she manages her spend as she can touch, feel and see her money.
My wife could not deal with a card (if nothing else her eye sight is so poor she cannot see the numbers on the keypads), take away cash and you take away about the only thing in her life that she has any level of independence over.
My wife may be a very extreme case, but there are probably far more people at that end of the spectrum than you would imagine.
Separately for those (unlike us on here) with limited funds - having a finite amount of notes makes it clear how much they can afford to spend today / this week. In a way that a figure on a phone simply doesn't work.
Re: cash, someone said to me the other day, have you seen the 'new' 50pm coin?
I replied that I hadn't seen it, nor a 50p coin of any kind, old, middle-aged or new, for about a decade.
Really?
Up until 2020, I had a coin jar, which accumulated change through the year and was periodically taken to the bank - it used to get about £400 a year in change. Since the pandemic, it no longer builds up ,and I have to go out of my way from time to time to get change to keep it stocked. But I do still need coins, for reasons including, er: - transactions with children (the tooth fairy doesn't bring plastic) - tips in restaurants (I want my money to go to the specific waiter/waitress who provided the service) - buskers - parking (most car parks accept payment by app but that is a massive pain in the arse, particularly if I don't have my glasses with me) - filling a pint glass with, then pissing in it and throwing it from on high at 15 year old girls who have a different favourite football team to me (joking - I'm not a Liverpool fan).
It's not a massive list. But cash isn't dead yet.
EDIT: All that said, upon meeting a colleague for the first time in 2 years recently, I was shocked to find he no longer even carries a wallet - just does everything on his phone. Does he not worry about running out of battery? Does he not worry about losing his phone? Does he not worry about having his phone but not his glasses? Apparently not. Not for me, Clive.
I haven't carried a wallet for nearly two years. Both my watch and phone make payments so what exactly is the point of carting around a load of pointless plastic and paper?
In Thailand it is still 80% cash at least. It is really quite annoying have to go back to paper wads (let alone meaningless coins). It made me realise that cash is definitely doomed. Cash is a total pain
It really is. A total timer waster –– "oh I have to go to the bank machine, where is the bank machine? Dunno, oh it's x miles away"
Absolutely ridiculous persisting with it nowadays.
(Don't worry, I'm going out for a meeting in a minute)
There is one guy who is dedicating his life, it seems, to producing the PERFECT image of a naked British girl on a grass tennis court. You can see him honing his prompts over time. He is getting there. Eventually - if he continues on trend - he will produce a better, sexier image of a naked British girl on a grass tennis court than anything that real porn could produce, thus putting a tiny tiny niche genre of real porn out of business
At the risk of being, er, a bit graphic for the mid afternoon session, I personally find my pleasure to be, uhm, considerably enhanced when reviewing sexy pictures or videos sent to me by various partners and former partners than just some generic porn star getting her kit off.
It's as I was saying the other week - you can make the "perfect" image but it can't replace the human connection you feel with a specific person, which is why onlyfans is so profitable - people pay for the interaction with the girl, which is scarce, not the nude photo, which is not. People will choose real relations over AI porn for the same reason.
Now I am aware that the tech is good enough to take a perfectly innocent mug shot of an old flame and digitally create as much porn based on her likeness as possible, but that raises insurmountable ethical issues and probably legal ones too. But my point is that it's the connection, not the image, that most people seek.
By the way, I recently upgraded to GPT4, and while its responses are still full of caveats and dubious moral guardrails, it's strikingly similar to the way GPT3 used to be back in December, which leads me to think a lot of the 'dumbing down' of GPT3 is less its guardrails and more that the GPT3 model has been pruned to prioritise speed over depth.
The GPT4 experience is smarter and much less "beige" even with minimal prompting, although it still feels more limited than the December iteration of ChatGPT.
But with real relations you risk rejection and you need the relations in the first place. There is a serious risk - indeed a near certain risk - AI porn will get so good - so perfectly curated for YOUR personal kinks and desires - people won't bother with the real thing. Then add in VR and sexbots and the rest
Plus of course AI could fake real girls on OnlyFans very very easily. Indeed there are rumours that some people are doing just that, already
Then we come to deepfake vids and pics of real girlfriends, boyfriends, models, actresses, and you can make them do anything you want. On an elephant in the snow, wearing a tam o shanter
I must investigate GPT4 more thoroughly
Time to repost this from yesterday.
プロ驚き屋 ("a professional surprised man", New Slang) = a person who excitedly shares state-of-the-art tools/technologies like ChatGPT on social media with hyperbole like 神/最強/ヤバすぎ, as well as with hallucination/overstatement at times based on a few cherry-picked examples https://mobile.twitter.com/takashionary/status/1645371251236503553O
That's me. How exciting! I have a new Japanese word designed specifically for me. I always said I was cutting edge
Council round here has moved to phone apps entirely for parking, even though they had machines available which could take contactless payments. Bonkers.
Contactless is great. Phone apps for carparking just shouldn't be allowed. For one thing your debit card won't go out of battery for that 1% of time your phone is out of juice and you can't phone tap the contactless.
If there's contactless (hell, even chip and pin) then I'm not too bothered about what else is available. Cash for those who prefer/need that should also be provided, I think.
The frustrating thing is that any halfway decent parking app standard would be more convenient for most. Car reg(s) stored in app. Location services pinpoint the car park (or some NFC thing to swipe at worst). Choose your time and go, automatic payment. Extendable without returning to the car park. No queues. Many benefits. The current shit-show is not necessary.
Why? Would you allow people to pay in postal orders or cheques or similarly obsolete payments?
Council round here has moved to phone apps entirely for parking, even though they had machines available which could take contactless payments. Bonkers.
Contactless is great. Phone apps for carparking just shouldn't be allowed. For one thing your debit card won't go out of battery for that 1% of time your phone is out of juice and you can't phone tap the contactless.
If there's contactless (hell, even chip and pin) then I'm not too bothered about what else is available. Cash for those who prefer/need that should also be provided, I think.
The frustrating thing is that any halfway decent parking app standard would be more convenient for most. Car reg(s) stored in app. Location services pinpoint the car park (or some NFC thing to swipe at worst). Choose your time and go, automatic payment. Extendable without returning to the car park. No queues. Many benefits. The current shit-show is not necessary.
Why? Would you allow people to pay in postal orders or cheques or similarly obsolete payments?
Because there will always be a proportion of the population that require cash as they are unable to deal with more modern ways of budgeting.
My wife had a very severe stroke 5 years ago and has left her with tremendous mental issues, she cannot understand the difference between up or down, left or right, forwards or backwards. She cannot unlock doors, she cannot leave the house alone.
But she does have a level of financial independence as each month we take some money out of her bank and over the month she manages her spend as she can touch, feel and see her money.
My wife could not deal with a card (if nothing else her eye sight is so poor she cannot see the numbers on the keypads), take away cash and you take away about the only thing in her life that she has any level of independence over.
My wife may be a very extreme case, but there are probably far more people at that end of the spectrum than you would imagine.
Absolutely - I know a few people who like to use cash for budgeting because paying by card doesn't feel like spending money.
Obviously, people who don't need to worry about having month left at the end of the money can merrily tap away.
One thing I do not understand is anime porn. Weird lurid quasi Japanese porn elves with dragon-snakes *doing things* to them, etc etc
Yet clearly a lot of people find these images genuinely arousing because an awful lot of these images are being carefully generated by hard-working prompters. It may account for the falling birth rates in Tokyo
Speaking entirely hypothetically, obvs, but I think that if something is very obviously not real it can make it easier to accept the fantasy and go along with it.
How much would that matter, though ? Presumably it would be possible to constitute a new pro-independence party. It might even do them a favour by clearing out those implicated, and distancing the new party from the mess.
The new party would lose all it's Westminster (and Scottish Parliament?) money however... Which would make funding the preparation of the next campaign a problem.
True. Short Money is a bit over a million a year for them ?
Council round here has moved to phone apps entirely for parking, even though they had machines available which could take contactless payments. Bonkers.
Contactless is great. Phone apps for carparking just shouldn't be allowed. For one thing your debit card won't go out of battery for that 1% of time your phone is out of juice and you can't phone tap the contactless.
If there's contactless (hell, even chip and pin) then I'm not too bothered about what else is available. Cash for those who prefer/need that should also be provided, I think.
The frustrating thing is that any halfway decent parking app standard would be more convenient for most. Car reg(s) stored in app. Location services pinpoint the car park (or some NFC thing to swipe at worst). Choose your time and go, automatic payment. Extendable without returning to the car park. No queues. Many benefits. The current shit-show is not necessary.
Why? Would you allow people to pay in postal orders or cheques or similarly obsolete payments?
I get paid by cheque.
Just saying...
So you are the one who still uses them.
For a cheque to be received, somebody has to send it. So it's not *one* person, by definition.
I've had quite a lot of cheques recently, if only because for charities it's still simpler to double-authorise by signing a cheque twice than setting up payments online. But I also had one for over £50,000 from Barclays Bank.
Re: cash, someone said to me the other day, have you seen the 'new' 50pm coin?
I replied that I hadn't seen it, nor a 50p coin of any kind, old, middle-aged or new, for about a decade.
Really?
Up until 2020, I had a coin jar, which accumulated change through the year and was periodically taken to the bank - it used to get about £400 a year in change. Since the pandemic, it no longer builds up ,and I have to go out of my way from time to time to get change to keep it stocked. But I do still need coins, for reasons including, er: - transactions with children (the tooth fairy doesn't bring plastic) - tips in restaurants (I want my money to go to the specific waiter/waitress who provided the service) - buskers - parking (most car parks accept payment by app but that is a massive pain in the arse, particularly if I don't have my glasses with me) - filling a pint glass with, then pissing in it and throwing it from on high at 15 year old girls who have a different favourite football team to me (joking - I'm not a Liverpool fan).
It's not a massive list. But cash isn't dead yet.
EDIT: All that said, upon meeting a colleague for the first time in 2 years recently, I was shocked to find he no longer even carries a wallet - just does everything on his phone. Does he not worry about running out of battery? Does he not worry about losing his phone? Does he not worry about having his phone but not his glasses? Apparently not. Not for me, Clive.
I haven't carried a wallet for nearly two years. Both my watch and phone make payments so what exactly is the point of carting around a load of pointless plastic and paper?
In Thailand it is still 80% cash at least. It is really quite annoying have to go back to paper wads (let alone meaningless coins). It made me realise that cash is definitely doomed. Cash is a total pain
It really is. A total timer waster –– "oh I have to go to the bank machine, where is the bank machine? Dunno, oh it's x miles away"
Absolutely ridiculous persisting with it nowadays.
Plus you can lose cash, it's a hassle to change it, you put it in the washing machine by mistake, and so on and so forth
Cash is doomed, the same way real gold and silver coins were doomed back in the day, and the value of notes and coins became notional
How much would that matter, though ? Presumably it would be possible to constitute a new pro-independence party. It might even do them a favour by clearing out those implicated, and distancing the new party from the mess.
The new party would lose all it's Westminster (and Scottish Parliament?) money however... Which would make funding the preparation of the next campaign a problem.
True. Short Money is a bit over a million a year for them ?
How much would that matter, though ? Presumably it would be possible to constitute a new pro-independence party. It might even do them a favour by clearing out those implicated, and distancing the new party from the mess.
The new party would lose all it's Westminster (and Scottish Parliament?) money however... Which would make funding the preparation of the next campaign a problem.
True. Short Money is a bit over a million a year for them ?
Absolutely not, King William will follow and then King George will outlive us all.
We certainly don't want President Johnson or President Blair
You may not, but lots of people would rather not have someone in a position simply by act of birth.
Its the 21st century.
About 25% of the population don't admittedly but even Corbyn won more than that in 2019.
A ceremonial constitutional monarch and head of state world renowned is far better than a divisive elected party political head of state or a nonentity ceremonial President.
Plenty of people still have jobs by birth, from farmers to family business owners anyway
Can you explain why? Do we need a head of state that is not the PM?
As the PM is head of government NOT head of state which should be above party politics.
See the US, Brazil or effectively France for the problems that come when the head of government is also head of state and the divisions that produces
Absent a monarch, what is the best approach here? The Irish model?
No, Higgins is an ex Irish Labour politician himself and little known outside Ireland.
Phew, a relief that PB whining about pols in a country in which the whiner does not live has moved on from France. Scotland and Germany still to come no doubt.
We don't just comment on English affairs, here.
‘Wanker’ being the top quality commentary we’ve come to expect,
You’ll be calling next for Guardian-esque letter writing campaigns to the voters in countries not your own. Tbf that’s about as close to regime change as the mangy old UK could manage nowadays.
Deary me. How long are you going to remain in this dyspeptic, geriatric, humourless ultra-sulk?
As a PBer who has been on here a lot longer than you recently said, I seem pretty much the same as I’ve always been, so that’s another 10 years of dyspepsia to go with the previous 10. When you’ve been on here a bit longer you’ll be able to pronounce on these matters with a little authority.
How much would that matter, though ? Presumably it would be possible to constitute a new pro-independence party. It might even do them a favour by clearing out those implicated, and distancing the new party from the mess.
The new party would lose all it's Westminster (and Scottish Parliament?) money however... Which would make funding the preparation of the next campaign a problem.
True. Short Money is a bit over a million a year for them ?
Hardly insurmountable, though.
Sell the motorhome?
In a bankruptcy that will go to the creditors, surely ?
Absolutely not, King William will follow and then King George will outlive us all.
We certainly don't want President Johnson or President Blair
You may not, but lots of people would rather not have someone in a position simply by act of birth.
Its the 21st century.
About 25% of the population don't admittedly but even Corbyn won more than that in 2019.
A ceremonial constitutional monarch and head of state world renowned is far better than a divisive elected party political head of state or a nonentity ceremonial President.
Plenty of people still have jobs by birth, from farmers to family business owners anyway
Can you explain why? Do we need a head of state that is not the PM?
As the PM is head of government NOT head of state which should be above party politics.
See the US, Brazil or effectively France for the problems that come when the head of government is also head of state and the divisions that produces
Absent a monarch, what is the best approach here? The Irish model?
No, Higgins is an ex Irish Labour politician himself and little known outside Ireland.
Phew, a relief that PB whining about pols in a country in which the whiner does not live has moved on from France. Scotland and Germany still to come no doubt.
We don't just comment on English affairs, here.
‘Wanker’ being the top quality commentary we’ve come to expect,
You’ll be calling next for Guardian-esque letter writing campaigns to the voters in countries not your own. Tbf that’s about as close to regime change as the mangy old UK could manage nowadays.
Deary me. How long are you going to remain in this dyspeptic, geriatric, humourless ultra-sulk?
As a PBer who has been on here a lot longer than you recently said, I seem pretty much the same as I’ve always been, so that’s another 10 years of dyspepsia to go with the previous 10. When you’ve been on here a bit longer you’ll be able to pronounce on these matters with a little authority.
QED. You've lost that dash of wryness, that sardonic mojo. Hope it returns
(Don't worry, I'm going out for a meeting in a minute)
There is one guy who is dedicating his life, it seems, to producing the PERFECT image of a naked British girl on a grass tennis court. You can see him honing his prompts over time. He is getting there. Eventually - if he continues on trend - he will produce a better, sexier image of a naked British girl on a grass tennis court than anything that real porn could produce, thus putting a tiny tiny niche genre of real porn out of business
At the risk of being, er, a bit graphic for the mid afternoon session, I personally find my pleasure to be, uhm, considerably enhanced when reviewing sexy pictures or videos sent to me by various partners and former partners than just some generic porn star getting her kit off.
It's as I was saying the other week - you can make the "perfect" image but it can't replace the human connection you feel with a specific person, which is why onlyfans is so profitable - people pay for the interaction with the girl, which is scarce, not the nude photo, which is not. People will choose real relations over AI porn for the same reason.
Now I am aware that the tech is good enough to take a perfectly innocent mug shot of an old flame and digitally create as much porn based on her likeness as possible, but that raises insurmountable ethical issues and probably legal ones too. But my point is that it's the connection, not the image, that most people seek.
By the way, I recently upgraded to GPT4, and while its responses are still full of caveats and dubious moral guardrails, it's strikingly similar to the way GPT3 used to be back in December, which leads me to think a lot of the 'dumbing down' of GPT3 is less its guardrails and more that the GPT3 model has been pruned to prioritise speed over depth.
The GPT4 experience is smarter and much less "beige" even with minimal prompting, although it still feels more limited than the December iteration of ChatGPT.
But with real relations you risk rejection and you need the relations in the first place. There is a serious risk - indeed a near certain risk - AI porn will get so good - so perfectly curated for YOUR personal kinks and desires - people won't bother with the real thing. Then add in VR and sexbots and the rest
Plus of course AI could fake real girls on OnlyFans very very easily. Indeed there are rumours that some people are doing just that, already
Then we come to deepfake vids and pics of real girlfriends, boyfriends, models, actresses, and you can make them do anything you want. On an elephant in the snow, wearing a tam o shanter
I must investigate GPT4 more thoroughly
Time to repost this from yesterday.
プロ驚き屋 ("a professional surprised man", New Slang) = a person who excitedly shares state-of-the-art tools/technologies like ChatGPT on social media with hyperbole like 神/最強/ヤバすぎ, as well as with hallucination/overstatement at times based on a few cherry-picked examples https://mobile.twitter.com/takashionary/status/1645371251236503553O
That's me. How exciting! I have a new Japanese word designed specifically for me. I always said I was cutting edge
We’ll be able quickly to recognise your next incarnation, then, when @プロ驚き屋 pops up.
Council round here has moved to phone apps entirely for parking, even though they had machines available which could take contactless payments. Bonkers.
Contactless is great. Phone apps for carparking just shouldn't be allowed. For one thing your debit card won't go out of battery for that 1% of time your phone is out of juice and you can't phone tap the contactless.
If there's contactless (hell, even chip and pin) then I'm not too bothered about what else is available. Cash for those who prefer/need that should also be provided, I think.
The frustrating thing is that any halfway decent parking app standard would be more convenient for most. Car reg(s) stored in app. Location services pinpoint the car park (or some NFC thing to swipe at worst). Choose your time and go, automatic payment. Extendable without returning to the car park. No queues. Many benefits. The current shit-show is not necessary.
Why? Would you allow people to pay in postal orders or cheques or similarly obsolete payments?
I get paid by cheque.
Just saying...
So you are the one who still uses them.
For a cheque to be received, somebody has to send it. So it's not *one* person, by definition.
I've had quite a lot of cheques recently, if only because for charities it's still simpler to double-authorise by signing a cheque twice than setting up payments online. But I also had one for over £50,000 from Barclays Bank.
You can pay in cheques with your phone these days.
Re: cash, someone said to me the other day, have you seen the 'new' 50pm coin?
I replied that I hadn't seen it, nor a 50p coin of any kind, old, middle-aged or new, for about a decade.
Really?
Up until 2020, I had a coin jar, which accumulated change through the year and was periodically taken to the bank - it used to get about £400 a year in change. Since the pandemic, it no longer builds up ,and I have to go out of my way from time to time to get change to keep it stocked. But I do still need coins, for reasons including, er: - transactions with children (the tooth fairy doesn't bring plastic) - tips in restaurants (I want my money to go to the specific waiter/waitress who provided the service) - buskers - parking (most car parks accept payment by app but that is a massive pain in the arse, particularly if I don't have my glasses with me) - filling a pint glass with, then pissing in it and throwing it from on high at 15 year old girls who have a different favourite football team to me (joking - I'm not a Liverpool fan).
It's not a massive list. But cash isn't dead yet.
EDIT: All that said, upon meeting a colleague for the first time in 2 years recently, I was shocked to find he no longer even carries a wallet - just does everything on his phone. Does he not worry about running out of battery? Does he not worry about losing his phone? Does he not worry about having his phone but not his glasses? Apparently not. Not for me, Clive.
I haven't carried a wallet for nearly two years. Both my watch and phone make payments so what exactly is the point of carting around a load of pointless plastic and paper?
In Thailand it is still 80% cash at least. It is really quite annoying have to go back to paper wads (let alone meaningless coins). It made me realise that cash is definitely doomed. Cash is a total pain
It really is. A total timer waster –– "oh I have to go to the bank machine, where is the bank machine? Dunno, oh it's x miles away"
Absolutely ridiculous persisting with it nowadays.
Plus you can lose cash, it's a hassle to change it, you put it in the washing machine by mistake, and so on and so forth
Cash is doomed, the same way real gold and silver coins were doomed back in the day, and the value of notes and coins became notional
Pedantic note - ye can wash notes these days. I won't stoop to a money laundering gag though.
Re: cash, someone said to me the other day, have you seen the 'new' 50pm coin?
I replied that I hadn't seen it, nor a 50p coin of any kind, old, middle-aged or new, for about a decade.
Really?
Up until 2020, I had a coin jar, which accumulated change through the year and was periodically taken to the bank - it used to get about £400 a year in change. Since the pandemic, it no longer builds up ,and I have to go out of my way from time to time to get change to keep it stocked. But I do still need coins, for reasons including, er: - transactions with children (the tooth fairy doesn't bring plastic) - tips in restaurants (I want my money to go to the specific waiter/waitress who provided the service) - buskers - parking (most car parks accept payment by app but that is a massive pain in the arse, particularly if I don't have my glasses with me) - filling a pint glass with, then pissing in it and throwing it from on high at 15 year old girls who have a different favourite football team to me (joking - I'm not a Liverpool fan).
It's not a massive list. But cash isn't dead yet.
EDIT: All that said, upon meeting a colleague for the first time in 2 years recently, I was shocked to find he no longer even carries a wallet - just does everything on his phone. Does he not worry about running out of battery? Does he not worry about losing his phone? Does he not worry about having his phone but not his glasses? Apparently not. Not for me, Clive.
I haven't carried a wallet for nearly two years. Both my watch and phone make payments so what exactly is the point of carting around a load of pointless plastic and paper?
In Thailand it is still 80% cash at least. It is really quite annoying have to go back to paper wads (let alone meaningless coins). It made me realise that cash is definitely doomed. Cash is a total pain
It really is. A total timer waster –– "oh I have to go to the bank machine, where is the bank machine? Dunno, oh it's x miles away"
Absolutely ridiculous persisting with it nowadays.
Plus you can lose cash, it's a hassle to change it, you put it in the washing machine by mistake, and so on and so forth
Cash is doomed, the same way real gold and silver coins were doomed back in the day, and the value of notes and coins became notional
Indeed. And it's risky, carrying it around. I imagine 'petty' robberies (in the absence of a more appropriate term) are much more prevalent in those countries where cash is the norm.
It's rare among my friends that anyone carries cash – as it's pointless in London.
Council round here has moved to phone apps entirely for parking, even though they had machines available which could take contactless payments. Bonkers.
Contactless is great. Phone apps for carparking just shouldn't be allowed. For one thing your debit card won't go out of battery for that 1% of time your phone is out of juice and you can't phone tap the contactless.
If there's contactless (hell, even chip and pin) then I'm not too bothered about what else is available. Cash for those who prefer/need that should also be provided, I think.
The frustrating thing is that any halfway decent parking app standard would be more convenient for most. Car reg(s) stored in app. Location services pinpoint the car park (or some NFC thing to swipe at worst). Choose your time and go, automatic payment. Extendable without returning to the car park. No queues. Many benefits. The current shit-show is not necessary.
Why? Would you allow people to pay in postal orders or cheques or similarly obsolete payments?
I get paid by cheque.
Just saying...
So you are the one who still uses them.
I miss being able to pay for my food shop by cheque a day or two before payday.
Council round here has moved to phone apps entirely for parking, even though they had machines available which could take contactless payments. Bonkers.
Contactless is great. Phone apps for carparking just shouldn't be allowed. For one thing your debit card won't go out of battery for that 1% of time your phone is out of juice and you can't phone tap the contactless.
If there's contactless (hell, even chip and pin) then I'm not too bothered about what else is available. Cash for those who prefer/need that should also be provided, I think.
The frustrating thing is that any halfway decent parking app standard would be more convenient for most. Car reg(s) stored in app. Location services pinpoint the car park (or some NFC thing to swipe at worst). Choose your time and go, automatic payment. Extendable without returning to the car park. No queues. Many benefits. The current shit-show is not necessary.
Why? Would you allow people to pay in postal orders or cheques or similarly obsolete payments?
I get paid by cheque.
Just saying...
So you are the one who still uses them.
For a cheque to be received, somebody has to send it. So it's not *one* person, by definition.
I've had quite a lot of cheques recently, if only because for charities it's still simpler to double-authorise by signing a cheque twice than setting up payments online. But I also had one for over £50,000 from Barclays Bank.
Then Barclays are hypocrites – the retail banks want cheques abolished and as I recall almost succeeded in their bid several years ago. The government backed down at the last minute if memory serves me right.
Re: cash, someone said to me the other day, have you seen the 'new' 50pm coin?
I replied that I hadn't seen it, nor a 50p coin of any kind, old, middle-aged or new, for about a decade.
Really?
Up until 2020, I had a coin jar, which accumulated change through the year and was periodically taken to the bank - it used to get about £400 a year in change. Since the pandemic, it no longer builds up ,and I have to go out of my way from time to time to get change to keep it stocked. But I do still need coins, for reasons including, er: - transactions with children (the tooth fairy doesn't bring plastic) - tips in restaurants (I want my money to go to the specific waiter/waitress who provided the service) - buskers - parking (most car parks accept payment by app but that is a massive pain in the arse, particularly if I don't have my glasses with me) - filling a pint glass with, then pissing in it and throwing it from on high at 15 year old girls who have a different favourite football team to me (joking - I'm not a Liverpool fan).
It's not a massive list. But cash isn't dead yet.
EDIT: All that said, upon meeting a colleague for the first time in 2 years recently, I was shocked to find he no longer even carries a wallet - just does everything on his phone. Does he not worry about running out of battery? Does he not worry about losing his phone? Does he not worry about having his phone but not his glasses? Apparently not. Not for me, Clive.
I haven't carried a wallet for nearly two years. Both my watch and phone make payments so what exactly is the point of carting around a load of pointless plastic and paper?
In Thailand it is still 80% cash at least. It is really quite annoying have to go back to paper wads (let alone meaningless coins). It made me realise that cash is definitely doomed. Cash is a total pain
It really is. A total timer waster –– "oh I have to go to the bank machine, where is the bank machine? Dunno, oh it's x miles away"
Absolutely ridiculous persisting with it nowadays.
Plus you can lose cash, it's a hassle to change it, you put it in the washing machine by mistake, and so on and so forth
Cash is doomed, the same way real gold and silver coins were doomed back in the day, and the value of notes and coins became notional
Indeed. And it's risky, carrying it around. I imagine 'petty' robberies (in the absence of a more appropriate term) are much more prevalent in those countries where cash is the norm.
It's rare among my friends that anyone carries cash – as it's pointless in London.
I've gone months in London without using cash. I always do have some, but it can stay unspent in my pocket for entire seasons
It just seems mad to believe that in twenty years we will still be reaching in purses and counting out bits of paper and circles of metal. I do sympathise with sad stories like that of @ManchesterKurt below - that's awful - but I don't see that stopping inevitable progress
Council round here has moved to phone apps entirely for parking, even though they had machines available which could take contactless payments. Bonkers.
Contactless is great. Phone apps for carparking just shouldn't be allowed. For one thing your debit card won't go out of battery for that 1% of time your phone is out of juice and you can't phone tap the contactless.
If there's contactless (hell, even chip and pin) then I'm not too bothered about what else is available. Cash for those who prefer/need that should also be provided, I think.
The frustrating thing is that any halfway decent parking app standard would be more convenient for most. Car reg(s) stored in app. Location services pinpoint the car park (or some NFC thing to swipe at worst). Choose your time and go, automatic payment. Extendable without returning to the car park. No queues. Many benefits. The current shit-show is not necessary.
Why? Would you allow people to pay in postal orders or cheques or similarly obsolete payments?
Because there will always be a proportion of the population that require cash as they are unable to deal with more modern ways of budgeting.
My wife had a very severe stroke 5 years ago and has left her with tremendous mental issues, she cannot understand the difference between up or down, left or right, forwards or backwards. She cannot unlock doors, she cannot leave the house alone.
But she does have a level of financial independence as each month we take some money out of her bank and over the month she manages her spend as she can touch, feel and see her money.
My wife could not deal with a card (if nothing else her eye sight is so poor she cannot see the numbers on the keypads), take away cash and you take away about the only thing in her life that she has any level of independence over.
My wife may be a very extreme case, but there are probably far more people at that end of the spectrum than you would imagine.
Absolutely - I know a few people who like to use cash for budgeting because paying by card doesn't feel like spending money.
Obviously, people who don't need to worry about having month left at the end of the money can merrily tap away.
I struggle with the veracity of such anecdotes. Do they pay their monthly bills by cash, at a post office? Their TV licence? Their mortgage? Their rent? How many people as a proportion of the UK population operate only in cash – and how exactly do they string a life together?
Re: cash, someone said to me the other day, have you seen the 'new' 50pm coin?
I replied that I hadn't seen it, nor a 50p coin of any kind, old, middle-aged or new, for about a decade.
Really?
Up until 2020, I had a coin jar, which accumulated change through the year and was periodically taken to the bank - it used to get about £400 a year in change. Since the pandemic, it no longer builds up ,and I have to go out of my way from time to time to get change to keep it stocked. But I do still need coins, for reasons including, er: - transactions with children (the tooth fairy doesn't bring plastic) - tips in restaurants (I want my money to go to the specific waiter/waitress who provided the service) - buskers - parking (most car parks accept payment by app but that is a massive pain in the arse, particularly if I don't have my glasses with me) - filling a pint glass with, then pissing in it and throwing it from on high at 15 year old girls who have a different favourite football team to me (joking - I'm not a Liverpool fan).
It's not a massive list. But cash isn't dead yet.
EDIT: All that said, upon meeting a colleague for the first time in 2 years recently, I was shocked to find he no longer even carries a wallet - just does everything on his phone. Does he not worry about running out of battery? Does he not worry about losing his phone? Does he not worry about having his phone but not his glasses? Apparently not. Not for me, Clive.
I haven't carried a wallet for nearly two years. Both my watch and phone make payments so what exactly is the point of carting around a load of pointless plastic and paper?
In Thailand it is still 80% cash at least. It is really quite annoying have to go back to paper wads (let alone meaningless coins). It made me realise that cash is definitely doomed. Cash is a total pain
It really is. A total timer waster –– "oh I have to go to the bank machine, where is the bank machine? Dunno, oh it's x miles away"
Absolutely ridiculous persisting with it nowadays.
Plus you can lose cash, it's a hassle to change it, you put it in the washing machine by mistake, and so on and so forth
Cash is doomed, the same way real gold and silver coins were doomed back in the day, and the value of notes and coins became notional
Indeed. And it's risky, carrying it around. I imagine 'petty' robberies (in the absence of a more appropriate term) are much more prevalent in those countries where cash is the norm.
It's rare among my friends that anyone carries cash – as it's pointless in London.
You are beginning to risk sounding just a little like "I'm Wockney Canker and everyone else ought to do as I do because of course there is a Tube station and Oyster Card travel to wherever I want to go"
Council round here has moved to phone apps entirely for parking, even though they had machines available which could take contactless payments. Bonkers.
Contactless is great. Phone apps for carparking just shouldn't be allowed. For one thing your debit card won't go out of battery for that 1% of time your phone is out of juice and you can't phone tap the contactless.
If there's contactless (hell, even chip and pin) then I'm not too bothered about what else is available. Cash for those who prefer/need that should also be provided, I think.
The frustrating thing is that any halfway decent parking app standard would be more convenient for most. Car reg(s) stored in app. Location services pinpoint the car park (or some NFC thing to swipe at worst). Choose your time and go, automatic payment. Extendable without returning to the car park. No queues. Many benefits. The current shit-show is not necessary.
Why? Would you allow people to pay in postal orders or cheques or similarly obsolete payments?
I get paid by cheque.
Just saying...
So you are the one who still uses them.
For a cheque to be received, somebody has to send it. So it's not *one* person, by definition.
I've had quite a lot of cheques recently, if only because for charities it's still simpler to double-authorise by signing a cheque twice than setting up payments online. But I also had one for over £50,000 from Barclays Bank.
Then Barclays are hypocrites – the retail banks want cheques abolished and as I recall almost succeeded in their bid several years ago. The government backed down at the last minute if memory serves me right.
You'd be surprised how many banks insist on sending cheques by post to close accounts. Ditto shares handling companies - I forget the technical term.
Council round here has moved to phone apps entirely for parking, even though they had machines available which could take contactless payments. Bonkers.
Contactless is great. Phone apps for carparking just shouldn't be allowed. For one thing your debit card won't go out of battery for that 1% of time your phone is out of juice and you can't phone tap the contactless.
If there's contactless (hell, even chip and pin) then I'm not too bothered about what else is available. Cash for those who prefer/need that should also be provided, I think.
The frustrating thing is that any halfway decent parking app standard would be more convenient for most. Car reg(s) stored in app. Location services pinpoint the car park (or some NFC thing to swipe at worst). Choose your time and go, automatic payment. Extendable without returning to the car park. No queues. Many benefits. The current shit-show is not necessary.
Why? Would you allow people to pay in postal orders or cheques or similarly obsolete payments?
Because there will always be a proportion of the population that require cash as they are unable to deal with more modern ways of budgeting.
My wife had a very severe stroke 5 years ago and has left her with tremendous mental issues, she cannot understand the difference between up or down, left or right, forwards or backwards. She cannot unlock doors, she cannot leave the house alone.
But she does have a level of financial independence as each month we take some money out of her bank and over the month she manages her spend as she can touch, feel and see her money.
My wife could not deal with a card (if nothing else her eye sight is so poor she cannot see the numbers on the keypads), take away cash and you take away about the only thing in her life that she has any level of independence over.
My wife may be a very extreme case, but there are probably far more people at that end of the spectrum than you would imagine.
Sympathies, Kurt, that sounds very rough for her (and probably for you too).
This is one of those areas where people in one cultural framework imagine that everyone else is. I know people like Anabob who use phones for everything, and people who use cash for everything. Most of my circle use contactless cards most of the time, and cash now and then. But in terms of avoiding social exclusion, it's important to maintain means of dealing with the world which are not found difficult by a large group of society, and elderly folk who can't handle smart watches (or even laptops) are still very common. When the number diminishes below 1%, it'll be reasonable to phase out cash, but for now it still makes sense to make it a requirement for any public service.
Presumably the trend to electronic transactions has reduced certain types of crime, or at least made them harder - tradesmen wanting to be paid in cash now look fishy rather than normal, though I suspect it's still quite common.
Re: cash, someone said to me the other day, have you seen the 'new' 50pm coin?
I replied that I hadn't seen it, nor a 50p coin of any kind, old, middle-aged or new, for about a decade.
Really?
Up until 2020, I had a coin jar, which accumulated change through the year and was periodically taken to the bank - it used to get about £400 a year in change. Since the pandemic, it no longer builds up ,and I have to go out of my way from time to time to get change to keep it stocked. But I do still need coins, for reasons including, er: - transactions with children (the tooth fairy doesn't bring plastic) - tips in restaurants (I want my money to go to the specific waiter/waitress who provided the service) - buskers - parking (most car parks accept payment by app but that is a massive pain in the arse, particularly if I don't have my glasses with me) - filling a pint glass with, then pissing in it and throwing it from on high at 15 year old girls who have a different favourite football team to me (joking - I'm not a Liverpool fan).
It's not a massive list. But cash isn't dead yet.
EDIT: All that said, upon meeting a colleague for the first time in 2 years recently, I was shocked to find he no longer even carries a wallet - just does everything on his phone. Does he not worry about running out of battery? Does he not worry about losing his phone? Does he not worry about having his phone but not his glasses? Apparently not. Not for me, Clive.
I haven't carried a wallet for nearly two years. Both my watch and phone make payments so what exactly is the point of carting around a load of pointless plastic and paper?
In Thailand it is still 80% cash at least. It is really quite annoying have to go back to paper wads (let alone meaningless coins). It made me realise that cash is definitely doomed. Cash is a total pain
It really is. A total timer waster –– "oh I have to go to the bank machine, where is the bank machine? Dunno, oh it's x miles away"
Absolutely ridiculous persisting with it nowadays.
Plus you can lose cash, it's a hassle to change it, you put it in the washing machine by mistake, and so on and so forth
Cash is doomed, the same way real gold and silver coins were doomed back in the day, and the value of notes and coins became notional
Indeed. And it's risky, carrying it around. I imagine 'petty' robberies (in the absence of a more appropriate term) are much more prevalent in those countries where cash is the norm.
It's rare among my friends that anyone carries cash – as it's pointless in London.
You are beginning to risk sounding just a little like "I'm Wockney Canker and everyone else ought to do as I do because of course there is a Tube station and Oyster Card travel to wherever I want to go"
Re: cash, someone said to me the other day, have you seen the 'new' 50pm coin?
I replied that I hadn't seen it, nor a 50p coin of any kind, old, middle-aged or new, for about a decade.
Really?
Up until 2020, I had a coin jar, which accumulated change through the year and was periodically taken to the bank - it used to get about £400 a year in change. Since the pandemic, it no longer builds up ,and I have to go out of my way from time to time to get change to keep it stocked. But I do still need coins, for reasons including, er: - transactions with children (the tooth fairy doesn't bring plastic) - tips in restaurants (I want my money to go to the specific waiter/waitress who provided the service) - buskers - parking (most car parks accept payment by app but that is a massive pain in the arse, particularly if I don't have my glasses with me) - filling a pint glass with, then pissing in it and throwing it from on high at 15 year old girls who have a different favourite football team to me (joking - I'm not a Liverpool fan).
It's not a massive list. But cash isn't dead yet.
EDIT: All that said, upon meeting a colleague for the first time in 2 years recently, I was shocked to find he no longer even carries a wallet - just does everything on his phone. Does he not worry about running out of battery? Does he not worry about losing his phone? Does he not worry about having his phone but not his glasses? Apparently not. Not for me, Clive.
I haven't carried a wallet for nearly two years. Both my watch and phone make payments so what exactly is the point of carting around a load of pointless plastic and paper?
In Thailand it is still 80% cash at least. It is really quite annoying have to go back to paper wads (let alone meaningless coins). It made me realise that cash is definitely doomed. Cash is a total pain
It really is. A total timer waster –– "oh I have to go to the bank machine, where is the bank machine? Dunno, oh it's x miles away"
Absolutely ridiculous persisting with it nowadays.
Plus you can lose cash, it's a hassle to change it, you put it in the washing machine by mistake, and so on and so forth
Cash is doomed, the same way real gold and silver coins were doomed back in the day, and the value of notes and coins became notional
Indeed. And it's risky, carrying it around. I imagine 'petty' robberies (in the absence of a more appropriate term) are much more prevalent in those countries where cash is the norm.
It's rare among my friends that anyone carries cash – as it's pointless in London.
I've gone months in London without using cash. I always do have some, but it can stay unspent in my pocket for entire seasons
It just seems mad to believe that in twenty years we will still be reaching in purses and counting out bits of paper and circles of metal. I do sympathise with sad stories like that of @ManchesterKurt below - that's awful - but I don't see that stopping inevitable progress
Agree entirely. In fact @ManchesterKurt has given an excellent if saddening counterexample – others just seem to be based on: "I like cash, dunno why".
Re: cash, someone said to me the other day, have you seen the 'new' 50pm coin?
I replied that I hadn't seen it, nor a 50p coin of any kind, old, middle-aged or new, for about a decade.
Really?
Up until 2020, I had a coin jar, which accumulated change through the year and was periodically taken to the bank - it used to get about £400 a year in change. Since the pandemic, it no longer builds up ,and I have to go out of my way from time to time to get change to keep it stocked. But I do still need coins, for reasons including, er: - transactions with children (the tooth fairy doesn't bring plastic) - tips in restaurants (I want my money to go to the specific waiter/waitress who provided the service) - buskers - parking (most car parks accept payment by app but that is a massive pain in the arse, particularly if I don't have my glasses with me) - filling a pint glass with, then pissing in it and throwing it from on high at 15 year old girls who have a different favourite football team to me (joking - I'm not a Liverpool fan).
It's not a massive list. But cash isn't dead yet.
EDIT: All that said, upon meeting a colleague for the first time in 2 years recently, I was shocked to find he no longer even carries a wallet - just does everything on his phone. Does he not worry about running out of battery? Does he not worry about losing his phone? Does he not worry about having his phone but not his glasses? Apparently not. Not for me, Clive.
I haven't carried a wallet for nearly two years. Both my watch and phone make payments so what exactly is the point of carting around a load of pointless plastic and paper?
In Thailand it is still 80% cash at least. It is really quite annoying have to go back to paper wads (let alone meaningless coins). It made me realise that cash is definitely doomed. Cash is a total pain
It really is. A total timer waster –– "oh I have to go to the bank machine, where is the bank machine? Dunno, oh it's x miles away"
Absolutely ridiculous persisting with it nowadays.
Plus you can lose cash, it's a hassle to change it, you put it in the washing machine by mistake, and so on and so forth
Cash is doomed, the same way real gold and silver coins were doomed back in the day, and the value of notes and coins became notional
Indeed. And it's risky, carrying it around. I imagine 'petty' robberies (in the absence of a more appropriate term) are much more prevalent in those countries where cash is the norm.
It's rare among my friends that anyone carries cash – as it's pointless in London.
Re: cash, someone said to me the other day, have you seen the 'new' 50pm coin?
I replied that I hadn't seen it, nor a 50p coin of any kind, old, middle-aged or new, for about a decade.
Really?
Up until 2020, I had a coin jar, which accumulated change through the year and was periodically taken to the bank - it used to get about £400 a year in change. Since the pandemic, it no longer builds up ,and I have to go out of my way from time to time to get change to keep it stocked. But I do still need coins, for reasons including, er: - transactions with children (the tooth fairy doesn't bring plastic) - tips in restaurants (I want my money to go to the specific waiter/waitress who provided the service) - buskers - parking (most car parks accept payment by app but that is a massive pain in the arse, particularly if I don't have my glasses with me) - filling a pint glass with, then pissing in it and throwing it from on high at 15 year old girls who have a different favourite football team to me (joking - I'm not a Liverpool fan).
It's not a massive list. But cash isn't dead yet.
EDIT: All that said, upon meeting a colleague for the first time in 2 years recently, I was shocked to find he no longer even carries a wallet - just does everything on his phone. Does he not worry about running out of battery? Does he not worry about losing his phone? Does he not worry about having his phone but not his glasses? Apparently not. Not for me, Clive.
I haven't carried a wallet for nearly two years. Both my watch and phone make payments so what exactly is the point of carting around a load of pointless plastic and paper?
In Thailand it is still 80% cash at least. It is really quite annoying have to go back to paper wads (let alone meaningless coins). It made me realise that cash is definitely doomed. Cash is a total pain
It really is. A total timer waster –– "oh I have to go to the bank machine, where is the bank machine? Dunno, oh it's x miles away"
Absolutely ridiculous persisting with it nowadays.
Plus you can lose cash, it's a hassle to change it, you put it in the washing machine by mistake, and so on and so forth
Cash is doomed, the same way real gold and silver coins were doomed back in the day, and the value of notes and coins became notional
Indeed. And it's risky, carrying it around. I imagine 'petty' robberies (in the absence of a more appropriate term) are much more prevalent in those countries where cash is the norm.
It's rare among my friends that anyone carries cash – as it's pointless in London.
Don't muggers nick phones these days ?
They also nick phones in cash-heavy societies, but they don't have the added incentive of people carrying around lots of money.
Council round here has moved to phone apps entirely for parking, even though they had machines available which could take contactless payments. Bonkers.
Contactless is great. Phone apps for carparking just shouldn't be allowed. For one thing your debit card won't go out of battery for that 1% of time your phone is out of juice and you can't phone tap the contactless.
If there's contactless (hell, even chip and pin) then I'm not too bothered about what else is available. Cash for those who prefer/need that should also be provided, I think.
The frustrating thing is that any halfway decent parking app standard would be more convenient for most. Car reg(s) stored in app. Location services pinpoint the car park (or some NFC thing to swipe at worst). Choose your time and go, automatic payment. Extendable without returning to the car park. No queues. Many benefits. The current shit-show is not necessary.
Why? Would you allow people to pay in postal orders or cheques or similarly obsolete payments?
Because there will always be a proportion of the population that require cash as they are unable to deal with more modern ways of budgeting.
My wife had a very severe stroke 5 years ago and has left her with tremendous mental issues, she cannot understand the difference between up or down, left or right, forwards or backwards. She cannot unlock doors, she cannot leave the house alone.
But she does have a level of financial independence as each month we take some money out of her bank and over the month she manages her spend as she can touch, feel and see her money.
My wife could not deal with a card (if nothing else her eye sight is so poor she cannot see the numbers on the keypads), take away cash and you take away about the only thing in her life that she has any level of independence over.
My wife may be a very extreme case, but there are probably far more people at that end of the spectrum than you would imagine.
Sympathies, Kurt, that sounds very rough for her (and probably for you too).
This is one of those areas where people in one cultural framework imagine that everyone else is. I know people like Anabob who use phones for everything, and people who use cash for everything. Most of my circle use contactless cards most of the time, and cash now and then. But in terms of avoiding social exclusion, it's important to maintain means of dealing with the world which are not found difficult by a large group of society, and elderly folk who can't handle smart watches (or even laptops) are still very common. When the number diminishes below 1%, it'll be reasonable to phase out cash, but for now it still makes sense to make it a requirement for any public service.
Presumably the trend to electronic transactions has reduced certain types of crime, or at least made them harder - tradesmen wanting to be paid in cash now look fishy rather than normal, though I suspect it's still quite common.
Cash will go, eventually, but it might take quite some time. Coins first, probably.
How much would that matter, though ? Presumably it would be possible to constitute a new pro-independence party. It might even do them a favour by clearing out those implicated, and distancing the new party from the mess.
Well, it would be enormously entertaining, for a start. So there's that?
Also, there would surely be a real risk of a split if they had to start a new party. It is already obvious that the Woke Nats should not be in the same party as Forbes and her supporters. A reboot would give them a chance to make the split formal
Actually, I believe that would be better for the long term prospects of indy
Council round here has moved to phone apps entirely for parking, even though they had machines available which could take contactless payments. Bonkers.
Contactless is great. Phone apps for carparking just shouldn't be allowed. For one thing your debit card won't go out of battery for that 1% of time your phone is out of juice and you can't phone tap the contactless.
If there's contactless (hell, even chip and pin) then I'm not too bothered about what else is available. Cash for those who prefer/need that should also be provided, I think.
The frustrating thing is that any halfway decent parking app standard would be more convenient for most. Car reg(s) stored in app. Location services pinpoint the car park (or some NFC thing to swipe at worst). Choose your time and go, automatic payment. Extendable without returning to the car park. No queues. Many benefits. The current shit-show is not necessary.
Why? Would you allow people to pay in postal orders or cheques or similarly obsolete payments?
Because there will always be a proportion of the population that require cash as they are unable to deal with more modern ways of budgeting.
My wife had a very severe stroke 5 years ago and has left her with tremendous mental issues, she cannot understand the difference between up or down, left or right, forwards or backwards. She cannot unlock doors, she cannot leave the house alone.
But she does have a level of financial independence as each month we take some money out of her bank and over the month she manages her spend as she can touch, feel and see her money.
My wife could not deal with a card (if nothing else her eye sight is so poor she cannot see the numbers on the keypads), take away cash and you take away about the only thing in her life that she has any level of independence over.
My wife may be a very extreme case, but there are probably far more people at that end of the spectrum than you would imagine.
Sympathies, Kurt, that sounds very rough for her (and probably for you too).
This is one of those areas where people in one cultural framework imagine that everyone else is. I know people like Anabob who use phones for everything, and people who use cash for everything. Most of my circle use contactless cards most of the time, and cash now and then. But in terms of avoiding social exclusion, it's important to maintain means of dealing with the world which are not found difficult by a large group of society, and elderly folk who can't handle smart watches (or even laptops) are still very common. When the number diminishes below 1%, it'll be reasonable to phase out cash, but for now it still makes sense to make it a requirement for any public service.
Presumably the trend to electronic transactions has reduced certain types of crime, or at least made them harder - tradesmen wanting to be paid in cash now look fishy rather than normal, though I suspect it's still quite common.
Agreed – and I'm not calling for an immediate ban. Simply that, as you say, it's going to dwindle so low that we'll have to make a realistic decision at some point fairly soon about phasing it out.
I'd been keen to know what proportion of the population only use cash... I suspect it's very low indeed currently – albeit not as low as 1%.
Re: cash, someone said to me the other day, have you seen the 'new' 50pm coin?
I replied that I hadn't seen it, nor a 50p coin of any kind, old, middle-aged or new, for about a decade.
Really?
Up until 2020, I had a coin jar, which accumulated change through the year and was periodically taken to the bank - it used to get about £400 a year in change. Since the pandemic, it no longer builds up ,and I have to go out of my way from time to time to get change to keep it stocked. But I do still need coins, for reasons including, er: - transactions with children (the tooth fairy doesn't bring plastic) - tips in restaurants (I want my money to go to the specific waiter/waitress who provided the service) - buskers - parking (most car parks accept payment by app but that is a massive pain in the arse, particularly if I don't have my glasses with me) - filling a pint glass with, then pissing in it and throwing it from on high at 15 year old girls who have a different favourite football team to me (joking - I'm not a Liverpool fan).
It's not a massive list. But cash isn't dead yet.
EDIT: All that said, upon meeting a colleague for the first time in 2 years recently, I was shocked to find he no longer even carries a wallet - just does everything on his phone. Does he not worry about running out of battery? Does he not worry about losing his phone? Does he not worry about having his phone but not his glasses? Apparently not. Not for me, Clive.
I haven't carried a wallet for nearly two years. Both my watch and phone make payments so what exactly is the point of carting around a load of pointless plastic and paper?
In Thailand it is still 80% cash at least. It is really quite annoying have to go back to paper wads (let alone meaningless coins). It made me realise that cash is definitely doomed. Cash is a total pain
It really is. A total timer waster –– "oh I have to go to the bank machine, where is the bank machine? Dunno, oh it's x miles away"
Absolutely ridiculous persisting with it nowadays.
Plus you can lose cash, it's a hassle to change it, you put it in the washing machine by mistake, and so on and so forth
Cash is doomed, the same way real gold and silver coins were doomed back in the day, and the value of notes and coins became notional
Indeed. And it's risky, carrying it around. I imagine 'petty' robberies (in the absence of a more appropriate term) are much more prevalent in those countries where cash is the norm.
It's rare among my friends that anyone carries cash – as it's pointless in London.
Council round here has moved to phone apps entirely for parking, even though they had machines available which could take contactless payments. Bonkers.
Contactless is great. Phone apps for carparking just shouldn't be allowed. For one thing your debit card won't go out of battery for that 1% of time your phone is out of juice and you can't phone tap the contactless.
If there's contactless (hell, even chip and pin) then I'm not too bothered about what else is available. Cash for those who prefer/need that should also be provided, I think.
The frustrating thing is that any halfway decent parking app standard would be more convenient for most. Car reg(s) stored in app. Location services pinpoint the car park (or some NFC thing to swipe at worst). Choose your time and go, automatic payment. Extendable without returning to the car park. No queues. Many benefits. The current shit-show is not necessary.
Why? Would you allow people to pay in postal orders or cheques or similarly obsolete payments?
Because there will always be a proportion of the population that require cash as they are unable to deal with more modern ways of budgeting.
My wife had a very severe stroke 5 years ago and has left her with tremendous mental issues, she cannot understand the difference between up or down, left or right, forwards or backwards. She cannot unlock doors, she cannot leave the house alone.
But she does have a level of financial independence as each month we take some money out of her bank and over the month she manages her spend as she can touch, feel and see her money.
My wife could not deal with a card (if nothing else her eye sight is so poor she cannot see the numbers on the keypads), take away cash and you take away about the only thing in her life that she has any level of independence over.
My wife may be a very extreme case, but there are probably far more people at that end of the spectrum than you would imagine.
Sympathies, Kurt, that sounds very rough for her (and probably for you too).
This is one of those areas where people in one cultural framework imagine that everyone else is. I know people like Anabob who use phones for everything, and people who use cash for everything. Most of my circle use contactless cards most of the time, and cash now and then. But in terms of avoiding social exclusion, it's important to maintain means of dealing with the world which are not found difficult by a large group of society, and elderly folk who can't handle smart watches (or even laptops) are still very common. When the number diminishes below 1%, it'll be reasonable to phase out cash, but for now it still makes sense to make it a requirement for any public service.
Presumably the trend to electronic transactions has reduced certain types of crime, or at least made them harder - tradesmen wanting to be paid in cash now look fishy rather than normal, though I suspect it's still quite common.
I personally know people - both my parents, my stepmum, my mother in law too - who still use cash regularly, albeit in a mixed economy with cards and tapping phones.
My father in law (who died a few years ago) had quite serious schizophrenia and psychosis; he refused to have a bank account on account of his paranoia and dealt only in cash. Another (sad) niche case, but I'd bet there are an awful lot of niche cases as Kurt says, particularly around vulnerable people who - if we aspire to have a half-decent society - we ought to be able to cope with a little inconvenience ourselves to be able to cater to.
Re: cash, someone said to me the other day, have you seen the 'new' 50pm coin?
I replied that I hadn't seen it, nor a 50p coin of any kind, old, middle-aged or new, for about a decade.
Really?
Up until 2020, I had a coin jar, which accumulated change through the year and was periodically taken to the bank - it used to get about £400 a year in change. Since the pandemic, it no longer builds up ,and I have to go out of my way from time to time to get change to keep it stocked. But I do still need coins, for reasons including, er: - transactions with children (the tooth fairy doesn't bring plastic) - tips in restaurants (I want my money to go to the specific waiter/waitress who provided the service) - buskers - parking (most car parks accept payment by app but that is a massive pain in the arse, particularly if I don't have my glasses with me) - filling a pint glass with, then pissing in it and throwing it from on high at 15 year old girls who have a different favourite football team to me (joking - I'm not a Liverpool fan).
It's not a massive list. But cash isn't dead yet.
EDIT: All that said, upon meeting a colleague for the first time in 2 years recently, I was shocked to find he no longer even carries a wallet - just does everything on his phone. Does he not worry about running out of battery? Does he not worry about losing his phone? Does he not worry about having his phone but not his glasses? Apparently not. Not for me, Clive.
I haven't carried a wallet for nearly two years. Both my watch and phone make payments so what exactly is the point of carting around a load of pointless plastic and paper?
In Thailand it is still 80% cash at least. It is really quite annoying have to go back to paper wads (let alone meaningless coins). It made me realise that cash is definitely doomed. Cash is a total pain
It really is. A total timer waster –– "oh I have to go to the bank machine, where is the bank machine? Dunno, oh it's x miles away"
Absolutely ridiculous persisting with it nowadays.
Plus you can lose cash, it's a hassle to change it, you put it in the washing machine by mistake, and so on and so forth
Cash is doomed, the same way real gold and silver coins were doomed back in the day, and the value of notes and coins became notional
Indeed. And it's risky, carrying it around. I imagine 'petty' robberies (in the absence of a more appropriate term) are much more prevalent in those countries where cash is the norm.
It's rare among my friends that anyone carries cash – as it's pointless in London.
I've gone months in London without using cash. I always do have some, but it can stay unspent in my pocket for entire seasons
It just seems mad to believe that in twenty years we will still be reaching in purses and counting out bits of paper and circles of metal. I do sympathise with sad stories like that of @ManchesterKurt below - that's awful - but I don't see that stopping inevitable progress
Agree entirely. In fact @ManchesterKurt has given an excellent if saddening counterexample – others just seem to be based on: "I like cash, dunno why".
I use cash, because as has been patiently explained to you before, outside Extortion City there are still lots of places that don't take cards because it's much more expensive particularly for small transactions. I know that a study put forward by the main card clearing house said otherwise but it was patently not telling the truth (as in, had forged its figures).
What might kill cash off eventually is the number of bank branches that are being closed, which will make it much more difficult to obtain and secure it. That's what's happening in say, North Wales. And that is not because of the merits or demerits of physical cash but because (1) branches being shut down, however well-used, reduces overheads dramatically and (b) banks can charge more in card transaction fees than in cash deposit fees.
London is not a typical example and should also never be used as such. It's much more crowded, much more expensive and much younger than the average town in the UK, including for things like food and transport (coins are still needed for many bus journeys round here). It's therefore less practical to use cash and the population tends to be more addicted to their phones in any case. That doesn't mean just because London is moving towards cashlessness everywhere else will as well.
Council round here has moved to phone apps entirely for parking, even though they had machines available which could take contactless payments. Bonkers.
Contactless is great. Phone apps for carparking just shouldn't be allowed. For one thing your debit card won't go out of battery for that 1% of time your phone is out of juice and you can't phone tap the contactless.
If there's contactless (hell, even chip and pin) then I'm not too bothered about what else is available. Cash for those who prefer/need that should also be provided, I think.
The frustrating thing is that any halfway decent parking app standard would be more convenient for most. Car reg(s) stored in app. Location services pinpoint the car park (or some NFC thing to swipe at worst). Choose your time and go, automatic payment. Extendable without returning to the car park. No queues. Many benefits. The current shit-show is not necessary.
Why? Would you allow people to pay in postal orders or cheques or similarly obsolete payments?
I get paid by cheque.
Just saying...
So you are the one who still uses them.
For a cheque to be received, somebody has to send it. So it's not *one* person, by definition.
I've had quite a lot of cheques recently, if only because for charities it's still simpler to double-authorise by signing a cheque twice than setting up payments online. But I also had one for over £50,000 from Barclays Bank.
Then Barclays are hypocrites – the retail banks want cheques abolished and as I recall almost succeeded in their bid several years ago. The government backed down at the last minute if memory serves me right.
You'd be surprised how many banks insist on sending cheques by post to close accounts. Ditto shares handling companies - I forget the technical term.
Re: cash, someone said to me the other day, have you seen the 'new' 50pm coin?
I replied that I hadn't seen it, nor a 50p coin of any kind, old, middle-aged or new, for about a decade.
Really?
Up until 2020, I had a coin jar, which accumulated change through the year and was periodically taken to the bank - it used to get about £400 a year in change. Since the pandemic, it no longer builds up ,and I have to go out of my way from time to time to get change to keep it stocked. But I do still need coins, for reasons including, er: - transactions with children (the tooth fairy doesn't bring plastic) - tips in restaurants (I want my money to go to the specific waiter/waitress who provided the service) - buskers - parking (most car parks accept payment by app but that is a massive pain in the arse, particularly if I don't have my glasses with me) - filling a pint glass with, then pissing in it and throwing it from on high at 15 year old girls who have a different favourite football team to me (joking - I'm not a Liverpool fan).
It's not a massive list. But cash isn't dead yet.
EDIT: All that said, upon meeting a colleague for the first time in 2 years recently, I was shocked to find he no longer even carries a wallet - just does everything on his phone. Does he not worry about running out of battery? Does he not worry about losing his phone? Does he not worry about having his phone but not his glasses? Apparently not. Not for me, Clive.
I haven't carried a wallet for nearly two years. Both my watch and phone make payments so what exactly is the point of carting around a load of pointless plastic and paper?
In Thailand it is still 80% cash at least. It is really quite annoying have to go back to paper wads (let alone meaningless coins). It made me realise that cash is definitely doomed. Cash is a total pain
It really is. A total timer waster –– "oh I have to go to the bank machine, where is the bank machine? Dunno, oh it's x miles away"
Absolutely ridiculous persisting with it nowadays.
Plus you can lose cash, it's a hassle to change it, you put it in the washing machine by mistake, and so on and so forth
Cash is doomed, the same way real gold and silver coins were doomed back in the day, and the value of notes and coins became notional
Indeed. And it's risky, carrying it around. I imagine 'petty' robberies (in the absence of a more appropriate term) are much more prevalent in those countries where cash is the norm.
It's rare among my friends that anyone carries cash – as it's pointless in London.
Council round here has moved to phone apps entirely for parking, even though they had machines available which could take contactless payments. Bonkers.
Contactless is great. Phone apps for carparking just shouldn't be allowed. For one thing your debit card won't go out of battery for that 1% of time your phone is out of juice and you can't phone tap the contactless.
If there's contactless (hell, even chip and pin) then I'm not too bothered about what else is available. Cash for those who prefer/need that should also be provided, I think.
The frustrating thing is that any halfway decent parking app standard would be more convenient for most. Car reg(s) stored in app. Location services pinpoint the car park (or some NFC thing to swipe at worst). Choose your time and go, automatic payment. Extendable without returning to the car park. No queues. Many benefits. The current shit-show is not necessary.
Why? Would you allow people to pay in postal orders or cheques or similarly obsolete payments?
Because there will always be a proportion of the population that require cash as they are unable to deal with more modern ways of budgeting.
My wife had a very severe stroke 5 years ago and has left her with tremendous mental issues, she cannot understand the difference between up or down, left or right, forwards or backwards. She cannot unlock doors, she cannot leave the house alone.
But she does have a level of financial independence as each month we take some money out of her bank and over the month she manages her spend as she can touch, feel and see her money.
My wife could not deal with a card (if nothing else her eye sight is so poor she cannot see the numbers on the keypads), take away cash and you take away about the only thing in her life that she has any level of independence over.
My wife may be a very extreme case, but there are probably far more people at that end of the spectrum than you would imagine.
Separately for those (unlike us on here) with limited funds - having a finite amount of notes makes it clear how much they can afford to spend today / this week. In a way that a figure on a phone simply doesn't work.
Plus all of the delightful mixups that the HMRC will have, you lend a friend joe bloggs 200£, only joe bloggs happens to be a self employed plumber and now you can't just give him it in cash welcome to the pain in the butt for him trying to convince that you electronically giving him cash was not a payment for plumbing services rendered.
There is a good reason to keep cash, it can't be tracked by either governments or corporations. I am sure that various people who are all for cashless only will be the first to moan when a government uses the ability to see your every transaction to limit you to for example only buying 12 pints of beer a week....for your own health naturally. Or everytime money changes hands they want a slice of tax from it even if its only lending your pal 50£ to keep them in food till the get paid....because of course they cant prove easily it was not a payment for services.
Also good luck when there is a network outage for a few days which there have been in some area's before now.....no card machine will work whether atm or instore. Being with 15 different banks won't help they all use the same comms network.
Council round here has moved to phone apps entirely for parking, even though they had machines available which could take contactless payments. Bonkers.
Contactless is great. Phone apps for carparking just shouldn't be allowed. For one thing your debit card won't go out of battery for that 1% of time your phone is out of juice and you can't phone tap the contactless.
If there's contactless (hell, even chip and pin) then I'm not too bothered about what else is available. Cash for those who prefer/need that should also be provided, I think.
The frustrating thing is that any halfway decent parking app standard would be more convenient for most. Car reg(s) stored in app. Location services pinpoint the car park (or some NFC thing to swipe at worst). Choose your time and go, automatic payment. Extendable without returning to the car park. No queues. Many benefits. The current shit-show is not necessary.
Why? Would you allow people to pay in postal orders or cheques or similarly obsolete payments?
Because there will always be a proportion of the population that require cash as they are unable to deal with more modern ways of budgeting.
My wife had a very severe stroke 5 years ago and has left her with tremendous mental issues, she cannot understand the difference between up or down, left or right, forwards or backwards. She cannot unlock doors, she cannot leave the house alone.
But she does have a level of financial independence as each month we take some money out of her bank and over the month she manages her spend as she can touch, feel and see her money.
My wife could not deal with a card (if nothing else her eye sight is so poor she cannot see the numbers on the keypads), take away cash and you take away about the only thing in her life that she has any level of independence over.
My wife may be a very extreme case, but there are probably far more people at that end of the spectrum than you would imagine.
Sympathies, Kurt, that sounds very rough for her (and probably for you too).
This is one of those areas where people in one cultural framework imagine that everyone else is. I know people like Anabob who use phones for everything, and people who use cash for everything. Most of my circle use contactless cards most of the time, and cash now and then. But in terms of avoiding social exclusion, it's important to maintain means of dealing with the world which are not found difficult by a large group of society, and elderly folk who can't handle smart watches (or even laptops) are still very common. When the number diminishes below 1%, it'll be reasonable to phase out cash, but for now it still makes sense to make it a requirement for any public service.
Presumably the trend to electronic transactions has reduced certain types of crime, or at least made them harder - tradesmen wanting to be paid in cash now look fishy rather than normal, though I suspect it's still quite common.
There’s a bitter, albeit good-tempered, argument going on about this subject in the U3a’s current magazine. For all the reasons advanced here.
Council round here has moved to phone apps entirely for parking, even though they had machines available which could take contactless payments. Bonkers.
Contactless is great. Phone apps for carparking just shouldn't be allowed. For one thing your debit card won't go out of battery for that 1% of time your phone is out of juice and you can't phone tap the contactless.
If there's contactless (hell, even chip and pin) then I'm not too bothered about what else is available. Cash for those who prefer/need that should also be provided, I think.
The frustrating thing is that any halfway decent parking app standard would be more convenient for most. Car reg(s) stored in app. Location services pinpoint the car park (or some NFC thing to swipe at worst). Choose your time and go, automatic payment. Extendable without returning to the car park. No queues. Many benefits. The current shit-show is not necessary.
Why? Would you allow people to pay in postal orders or cheques or similarly obsolete payments?
Because there will always be a proportion of the population that require cash as they are unable to deal with more modern ways of budgeting.
My wife had a very severe stroke 5 years ago and has left her with tremendous mental issues, she cannot understand the difference between up or down, left or right, forwards or backwards. She cannot unlock doors, she cannot leave the house alone.
But she does have a level of financial independence as each month we take some money out of her bank and over the month she manages her spend as she can touch, feel and see her money.
My wife could not deal with a card (if nothing else her eye sight is so poor she cannot see the numbers on the keypads), take away cash and you take away about the only thing in her life that she has any level of independence over.
My wife may be a very extreme case, but there are probably far more people at that end of the spectrum than you would imagine.
Separately for those (unlike us on here) with limited funds - having a finite amount of notes makes it clear how much they can afford to spend today / this week. In a way that a figure on a phone simply doesn't work.
Plus all of the delightful mixups that the HMRC will have, you lend a friend joe bloggs 200£, only joe bloggs happens to be a self employed plumber and now you can't just give him it in cash welcome to the pain in the butt for him trying to convince that you electronically giving him cash was not a payment for plumbing services rendered.
There is a good reason to keep cash, it can't be tracked by either governments or corporations. I am sure that various people who are all for cashless only will be the first to moan when a government uses the ability to see your every transaction to limit you to for example only buying 12 pints of beer a week....for your own health naturally. Or everytime money changes hands they want a slice of tax from it even if its only lending your pal 50£ to keep them in food till the get paid....because of course they cant prove easily it was not a payment for services.
Also good luck when there is a network outage for a few days which there have been in some area's before now.....no card machine will work whether atm or instore. Being with 15 different banks won't help they all use the same comms network.
Imagine what Justin Trudeau could have done to striking truckers in a cashless society.
Council round here has moved to phone apps entirely for parking, even though they had machines available which could take contactless payments. Bonkers.
Contactless is great. Phone apps for carparking just shouldn't be allowed. For one thing your debit card won't go out of battery for that 1% of time your phone is out of juice and you can't phone tap the contactless.
If there's contactless (hell, even chip and pin) then I'm not too bothered about what else is available. Cash for those who prefer/need that should also be provided, I think.
The frustrating thing is that any halfway decent parking app standard would be more convenient for most. Car reg(s) stored in app. Location services pinpoint the car park (or some NFC thing to swipe at worst). Choose your time and go, automatic payment. Extendable without returning to the car park. No queues. Many benefits. The current shit-show is not necessary.
Why? Would you allow people to pay in postal orders or cheques or similarly obsolete payments?
I get paid by cheque.
Just saying...
So you are the one who still uses them.
For a cheque to be received, somebody has to send it. So it's not *one* person, by definition.
I've had quite a lot of cheques recently, if only because for charities it's still simpler to double-authorise by signing a cheque twice than setting up payments online. But I also had one for over £50,000 from Barclays Bank.
Then Barclays are hypocrites – the retail banks want cheques abolished and as I recall almost succeeded in their bid several years ago. The government backed down at the last minute if memory serves me right.
You'd be surprised how many banks insist on sending cheques by post to close accounts. Ditto shares handling companies - I forget the technical term.
Our solar panel FiT payments still come by cheque. Only four times per year and with cheque scanning in bank apps it's not a big issue. About the only cheques we receive now.
(I assume that the payer, BG, does it this way as some people fail to cash the cheques, but who knows. I've not cared enough to battle customer services to ask about electronic options)
Council round here has moved to phone apps entirely for parking, even though they had machines available which could take contactless payments. Bonkers.
Contactless is great. Phone apps for carparking just shouldn't be allowed. For one thing your debit card won't go out of battery for that 1% of time your phone is out of juice and you can't phone tap the contactless.
If there's contactless (hell, even chip and pin) then I'm not too bothered about what else is available. Cash for those who prefer/need that should also be provided, I think.
The frustrating thing is that any halfway decent parking app standard would be more convenient for most. Car reg(s) stored in app. Location services pinpoint the car park (or some NFC thing to swipe at worst). Choose your time and go, automatic payment. Extendable without returning to the car park. No queues. Many benefits. The current shit-show is not necessary.
Why? Would you allow people to pay in postal orders or cheques or similarly obsolete payments?
Because there will always be a proportion of the population that require cash as they are unable to deal with more modern ways of budgeting.
My wife had a very severe stroke 5 years ago and has left her with tremendous mental issues, she cannot understand the difference between up or down, left or right, forwards or backwards. She cannot unlock doors, she cannot leave the house alone.
But she does have a level of financial independence as each month we take some money out of her bank and over the month she manages her spend as she can touch, feel and see her money.
My wife could not deal with a card (if nothing else her eye sight is so poor she cannot see the numbers on the keypads), take away cash and you take away about the only thing in her life that she has any level of independence over.
My wife may be a very extreme case, but there are probably far more people at that end of the spectrum than you would imagine.
Sympathies, Kurt, that sounds very rough for her (and probably for you too).
This is one of those areas where people in one cultural framework imagine that everyone else is. I know people like Anabob who use phones for everything, and people who use cash for everything. Most of my circle use contactless cards most of the time, and cash now and then. But in terms of avoiding social exclusion, it's important to maintain means of dealing with the world which are not found difficult by a large group of society, and elderly folk who can't handle smart watches (or even laptops) are still very common. When the number diminishes below 1%, it'll be reasonable to phase out cash, but for now it still makes sense to make it a requirement for any public service.
Presumably the trend to electronic transactions has reduced certain types of crime, or at least made them harder - tradesmen wanting to be paid in cash now look fishy rather than normal, though I suspect it's still quite common.
Agreed – and I'm not calling for an immediate ban. Simply that, as you say, it's going to dwindle so low that we'll have to make a realistic decision at some point fairly soon about phasing it out.
I'd been keen to know what proportion of the population only use cash... I suspect it's very low indeed currently – albeit not as low as 1%.
It's around 18-21% only use cash (the figures cannot be exact for obvious reasons). But 83% still use it as a regular part of their lives.
It was suggested above that notes will go last. I would expect coins to survive them actually for the simple reason they are more useful in the smaller transactions that will stubbornly cling on.
Council round here has moved to phone apps entirely for parking, even though they had machines available which could take contactless payments. Bonkers.
Contactless is great. Phone apps for carparking just shouldn't be allowed. For one thing your debit card won't go out of battery for that 1% of time your phone is out of juice and you can't phone tap the contactless.
If there's contactless (hell, even chip and pin) then I'm not too bothered about what else is available. Cash for those who prefer/need that should also be provided, I think.
The frustrating thing is that any halfway decent parking app standard would be more convenient for most. Car reg(s) stored in app. Location services pinpoint the car park (or some NFC thing to swipe at worst). Choose your time and go, automatic payment. Extendable without returning to the car park. No queues. Many benefits. The current shit-show is not necessary.
Why? Would you allow people to pay in postal orders or cheques or similarly obsolete payments?
Because there will always be a proportion of the population that require cash as they are unable to deal with more modern ways of budgeting.
My wife had a very severe stroke 5 years ago and has left her with tremendous mental issues, she cannot understand the difference between up or down, left or right, forwards or backwards. She cannot unlock doors, she cannot leave the house alone.
But she does have a level of financial independence as each month we take some money out of her bank and over the month she manages her spend as she can touch, feel and see her money.
My wife could not deal with a card (if nothing else her eye sight is so poor she cannot see the numbers on the keypads), take away cash and you take away about the only thing in her life that she has any level of independence over.
My wife may be a very extreme case, but there are probably far more people at that end of the spectrum than you would imagine.
Absolutely - I know a few people who like to use cash for budgeting because paying by card doesn't feel like spending money.
Obviously, people who don't need to worry about having month left at the end of the money can merrily tap away.
I struggle with the veracity of such anecdotes. Do they pay their monthly bills by cash, at a post office? Their TV licence? Their mortgage? Their rent? How many people as a proportion of the UK population operate only in cash – and how exactly do they string a life together?
Bills go out the day after payday, then they withdraw whatever's left in cash and budget accordingly.
Re: cash, someone said to me the other day, have you seen the 'new' 50pm coin?
I replied that I hadn't seen it, nor a 50p coin of any kind, old, middle-aged or new, for about a decade.
Really?
Up until 2020, I had a coin jar, which accumulated change through the year and was periodically taken to the bank - it used to get about £400 a year in change. Since the pandemic, it no longer builds up ,and I have to go out of my way from time to time to get change to keep it stocked. But I do still need coins, for reasons including, er: - transactions with children (the tooth fairy doesn't bring plastic) - tips in restaurants (I want my money to go to the specific waiter/waitress who provided the service) - buskers - parking (most car parks accept payment by app but that is a massive pain in the arse, particularly if I don't have my glasses with me) - filling a pint glass with, then pissing in it and throwing it from on high at 15 year old girls who have a different favourite football team to me (joking - I'm not a Liverpool fan).
It's not a massive list. But cash isn't dead yet.
EDIT: All that said, upon meeting a colleague for the first time in 2 years recently, I was shocked to find he no longer even carries a wallet - just does everything on his phone. Does he not worry about running out of battery? Does he not worry about losing his phone? Does he not worry about having his phone but not his glasses? Apparently not. Not for me, Clive.
I haven't carried a wallet for nearly two years. Both my watch and phone make payments so what exactly is the point of carting around a load of pointless plastic and paper?
In Thailand it is still 80% cash at least. It is really quite annoying have to go back to paper wads (let alone meaningless coins). It made me realise that cash is definitely doomed. Cash is a total pain
It really is. A total timer waster –– "oh I have to go to the bank machine, where is the bank machine? Dunno, oh it's x miles away"
Absolutely ridiculous persisting with it nowadays.
Plus you can lose cash, it's a hassle to change it, you put it in the washing machine by mistake, and so on and so forth
Cash is doomed, the same way real gold and silver coins were doomed back in the day, and the value of notes and coins became notional
Indeed. And it's risky, carrying it around. I imagine 'petty' robberies (in the absence of a more appropriate term) are much more prevalent in those countries where cash is the norm.
It's rare among my friends that anyone carries cash – as it's pointless in London.
I've gone months in London without using cash. I always do have some, but it can stay unspent in my pocket for entire seasons
It just seems mad to believe that in twenty years we will still be reaching in purses and counting out bits of paper and circles of metal. I do sympathise with sad stories like that of @ManchesterKurt below - that's awful - but I don't see that stopping inevitable progress
Agree entirely. In fact @ManchesterKurt has given an excellent if saddening counterexample – others just seem to be based on: "I like cash, dunno why".
I use cash, because as has been patiently explained to you before, outside Extortion City there are still lots of places that don't take cards because it's much more expensive particularly for small transactions. I know that a study put forward by the main card clearing house said otherwise but it was patently not telling the truth (as in, had forged its figures).
What might kill cash off eventually is the number of bank branches that are being closed, which will make it much more difficult to obtain and secure it. That's what's happening in say, North Wales. And that is not because of the merits or demerits of physical cash but because (1) branches being shut down, however well-used, reduces overheads dramatically and (b) banks can charge more in card transaction fees than in cash deposit fees.
London is not a typical example and should also never be used as such. It's much more crowded, much more expensive and much younger than the average town in the UK, including for things like food and transport (coins are still needed for many bus journeys round here). It's therefore less practical to use cash and the population tends to be more addicted to their phones in any case. That doesn't mean just because London is moving towards cashlessness everywhere else will as well.
Everywhere is MOVING TOWARDS cashlessness and to claim otherwise is to deny the clear evidence in front of you. As much as it might not appeal to your prejudices, I leave London regularly – particularly for hiking and biking tours in high-country remote places.
I haven't used cash for anything, anywhere in the UK, and haven't needed to. The idea that rural areas are still cash-only holdouts is an utter fantasy.
Re: cash, someone said to me the other day, have you seen the 'new' 50pm coin?
I replied that I hadn't seen it, nor a 50p coin of any kind, old, middle-aged or new, for about a decade.
Really?
Up until 2020, I had a coin jar, which accumulated change through the year and was periodically taken to the bank - it used to get about £400 a year in change. Since the pandemic, it no longer builds up ,and I have to go out of my way from time to time to get change to keep it stocked. But I do still need coins, for reasons including, er: - transactions with children (the tooth fairy doesn't bring plastic) - tips in restaurants (I want my money to go to the specific waiter/waitress who provided the service) - buskers - parking (most car parks accept payment by app but that is a massive pain in the arse, particularly if I don't have my glasses with me) - filling a pint glass with, then pissing in it and throwing it from on high at 15 year old girls who have a different favourite football team to me (joking - I'm not a Liverpool fan).
It's not a massive list. But cash isn't dead yet.
EDIT: All that said, upon meeting a colleague for the first time in 2 years recently, I was shocked to find he no longer even carries a wallet - just does everything on his phone. Does he not worry about running out of battery? Does he not worry about losing his phone? Does he not worry about having his phone but not his glasses? Apparently not. Not for me, Clive.
I haven't carried a wallet for nearly two years. Both my watch and phone make payments so what exactly is the point of carting around a load of pointless plastic and paper?
In Thailand it is still 80% cash at least. It is really quite annoying have to go back to paper wads (let alone meaningless coins). It made me realise that cash is definitely doomed. Cash is a total pain
It really is. A total timer waster –– "oh I have to go to the bank machine, where is the bank machine? Dunno, oh it's x miles away"
Absolutely ridiculous persisting with it nowadays.
Plus you can lose cash, it's a hassle to change it, you put it in the washing machine by mistake, and so on and so forth
Cash is doomed, the same way real gold and silver coins were doomed back in the day, and the value of notes and coins became notional
Indeed. And it's risky, carrying it around. I imagine 'petty' robberies (in the absence of a more appropriate term) are much more prevalent in those countries where cash is the norm.
It's rare among my friends that anyone carries cash – as it's pointless in London.
I've gone months in London without using cash. I always do have some, but it can stay unspent in my pocket for entire seasons
It just seems mad to believe that in twenty years we will still be reaching in purses and counting out bits of paper and circles of metal. I do sympathise with sad stories like that of @ManchesterKurt below - that's awful - but I don't see that stopping inevitable progress
Agree entirely. In fact @ManchesterKurt has given an excellent if saddening counterexample – others just seem to be based on: "I like cash, dunno why".
I use cash, because as has been patiently explained to you before, outside Extortion City there are still lots of places that don't take cards because it's much more expensive particularly for small transactions. I know that a study put forward by the main card clearing house said otherwise but it was patently not telling the truth (as in, had forged its figures).
What might kill cash off eventually is the number of bank branches that are being closed, which will make it much more difficult to obtain and secure it. That's what's happening in say, North Wales. And that is not because of the merits or demerits of physical cash but because (1) branches being shut down, however well-used, reduces overheads dramatically and (b) banks can charge more in card transaction fees than in cash deposit fees.
London is not a typical example and should also never be used as such. It's much more crowded, much more expensive and much younger than the average town in the UK, including for things like food and transport (coins are still needed for many bus journeys round here). It's therefore less practical to use cash and the population tends to be more addicted to their phones in any case. That doesn't mean just because London is moving towards cashlessness everywhere else will as well.
Everywhere is MOVING TOWARDS cashlessness and to claim otherwise is to deny the clear evidence in front of you. As much as it might not appeal to your prejudices, I leave London regularly – particularly for hiking and biking tours in high-country remote places.
I haven't used cash for anything, anywhere in the UK, and haven't needed to. The idea that rural areas are still cash-only holdouts is an utter fantasy.
Tourist hotspots and rural areas are not the same thing. And you might have noticed I did in fact make that distinction.
But you are simply wrong to say that nobody needs cash now. As in, are clearly wilfully obtuse or actually lying. I am stating facts, and if you don't find they fit with your prejudices (your remarks on that struck me as ironic) that is your problem. There are many places where you still need it. That may change. But it's not many years ago that people thought cards would replace everything - nobody foresaw phone payments
Re: cash, someone said to me the other day, have you seen the 'new' 50pm coin?
I replied that I hadn't seen it, nor a 50p coin of any kind, old, middle-aged or new, for about a decade.
Really?
Up until 2020, I had a coin jar, which accumulated change through the year and was periodically taken to the bank - it used to get about £400 a year in change. Since the pandemic, it no longer builds up ,and I have to go out of my way from time to time to get change to keep it stocked. But I do still need coins, for reasons including, er: - transactions with children (the tooth fairy doesn't bring plastic) - tips in restaurants (I want my money to go to the specific waiter/waitress who provided the service) - buskers - parking (most car parks accept payment by app but that is a massive pain in the arse, particularly if I don't have my glasses with me) - filling a pint glass with, then pissing in it and throwing it from on high at 15 year old girls who have a different favourite football team to me (joking - I'm not a Liverpool fan).
It's not a massive list. But cash isn't dead yet.
EDIT: All that said, upon meeting a colleague for the first time in 2 years recently, I was shocked to find he no longer even carries a wallet - just does everything on his phone. Does he not worry about running out of battery? Does he not worry about losing his phone? Does he not worry about having his phone but not his glasses? Apparently not. Not for me, Clive.
I haven't carried a wallet for nearly two years. Both my watch and phone make payments so what exactly is the point of carting around a load of pointless plastic and paper?
In Thailand it is still 80% cash at least. It is really quite annoying have to go back to paper wads (let alone meaningless coins). It made me realise that cash is definitely doomed. Cash is a total pain
It really is. A total timer waster –– "oh I have to go to the bank machine, where is the bank machine? Dunno, oh it's x miles away"
Absolutely ridiculous persisting with it nowadays.
Plus you can lose cash, it's a hassle to change it, you put it in the washing machine by mistake, and so on and so forth
Cash is doomed, the same way real gold and silver coins were doomed back in the day, and the value of notes and coins became notional
Indeed. And it's risky, carrying it around. I imagine 'petty' robberies (in the absence of a more appropriate term) are much more prevalent in those countries where cash is the norm.
It's rare among my friends that anyone carries cash – as it's pointless in London.
I've gone months in London without using cash. I always do have some, but it can stay unspent in my pocket for entire seasons
It just seems mad to believe that in twenty years we will still be reaching in purses and counting out bits of paper and circles of metal. I do sympathise with sad stories like that of @ManchesterKurt below - that's awful - but I don't see that stopping inevitable progress
Agree entirely. In fact @ManchesterKurt has given an excellent if saddening counterexample – others just seem to be based on: "I like cash, dunno why".
I use cash, because as has been patiently explained to you before, outside Extortion City there are still lots of places that don't take cards because it's much more expensive particularly for small transactions. I know that a study put forward by the main card clearing house said otherwise but it was patently not telling the truth (as in, had forged its figures).
What might kill cash off eventually is the number of bank branches that are being closed, which will make it much more difficult to obtain and secure it. That's what's happening in say, North Wales. And that is not because of the merits or demerits of physical cash but because (1) branches being shut down, however well-used, reduces overheads dramatically and (b) banks can charge more in card transaction fees than in cash deposit fees.
London is not a typical example and should also never be used as such. It's much more crowded, much more expensive and much younger than the average town in the UK, including for things like food and transport (coins are still needed for many bus journeys round here). It's therefore less practical to use cash and the population tends to be more addicted to their phones in any case. That doesn't mean just because London is moving towards cashlessness everywhere else will as well.
Everywhere is MOVING TOWARDS cashlessness and to claim otherwise is to deny the clear evidence in front of you. As much as it might not appeal to your prejudices, I leave London regularly – particularly for hiking and biking tours in high-country remote places.
I haven't used cash for anything, anywhere in the UK, and haven't needed to. The idea that rural areas are still cash-only holdouts is an utter fantasy.
I've just spent about two weeks going around Cornwall - from little villages to bigger towns. I needed cash just once - in a cafe in a remote cove - but that was only because their wifi was down so the machine would not work
It was noticeable and I remember it precisely because it seemed so odd - to everyone. Actual Cash!
Re: cash, someone said to me the other day, have you seen the 'new' 50pm coin?
I replied that I hadn't seen it, nor a 50p coin of any kind, old, middle-aged or new, for about a decade.
Really?
Up until 2020, I had a coin jar, which accumulated change through the year and was periodically taken to the bank - it used to get about £400 a year in change. Since the pandemic, it no longer builds up ,and I have to go out of my way from time to time to get change to keep it stocked. But I do still need coins, for reasons including, er: - transactions with children (the tooth fairy doesn't bring plastic) - tips in restaurants (I want my money to go to the specific waiter/waitress who provided the service) - buskers - parking (most car parks accept payment by app but that is a massive pain in the arse, particularly if I don't have my glasses with me) - filling a pint glass with, then pissing in it and throwing it from on high at 15 year old girls who have a different favourite football team to me (joking - I'm not a Liverpool fan).
It's not a massive list. But cash isn't dead yet.
EDIT: All that said, upon meeting a colleague for the first time in 2 years recently, I was shocked to find he no longer even carries a wallet - just does everything on his phone. Does he not worry about running out of battery? Does he not worry about losing his phone? Does he not worry about having his phone but not his glasses? Apparently not. Not for me, Clive.
I haven't carried a wallet for nearly two years. Both my watch and phone make payments so what exactly is the point of carting around a load of pointless plastic and paper?
In Thailand it is still 80% cash at least. It is really quite annoying have to go back to paper wads (let alone meaningless coins). It made me realise that cash is definitely doomed. Cash is a total pain
It really is. A total timer waster –– "oh I have to go to the bank machine, where is the bank machine? Dunno, oh it's x miles away"
Absolutely ridiculous persisting with it nowadays.
Plus you can lose cash, it's a hassle to change it, you put it in the washing machine by mistake, and so on and so forth
Cash is doomed, the same way real gold and silver coins were doomed back in the day, and the value of notes and coins became notional
Indeed. And it's risky, carrying it around. I imagine 'petty' robberies (in the absence of a more appropriate term) are much more prevalent in those countries where cash is the norm.
It's rare among my friends that anyone carries cash – as it's pointless in London.
I've gone months in London without using cash. I always do have some, but it can stay unspent in my pocket for entire seasons
It just seems mad to believe that in twenty years we will still be reaching in purses and counting out bits of paper and circles of metal. I do sympathise with sad stories like that of @ManchesterKurt below - that's awful - but I don't see that stopping inevitable progress
Agree entirely. In fact @ManchesterKurt has given an excellent if saddening counterexample – others just seem to be based on: "I like cash, dunno why".
I use cash, because as has been patiently explained to you before, outside Extortion City there are still lots of places that don't take cards because it's much more expensive particularly for small transactions. I know that a study put forward by the main card clearing house said otherwise but it was patently not telling the truth (as in, had forged its figures).
What might kill cash off eventually is the number of bank branches that are being closed, which will make it much more difficult to obtain and secure it. That's what's happening in say, North Wales. And that is not because of the merits or demerits of physical cash but because (1) branches being shut down, however well-used, reduces overheads dramatically and (b) banks can charge more in card transaction fees than in cash deposit fees.
London is not a typical example and should also never be used as such. It's much more crowded, much more expensive and much younger than the average town in the UK, including for things like food and transport (coins are still needed for many bus journeys round here). It's therefore less practical to use cash and the population tends to be more addicted to their phones in any case. That doesn't mean just because London is moving towards cashlessness everywhere else will as well.
Everywhere is MOVING TOWARDS cashlessness and to claim otherwise is to deny the clear evidence in front of you. As much as it might not appeal to your prejudices, I leave London regularly – particularly for hiking and biking tours in high-country remote places.
I haven't used cash for anything, anywhere in the UK, and haven't needed to. The idea that rural areas are still cash-only holdouts is an utter fantasy.
You would have been stuck last week then here as the local shop to me was cash only for 2 days as their machine wasn't working. Only other option was to get a bus to town or go without.....luckily I pretty much use cash for all my day to day purchases so I was ok......other people expecting to be able to pay cashlessly were so out of luck......next time I will take a deckchair round and some beer and taunt them mercilessly
Re: cash, someone said to me the other day, have you seen the 'new' 50pm coin?
I replied that I hadn't seen it, nor a 50p coin of any kind, old, middle-aged or new, for about a decade.
Really?
Up until 2020, I had a coin jar, which accumulated change through the year and was periodically taken to the bank - it used to get about £400 a year in change. Since the pandemic, it no longer builds up ,and I have to go out of my way from time to time to get change to keep it stocked. But I do still need coins, for reasons including, er: - transactions with children (the tooth fairy doesn't bring plastic) - tips in restaurants (I want my money to go to the specific waiter/waitress who provided the service) - buskers - parking (most car parks accept payment by app but that is a massive pain in the arse, particularly if I don't have my glasses with me) - filling a pint glass with, then pissing in it and throwing it from on high at 15 year old girls who have a different favourite football team to me (joking - I'm not a Liverpool fan).
It's not a massive list. But cash isn't dead yet.
EDIT: All that said, upon meeting a colleague for the first time in 2 years recently, I was shocked to find he no longer even carries a wallet - just does everything on his phone. Does he not worry about running out of battery? Does he not worry about losing his phone? Does he not worry about having his phone but not his glasses? Apparently not. Not for me, Clive.
I haven't carried a wallet for nearly two years. Both my watch and phone make payments so what exactly is the point of carting around a load of pointless plastic and paper?
In Thailand it is still 80% cash at least. It is really quite annoying have to go back to paper wads (let alone meaningless coins). It made me realise that cash is definitely doomed. Cash is a total pain
It really is. A total timer waster –– "oh I have to go to the bank machine, where is the bank machine? Dunno, oh it's x miles away"
Absolutely ridiculous persisting with it nowadays.
Plus you can lose cash, it's a hassle to change it, you put it in the washing machine by mistake, and so on and so forth
Cash is doomed, the same way real gold and silver coins were doomed back in the day, and the value of notes and coins became notional
Indeed. And it's risky, carrying it around. I imagine 'petty' robberies (in the absence of a more appropriate term) are much more prevalent in those countries where cash is the norm.
It's rare among my friends that anyone carries cash – as it's pointless in London.
I've gone months in London without using cash. I always do have some, but it can stay unspent in my pocket for entire seasons
It just seems mad to believe that in twenty years we will still be reaching in purses and counting out bits of paper and circles of metal. I do sympathise with sad stories like that of @ManchesterKurt below - that's awful - but I don't see that stopping inevitable progress
Agree entirely. In fact @ManchesterKurt has given an excellent if saddening counterexample – others just seem to be based on: "I like cash, dunno why".
I use cash, because as has been patiently explained to you before, outside Extortion City there are still lots of places that don't take cards because it's much more expensive particularly for small transactions. I know that a study put forward by the main card clearing house said otherwise but it was patently not telling the truth (as in, had forged its figures).
What might kill cash off eventually is the number of bank branches that are being closed, which will make it much more difficult to obtain and secure it. That's what's happening in say, North Wales. And that is not because of the merits or demerits of physical cash but because (1) branches being shut down, however well-used, reduces overheads dramatically and (b) banks can charge more in card transaction fees than in cash deposit fees.
London is not a typical example and should also never be used as such. It's much more crowded, much more expensive and much younger than the average town in the UK, including for things like food and transport (coins are still needed for many bus journeys round here). It's therefore less practical to use cash and the population tends to be more addicted to their phones in any case. That doesn't mean just because London is moving towards cashlessness everywhere else will as well.
Everywhere is MOVING TOWARDS cashlessness and to claim otherwise is to deny the clear evidence in front of you. As much as it might not appeal to your prejudices, I leave London regularly – particularly for hiking and biking tours in high-country remote places.
I haven't used cash for anything, anywhere in the UK, and haven't needed to. The idea that rural areas are still cash-only holdouts is an utter fantasy.
Tourist hotspots and rural areas are not the same thing. And you might have noticed I did in fact make that distinction.
But you are simply wrong to say that nobody needs cash now. As in, are clearly wilfully obtuse or actually lying. I am stating facts, and if you don't find they fit with your prejudices (your remarks on that struck me as ironic) that is your problem. There are many places where you still need it. That may change. But it's not many years ago that people thought cards would replace everything - nobody foresaw phone payments
What proportion of retail businesses do you think accept cash only, UK wide? Take your time.
Re: cash, someone said to me the other day, have you seen the 'new' 50pm coin?
I replied that I hadn't seen it, nor a 50p coin of any kind, old, middle-aged or new, for about a decade.
Really?
Up until 2020, I had a coin jar, which accumulated change through the year and was periodically taken to the bank - it used to get about £400 a year in change. Since the pandemic, it no longer builds up ,and I have to go out of my way from time to time to get change to keep it stocked. But I do still need coins, for reasons including, er: - transactions with children (the tooth fairy doesn't bring plastic) - tips in restaurants (I want my money to go to the specific waiter/waitress who provided the service) - buskers - parking (most car parks accept payment by app but that is a massive pain in the arse, particularly if I don't have my glasses with me) - filling a pint glass with, then pissing in it and throwing it from on high at 15 year old girls who have a different favourite football team to me (joking - I'm not a Liverpool fan).
It's not a massive list. But cash isn't dead yet.
EDIT: All that said, upon meeting a colleague for the first time in 2 years recently, I was shocked to find he no longer even carries a wallet - just does everything on his phone. Does he not worry about running out of battery? Does he not worry about losing his phone? Does he not worry about having his phone but not his glasses? Apparently not. Not for me, Clive.
I haven't carried a wallet for nearly two years. Both my watch and phone make payments so what exactly is the point of carting around a load of pointless plastic and paper?
In Thailand it is still 80% cash at least. It is really quite annoying have to go back to paper wads (let alone meaningless coins). It made me realise that cash is definitely doomed. Cash is a total pain
It really is. A total timer waster –– "oh I have to go to the bank machine, where is the bank machine? Dunno, oh it's x miles away"
Absolutely ridiculous persisting with it nowadays.
Plus you can lose cash, it's a hassle to change it, you put it in the washing machine by mistake, and so on and so forth
Cash is doomed, the same way real gold and silver coins were doomed back in the day, and the value of notes and coins became notional
Indeed. And it's risky, carrying it around. I imagine 'petty' robberies (in the absence of a more appropriate term) are much more prevalent in those countries where cash is the norm.
It's rare among my friends that anyone carries cash – as it's pointless in London.
I've gone months in London without using cash. I always do have some, but it can stay unspent in my pocket for entire seasons
It just seems mad to believe that in twenty years we will still be reaching in purses and counting out bits of paper and circles of metal. I do sympathise with sad stories like that of @ManchesterKurt below - that's awful - but I don't see that stopping inevitable progress
Agree entirely. In fact @ManchesterKurt has given an excellent if saddening counterexample – others just seem to be based on: "I like cash, dunno why".
I use cash, because as has been patiently explained to you before, outside Extortion City there are still lots of places that don't take cards because it's much more expensive particularly for small transactions. I know that a study put forward by the main card clearing house said otherwise but it was patently not telling the truth (as in, had forged its figures).
What might kill cash off eventually is the number of bank branches that are being closed, which will make it much more difficult to obtain and secure it. That's what's happening in say, North Wales. And that is not because of the merits or demerits of physical cash but because (1) branches being shut down, however well-used, reduces overheads dramatically and (b) banks can charge more in card transaction fees than in cash deposit fees.
London is not a typical example and should also never be used as such. It's much more crowded, much more expensive and much younger than the average town in the UK, including for things like food and transport (coins are still needed for many bus journeys round here). It's therefore less practical to use cash and the population tends to be more addicted to their phones in any case. That doesn't mean just because London is moving towards cashlessness everywhere else will as well.
Everywhere is MOVING TOWARDS cashlessness and to claim otherwise is to deny the clear evidence in front of you. As much as it might not appeal to your prejudices, I leave London regularly – particularly for hiking and biking tours in high-country remote places.
I haven't used cash for anything, anywhere in the UK, and haven't needed to. The idea that rural areas are still cash-only holdouts is an utter fantasy.
I've just spent about two weeks going around Cornwall - from little villages to bigger towns. I needed cash just once - in a cafe in a remote cove - but that was only because their wifi was down so the machine would not work
It was noticeable and I remember it precisely because it seemed so odd - to everyone. Actual Cash!
Do you think it's wise to abolish cash? I'm not sure it is, because it will give too much power to centralised authorities.
Council round here has moved to phone apps entirely for parking, even though they had machines available which could take contactless payments. Bonkers.
Contactless is great. Phone apps for carparking just shouldn't be allowed. For one thing your debit card won't go out of battery for that 1% of time your phone is out of juice and you can't phone tap the contactless.
If there's contactless (hell, even chip and pin) then I'm not too bothered about what else is available. Cash for those who prefer/need that should also be provided, I think.
The frustrating thing is that any halfway decent parking app standard would be more convenient for most. Car reg(s) stored in app. Location services pinpoint the car park (or some NFC thing to swipe at worst). Choose your time and go, automatic payment. Extendable without returning to the car park. No queues. Many benefits. The current shit-show is not necessary.
Why? Would you allow people to pay in postal orders or cheques or similarly obsolete payments?
Re: cash, someone said to me the other day, have you seen the 'new' 50pm coin?
I replied that I hadn't seen it, nor a 50p coin of any kind, old, middle-aged or new, for about a decade.
Really?
Up until 2020, I had a coin jar, which accumulated change through the year and was periodically taken to the bank - it used to get about £400 a year in change. Since the pandemic, it no longer builds up ,and I have to go out of my way from time to time to get change to keep it stocked. But I do still need coins, for reasons including, er: - transactions with children (the tooth fairy doesn't bring plastic) - tips in restaurants (I want my money to go to the specific waiter/waitress who provided the service) - buskers - parking (most car parks accept payment by app but that is a massive pain in the arse, particularly if I don't have my glasses with me) - filling a pint glass with, then pissing in it and throwing it from on high at 15 year old girls who have a different favourite football team to me (joking - I'm not a Liverpool fan).
It's not a massive list. But cash isn't dead yet.
EDIT: All that said, upon meeting a colleague for the first time in 2 years recently, I was shocked to find he no longer even carries a wallet - just does everything on his phone. Does he not worry about running out of battery? Does he not worry about losing his phone? Does he not worry about having his phone but not his glasses? Apparently not. Not for me, Clive.
I haven't carried a wallet for nearly two years. Both my watch and phone make payments so what exactly is the point of carting around a load of pointless plastic and paper?
In Thailand it is still 80% cash at least. It is really quite annoying have to go back to paper wads (let alone meaningless coins). It made me realise that cash is definitely doomed. Cash is a total pain
It really is. A total timer waster –– "oh I have to go to the bank machine, where is the bank machine? Dunno, oh it's x miles away"
Absolutely ridiculous persisting with it nowadays.
Plus you can lose cash, it's a hassle to change it, you put it in the washing machine by mistake, and so on and so forth
Cash is doomed, the same way real gold and silver coins were doomed back in the day, and the value of notes and coins became notional
Indeed. And it's risky, carrying it around. I imagine 'petty' robberies (in the absence of a more appropriate term) are much more prevalent in those countries where cash is the norm.
It's rare among my friends that anyone carries cash – as it's pointless in London.
I've gone months in London without using cash. I always do have some, but it can stay unspent in my pocket for entire seasons
It just seems mad to believe that in twenty years we will still be reaching in purses and counting out bits of paper and circles of metal. I do sympathise with sad stories like that of @ManchesterKurt below - that's awful - but I don't see that stopping inevitable progress
Agree entirely. In fact @ManchesterKurt has given an excellent if saddening counterexample – others just seem to be based on: "I like cash, dunno why".
I use cash, because as has been patiently explained to you before, outside Extortion City there are still lots of places that don't take cards because it's much more expensive particularly for small transactions. I know that a study put forward by the main card clearing house said otherwise but it was patently not telling the truth (as in, had forged its figures).
What might kill cash off eventually is the number of bank branches that are being closed, which will make it much more difficult to obtain and secure it. That's what's happening in say, North Wales. And that is not because of the merits or demerits of physical cash but because (1) branches being shut down, however well-used, reduces overheads dramatically and (b) banks can charge more in card transaction fees than in cash deposit fees.
London is not a typical example and should also never be used as such. It's much more crowded, much more expensive and much younger than the average town in the UK, including for things like food and transport (coins are still needed for many bus journeys round here). It's therefore less practical to use cash and the population tends to be more addicted to their phones in any case. That doesn't mean just because London is moving towards cashlessness everywhere else will as well.
Everywhere is MOVING TOWARDS cashlessness and to claim otherwise is to deny the clear evidence in front of you. As much as it might not appeal to your prejudices, I leave London regularly – particularly for hiking and biking tours in high-country remote places.
I haven't used cash for anything, anywhere in the UK, and haven't needed to. The idea that rural areas are still cash-only holdouts is an utter fantasy.
I've just spent about two weeks going around Cornwall - from little villages to bigger towns. I needed cash just once - in a cafe in a remote cove - but that was only because their wifi was down so the machine would not work
It was noticeable and I remember it precisely because it seemed so odd - to everyone. Actual Cash!
Yes. There is a lot of ridiculous exaggeration going on on this thread. As if Londoners don't travel. Amazingly, my view of Great Rural Britain is not one where everyone chews on straw and accepts only burnished groats for payment.
Re: cash, someone said to me the other day, have you seen the 'new' 50pm coin?
I replied that I hadn't seen it, nor a 50p coin of any kind, old, middle-aged or new, for about a decade.
Really?
Up until 2020, I had a coin jar, which accumulated change through the year and was periodically taken to the bank - it used to get about £400 a year in change. Since the pandemic, it no longer builds up ,and I have to go out of my way from time to time to get change to keep it stocked. But I do still need coins, for reasons including, er: - transactions with children (the tooth fairy doesn't bring plastic) - tips in restaurants (I want my money to go to the specific waiter/waitress who provided the service) - buskers - parking (most car parks accept payment by app but that is a massive pain in the arse, particularly if I don't have my glasses with me) - filling a pint glass with, then pissing in it and throwing it from on high at 15 year old girls who have a different favourite football team to me (joking - I'm not a Liverpool fan).
It's not a massive list. But cash isn't dead yet.
EDIT: All that said, upon meeting a colleague for the first time in 2 years recently, I was shocked to find he no longer even carries a wallet - just does everything on his phone. Does he not worry about running out of battery? Does he not worry about losing his phone? Does he not worry about having his phone but not his glasses? Apparently not. Not for me, Clive.
I haven't carried a wallet for nearly two years. Both my watch and phone make payments so what exactly is the point of carting around a load of pointless plastic and paper?
In Thailand it is still 80% cash at least. It is really quite annoying have to go back to paper wads (let alone meaningless coins). It made me realise that cash is definitely doomed. Cash is a total pain
It really is. A total timer waster –– "oh I have to go to the bank machine, where is the bank machine? Dunno, oh it's x miles away"
Absolutely ridiculous persisting with it nowadays.
Plus you can lose cash, it's a hassle to change it, you put it in the washing machine by mistake, and so on and so forth
Cash is doomed, the same way real gold and silver coins were doomed back in the day, and the value of notes and coins became notional
Indeed. And it's risky, carrying it around. I imagine 'petty' robberies (in the absence of a more appropriate term) are much more prevalent in those countries where cash is the norm.
It's rare among my friends that anyone carries cash – as it's pointless in London.
I've gone months in London without using cash. I always do have some, but it can stay unspent in my pocket for entire seasons
It just seems mad to believe that in twenty years we will still be reaching in purses and counting out bits of paper and circles of metal. I do sympathise with sad stories like that of @ManchesterKurt below - that's awful - but I don't see that stopping inevitable progress
Agree entirely. In fact @ManchesterKurt has given an excellent if saddening counterexample – others just seem to be based on: "I like cash, dunno why".
I use cash, because as has been patiently explained to you before, outside Extortion City there are still lots of places that don't take cards because it's much more expensive particularly for small transactions. I know that a study put forward by the main card clearing house said otherwise but it was patently not telling the truth (as in, had forged its figures).
What might kill cash off eventually is the number of bank branches that are being closed, which will make it much more difficult to obtain and secure it. That's what's happening in say, North Wales. And that is not because of the merits or demerits of physical cash but because (1) branches being shut down, however well-used, reduces overheads dramatically and (b) banks can charge more in card transaction fees than in cash deposit fees.
London is not a typical example and should also never be used as such. It's much more crowded, much more expensive and much younger than the average town in the UK, including for things like food and transport (coins are still needed for many bus journeys round here). It's therefore less practical to use cash and the population tends to be more addicted to their phones in any case. That doesn't mean just because London is moving towards cashlessness everywhere else will as well.
Everywhere is MOVING TOWARDS cashlessness and to claim otherwise is to deny the clear evidence in front of you. As much as it might not appeal to your prejudices, I leave London regularly – particularly for hiking and biking tours in high-country remote places.
I haven't used cash for anything, anywhere in the UK, and haven't needed to. The idea that rural areas are still cash-only holdouts is an utter fantasy.
I've just spent about two weeks going around Cornwall - from little villages to bigger towns. I needed cash just once - in a cafe in a remote cove - but that was only because their wifi was down so the machine would not work
It was noticeable and I remember it precisely because it seemed so odd - to everyone. Actual Cash!
Yes. There is a lot of ridiculous exaggeration going on on this thread. As if Londoners don't travel. Amazingly, my view of Great Rural Britain is not one where everyone chews on straw and accepts only burnished groats for payment.
But why are you so evangelical about getting rid of cash? It's almost like a religion with some people.
Re: cash, someone said to me the other day, have you seen the 'new' 50pm coin?
I replied that I hadn't seen it, nor a 50p coin of any kind, old, middle-aged or new, for about a decade.
Really?
Up until 2020, I had a coin jar, which accumulated change through the year and was periodically taken to the bank - it used to get about £400 a year in change. Since the pandemic, it no longer builds up ,and I have to go out of my way from time to time to get change to keep it stocked. But I do still need coins, for reasons including, er: - transactions with children (the tooth fairy doesn't bring plastic) - tips in restaurants (I want my money to go to the specific waiter/waitress who provided the service) - buskers - parking (most car parks accept payment by app but that is a massive pain in the arse, particularly if I don't have my glasses with me) - filling a pint glass with, then pissing in it and throwing it from on high at 15 year old girls who have a different favourite football team to me (joking - I'm not a Liverpool fan).
It's not a massive list. But cash isn't dead yet.
EDIT: All that said, upon meeting a colleague for the first time in 2 years recently, I was shocked to find he no longer even carries a wallet - just does everything on his phone. Does he not worry about running out of battery? Does he not worry about losing his phone? Does he not worry about having his phone but not his glasses? Apparently not. Not for me, Clive.
I haven't carried a wallet for nearly two years. Both my watch and phone make payments so what exactly is the point of carting around a load of pointless plastic and paper?
In Thailand it is still 80% cash at least. It is really quite annoying have to go back to paper wads (let alone meaningless coins). It made me realise that cash is definitely doomed. Cash is a total pain
It really is. A total timer waster –– "oh I have to go to the bank machine, where is the bank machine? Dunno, oh it's x miles away"
Absolutely ridiculous persisting with it nowadays.
Plus you can lose cash, it's a hassle to change it, you put it in the washing machine by mistake, and so on and so forth
Cash is doomed, the same way real gold and silver coins were doomed back in the day, and the value of notes and coins became notional
Indeed. And it's risky, carrying it around. I imagine 'petty' robberies (in the absence of a more appropriate term) are much more prevalent in those countries where cash is the norm.
It's rare among my friends that anyone carries cash – as it's pointless in London.
I've gone months in London without using cash. I always do have some, but it can stay unspent in my pocket for entire seasons
It just seems mad to believe that in twenty years we will still be reaching in purses and counting out bits of paper and circles of metal. I do sympathise with sad stories like that of @ManchesterKurt below - that's awful - but I don't see that stopping inevitable progress
Agree entirely. In fact @ManchesterKurt has given an excellent if saddening counterexample – others just seem to be based on: "I like cash, dunno why".
I use cash, because as has been patiently explained to you before, outside Extortion City there are still lots of places that don't take cards because it's much more expensive particularly for small transactions. I know that a study put forward by the main card clearing house said otherwise but it was patently not telling the truth (as in, had forged its figures).
What might kill cash off eventually is the number of bank branches that are being closed, which will make it much more difficult to obtain and secure it. That's what's happening in say, North Wales. And that is not because of the merits or demerits of physical cash but because (1) branches being shut down, however well-used, reduces overheads dramatically and (b) banks can charge more in card transaction fees than in cash deposit fees.
London is not a typical example and should also never be used as such. It's much more crowded, much more expensive and much younger than the average town in the UK, including for things like food and transport (coins are still needed for many bus journeys round here). It's therefore less practical to use cash and the population tends to be more addicted to their phones in any case. That doesn't mean just because London is moving towards cashlessness everywhere else will as well.
Everywhere is MOVING TOWARDS cashlessness and to claim otherwise is to deny the clear evidence in front of you. As much as it might not appeal to your prejudices, I leave London regularly – particularly for hiking and biking tours in high-country remote places.
I haven't used cash for anything, anywhere in the UK, and haven't needed to. The idea that rural areas are still cash-only holdouts is an utter fantasy.
I've just spent about two weeks going around Cornwall - from little villages to bigger towns. I needed cash just once - in a cafe in a remote cove - but that was only because their wifi was down so the machine would not work
It was noticeable and I remember it precisely because it seemed so odd - to everyone. Actual Cash!
Do you think it's wise to abolish cash? I'm not sure it is, because it will give too much power to centralised authorities.
By the time they realise what they gave up in terms of anonymity it will be too late sadly as is always the case, people warn about things and it gets hand waved away as no one will do that....then lo and behold they go and do it. The irritating thing is they take the rest of us down with them because there are far too many "the governement will never be that nasty" idiots around
Council round here has moved to phone apps entirely for parking, even though they had machines available which could take contactless payments. Bonkers.
Contactless is great. Phone apps for carparking just shouldn't be allowed. For one thing your debit card won't go out of battery for that 1% of time your phone is out of juice and you can't phone tap the contactless.
If there's contactless (hell, even chip and pin) then I'm not too bothered about what else is available. Cash for those who prefer/need that should also be provided, I think.
The frustrating thing is that any halfway decent parking app standard would be more convenient for most. Car reg(s) stored in app. Location services pinpoint the car park (or some NFC thing to swipe at worst). Choose your time and go, automatic payment. Extendable without returning to the car park. No queues. Many benefits. The current shit-show is not necessary.
Why? Would you allow people to pay in postal orders or cheques or similarly obsolete payments?
Because there will always be a proportion of the population that require cash as they are unable to deal with more modern ways of budgeting.
My wife had a very severe stroke 5 years ago and has left her with tremendous mental issues, she cannot understand the difference between up or down, left or right, forwards or backwards. She cannot unlock doors, she cannot leave the house alone.
But she does have a level of financial independence as each month we take some money out of her bank and over the month she manages her spend as she can touch, feel and see her money.
My wife could not deal with a card (if nothing else her eye sight is so poor she cannot see the numbers on the keypads), take away cash and you take away about the only thing in her life that she has any level of independence over.
My wife may be a very extreme case, but there are probably far more people at that end of the spectrum than you would imagine.
Absolutely - I know a few people who like to use cash for budgeting because paying by card doesn't feel like spending money.
Obviously, people who don't need to worry about having month left at the end of the money can merrily tap away.
I struggle with the veracity of such anecdotes. Do they pay their monthly bills by cash, at a post office? Their TV licence? Their mortgage? Their rent? How many people as a proportion of the UK population operate only in cash – and how exactly do they string a life together?
Bills go out the day after payday, then they withdraw whatever's left in cash and budget accordingly.
You can call me a liar if you want.
I'm not calling you a liar, simply challenging the idea that they wouldn't learn to budget were cash unavailable. People adapt. Seatbelt paradox.
Re: cash, someone said to me the other day, have you seen the 'new' 50pm coin?
I replied that I hadn't seen it, nor a 50p coin of any kind, old, middle-aged or new, for about a decade.
Really?
Up until 2020, I had a coin jar, which accumulated change through the year and was periodically taken to the bank - it used to get about £400 a year in change. Since the pandemic, it no longer builds up ,and I have to go out of my way from time to time to get change to keep it stocked. But I do still need coins, for reasons including, er: - transactions with children (the tooth fairy doesn't bring plastic) - tips in restaurants (I want my money to go to the specific waiter/waitress who provided the service) - buskers - parking (most car parks accept payment by app but that is a massive pain in the arse, particularly if I don't have my glasses with me) - filling a pint glass with, then pissing in it and throwing it from on high at 15 year old girls who have a different favourite football team to me (joking - I'm not a Liverpool fan).
It's not a massive list. But cash isn't dead yet.
EDIT: All that said, upon meeting a colleague for the first time in 2 years recently, I was shocked to find he no longer even carries a wallet - just does everything on his phone. Does he not worry about running out of battery? Does he not worry about losing his phone? Does he not worry about having his phone but not his glasses? Apparently not. Not for me, Clive.
I haven't carried a wallet for nearly two years. Both my watch and phone make payments so what exactly is the point of carting around a load of pointless plastic and paper?
In Thailand it is still 80% cash at least. It is really quite annoying have to go back to paper wads (let alone meaningless coins). It made me realise that cash is definitely doomed. Cash is a total pain
It really is. A total timer waster –– "oh I have to go to the bank machine, where is the bank machine? Dunno, oh it's x miles away"
Absolutely ridiculous persisting with it nowadays.
Plus you can lose cash, it's a hassle to change it, you put it in the washing machine by mistake, and so on and so forth
Cash is doomed, the same way real gold and silver coins were doomed back in the day, and the value of notes and coins became notional
Indeed. And it's risky, carrying it around. I imagine 'petty' robberies (in the absence of a more appropriate term) are much more prevalent in those countries where cash is the norm.
It's rare among my friends that anyone carries cash – as it's pointless in London.
I've gone months in London without using cash. I always do have some, but it can stay unspent in my pocket for entire seasons
It just seems mad to believe that in twenty years we will still be reaching in purses and counting out bits of paper and circles of metal. I do sympathise with sad stories like that of @ManchesterKurt below - that's awful - but I don't see that stopping inevitable progress
Agree entirely. In fact @ManchesterKurt has given an excellent if saddening counterexample – others just seem to be based on: "I like cash, dunno why".
I use cash, because as has been patiently explained to you before, outside Extortion City there are still lots of places that don't take cards because it's much more expensive particularly for small transactions. I know that a study put forward by the main card clearing house said otherwise but it was patently not telling the truth (as in, had forged its figures).
What might kill cash off eventually is the number of bank branches that are being closed, which will make it much more difficult to obtain and secure it. That's what's happening in say, North Wales. And that is not because of the merits or demerits of physical cash but because (1) branches being shut down, however well-used, reduces overheads dramatically and (b) banks can charge more in card transaction fees than in cash deposit fees.
London is not a typical example and should also never be used as such. It's much more crowded, much more expensive and much younger than the average town in the UK, including for things like food and transport (coins are still needed for many bus journeys round here). It's therefore less practical to use cash and the population tends to be more addicted to their phones in any case. That doesn't mean just because London is moving towards cashlessness everywhere else will as well.
Everywhere is MOVING TOWARDS cashlessness and to claim otherwise is to deny the clear evidence in front of you. As much as it might not appeal to your prejudices, I leave London regularly – particularly for hiking and biking tours in high-country remote places.
I haven't used cash for anything, anywhere in the UK, and haven't needed to. The idea that rural areas are still cash-only holdouts is an utter fantasy.
I've just spent about two weeks going around Cornwall - from little villages to bigger towns. I needed cash just once - in a cafe in a remote cove - but that was only because their wifi was down so the machine would not work
It was noticeable and I remember it precisely because it seemed so odd - to everyone. Actual Cash!
Yes. There is a lot of ridiculous exaggeration going on on this thread. As if Londoners don't travel. Amazingly, my view of Great Rural Britain is not one where everyone chews on straw and accepts only burnished groats for payment.
But why are you so evangelical about getting rid of cash? It's almost like a religion with some people.
I wouldn't ban it yet for reasons stated above. But the trend is only one way – would you advocate retaining cash and cheques if less than 1% of the population ever used them?
Re: cash, someone said to me the other day, have you seen the 'new' 50pm coin?
I replied that I hadn't seen it, nor a 50p coin of any kind, old, middle-aged or new, for about a decade.
Really?
Up until 2020, I had a coin jar, which accumulated change through the year and was periodically taken to the bank - it used to get about £400 a year in change. Since the pandemic, it no longer builds up ,and I have to go out of my way from time to time to get change to keep it stocked. But I do still need coins, for reasons including, er: - transactions with children (the tooth fairy doesn't bring plastic) - tips in restaurants (I want my money to go to the specific waiter/waitress who provided the service) - buskers - parking (most car parks accept payment by app but that is a massive pain in the arse, particularly if I don't have my glasses with me) - filling a pint glass with, then pissing in it and throwing it from on high at 15 year old girls who have a different favourite football team to me (joking - I'm not a Liverpool fan).
It's not a massive list. But cash isn't dead yet.
EDIT: All that said, upon meeting a colleague for the first time in 2 years recently, I was shocked to find he no longer even carries a wallet - just does everything on his phone. Does he not worry about running out of battery? Does he not worry about losing his phone? Does he not worry about having his phone but not his glasses? Apparently not. Not for me, Clive.
I haven't carried a wallet for nearly two years. Both my watch and phone make payments so what exactly is the point of carting around a load of pointless plastic and paper?
In Thailand it is still 80% cash at least. It is really quite annoying have to go back to paper wads (let alone meaningless coins). It made me realise that cash is definitely doomed. Cash is a total pain
It really is. A total timer waster –– "oh I have to go to the bank machine, where is the bank machine? Dunno, oh it's x miles away"
Absolutely ridiculous persisting with it nowadays.
Plus you can lose cash, it's a hassle to change it, you put it in the washing machine by mistake, and so on and so forth
Cash is doomed, the same way real gold and silver coins were doomed back in the day, and the value of notes and coins became notional
Indeed. And it's risky, carrying it around. I imagine 'petty' robberies (in the absence of a more appropriate term) are much more prevalent in those countries where cash is the norm.
It's rare among my friends that anyone carries cash – as it's pointless in London.
I've gone months in London without using cash. I always do have some, but it can stay unspent in my pocket for entire seasons
It just seems mad to believe that in twenty years we will still be reaching in purses and counting out bits of paper and circles of metal. I do sympathise with sad stories like that of @ManchesterKurt below - that's awful - but I don't see that stopping inevitable progress
Agree entirely. In fact @ManchesterKurt has given an excellent if saddening counterexample – others just seem to be based on: "I like cash, dunno why".
I use cash, because as has been patiently explained to you before, outside Extortion City there are still lots of places that don't take cards because it's much more expensive particularly for small transactions. I know that a study put forward by the main card clearing house said otherwise but it was patently not telling the truth (as in, had forged its figures).
What might kill cash off eventually is the number of bank branches that are being closed, which will make it much more difficult to obtain and secure it. That's what's happening in say, North Wales. And that is not because of the merits or demerits of physical cash but because (1) branches being shut down, however well-used, reduces overheads dramatically and (b) banks can charge more in card transaction fees than in cash deposit fees.
London is not a typical example and should also never be used as such. It's much more crowded, much more expensive and much younger than the average town in the UK, including for things like food and transport (coins are still needed for many bus journeys round here). It's therefore less practical to use cash and the population tends to be more addicted to their phones in any case. That doesn't mean just because London is moving towards cashlessness everywhere else will as well.
Everywhere is MOVING TOWARDS cashlessness and to claim otherwise is to deny the clear evidence in front of you. As much as it might not appeal to your prejudices, I leave London regularly – particularly for hiking and biking tours in high-country remote places.
I haven't used cash for anything, anywhere in the UK, and haven't needed to. The idea that rural areas are still cash-only holdouts is an utter fantasy.
I've just spent about two weeks going around Cornwall - from little villages to bigger towns. I needed cash just once - in a cafe in a remote cove - but that was only because their wifi was down so the machine would not work
It was noticeable and I remember it precisely because it seemed so odd - to everyone. Actual Cash!
In the last few years I have only used cash for a haircut (yep I don't know why they only take cash). I did a holiday in Iceland a few years ago and never used cash once; I didn't have any. Adnams will not take cash in their pubs.
This is going to be a problem going forward for the very few who have no alternative to cash.
Council round here has moved to phone apps entirely for parking, even though they had machines available which could take contactless payments. Bonkers.
Contactless is great. Phone apps for carparking just shouldn't be allowed. For one thing your debit card won't go out of battery for that 1% of time your phone is out of juice and you can't phone tap the contactless.
If there's contactless (hell, even chip and pin) then I'm not too bothered about what else is available. Cash for those who prefer/need that should also be provided, I think.
The frustrating thing is that any halfway decent parking app standard would be more convenient for most. Car reg(s) stored in app. Location services pinpoint the car park (or some NFC thing to swipe at worst). Choose your time and go, automatic payment. Extendable without returning to the car park. No queues. Many benefits. The current shit-show is not necessary.
Why? Would you allow people to pay in postal orders or cheques or similarly obsolete payments?
Because there will always be a proportion of the population that require cash as they are unable to deal with more modern ways of budgeting.
My wife had a very severe stroke 5 years ago and has left her with tremendous mental issues, she cannot understand the difference between up or down, left or right, forwards or backwards. She cannot unlock doors, she cannot leave the house alone.
But she does have a level of financial independence as each month we take some money out of her bank and over the month she manages her spend as she can touch, feel and see her money.
My wife could not deal with a card (if nothing else her eye sight is so poor she cannot see the numbers on the keypads), take away cash and you take away about the only thing in her life that she has any level of independence over.
My wife may be a very extreme case, but there are probably far more people at that end of the spectrum than you would imagine.
Absolutely - I know a few people who like to use cash for budgeting because paying by card doesn't feel like spending money.
Obviously, people who don't need to worry about having month left at the end of the money can merrily tap away.
I struggle with the veracity of such anecdotes. Do they pay their monthly bills by cash, at a post office? Their TV licence? Their mortgage? Their rent? How many people as a proportion of the UK population operate only in cash – and how exactly do they string a life together?
Bills go out the day after payday, then they withdraw whatever's left in cash and budget accordingly.
You can call me a liar if you want.
I'm not calling you a liar, simply challenging the idea that they wouldn't learn to budget were cash unavailable. People adapt. Seatbelt paradox.
I am curious why you are strident on this issue, most of those saying they should be able to continue to pay cash aren't telling you that you must use cash. They are just saying they want to retain the right to use cash instead of card/phone whatever.
So if no one is saying you have to be made to use cash...why are you so fervent on stopping those that want the option to continue having the option to use cash?
Council round here has moved to phone apps entirely for parking, even though they had machines available which could take contactless payments. Bonkers.
Contactless is great. Phone apps for carparking just shouldn't be allowed. For one thing your debit card won't go out of battery for that 1% of time your phone is out of juice and you can't phone tap the contactless.
If there's contactless (hell, even chip and pin) then I'm not too bothered about what else is available. Cash for those who prefer/need that should also be provided, I think.
The frustrating thing is that any halfway decent parking app standard would be more convenient for most. Car reg(s) stored in app. Location services pinpoint the car park (or some NFC thing to swipe at worst). Choose your time and go, automatic payment. Extendable without returning to the car park. No queues. Many benefits. The current shit-show is not necessary.
Why? Would you allow people to pay in postal orders or cheques or similarly obsolete payments?
Because there will always be a proportion of the population that require cash as they are unable to deal with more modern ways of budgeting.
My wife had a very severe stroke 5 years ago and has left her with tremendous mental issues, she cannot understand the difference between up or down, left or right, forwards or backwards. She cannot unlock doors, she cannot leave the house alone.
But she does have a level of financial independence as each month we take some money out of her bank and over the month she manages her spend as she can touch, feel and see her money.
My wife could not deal with a card (if nothing else her eye sight is so poor she cannot see the numbers on the keypads), take away cash and you take away about the only thing in her life that she has any level of independence over.
My wife may be a very extreme case, but there are probably far more people at that end of the spectrum than you would imagine.
Absolutely - I know a few people who like to use cash for budgeting because paying by card doesn't feel like spending money.
Obviously, people who don't need to worry about having month left at the end of the money can merrily tap away.
I struggle with the veracity of such anecdotes. Do they pay their monthly bills by cash, at a post office? Their TV licence? Their mortgage? Their rent? How many people as a proportion of the UK population operate only in cash – and how exactly do they string a life together?
Bills go out the day after payday, then they withdraw whatever's left in cash and budget accordingly.
Council round here has moved to phone apps entirely for parking, even though they had machines available which could take contactless payments. Bonkers.
Contactless is great. Phone apps for carparking just shouldn't be allowed. For one thing your debit card won't go out of battery for that 1% of time your phone is out of juice and you can't phone tap the contactless.
If there's contactless (hell, even chip and pin) then I'm not too bothered about what else is available. Cash for those who prefer/need that should also be provided, I think.
The frustrating thing is that any halfway decent parking app standard would be more convenient for most. Car reg(s) stored in app. Location services pinpoint the car park (or some NFC thing to swipe at worst). Choose your time and go, automatic payment. Extendable without returning to the car park. No queues. Many benefits. The current shit-show is not necessary.
Why? Would you allow people to pay in postal orders or cheques or similarly obsolete payments?
Because there will always be a proportion of the population that require cash as they are unable to deal with more modern ways of budgeting.
My wife had a very severe stroke 5 years ago and has left her with tremendous mental issues, she cannot understand the difference between up or down, left or right, forwards or backwards. She cannot unlock doors, she cannot leave the house alone.
But she does have a level of financial independence as each month we take some money out of her bank and over the month she manages her spend as she can touch, feel and see her money.
My wife could not deal with a card (if nothing else her eye sight is so poor she cannot see the numbers on the keypads), take away cash and you take away about the only thing in her life that she has any level of independence over.
My wife may be a very extreme case, but there are probably far more people at that end of the spectrum than you would imagine.
Absolutely - I know a few people who like to use cash for budgeting because paying by card doesn't feel like spending money.
Obviously, people who don't need to worry about having month left at the end of the money can merrily tap away.
I struggle with the veracity of such anecdotes. Do they pay their monthly bills by cash, at a post office? Their TV licence? Their mortgage? Their rent? How many people as a proportion of the UK population operate only in cash – and how exactly do they string a life together?
Bills go out the day after payday, then they withdraw whatever's left in cash and budget accordingly.
You can call me a liar if you want.
I'm not calling you a liar, simply challenging the idea that they wouldn't learn to budget were cash unavailable. People adapt. Seatbelt paradox.
Dyscalculia is surprisingly common and has many forms.
Re: cash, someone said to me the other day, have you seen the 'new' 50pm coin?
I replied that I hadn't seen it, nor a 50p coin of any kind, old, middle-aged or new, for about a decade.
Really?
Up until 2020, I had a coin jar, which accumulated change through the year and was periodically taken to the bank - it used to get about £400 a year in change. Since the pandemic, it no longer builds up ,and I have to go out of my way from time to time to get change to keep it stocked. But I do still need coins, for reasons including, er: - transactions with children (the tooth fairy doesn't bring plastic) - tips in restaurants (I want my money to go to the specific waiter/waitress who provided the service) - buskers - parking (most car parks accept payment by app but that is a massive pain in the arse, particularly if I don't have my glasses with me) - filling a pint glass with, then pissing in it and throwing it from on high at 15 year old girls who have a different favourite football team to me (joking - I'm not a Liverpool fan).
It's not a massive list. But cash isn't dead yet.
EDIT: All that said, upon meeting a colleague for the first time in 2 years recently, I was shocked to find he no longer even carries a wallet - just does everything on his phone. Does he not worry about running out of battery? Does he not worry about losing his phone? Does he not worry about having his phone but not his glasses? Apparently not. Not for me, Clive.
I haven't carried a wallet for nearly two years. Both my watch and phone make payments so what exactly is the point of carting around a load of pointless plastic and paper?
In Thailand it is still 80% cash at least. It is really quite annoying have to go back to paper wads (let alone meaningless coins). It made me realise that cash is definitely doomed. Cash is a total pain
It really is. A total timer waster –– "oh I have to go to the bank machine, where is the bank machine? Dunno, oh it's x miles away"
Absolutely ridiculous persisting with it nowadays.
Plus you can lose cash, it's a hassle to change it, you put it in the washing machine by mistake, and so on and so forth
Cash is doomed, the same way real gold and silver coins were doomed back in the day, and the value of notes and coins became notional
Indeed. And it's risky, carrying it around. I imagine 'petty' robberies (in the absence of a more appropriate term) are much more prevalent in those countries where cash is the norm.
It's rare among my friends that anyone carries cash – as it's pointless in London.
I've gone months in London without using cash. I always do have some, but it can stay unspent in my pocket for entire seasons
It just seems mad to believe that in twenty years we will still be reaching in purses and counting out bits of paper and circles of metal. I do sympathise with sad stories like that of @ManchesterKurt below - that's awful - but I don't see that stopping inevitable progress
Agree entirely. In fact @ManchesterKurt has given an excellent if saddening counterexample – others just seem to be based on: "I like cash, dunno why".
I use cash, because as has been patiently explained to you before, outside Extortion City there are still lots of places that don't take cards because it's much more expensive particularly for small transactions. I know that a study put forward by the main card clearing house said otherwise but it was patently not telling the truth (as in, had forged its figures).
What might kill cash off eventually is the number of bank branches that are being closed, which will make it much more difficult to obtain and secure it. That's what's happening in say, North Wales. And that is not because of the merits or demerits of physical cash but because (1) branches being shut down, however well-used, reduces overheads dramatically and (b) banks can charge more in card transaction fees than in cash deposit fees.
London is not a typical example and should also never be used as such. It's much more crowded, much more expensive and much younger than the average town in the UK, including for things like food and transport (coins are still needed for many bus journeys round here). It's therefore less practical to use cash and the population tends to be more addicted to their phones in any case. That doesn't mean just because London is moving towards cashlessness everywhere else will as well.
Everywhere is MOVING TOWARDS cashlessness and to claim otherwise is to deny the clear evidence in front of you. As much as it might not appeal to your prejudices, I leave London regularly – particularly for hiking and biking tours in high-country remote places.
I haven't used cash for anything, anywhere in the UK, and haven't needed to. The idea that rural areas are still cash-only holdouts is an utter fantasy.
You would have been stuck last week then here as the local shop to me was cash only for 2 days as their machine wasn't working. Only other option was to get a bus to town or go without.....luckily I pretty much use cash for all my day to day purchases so I was ok......other people expecting to be able to pay cashlessly were so out of luck......next time I will take a deckchair round and some beer and taunt them mercilessly
Comment from my corner shop yesterday - he lost £500 or so of sales when the card machine went down for an hour on Sunday.
His annoyance was that his wife didn't call him to ask how to fix it and just said cash only...
Council round here has moved to phone apps entirely for parking, even though they had machines available which could take contactless payments. Bonkers.
Contactless is great. Phone apps for carparking just shouldn't be allowed. For one thing your debit card won't go out of battery for that 1% of time your phone is out of juice and you can't phone tap the contactless.
If there's contactless (hell, even chip and pin) then I'm not too bothered about what else is available. Cash for those who prefer/need that should also be provided, I think.
The frustrating thing is that any halfway decent parking app standard would be more convenient for most. Car reg(s) stored in app. Location services pinpoint the car park (or some NFC thing to swipe at worst). Choose your time and go, automatic payment. Extendable without returning to the car park. No queues. Many benefits. The current shit-show is not necessary.
Why? Would you allow people to pay in postal orders or cheques or similarly obsolete payments?
Because there will always be a proportion of the population that require cash as they are unable to deal with more modern ways of budgeting.
My wife had a very severe stroke 5 years ago and has left her with tremendous mental issues, she cannot understand the difference between up or down, left or right, forwards or backwards. She cannot unlock doors, she cannot leave the house alone.
But she does have a level of financial independence as each month we take some money out of her bank and over the month she manages her spend as she can touch, feel and see her money.
My wife could not deal with a card (if nothing else her eye sight is so poor she cannot see the numbers on the keypads), take away cash and you take away about the only thing in her life that she has any level of independence over.
My wife may be a very extreme case, but there are probably far more people at that end of the spectrum than you would imagine.
Absolutely - I know a few people who like to use cash for budgeting because paying by card doesn't feel like spending money.
Obviously, people who don't need to worry about having month left at the end of the money can merrily tap away.
I struggle with the veracity of such anecdotes. Do they pay their monthly bills by cash, at a post office? Their TV licence? Their mortgage? Their rent? How many people as a proportion of the UK population operate only in cash – and how exactly do they string a life together?
Bills go out the day after payday, then they withdraw whatever's left in cash and budget accordingly.
You can call me a liar if you want.
I'm not calling you a liar, simply
...struggling with my veracity?
I struggle with the veracity of the anecdote – they tell you they can't budget without cash. I say most of them probably could.
Council round here has moved to phone apps entirely for parking, even though they had machines available which could take contactless payments. Bonkers.
Contactless is great. Phone apps for carparking just shouldn't be allowed. For one thing your debit card won't go out of battery for that 1% of time your phone is out of juice and you can't phone tap the contactless.
If there's contactless (hell, even chip and pin) then I'm not too bothered about what else is available. Cash for those who prefer/need that should also be provided, I think.
The frustrating thing is that any halfway decent parking app standard would be more convenient for most. Car reg(s) stored in app. Location services pinpoint the car park (or some NFC thing to swipe at worst). Choose your time and go, automatic payment. Extendable without returning to the car park. No queues. Many benefits. The current shit-show is not necessary.
Why? Would you allow people to pay in postal orders or cheques or similarly obsolete payments?
Because there will always be a proportion of the population that require cash as they are unable to deal with more modern ways of budgeting.
My wife had a very severe stroke 5 years ago and has left her with tremendous mental issues, she cannot understand the difference between up or down, left or right, forwards or backwards. She cannot unlock doors, she cannot leave the house alone.
But she does have a level of financial independence as each month we take some money out of her bank and over the month she manages her spend as she can touch, feel and see her money.
My wife could not deal with a card (if nothing else her eye sight is so poor she cannot see the numbers on the keypads), take away cash and you take away about the only thing in her life that she has any level of independence over.
My wife may be a very extreme case, but there are probably far more people at that end of the spectrum than you would imagine.
Absolutely - I know a few people who like to use cash for budgeting because paying by card doesn't feel like spending money.
Obviously, people who don't need to worry about having month left at the end of the money can merrily tap away.
I struggle with the veracity of such anecdotes. Do they pay their monthly bills by cash, at a post office? Their TV licence? Their mortgage? Their rent? How many people as a proportion of the UK population operate only in cash – and how exactly do they string a life together?
Bills go out the day after payday, then they withdraw whatever's left in cash and budget accordingly.
You can call me a liar if you want.
I'm not calling you a liar, simply challenging the idea that they wouldn't learn to budget were cash unavailable. People adapt. Seatbelt paradox.
I am curious why you are strident on this issue, most of those saying they should be able to continue to pay cash aren't telling you that you must use cash. They are just saying they want to retain the right to use cash instead of card/phone whatever.
So if no one is saying you have to be made to use cash...why are you so fervent on stopping those that want the option to continue having the option to use cash?
It's going to become a big policy question, probably fairly soon. Cash is dying. A large and growing proportion of the population never or rarely use it. It's like analogue telly – getting the holdouts to switch to digital was vexatious for a while, but it happened. Retaining cash when a tiny proportion of the population use it will be akin to retaining analogue telly.
Council round here has moved to phone apps entirely for parking, even though they had machines available which could take contactless payments. Bonkers.
Contactless is great. Phone apps for carparking just shouldn't be allowed. For one thing your debit card won't go out of battery for that 1% of time your phone is out of juice and you can't phone tap the contactless.
If there's contactless (hell, even chip and pin) then I'm not too bothered about what else is available. Cash for those who prefer/need that should also be provided, I think.
The frustrating thing is that any halfway decent parking app standard would be more convenient for most. Car reg(s) stored in app. Location services pinpoint the car park (or some NFC thing to swipe at worst). Choose your time and go, automatic payment. Extendable without returning to the car park. No queues. Many benefits. The current shit-show is not necessary.
Why? Would you allow people to pay in postal orders or cheques or similarly obsolete payments?
Because there will always be a proportion of the population that require cash as they are unable to deal with more modern ways of budgeting.
My wife had a very severe stroke 5 years ago and has left her with tremendous mental issues, she cannot understand the difference between up or down, left or right, forwards or backwards. She cannot unlock doors, she cannot leave the house alone.
But she does have a level of financial independence as each month we take some money out of her bank and over the month she manages her spend as she can touch, feel and see her money.
My wife could not deal with a card (if nothing else her eye sight is so poor she cannot see the numbers on the keypads), take away cash and you take away about the only thing in her life that she has any level of independence over.
My wife may be a very extreme case, but there are probably far more people at that end of the spectrum than you would imagine.
Absolutely - I know a few people who like to use cash for budgeting because paying by card doesn't feel like spending money.
Obviously, people who don't need to worry about having month left at the end of the money can merrily tap away.
I struggle with the veracity of such anecdotes. Do they pay their monthly bills by cash, at a post office? Their TV licence? Their mortgage? Their rent? How many people as a proportion of the UK population operate only in cash – and how exactly do they string a life together?
Bills go out the day after payday, then they withdraw whatever's left in cash and budget accordingly.
You can call me a liar if you want.
I'm not calling you a liar, simply challenging the idea that they wouldn't learn to budget were cash unavailable. People adapt. Seatbelt paradox.
I am curious why you are strident on this issue, most of those saying they should be able to continue to pay cash aren't telling you that you must use cash. They are just saying they want to retain the right to use cash instead of card/phone whatever.
So if no one is saying you have to be made to use cash...why are you so fervent on stopping those that want the option to continue having the option to use cash?
It's going to become a big policy question, probably fairly soon. Cash is dying. A large and growing proportion of the population never or rarely use it. It's like analogue telly – getting the holdouts to switch to digital was vexatious for a while, but it happened. Retaining cash when a tiny proportion of the population use it will be akin to retaining analogue telly.
Nobody denies that cash is dying. The question is whether we do anything about it.
Council round here has moved to phone apps entirely for parking, even though they had machines available which could take contactless payments. Bonkers.
Contactless is great. Phone apps for carparking just shouldn't be allowed. For one thing your debit card won't go out of battery for that 1% of time your phone is out of juice and you can't phone tap the contactless.
If there's contactless (hell, even chip and pin) then I'm not too bothered about what else is available. Cash for those who prefer/need that should also be provided, I think.
The frustrating thing is that any halfway decent parking app standard would be more convenient for most. Car reg(s) stored in app. Location services pinpoint the car park (or some NFC thing to swipe at worst). Choose your time and go, automatic payment. Extendable without returning to the car park. No queues. Many benefits. The current shit-show is not necessary.
Why? Would you allow people to pay in postal orders or cheques or similarly obsolete payments?
Because there will always be a proportion of the population that require cash as they are unable to deal with more modern ways of budgeting.
My wife had a very severe stroke 5 years ago and has left her with tremendous mental issues, she cannot understand the difference between up or down, left or right, forwards or backwards. She cannot unlock doors, she cannot leave the house alone.
But she does have a level of financial independence as each month we take some money out of her bank and over the month she manages her spend as she can touch, feel and see her money.
My wife could not deal with a card (if nothing else her eye sight is so poor she cannot see the numbers on the keypads), take away cash and you take away about the only thing in her life that she has any level of independence over.
My wife may be a very extreme case, but there are probably far more people at that end of the spectrum than you would imagine.
Absolutely - I know a few people who like to use cash for budgeting because paying by card doesn't feel like spending money.
Obviously, people who don't need to worry about having month left at the end of the money can merrily tap away.
I struggle with the veracity of such anecdotes. Do they pay their monthly bills by cash, at a post office? Their TV licence? Their mortgage? Their rent? How many people as a proportion of the UK population operate only in cash – and how exactly do they string a life together?
Bills go out the day after payday, then they withdraw whatever's left in cash and budget accordingly.
You can call me a liar if you want.
I'm not calling you a liar, simply
...struggling with my veracity?
I struggle with the veracity of the anecdote – they tell you they can't budget without cash. I say most of them probably could.
Great that you can decide that without knowing them.
As for me, I rarely use cash myself - but I always carry £20-£30 just in case. I don't like "cash only" or "card only" businesses - let people choose.
Re: cash, someone said to me the other day, have you seen the 'new' 50pm coin?
I replied that I hadn't seen it, nor a 50p coin of any kind, old, middle-aged or new, for about a decade.
Really?
Up until 2020, I had a coin jar, which accumulated change through the year and was periodically taken to the bank - it used to get about £400 a year in change. Since the pandemic, it no longer builds up ,and I have to go out of my way from time to time to get change to keep it stocked. But I do still need coins, for reasons including, er: - transactions with children (the tooth fairy doesn't bring plastic) - tips in restaurants (I want my money to go to the specific waiter/waitress who provided the service) - buskers - parking (most car parks accept payment by app but that is a massive pain in the arse, particularly if I don't have my glasses with me) - filling a pint glass with, then pissing in it and throwing it from on high at 15 year old girls who have a different favourite football team to me (joking - I'm not a Liverpool fan).
It's not a massive list. But cash isn't dead yet.
EDIT: All that said, upon meeting a colleague for the first time in 2 years recently, I was shocked to find he no longer even carries a wallet - just does everything on his phone. Does he not worry about running out of battery? Does he not worry about losing his phone? Does he not worry about having his phone but not his glasses? Apparently not. Not for me, Clive.
I haven't carried a wallet for nearly two years. Both my watch and phone make payments so what exactly is the point of carting around a load of pointless plastic and paper?
In Thailand it is still 80% cash at least. It is really quite annoying have to go back to paper wads (let alone meaningless coins). It made me realise that cash is definitely doomed. Cash is a total pain
It really is. A total timer waster –– "oh I have to go to the bank machine, where is the bank machine? Dunno, oh it's x miles away"
Absolutely ridiculous persisting with it nowadays.
Plus you can lose cash, it's a hassle to change it, you put it in the washing machine by mistake, and so on and so forth
Cash is doomed, the same way real gold and silver coins were doomed back in the day, and the value of notes and coins became notional
Indeed. And it's risky, carrying it around. I imagine 'petty' robberies (in the absence of a more appropriate term) are much more prevalent in those countries where cash is the norm.
It's rare among my friends that anyone carries cash – as it's pointless in London.
I've gone months in London without using cash. I always do have some, but it can stay unspent in my pocket for entire seasons
It just seems mad to believe that in twenty years we will still be reaching in purses and counting out bits of paper and circles of metal. I do sympathise with sad stories like that of @ManchesterKurt below - that's awful - but I don't see that stopping inevitable progress
Agree entirely. In fact @ManchesterKurt has given an excellent if saddening counterexample – others just seem to be based on: "I like cash, dunno why".
I use cash, because as has been patiently explained to you before, outside Extortion City there are still lots of places that don't take cards because it's much more expensive particularly for small transactions. I know that a study put forward by the main card clearing house said otherwise but it was patently not telling the truth (as in, had forged its figures).
What might kill cash off eventually is the number of bank branches that are being closed, which will make it much more difficult to obtain and secure it. That's what's happening in say, North Wales. And that is not because of the merits or demerits of physical cash but because (1) branches being shut down, however well-used, reduces overheads dramatically and (b) banks can charge more in card transaction fees than in cash deposit fees.
London is not a typical example and should also never be used as such. It's much more crowded, much more expensive and much younger than the average town in the UK, including for things like food and transport (coins are still needed for many bus journeys round here). It's therefore less practical to use cash and the population tends to be more addicted to their phones in any case. That doesn't mean just because London is moving towards cashlessness everywhere else will as well.
Everywhere is MOVING TOWARDS cashlessness and to claim otherwise is to deny the clear evidence in front of you. As much as it might not appeal to your prejudices, I leave London regularly – particularly for hiking and biking tours in high-country remote places.
I haven't used cash for anything, anywhere in the UK, and haven't needed to. The idea that rural areas are still cash-only holdouts is an utter fantasy.
You would have been stuck last week then here as the local shop to me was cash only for 2 days as their machine wasn't working. Only other option was to get a bus to town or go without.....luckily I pretty much use cash for all my day to day purchases so I was ok......other people expecting to be able to pay cashlessly were so out of luck......next time I will take a deckchair round and some beer and taunt them mercilessly
Comment from my corner shop yesterday - he lost £500 or so of sales when the card machine went down for an hour on Sunday.
His annoyance was that his wife didn't call him to ask how to fix it and just said cash only...
Where do you have to thump one of those machines to get it working?
Re: cash, someone said to me the other day, have you seen the 'new' 50pm coin?
I replied that I hadn't seen it, nor a 50p coin of any kind, old, middle-aged or new, for about a decade.
Really?
Up until 2020, I had a coin jar, which accumulated change through the year and was periodically taken to the bank - it used to get about £400 a year in change. Since the pandemic, it no longer builds up ,and I have to go out of my way from time to time to get change to keep it stocked. But I do still need coins, for reasons including, er: - transactions with children (the tooth fairy doesn't bring plastic) - tips in restaurants (I want my money to go to the specific waiter/waitress who provided the service) - buskers - parking (most car parks accept payment by app but that is a massive pain in the arse, particularly if I don't have my glasses with me) - filling a pint glass with, then pissing in it and throwing it from on high at 15 year old girls who have a different favourite football team to me (joking - I'm not a Liverpool fan).
It's not a massive list. But cash isn't dead yet.
EDIT: All that said, upon meeting a colleague for the first time in 2 years recently, I was shocked to find he no longer even carries a wallet - just does everything on his phone. Does he not worry about running out of battery? Does he not worry about losing his phone? Does he not worry about having his phone but not his glasses? Apparently not. Not for me, Clive.
I haven't carried a wallet for nearly two years. Both my watch and phone make payments so what exactly is the point of carting around a load of pointless plastic and paper?
In Thailand it is still 80% cash at least. It is really quite annoying have to go back to paper wads (let alone meaningless coins). It made me realise that cash is definitely doomed. Cash is a total pain
It really is. A total timer waster –– "oh I have to go to the bank machine, where is the bank machine? Dunno, oh it's x miles away"
Absolutely ridiculous persisting with it nowadays.
Plus you can lose cash, it's a hassle to change it, you put it in the washing machine by mistake, and so on and so forth
Cash is doomed, the same way real gold and silver coins were doomed back in the day, and the value of notes and coins became notional
Indeed. And it's risky, carrying it around. I imagine 'petty' robberies (in the absence of a more appropriate term) are much more prevalent in those countries where cash is the norm.
It's rare among my friends that anyone carries cash – as it's pointless in London.
I've gone months in London without using cash. I always do have some, but it can stay unspent in my pocket for entire seasons
It just seems mad to believe that in twenty years we will still be reaching in purses and counting out bits of paper and circles of metal. I do sympathise with sad stories like that of @ManchesterKurt below - that's awful - but I don't see that stopping inevitable progress
Agree entirely. In fact @ManchesterKurt has given an excellent if saddening counterexample – others just seem to be based on: "I like cash, dunno why".
I use cash, because as has been patiently explained to you before, outside Extortion City there are still lots of places that don't take cards because it's much more expensive particularly for small transactions. I know that a study put forward by the main card clearing house said otherwise but it was patently not telling the truth (as in, had forged its figures).
What might kill cash off eventually is the number of bank branches that are being closed, which will make it much more difficult to obtain and secure it. That's what's happening in say, North Wales. And that is not because of the merits or demerits of physical cash but because (1) branches being shut down, however well-used, reduces overheads dramatically and (b) banks can charge more in card transaction fees than in cash deposit fees.
London is not a typical example and should also never be used as such. It's much more crowded, much more expensive and much younger than the average town in the UK, including for things like food and transport (coins are still needed for many bus journeys round here). It's therefore less practical to use cash and the population tends to be more addicted to their phones in any case. That doesn't mean just because London is moving towards cashlessness everywhere else will as well.
Everywhere is MOVING TOWARDS cashlessness and to claim otherwise is to deny the clear evidence in front of you. As much as it might not appeal to your prejudices, I leave London regularly – particularly for hiking and biking tours in high-country remote places.
I haven't used cash for anything, anywhere in the UK, and haven't needed to. The idea that rural areas are still cash-only holdouts is an utter fantasy.
I've just spent about two weeks going around Cornwall - from little villages to bigger towns. I needed cash just once - in a cafe in a remote cove - but that was only because their wifi was down so the machine would not work
It was noticeable and I remember it precisely because it seemed so odd - to everyone. Actual Cash!
In the last few years I have only used cash for a haircut (yep I don't know why they only take cash). I did a holiday in Iceland a few years ago and never used cash once; I didn't have any. Adnams will not take cash in their pubs.
This is going to be a problem going forward for the very few who have no alternative to cash.
Your barber is probably dodging tax.
Adnams have realised that so few of their punters insist on paying cash that the faff and risk of handling it simply isn't worth their retaining.
The pubs are a microcosm of what's happening in wider society.
Council round here has moved to phone apps entirely for parking, even though they had machines available which could take contactless payments. Bonkers.
Contactless is great. Phone apps for carparking just shouldn't be allowed. For one thing your debit card won't go out of battery for that 1% of time your phone is out of juice and you can't phone tap the contactless.
If there's contactless (hell, even chip and pin) then I'm not too bothered about what else is available. Cash for those who prefer/need that should also be provided, I think.
The frustrating thing is that any halfway decent parking app standard would be more convenient for most. Car reg(s) stored in app. Location services pinpoint the car park (or some NFC thing to swipe at worst). Choose your time and go, automatic payment. Extendable without returning to the car park. No queues. Many benefits. The current shit-show is not necessary.
Why? Would you allow people to pay in postal orders or cheques or similarly obsolete payments?
Because there will always be a proportion of the population that require cash as they are unable to deal with more modern ways of budgeting.
My wife had a very severe stroke 5 years ago and has left her with tremendous mental issues, she cannot understand the difference between up or down, left or right, forwards or backwards. She cannot unlock doors, she cannot leave the house alone.
But she does have a level of financial independence as each month we take some money out of her bank and over the month she manages her spend as she can touch, feel and see her money.
My wife could not deal with a card (if nothing else her eye sight is so poor she cannot see the numbers on the keypads), take away cash and you take away about the only thing in her life that she has any level of independence over.
My wife may be a very extreme case, but there are probably far more people at that end of the spectrum than you would imagine.
Absolutely - I know a few people who like to use cash for budgeting because paying by card doesn't feel like spending money.
Obviously, people who don't need to worry about having month left at the end of the money can merrily tap away.
I struggle with the veracity of such anecdotes. Do they pay their monthly bills by cash, at a post office? Their TV licence? Their mortgage? Their rent? How many people as a proportion of the UK population operate only in cash – and how exactly do they string a life together?
You must know that hardly anyone used to only use cash. Most people used cheques for large payments.
The pandemic killed my cash habit. I used to use it a lot, far more than most, just liked doing it, nice crisp notes, nice shiny coins, but come Covid and the consequent urge to not touch things others had touched I went card only, and now the thought of carrying cash around seems weird. I took £20 out of a machine in Feb 2020 and I still have it sitting there in a drawer. I think I do anyway ... let me just go and check ... yep it's still there. £20.
Re: cash, someone said to me the other day, have you seen the 'new' 50pm coin?
I replied that I hadn't seen it, nor a 50p coin of any kind, old, middle-aged or new, for about a decade.
Really?
Up until 2020, I had a coin jar, which accumulated change through the year and was periodically taken to the bank - it used to get about £400 a year in change. Since the pandemic, it no longer builds up ,and I have to go out of my way from time to time to get change to keep it stocked. But I do still need coins, for reasons including, er: - transactions with children (the tooth fairy doesn't bring plastic) - tips in restaurants (I want my money to go to the specific waiter/waitress who provided the service) - buskers - parking (most car parks accept payment by app but that is a massive pain in the arse, particularly if I don't have my glasses with me) - filling a pint glass with, then pissing in it and throwing it from on high at 15 year old girls who have a different favourite football team to me (joking - I'm not a Liverpool fan).
It's not a massive list. But cash isn't dead yet.
EDIT: All that said, upon meeting a colleague for the first time in 2 years recently, I was shocked to find he no longer even carries a wallet - just does everything on his phone. Does he not worry about running out of battery? Does he not worry about losing his phone? Does he not worry about having his phone but not his glasses? Apparently not. Not for me, Clive.
I haven't carried a wallet for nearly two years. Both my watch and phone make payments so what exactly is the point of carting around a load of pointless plastic and paper?
In Thailand it is still 80% cash at least. It is really quite annoying have to go back to paper wads (let alone meaningless coins). It made me realise that cash is definitely doomed. Cash is a total pain
It really is. A total timer waster –– "oh I have to go to the bank machine, where is the bank machine? Dunno, oh it's x miles away"
Absolutely ridiculous persisting with it nowadays.
Plus you can lose cash, it's a hassle to change it, you put it in the washing machine by mistake, and so on and so forth
Cash is doomed, the same way real gold and silver coins were doomed back in the day, and the value of notes and coins became notional
Indeed. And it's risky, carrying it around. I imagine 'petty' robberies (in the absence of a more appropriate term) are much more prevalent in those countries where cash is the norm.
It's rare among my friends that anyone carries cash – as it's pointless in London.
I've gone months in London without using cash. I always do have some, but it can stay unspent in my pocket for entire seasons
It just seems mad to believe that in twenty years we will still be reaching in purses and counting out bits of paper and circles of metal. I do sympathise with sad stories like that of @ManchesterKurt below - that's awful - but I don't see that stopping inevitable progress
Agree entirely. In fact @ManchesterKurt has given an excellent if saddening counterexample – others just seem to be based on: "I like cash, dunno why".
I use cash, because as has been patiently explained to you before, outside Extortion City there are still lots of places that don't take cards because it's much more expensive particularly for small transactions. I know that a study put forward by the main card clearing house said otherwise but it was patently not telling the truth (as in, had forged its figures).
What might kill cash off eventually is the number of bank branches that are being closed, which will make it much more difficult to obtain and secure it. That's what's happening in say, North Wales. And that is not because of the merits or demerits of physical cash but because (1) branches being shut down, however well-used, reduces overheads dramatically and (b) banks can charge more in card transaction fees than in cash deposit fees.
London is not a typical example and should also never be used as such. It's much more crowded, much more expensive and much younger than the average town in the UK, including for things like food and transport (coins are still needed for many bus journeys round here). It's therefore less practical to use cash and the population tends to be more addicted to their phones in any case. That doesn't mean just because London is moving towards cashlessness everywhere else will as well.
Everywhere is MOVING TOWARDS cashlessness and to claim otherwise is to deny the clear evidence in front of you. As much as it might not appeal to your prejudices, I leave London regularly – particularly for hiking and biking tours in high-country remote places.
I haven't used cash for anything, anywhere in the UK, and haven't needed to. The idea that rural areas are still cash-only holdouts is an utter fantasy.
You would have been stuck last week then here as the local shop to me was cash only for 2 days as their machine wasn't working. Only other option was to get a bus to town or go without.....luckily I pretty much use cash for all my day to day purchases so I was ok......other people expecting to be able to pay cashlessly were so out of luck......next time I will take a deckchair round and some beer and taunt them mercilessly
Comment from my corner shop yesterday - he lost £500 or so of sales when the card machine went down for an hour on Sunday.
His annoyance was that his wife didn't call him to ask how to fix it and just said cash only...
Where do you have to thump one of those machines to get it working?
According to the PBplumbers it needs a 5 year apprenticeship to know, and refresher training from the Terminal Thumping Safety Council every 3 years or so.
On cash and crooks: Washington state legalized marijauna -- but it hasn't been legalized nationally. So the local marijuana shops can't take debit and credit cards. So they have a lot of cash, as well as the marijuana.
Which has made them targets for crooks, even more than jewelers.
In a distressingly common kind of attack, the crooks steal a car, use it to smash into a shop, and then drive away with the loot (which sometimes includes an ATM machine), in another vehicle.
Comments
He said he wouldn't go that far but he wasn't sold on it.
It's as I was saying the other week - you can make the "perfect" image but it can't replace the human connection you feel with a specific person, which is why onlyfans is so profitable - people pay for the interaction with the girl, which is scarce, not the nude photo, which is not. People will choose real relations over AI porn for the same reason.
Now I am aware that the tech is good enough to take a perfectly innocent mug shot of an old flame and digitally create as much porn based on her likeness as possible, but that raises insurmountable ethical issues and probably legal ones too. But my point is that it's the connection, not the image, that most people seek.
By the way, I recently upgraded to GPT4, and while its responses are still full of caveats and dubious moral guardrails, it's strikingly similar to the way GPT3 used to be back in December, which leads me to think a lot of the 'dumbing down' of GPT3 is less its guardrails and more that the GPT3 model has been pruned to prioritise speed over depth.
The GPT4 experience is smarter and much less "beige" even with minimal prompting, although it still feels more limited than the December iteration of ChatGPT.
https://order-order.com/2023/04/13/snp-westminster-group-face-losing-1-million-after-auditors-quit/
Might they actually go bankrupt?
Prosecutors bringing the conspiracy wire fraud case, if it happens, will have had most of their legwork done for them already, since is took place in plain sight. And was, and continues to be, extensively reported.
Alex Wagner just broadcast audio of a Trump campaign official acknowledging during a phone call with a Fox News producer in December 2020 that there was no evidence of physical issues with Dominion voting machines
https://twitter.com/atrupar/status/1646321015276937216
Give them a bank account and let them see how their cashless transfers rack up.
Cash just burns a whole in their pocket – sweets tokens.
Plus of course AI could fake real girls on OnlyFans very very easily. Indeed there are rumours that some people are doing just that, already
Then we come to deepfake vids and pics of real girlfriends, boyfriends, models, actresses, and you can make them do anything you want. On an elephant in the snow, wearing a tam o shanter
I must investigate GPT4 more thoroughly
Presumably it would be possible to constitute a new pro-independence party. It might even do them a favour by clearing out those implicated, and distancing the new party from the mess.
Just saying...
Also, there would surely be a real risk of a split if they had to start a new party. It is already obvious that the Woke Nats should not be in the same party as Forbes and her supporters. A reboot would give them a chance to make the split formal
Actually, I believe that would be better for the long term prospects of indy
プロ驚き屋 ("a professional surprised man", New Slang)
= a person who excitedly shares state-of-the-art tools/technologies like ChatGPT on social media with hyperbole like 神/最強/ヤバすぎ, as well as with hallucination/overstatement at times based on a few cherry-picked examples
https://mobile.twitter.com/takashionary/status/1645371251236503553O
My wife had a very severe stroke 5 years ago and has left her with tremendous mental issues, she cannot understand the difference between up or down, left or right, forwards or backwards. She cannot unlock doors, she cannot leave the house alone.
But she does have a level of financial independence as each month we take some money out of her bank and over the month she manages her spend as she can touch, feel and see her money.
My wife could not deal with a card (if nothing else her eye sight is so poor she cannot see the numbers on the keypads), take away cash and you take away about the only thing in her life that she has any level of independence over.
My wife may be a very extreme case, but there are probably far more people at that end of the spectrum than you would imagine.
Absolutely ridiculous persisting with it nowadays.
Obviously, people who don't need to worry about having month left at the end of the money can merrily tap away.
Short Money is a bit over a million a year for them ?
Hardly insurmountable, though.
I've had quite a lot of cheques recently, if only because for charities it's still simpler to double-authorise by signing a cheque twice than setting up payments online. But I also had one for over £50,000 from Barclays Bank.
Cash is doomed, the same way real gold and silver coins were doomed back in the day, and the value of notes and coins became notional
Indy may be gone, but you can still have a laugh
People adapt.
It's rare among my friends that anyone carries cash – as it's pointless in London.
It just seems mad to believe that in twenty years we will still be reaching in purses and counting out bits of paper and circles of metal. I do sympathise with sad stories like that of @ManchesterKurt below - that's awful - but I don't see that stopping inevitable progress
This is one of those areas where people in one cultural framework imagine that everyone else is. I know people like Anabob who use phones for everything, and people who use cash for everything. Most of my circle use contactless cards most of the time, and cash now and then. But in terms of avoiding social exclusion, it's important to maintain means of dealing with the world which are not found difficult by a large group of society, and elderly folk who can't handle smart watches (or even laptops) are still very common. When the number diminishes below 1%, it'll be reasonable to phase out cash, but for now it still makes sense to make it a requirement for any public service.
Presumably the trend to electronic transactions has reduced certain types of crime, or at least made them harder - tradesmen wanting to be paid in cash now look fishy rather than normal, though I suspect it's still quite common.
If so, did a remarkable job of finding one to fit.
https://twitter.com/alx/status/1646494950740094977
Joe Biden says he’s staying in Ireland: “I'm not going home. I'm staying here.”
https://www.irishexaminer.com/business/companies/arid-41115646.html
Guinness-maker Diageo to delist from Euronext Dublin and Paris
Coins first, probably.
I'd been keen to know what proportion of the population only use cash... I suspect it's very low indeed currently – albeit not as low as 1%.
And the Police do little about it because it's hard.
My father in law (who died a few years ago) had quite serious schizophrenia and psychosis; he refused to have a bank account on account of his paranoia and dealt only in cash. Another (sad) niche case, but I'd bet there are an awful lot of niche cases as Kurt says, particularly around vulnerable people who - if we aspire to have a half-decent society - we ought to be able to cope with a little inconvenience ourselves to be able to cater to.
What might kill cash off eventually is the number of bank branches that are being closed, which will make it much more difficult to obtain and secure it. That's what's happening in say, North Wales. And that is not because of the merits or demerits of physical cash but because (1) branches being shut down, however well-used, reduces overheads dramatically and (b) banks can charge more in card transaction fees than in cash deposit fees.
London is not a typical example and should also never be used as such. It's much more crowded, much more expensive and much younger than the average town in the UK, including for things like food and transport (coins are still needed for many bus journeys round here). It's therefore less practical to use cash and the population tends to be more addicted to their phones in any case. That doesn't mean just because London is moving towards cashlessness everywhere else will as well.
There is a good reason to keep cash, it can't be tracked by either governments or corporations. I am sure that various people who are all for cashless only will be the first to moan when a government uses the ability to see your every transaction to limit you to for example only buying 12 pints of beer a week....for your own health naturally. Or everytime money changes hands they want a slice of tax from it even if its only lending your pal 50£ to keep them in food till the get paid....because of course they cant prove easily it was not a payment for services.
Also good luck when there is a network outage for a few days which there have been in some area's before now.....no card machine will work whether atm or instore. Being with 15 different banks won't help they all use the same comms network.
(I assume that the payer, BG, does it this way as some people fail to cash the cheques, but who knows. I've not cared enough to battle customer services to ask about electronic options)
https://www.thersa.org/blog/2022/04/card-or-cash-patterns-of-cash-use-in-the-uk
It was suggested above that notes will go last. I would expect coins to survive them actually for the simple reason they are more useful in the smaller transactions that will stubbornly cling on.
Lab 344
Con 210
SNP 47
LD 26
https://pollingreport.uk/seats
You can call me a liar if you want.
I haven't used cash for anything, anywhere in the UK, and haven't needed to. The idea that rural areas are still cash-only holdouts is an utter fantasy.
But you are simply wrong to say that nobody needs cash now. As in, are clearly wilfully obtuse or actually lying. I am stating facts, and if you don't find they fit with your prejudices (your remarks on that struck me as ironic) that is your problem. There are many places where you still need it. That may change. But it's not many years ago that people thought cards would replace everything - nobody foresaw phone payments
NEW POLL - Westminster voting intention:
LAB: 44%
CON: 30%
LIB: 10%
GREEN: 6%
REFORM: 5%
SNP: 3%
OTHER: 1%"
https://twitter.com/PollingReportUK/status/1646479319839956994
It was noticeable and I remember it precisely because it seemed so odd - to everyone. Actual Cash!
This is going to be a problem going forward for the very few who have no alternative to cash.
So if no one is saying you have to be made to use cash...why are you so fervent on stopping those that want the option to continue having the option to use cash?
His annoyance was that his wife didn't call him to ask how to fix it and just said cash only...
As for me, I rarely use cash myself - but I always carry £20-£30 just in case. I don't like "cash only" or "card only" businesses - let people choose.
Adnams have realised that so few of their punters insist on paying cash that the faff and risk of handling it simply isn't worth their retaining.
The pubs are a microcosm of what's happening in wider society.
Which has made them targets for crooks, even more than jewelers.
In a distressingly common kind of attack, the crooks steal a car, use it to smash into a shop, and then drive away with the loot (which sometimes includes an ATM machine), in another vehicle.