Local Elections 2 weeks away received my postal vote just now. Plenty of time to spoil my ballot with juvenile scribblings
You don't need photo ID for postal votes at least, showing even more how ludicrous the requirement is for ID for polling station votes
Its notable that even supporters of the changes seem confused why nothing on postal votes.
Really? But that's easy. Postal votes benefit the Tories.
Why would anyone be confused about that?
Mine didn’t! There is a requirement for a signature of the voter, to be enclosed in the outer of the two envelopes, but without I previously submitted example, I can’t really see how that helps.
You wonder why this government chooses to pick a fight with healthcare staff.
I think you might have that the wrong way around. Well compensated professionals on what most taxpayers would consider good salaries and massive pension deals are demanding a 35% increase. Do you think the government should just roll over?
Anyway, I will spend the rest of the evening with my family.
Five years ago I got annoyed that London cabbies still only took cash and refused cards. I'm just arguing for choice.
Deeply odd how cash v. card has become such a fervent culture war issue. It's possibly fuelled by whichever group is detected to be largely on one side of it or not.
Sign of the times perhaps.
Cash is being defended by three groups: 1. Dodgy Traders who love cash as they don't pay tax on it. Have been quoted different amounts for work if I want an invoice for my company to pay vs cash. "Err, really?" 2. Nostalgia merchants who are still living pre-covid. My MIL who at Easter got arsey with wife because she wasn't carrying cash for a restaurant tip 3. People who want to withdraw lovely anonymous cash before buying something they don't want on a credit card statement.
As I understand it the old legal tender arguments went out with Covid. Its now legal not to take cash. When we get our shop open later in he summer I'm only planning to take cash because there are some elderly people and small kids who may want to use it.
For a business like ours cash is an absolute arse.
The only thing worse than cash is being given a cheque.
Cash is still useful. Some posters (and sadly, seemingly RP) look at their own lives and see no use for it: they seem not to understand that others *may* have use cases where cash is useful. It's particularly funny given that the people most against cash appear to be the left-leaning on here - who should allegedly care for those left behind in society...
As a small example: when we had covid recently, a friend got us a few groceries whilst we awaited a supermarket delivery. I paid him back yesterday, in cash. The alternatives would have been a cheque (inconvenient), or bank transfer (slightly awkward for such a small sum, esp. as I did not have his account set up). It was much easier to just walk over and hand over a couple of notes.
Admittedly, I use cash much less than I used to. But it is still useful.
Then there are other use cases: people who use cash as they have problems controlling spending; people who do not want their controlling partners to see everything they have spent, etc, etc.
I am not *anti-cash*. I laid out a few areas where it is still useful. Your example of someone has got a few groceries I accept. But do you have cash to pay them? Do they have change to give you? As cash disappears it becomes just as likely that cash becomes more, not less, difficult.
An example. We have a chinese takeaway in the village who studiously refuse to get a card reader. The nearest cash machine is 5 miles away in the next village. So if we want to use them it takes planning. Because having ended up with notes sat in a wallet for literal months we just don't get cash out regularly any more - it is by exception.
Cash won't disappear and I don't want it to. But its utility is shrinking rapidly. When you understand that fiat money is a computer-created fiction anyway it seems archaic creating these tokens to represent something which is entirely digital.
TBF, you said: "Cash is being defended by three groups:", and then gave groups in a negative manner. My point is that cash is used, and needed, far wider than those three groups.
In fact, I'm amused that you wrote that post in such a manner. The people who primarily be using cash are the people I'd expect you to care about, and be concerned about, the most.
We've repeated these arguments over at least three threads now, and done the subject to death. No one has changed their position.
Local Elections 2 weeks away received my postal vote just now. Plenty of time to spoil my ballot with juvenile scribblings
You don't need photo ID for postal votes at least, showing even more how ludicrous the requirement is for ID for polling station votes
Its notable that even supporters of the changes seem confused why nothing on postal votes.
Really? But that's easy. Postal votes benefit the Tories.
Why would anyone be confused about that?
Mine didn’t! There is a requirement for a signature of the voter, to be enclosed in the outer of the two envelopes, but without I previously submitted example, I can’t really see how that helps.
I know yours personally didn't. And nor will BJO's of course.
But on average postal votes seem to break Tory, probably because they are disproportionately for older people.
I'm pondering whether to spoil my own paper with something like 'this government criminalises voters and votes through money for criminals.'
One thing the NHS could do is immediately stop all prescriptions for paracetomol & ibuprofen. A (rather fed up) GP on the radio claimed the cost to the NHS of one of these prescriptions was ~ £20 a time !
Separate from the usual mass shooting madness, which seems to have become almost accepted by large parts of US society, I don't know if there is a sudden rise in irritable guys shooting innocent people for no good reason, or whether it's just getting more media attention.
Kinsley White, 6, was shot by a North Carolina neighbor who was upset that a basketball rolled into his yard. The gunman also shot her parents and other family members. White was released from the hospital overnight. https://mobile.twitter.com/shannonrwatts/status/1648792325156401153
Gun law is perhaps going to be a more significant issue at the next election, beyond its usual purpose of motivating the Republican vote.
One thing the NHS could do is immediately stop all prescriptions for paracetomol & ibuprofen. A (rather fed up) GP on the radio claimed the cost to the NHS of one of these prescriptions was ~ £20 a time !
As well as putting more funds into the NHS we need to ease the burden on it by encouraging those who can afford it to go private. In terms of Covid as long as we avoid any new vaccine immune variant it is over for now
The whole structure needs decentralising, particularly on the issue of salary scales. Each hospital trust should be considered a separate employer with absolute autonomy to set it's own pay rates. The unions, and particularly the BMA will never agree to this of course because it will reduce their ability to bring the system to its knees
You wonder why this government chooses to pick a fight with healthcare staff.
There is well over 1m of them, they cost a staggering sum of money, they want a lot more and they are not actually delivering as their productivity is seriously down post Covid is my starter for 10.
Of course, a lot of this is not their fault as @Foxy has explained. Incompetence, misallocation of resources and failures of management also play a major role. But these are inevitable in such a large organisation. We are spending more than ever on the NHS both in cash and real terms and yet the demand for private medicine is booming. It’s not a happy situation for anyone.
You don't need photo ID for postal votes at least, showing even more how ludicrous the requirement is for ID for polling station votes
Its notable that even supporters of the changes seem confused why nothing on postal votes.
Plus inevitably parties of all colours are now nudging their supporters towards getting a postal vote, since it doesn't have the ID requirement and avoids the "your supporter forgets to take ID or whatever to the polling station and ends up not voting" risk. So the policy ends up funnelling more voters into the greater-fraud-risk method...
On subject of cash I had what I thought was a unique idea - only to find out the NZ has already done it. Scrap the 1p & 2p coins with shops charging to nearest 5p only (or 10p). They still advertise prices to nearest penny but then till automatically rounds up (if 4p) or down (if 1,2 or 3p)
You wonder why this government chooses to pick a fight with healthcare staff.
There is well over 1m of them, they cost a staggering sum of money, they want a lot more and they are not actually delivering as their productivity is seriously down post Covid is my starter for 10.
Of course, a lot of this is not their fault as @Foxy has explained. Incompetence, misallocation of resources and failures of management also play a major role. But these are inevitable in such a large organisation. We are spending more than ever on the NHS both in cash and real terms and yet the demand for private medicine is booming. It’s not a happy situation for anyone.
Again, perhaps they should pause and ask themselves why.
It is worth noting that this isn't just an issue in England either, so whatever the problems are (despite my disdain for the civil service) they are clearly deep-seated and will be hard to shift.
With stories like this it's small bleeding wonder things are in a mess.
Bad enough there aren't enough training places, worse that we can't even employ the ones we do train!
Why bother?
Calling a "lefty Lawyer" "Sir Softie" would appear to garner more Tory votes according to the PB glitterati than resolving the NHS crisis. So as you were.
"Sir Softie"? Genius!
Apparently that's the answer to the failing criminal justice system, too.
Along with everything else.
Utterly pathetic from Sunak at PMQs.
More than anything, Sir Softie is so utterly naff. There’s no conviction or brutality in it. Captain Hindsight was so much better. I mean, if you want to call Keir Starmer silly names as public services collapse, the tax burden soars, turds pour into our waterways and the cost of living skyrockets, go ahead. It’s fundamentally unserious.
If it's being used at PMQs it won't be an off the cuff remark.
It will have been polled and focus-grouped by Levido first.
That means they're confident it will resonate.
We’ll see if it does. For me, it’s just a bit “meh”. It lacks any kind of conviction and doesn’t even scan well.
The problem with the softie line, which may well have been tested , is that Rishi Sunak is anything but tough. As Sunak delivers it, it underlines the PMs own weaknesses. Rishi looks at home in the playground.
Card fees are hidden..... I cannot find a definitive guide to what using a cards costs a business user (and in turn the cutomer)...
That's because the fees charged depend on the size of the business, which payment provider they're using, what kind of business they're in and a bunch of other factors. It's like asking what the definitive price of a pint of milk is. The best you'll be able to do is get some rough estimated ranges.
One thing the NHS could do is immediately stop all prescriptions for paracetomol & ibuprofen. A (rather fed up) GP on the radio claimed the cost to the NHS of one of these prescriptions was ~ £20 a time !
Wtf? How have they managed that?
It is a perfect example of the fact that a nationalised system of healthcare is bureaucratic and inefficient. The Labour party has been trying to convince it's less well travelled and informed followers that the NHS is the "envy of the world". It never has been and never will be. That is why no other western country has tried to copy it.
Local Elections 2 weeks away received my postal vote just now. Plenty of time to spoil my ballot with juvenile scribblings
You don't need photo ID for postal votes at least, showing even more how ludicrous the requirement is for ID for polling station votes
Its notable that even supporters of the changes seem confused why nothing on postal votes.
Particularly as postal votes were the area of significant concern and polling station fraud was not. One can only draw one conclusion...
Great post from HYUFD by the way, pinpointing the anomaly.
I was doing an extended session on constitutional reform from 1832 to 1928 yesterday.
One student was literally open mouthed all the way through at how cynical every reform bill was - solely for partisan advantage. 1832 to entrench the Whig win of 1830 and ride the wave of fervour, 1867 to control redistribution of seats, 1884-85 as a grubby deal that gave Liberals voters and Tories seats. 1918 to get supporters of the government that won the war to vote.
Some things never change...
Partisan advantage? No, the best thing for the country is obviously the election of a Whig/Liberal/Conservative/Labour* government and the reform merely allows that to happen more easily.
Anyway, I will spend the rest of the evening with my family.
Five years ago I got annoyed that London cabbies still only took cash and refused cards. I'm just arguing for choice.
Deeply odd how cash v. card has become such a fervent culture war issue. It's possibly fuelled by whichever group is detected to be largely on one side of it or not.
Sign of the times perhaps.
Cash is being defended by three groups: 1. Dodgy Traders who love cash as they don't pay tax on it. Have been quoted different amounts for work if I want an invoice for my company to pay vs cash. "Err, really?" 2. Nostalgia merchants who are still living pre-covid. My MIL who at Easter got arsey with wife because she wasn't carrying cash for a restaurant tip 3. People who want to withdraw lovely anonymous cash before buying something they don't want on a credit card statement.
As I understand it the old legal tender arguments went out with Covid. Its now legal not to take cash. When we get our shop open later in he summer I'm only planning to take cash because there are some elderly people and small kids who may want to use it.
For a business like ours cash is an absolute arse.
The only thing worse than cash is being given a cheque.
Cash is still useful. Some posters (and sadly, seemingly RP) look at their own lives and see no use for it: they seem not to understand that others *may* have use cases where cash is useful. It's particularly funny given that the people most against cash appear to be the left-leaning on here - who should allegedly care for those left behind in society...
As a small example: when we had covid recently, a friend got us a few groceries whilst we awaited a supermarket delivery. I paid him back yesterday, in cash. The alternatives would have been a cheque (inconvenient), or bank transfer (slightly awkward for such a small sum, esp. as I did not have his account set up). It was much easier to just walk over and hand over a couple of notes.
Admittedly, I use cash much less than I used to. But it is still useful.
Then there are other use cases: people who use cash as they have problems controlling spending; people who do not want their controlling partners to see everything they have spent, etc, etc.
I am not *anti-cash*. I laid out a few areas where it is still useful. Your example of someone has got a few groceries I accept. But do you have cash to pay them? Do they have change to give you? As cash disappears it becomes just as likely that cash becomes more, not less, difficult.
An example. We have a chinese takeaway in the village who studiously refuse to get a card reader. The nearest cash machine is 5 miles away in the next village. So if we want to use them it takes planning. Because having ended up with notes sat in a wallet for literal months we just don't get cash out regularly any more - it is by exception.
Cash won't disappear and I don't want it to. But its utility is shrinking rapidly. When you understand that fiat money is a computer-created fiction anyway it seems archaic creating these tokens to represent something which is entirely digital.
TBF, you said: "Cash is being defended by three groups:", and then gave groups in a negative manner. My point is that cash is used, and needed, far wider than those three groups.
In fact, I'm amused that you wrote that post in such a manner. The people who primarily be using cash are the people I'd expect you to care about, and be concerned about, the most.
I will say this once more, and then leave it.
The key group who use and need cash are small businesses and their customers in poorer areas. Where margins are tight, the high fees charged for card machines and card transactions are literally the difference between solvency and closure. Although there are fees for banking in cash, they are (a) somewhat lower and (b) it's in your power to vary them by deciding how much cash you do and don't bank. You don't have that power with cards.
Banks and their apologists claim it is cheaper to use cards, but this is simply not true. It is cheaper for (1) people who pay large amounts every time, so it's a smaller percentage of the overall take and (2) large corporations including banks, who are deliberately running down their branch network to increase their profits and therefore want us all to pay by card.
Now I can understand why in London or Manchester, dominated by the big corps and with a high (extortionate, truthfully) cost of living, that means cash is no longer important.
That does not mean it is the case everywhere. Outside of major cities and tourist honeypots, where you can still get a decent meal for a fiver, insisting on card only would mean some businesses paying near 20% of turnover in card fees, instead of around 5% for cash banking fees. Which seems to me utterly unfair, ridiculous and in itself pretty well criminal.
And while I have no objection to people using cards to pay (I do it myself an awful lot) I cannot understand the mentality of people who say 'I find cash inconvenient in my particular circumstances, therefore everyone who uses it must be a criminal or a moron.' Which we see one particularly weird example of on this board.
If that person doesn't like that, that's his problem. But he should understand that his is playing the games of big businesses against ordinary people, out of selfishness.
I think you may be very out of date on card fees. Square charge 1.75% on contactless and inserted cards, so 9p rather than £1 on £5 card charge.
Card fees are hidden..... I cannot find a definitive guide to what using a cards costs a business user (and in turn the cutomer)... in Fiji they routinely add3% for card transactions...thats a lot of take by the banks IMO.
Even today, I still can't find anyone who'll take American Express.
Cazoo do and give you £250 cashback for every 10 grand you spend. I bought a G32 with my Amex last week.
Big diesels are getting comedically cheap. If you've got one, get rid ASAP. I reckon my recent 640d purchase cost its owner 12 grand/year in depreciation in the four years that they had it.
As well as putting more funds into the NHS we need to ease the burden on it by encouraging those who can afford it to go private. In terms of Covid as long as we avoid any new vaccine immune variant it is over for now
The whole structure needs decentralising, particularly on the issue of salary scales. Each hospital trust should be considered a separate employer with absolute autonomy to set it's own pay rates. The unions, and particularly the BMA will never agree to this of course because it will reduce their ability to bring the system to its knees
Careful what you wish for.
One of the reasons train drivers are paid so well is that unions have been able to play one company off against another.
In a situation where there is an underlying shortage of qualified doctors, and you can't microwave new doctors into existence, the fact that the NHS is a near-monopoly employer could well be saving us all money.
With stories like this it's small bleeding wonder things are in a mess.
Bad enough there aren't enough training places, worse that we can't even employ the ones we do train!
Why bother?
Calling a "lefty Lawyer" "Sir Softie" would appear to garner more Tory votes according to the PB glitterati than resolving the NHS crisis. So as you were.
"Sir Softie"? Genius!
Apparently that's the answer to the failing criminal justice system, too.
Along with everything else.
Utterly pathetic from Sunak at PMQs.
More than anything, Sir Softie is so utterly naff. There’s no conviction or brutality in it. Captain Hindsight was so much better. I mean, if you want to call Keir Starmer silly names as public services collapse, the tax burden soars, turds pour into our waterways and the cost of living skyrockets, go ahead. It’s fundamentally unserious.
If it's being used at PMQs it won't be an off the cuff remark.
It will have been polled and focus-grouped by Levido first.
That means they're confident it will resonate.
, it’s just a bit “meh”. It lacks any kind of conviction.
Michael Schumacher's family are planning legal action against a magazine which published an artificial intelligence-generated 'interview' with the former Formula 1 driver.
Schumacher, a seven-time F1 champion, suffered severe head injuries in a skiing accident in December 2013 and has not been seen in public since.
Die Aktuelle ran a picture of a smiling Schumacher, 54, on the front cover of its latest edition with a headline of "Michael Schumacher, the first interview".
A strapline underneath reads "it sounded deceptively real", and it emerges in the article that the supposed quotes had been produced by AI.
The family have confirmed to news agency Reuters that they are planning to pursue the matter legally.
You wonder why this government chooses to pick a fight with healthcare staff.
There is well over 1m of them, they cost a staggering sum of money, they want a lot more and they are not actually delivering as their productivity is seriously down post Covid is my starter for 10.
Of course, a lot of this is not their fault as @Foxy has explained. Incompetence, misallocation of resources and failures of management also play a major role. But these are inevitable in such a large organisation. We are spending more than ever on the NHS both in cash and real terms and yet the demand for private medicine is booming. It’s not a happy situation for anyone.
Again, perhaps they should pause and ask themselves why.
It is worth noting that this isn't just an issue in England either, so whatever the problems are (despite my disdain for the civil service) they are clearly deep-seated and will be hard to shift.
Oh yes, just as with education and indeed the Crown where I now work pointing to faults is dead easy but solutions are hard.
Sometimes, however, the only possible solution is picking some of the low hanging fruit and fixing immediate bottlenecks such as the HEE or Ofsted. If you wait for the perfect master plan you will wait for ever and, as we saw with the Lansley reforms, it may just create a whole new set of problems anyway.
One thing the NHS could do is immediately stop all prescriptions for paracetomol & ibuprofen. A (rather fed up) GP on the radio claimed the cost to the NHS of one of these prescriptions was ~ £20 a time !
Wtf? How have they managed that?
It is a perfect example of the fact that a nationalised system of healthcare is bureaucratic and inefficient. The Labour party has been trying to convince it's less well travelled and informed followers that the NHS is the "envy of the world". It never has been and never will be. That is why no other western country has tried to copy it.
That's an interesting way to describe the Tories. And Mr Streeting wouldn't agree.
ydoethur said: » show previous quotes Yes, I do mean you, and you do not ‘merely’ disagree. You make wilfully false statements in an obsessive and frequently rude way on this subject, and when it is demonstrated to you that you are wrong or at the very least, seriously mistaken become unpleasant to the point of being abusive.
It never seems to occur to you to simply accept what information you’re given and learn from it. Which makes you come across as ‘a loon.’ You even take criticisms aimed at you as aimed at others.
I have no idea why you behave in such a peculiar way on this subject, but to give you some idea of how you come across compared to your behaviour on this Farage’s discourse on the EU appears positively reasonable.
Anabob replied:
I’m not the one making false accusations, you are. I have just shown you why you were wrong about what I said to Sandpit, and you ignored my explanation and continued to rant.
In the past week, I’ve been called a “moron”, a “fuckwit”, accused of “throwing the poor under a bus”, a “loon”, and various other names.
I have taken most of these in remarkable good humour.
Cash is dying. We need to prepare for that as a society. I am not calling for its abolition, simply speaking the truth about the collapsing demand for it, both from businesses and consumers.
Why don’t you engage with the debate instead of calling me childish names?
Michael Schumacher's family are planning legal action against a magazine which published an artificial intelligence-generated 'interview' with the former Formula 1 driver.
Schumacher, a seven-time F1 champion, suffered severe head injuries in a skiing accident in December 2013 and has not been seen in public since.
Die Aktuelle ran a picture of a smiling Schumacher, 54, on the front cover of its latest edition with a headline of "Michael Schumacher, the first interview".
A strapline underneath reads "it sounded deceptively real", and it emerges in the article that the supposed quotes had been produced by AI.
The family have confirmed to news agency Reuters that they are planning to pursue the matter legally.
Actually, reflecting on my earlier post ….. post in haste, repent at leisure… There is a pre-submitted sample of one’s signature; when one actually applied for a postal vote. I’ve never been to the opening of the postal votes; are the signatures checked against that which was previously submitted or not? Register of postal vote, applicants, with samples of their signatures, would enable checking, although might be a bit tedious.
Local Elections 2 weeks away received my postal vote just now. Plenty of time to spoil my ballot with juvenile scribblings
You don't need photo ID for postal votes at least, showing even more how ludicrous the requirement is for ID for polling station votes
Its notable that even supporters of the changes seem confused why nothing on postal votes.
Particularly as postal votes were the area of significant concern and polling station fraud was not. One can only draw one conclusion...
Great post from HYUFD by the way, pinpointing the anomaly.
I was doing an extended session on constitutional reform from 1832 to 1928 yesterday.
One student was literally open mouthed all the way through at how cynical every reform bill was - solely for partisan advantage. 1832 to entrench the Whig win of 1830 and ride the wave of fervour, 1867 to control redistribution of seats, 1884-85 as a grubby deal that gave Liberals voters and Tories seats. 1918 to get supporters of the government that won the war to vote.
Some things never change...
Partisan advantage? No, the best thing for the country is obviously the election of a Whig/Liberal/Conservative/Labour* government and the reform merely allows that to happen more easily.
*Delete as appropriate
It is why we need some kind of constitutional convention that is based on evidence and taking from the best systems from around the world. Unfortunately the vested interests would attempt to subvert this too.
I think a good place to start would be to teach all youngsters about government and politics (GCSE mandatory perhaps) so they can see how the system works and how it could be made better. They will then have a better idea about political parties and vested interests.
FPT legal tender thing is largely a myth but I would be sad if cash ceased to be used.
For me it's a civil liberties issue. Why should the vendor know who I am when I buy something? A whiff of the officious and a step towards dystopia I think.
It's more a convenience thing for the vendor.
With fewer and fewer bank branches open the average business now has to travel over 20 miles to their nearest branch.
With cards, just tap the PDQ machine at close of business and the money is in your account the next working day.
Where there is a niche in the market (in the UK) is for a ready cash card that requires neither credit check nor bank account. These are readily available in the US and other countries – the technology is there. Cashless is not perfect, but it is vastly superior to cash. Which is why cash is dying.
We need to prepare for it, and innovate to solve the snags of going cash-free, rather that kicking out at those people who are simply pointing out a very clear trend.
Local Elections 2 weeks away received my postal vote just now. Plenty of time to spoil my ballot with juvenile scribblings
You don't need photo ID for postal votes at least, showing even more how ludicrous the requirement is for ID for polling station votes
Its notable that even supporters of the changes seem confused why nothing on postal votes.
Particularly as postal votes were the area of significant concern and polling station fraud was not. One can only draw one conclusion...
Great post from HYUFD by the way, pinpointing the anomaly.
I was doing an extended session on constitutional reform from 1832 to 1928 yesterday.
One student was literally open mouthed all the way through at how cynical every reform bill was - solely for partisan advantage. 1832 to entrench the Whig win of 1830 and ride the wave of fervour, 1867 to control redistribution of seats, 1884-85 as a grubby deal that gave Liberals voters and Tories seats. 1918 to get supporters of the government that won the war to vote.
Some things never change...
Partisan advantage? No, the best thing for the country is obviously the election of a Whig/Liberal/Conservative/Labour* government and the reform merely allows that to happen more easily.
*Delete as appropriate
It is why we need some kind of constitutional convention that is based on evidence and taking from the best systems from around the world. Unfortunately the vested interests would attempt to subvert this too.
I think a good place to start would be to teach all youngsters about government and politics (GCSE mandatory perhaps) so they can see how the system works and how it could be made better. They will then have a better idea about political parties and vested interests.
Then you end up with all the problems that the USA have with the second amendment (and, I would argue, the first).
With stories like this it's small bleeding wonder things are in a mess.
Bad enough there aren't enough training places, worse that we can't even employ the ones we do train!
Why bother?
Calling a "lefty Lawyer" "Sir Softie" would appear to garner more Tory votes according to the PB glitterati than resolving the NHS crisis. So as you were.
"Sir Softie"? Genius!
Apparently that's the answer to the failing criminal justice system, too.
Along with everything else.
Utterly pathetic from Sunak at PMQs.
More than anything, Sir Softie is so utterly naff. There’s no conviction or brutality in it. Captain Hindsight was so much better. I mean, if you want to call Keir Starmer silly names as public services collapse, the tax burden soars, turds pour into our waterways and the cost of living skyrockets, go ahead. It’s fundamentally unserious.
If it's being used at PMQs it won't be an off the cuff remark.
It will have been polled and focus-grouped by Levido first.
That means they're confident it will resonate.
, it’s just a bit “meh”. It lacks any kind of conviction.
Why are you calling SKS it?
Because he is a Softie. Even when he tries to sound tough, its a little limp wristed wet gish sort of delivery.
With stories like this it's small bleeding wonder things are in a mess.
Bad enough there aren't enough training places, worse that we can't even employ the ones we do train!
Why bother?
Calling a "lefty Lawyer" "Sir Softie" would appear to garner more Tory votes according to the PB glitterati than resolving the NHS crisis. So as you were.
"Sir Softie"? Genius!
Apparently that's the answer to the failing criminal justice system, too.
Along with everything else.
Utterly pathetic from Sunak at PMQs.
More than anything, Sir Softie is so utterly naff. There’s no conviction or brutality in it. Captain Hindsight was so much better. I mean, if you want to call Keir Starmer silly names as public services collapse, the tax burden soars, turds pour into our waterways and the cost of living skyrockets, go ahead. It’s fundamentally unserious.
If it's being used at PMQs it won't be an off the cuff remark.
It will have been polled and focus-grouped by Levido first.
That means they're confident it will resonate.
, it’s just a bit “meh”. It lacks any kind of conviction.
Why are you calling SKS it?
Because he is a Softie. Even when he tries to sound tough, its a little limp wristed wet gish sort of delivery.
Anyway, I will spend the rest of the evening with my family.
Five years ago I got annoyed that London cabbies still only took cash and refused cards. I'm just arguing for choice.
Deeply odd how cash v. card has become such a fervent culture war issue. It's possibly fuelled by whichever group is detected to be largely on one side of it or not.
Sign of the times perhaps.
Cash is being defended by three groups: 1. Dodgy Traders who love cash as they don't pay tax on it. Have been quoted different amounts for work if I want an invoice for my company to pay vs cash. "Err, really?" 2. Nostalgia merchants who are still living pre-covid. My MIL who at Easter got arsey with wife because she wasn't carrying cash for a restaurant tip 3. People who want to withdraw lovely anonymous cash before buying something they don't want on a credit card statement.
As I understand it the old legal tender arguments went out with Covid. Its now legal not to take cash. When we get our shop open later in he summer I'm only planning to take cash because there are some elderly people and small kids who may want to use it.
For a business like ours cash is an absolute arse.
The only thing worse than cash is being given a cheque.
Cash is still useful. Some posters (and sadly, seemingly RP) look at their own lives and see no use for it: they seem not to understand that others *may* have use cases where cash is useful. It's particularly funny given that the people most against cash appear to be the left-leaning on here - who should allegedly care for those left behind in society...
As a small example: when we had covid recently, a friend got us a few groceries whilst we awaited a supermarket delivery. I paid him back yesterday, in cash. The alternatives would have been a cheque (inconvenient), or bank transfer (slightly awkward for such a small sum, esp. as I did not have his account set up). It was much easier to just walk over and hand over a couple of notes.
Admittedly, I use cash much less than I used to. But it is still useful.
Then there are other use cases: people who use cash as they have problems controlling spending; people who do not want their controlling partners to see everything they have spent, etc, etc.
I am not *anti-cash*. I laid out a few areas where it is still useful. Your example of someone has got a few groceries I accept. But do you have cash to pay them? Do they have change to give you? As cash disappears it becomes just as likely that cash becomes more, not less, difficult.
An example. We have a chinese takeaway in the village who studiously refuse to get a card reader. The nearest cash machine is 5 miles away in the next village. So if we want to use them it takes planning. Because having ended up with notes sat in a wallet for literal months we just don't get cash out regularly any more - it is by exception.
Cash won't disappear and I don't want it to. But its utility is shrinking rapidly. When you understand that fiat money is a computer-created fiction anyway it seems archaic creating these tokens to represent something which is entirely digital.
TBF, you said: "Cash is being defended by three groups:", and then gave groups in a negative manner. My point is that cash is used, and needed, far wider than those three groups.
In fact, I'm amused that you wrote that post in such a manner. The people who primarily be using cash are the people I'd expect you to care about, and be concerned about, the most.
The example you give fits one of the groups I described - nostalgia merchants.
Bit presumptive to describe who I am concerned about. My dad is about as tech-phobic as you can get. He is a classic cash nostalgia person, but even he now does online shopping. Took some doing but they can now do a shop without having to physically go. For someone who was adamant that he'd get robbed online its real progress.
Is caring for my parents enabling them to be able to have shopping delivered? Or pandering to his cash is king nostalgia so they can't...?
Exactly.
Much of the argument over going cash follows similar lines to the digitisation of TV, or decimalisation, or against the Ulez, that it will hit some groups hard and that they won't be able to adapt.
Yet, they are already adapting to cashlessness – we see that every day.
That said, we do need to prepare for it as a society and address any flaws in the system, but simply indulging nostalgia for an outdated bartering tool is not the way to do it!
Local Elections 2 weeks away received my postal vote just now. Plenty of time to spoil my ballot with juvenile scribblings
You don't need photo ID for postal votes at least, showing even more how ludicrous the requirement is for ID for polling station votes
Its notable that even supporters of the changes seem confused why nothing on postal votes.
Particularly as postal votes were the area of significant concern and polling station fraud was not. One can only draw one conclusion...
Great post from HYUFD by the way, pinpointing the anomaly.
I was doing an extended session on constitutional reform from 1832 to 1928 yesterday.
One student was literally open mouthed all the way through at how cynical every reform bill was - solely for partisan advantage. 1832 to entrench the Whig win of 1830 and ride the wave of fervour, 1867 to control redistribution of seats, 1884-85 as a grubby deal that gave Liberals voters and Tories seats. 1918 to get supporters of the government that won the war to vote.
Some things never change...
Partisan advantage? No, the best thing for the country is obviously the election of a Whig/Liberal/Conservative/Labour* government and the reform merely allows that to happen more easily.
*Delete as appropriate
It is why we need some kind of constitutional convention that is based on evidence and taking from the best systems from around the world. Unfortunately the vested interests would attempt to subvert this too.
I think a good place to start would be to teach all youngsters about government and politics (GCSE mandatory perhaps) so they can see how the system works and how it could be made better. They will then have a better idea about political parties and vested interests.
Speakers Conference 1919 for example? Recommended some form of PR, IIRC.
Local Elections 2 weeks away received my postal vote just now. Plenty of time to spoil my ballot with juvenile scribblings
You don't need photo ID for postal votes at least, showing even more how ludicrous the requirement is for ID for polling station votes
Its notable that even supporters of the changes seem confused why nothing on postal votes.
Particularly as postal votes were the area of significant concern and polling station fraud was not. One can only draw one conclusion...
Great post from HYUFD by the way, pinpointing the anomaly.
I was doing an extended session on constitutional reform from 1832 to 1928 yesterday.
One student was literally open mouthed all the way through at how cynical every reform bill was - solely for partisan advantage. 1832 to entrench the Whig win of 1830 and ride the wave of fervour, 1867 to control redistribution of seats, 1884-85 as a grubby deal that gave Liberals voters and Tories seats. 1918 to get supporters of the government that won the war to vote.
Some things never change...
Partisan advantage? No, the best thing for the country is obviously the election of a Whig/Liberal/Conservative/Labour* government and the reform merely allows that to happen more easily.
*Delete as appropriate
It is why we need some kind of constitutional convention that is based on evidence and taking from the best systems from around the world. Unfortunately the vested interests would attempt to subvert this too.
I think a good place to start would be to teach all youngsters about government and politics (GCSE mandatory perhaps) so they can see how the system works and how it could be made better. They will then have a better idea about political parties and vested interests.
On the GCSE part of your suggestion; in my experience getting people to understand Newton’s Laws of motion is hard enough where there is pretty good consensus of what they are (and their limitations). Working out “how it could be made better” for a system of government is not exactly easy, and there are multiple competing theories as to which is best.
Anyway, I will spend the rest of the evening with my family.
Five years ago I got annoyed that London cabbies still only took cash and refused cards. I'm just arguing for choice.
Deeply odd how cash v. card has become such a fervent culture war issue. It's possibly fuelled by whichever group is detected to be largely on one side of it or not.
Sign of the times perhaps.
Cash is being defended by three groups: 1. Dodgy Traders who love cash as they don't pay tax on it. Have been quoted different amounts for work if I want an invoice for my company to pay vs cash. "Err, really?" 2. Nostalgia merchants who are still living pre-covid. My MIL who at Easter got arsey with wife because she wasn't carrying cash for a restaurant tip 3. People who want to withdraw lovely anonymous cash before buying something they don't want on a credit card statement.
As I understand it the old legal tender arguments went out with Covid. Its now legal not to take cash. When we get our shop open later in he summer I'm only planning to take cash because there are some elderly people and small kids who may want to use it. I know people For a business like ours cash is an absolute arse.
The only thing worse than cash is being given a cheque.
Cash is still useful. Some posters (and sadly, seemingly RP) look at their own lives and see no use for it: they seem not to understand that others *may* have use cases where cash is useful. It's particularly funny given that the people most against cash appear to be the left-leaning on here - who should allegedly care for those left behind in society...
As a small example: when we had covid recently, a friend got us a few groceries whilst we awaited a supermarket delivery. I paid him back yesterday, in cash. The alternatives would have been a cheque (inconvenient), or bank transfer (slightly awkward for such a small sum, esp. as I did not have his account set up). It was much easier to just walk over and hand over a couple of notes.
Admittedly, I use cash much less than I used to. But it is still useful.
Then there are other use cases: people who use cash as they have problems controlling spending; people who do not want their controlling partners to see everything they have spent, etc, etc.
I am not *anti-cash*. I laid out a few areas where it is still useful. Your example of someone has got a few groceries I accept. But do you have cash to pay them? Do they have change to give you? As cash disappears it becomes just as likely that cash becomes more, not less, difficult.
An example. We have a chinese takeaway in the village who studiously refuse to get a card reader. The nearest cash machine is 5 miles away in the next village. So if we want to use them it takes planning. Because having ended up with notes sat in a wallet for literal months we just don't get cash out regularly any more - it is by exception.
Cash won't disappear and I don't want it to. But its utility is shrinking rapidly. When you understand that fiat money is a computer-created fiction anyway it seems archaic creating these tokens to represent something which is entirely digital.
TBF, you said: "Cash is being defended by three groups:", and then gave groups in a negative manner. My point is that cash is used, and needed, far wider than those three groups.
In fact, I'm amused that you wrote that post in such a manner. The people who primarily be using cash are the people I'd expect you to care about, and be concerned about, the most.
The example you give fits one of the groups I described - nostalgia merchants.
Bit presumptive to describe who I am concerned about. My dad is about as tech-phobic as you can get. He is a classic cash nostalgia person, but even he now does online shopping. Took some doing but they can now do a shop without having to physically go. For someone who was adamant that he'd get robbed online its real progress.
Is caring for my parents enabling them to be able to have shopping delivered? Or pandering to his cash is king nostalgia so they can't...?
I know people want this dropped, but if you think the example I gave was one of "nostalgia merchants", then you either did not read what I wrote, or are trolling.
If you cared for people "left behind", then you wouldn't be quite so dismissive or condemnatory of users of cash.
Anyway, I will spend the rest of the evening with my family.
Five years ago I got annoyed that London cabbies still only took cash and refused cards. I'm just arguing for choice.
Deeply odd how cash v. card has become such a fervent culture war issue. It's possibly fuelled by whichever group is detected to be largely on one side of it or not.
Sign of the times perhaps.
Cash is being defended by three groups: 1. Dodgy Traders who love cash as they don't pay tax on it. Have been quoted different amounts for work if I want an invoice for my company to pay vs cash. "Err, really?" 2. Nostalgia merchants who are still living pre-covid. My MIL who at Easter got arsey with wife because she wasn't carrying cash for a restaurant tip 3. People who want to withdraw lovely anonymous cash before buying something they don't want on a credit card statement.
As I understand it the old legal tender arguments went out with Covid. Its now legal not to take cash. When we get our shop open later in he summer I'm only planning to take cash because there are some elderly people and small kids who may want to use it.
For a business like ours cash is an absolute arse.
The only thing worse than cash is being given a cheque.
Cash is still useful. Some posters (and sadly, seemingly RP) look at their own lives and see no use for it: they seem not to understand that others *may* have use cases where cash is useful. It's particularly funny given that the people most against cash appear to be the left-leaning on here - who should allegedly care for those left behind in society...
As a small example: when we had covid recently, a friend got us a few groceries whilst we awaited a supermarket delivery. I paid him back yesterday, in cash. The alternatives would have been a cheque (inconvenient), or bank transfer (slightly awkward for such a small sum, esp. as I did not have his account set up). It was much easier to just walk over and hand over a couple of notes.
Admittedly, I use cash much less than I used to. But it is still useful.
Then there are other use cases: people who use cash as they have problems controlling spending; people who do not want their controlling partners to see everything they have spent, etc, etc.
I am not *anti-cash*. I laid out a few areas where it is still useful. Your example of someone has got a few groceries I accept. But do you have cash to pay them? Do they have change to give you? As cash disappears it becomes just as likely that cash becomes more, not less, difficult.
An example. We have a chinese takeaway in the village who studiously refuse to get a card reader. The nearest cash machine is 5 miles away in the next village. So if we want to use them it takes planning. Because having ended up with notes sat in a wallet for literal months we just don't get cash out regularly any more - it is by exception.
Cash won't disappear and I don't want it to. But its utility is shrinking rapidly. When you understand that fiat money is a computer-created fiction anyway it seems archaic creating these tokens to represent something which is entirely digital.
TBF, you said: "Cash is being defended by three groups:", and then gave groups in a negative manner. My point is that cash is used, and needed, far wider than those three groups.
In fact, I'm amused that you wrote that post in such a manner. The people who primarily be using cash are the people I'd expect you to care about, and be concerned about, the most.
I will say this once more, and then leave it.
The key group who use and need cash are small businesses and their customers in poorer areas. Where margins are tight, the high fees charged for card machines and card transactions are literally the difference between solvency and closure. Although there are fees for banking in cash, they are (a) somewhat lower and (b) it's in your power to vary them by deciding how much cash you do and don't bank. You don't have that power with cards.
Banks and their apologists claim it is cheaper to use cards, but this is simply not true. It is cheaper for (1) people who pay large amounts every time, so it's a smaller percentage of the overall take and (2) large corporations including banks, who are deliberately running down their branch network to increase their profits and therefore want us all to pay by card.
Now I can understand why in London or Manchester, dominated by the big corps and with a high (extortionate, truthfully) cost of living, that means cash is no longer important.
That does not mean it is the case everywhere. Outside of major cities and tourist honeypots, where you can still get a decent meal for a fiver, insisting on card only would mean some businesses paying near 20% of turnover in card fees, instead of around 5% for cash banking fees. Which seems to me utterly unfair, ridiculous and in itself pretty well criminal.
And while I have no objection to people using cards to pay (I do it myself an awful lot) I cannot understand the mentality of people who say 'I find cash inconvenient in my particular circumstances, therefore everyone who uses it must be a criminal or a moron.' Which we see one particularly weird example of on this board.
If that person doesn't like that, that's his problem. But he should understand that his is playing the games of big businesses against ordinary people, out of selfishness.
I think you may be very out of date on card fees. Square charge 1.75% on contactless and inserted cards, so 9p rather than £1.
My information is from nine months ago. I do not think it is out of date.
Anyway, I suggest we leave this. It grew out of Anabobazina's decision to criticise somebody for not paying for a bus by smartphone in 2005. I don't see why we should pander (to link to my other pun) to his obsessions on the subject, particularly when it generates so much more heat than light.
Edit - incidentally I think the 1.75% is a fee to use the machine separate from bank fees, which is what I was referring to.
Again, I did not criticise him – you are making this up. It is a lie, and I have shown you why in an earlier post.
I merely asked@Sandpit when the incident occurred as you have been able to pay for a bus with your phone for several years now, and he replied "2005, and I noted his response by liking it.
Local Elections 2 weeks away received my postal vote just now. Plenty of time to spoil my ballot with juvenile scribblings
You don't need photo ID for postal votes at least, showing even more how ludicrous the requirement is for ID for polling station votes
Its notable that even supporters of the changes seem confused why nothing on postal votes.
Particularly as postal votes were the area of significant concern and polling station fraud was not. One can only draw one conclusion...
Great post from HYUFD by the way, pinpointing the anomaly.
I was doing an extended session on constitutional reform from 1832 to 1928 yesterday.
One student was literally open mouthed all the way through at how cynical every reform bill was - solely for partisan advantage. 1832 to entrench the Whig win of 1830 and ride the wave of fervour, 1867 to control redistribution of seats, 1884-85 as a grubby deal that gave Liberals voters and Tories seats. 1918 to get supporters of the government that won the war to vote.
Some things never change...
The 1832 Act also closed the "loophole" that gave the vote to a very small number of women, as property owners.
FPT legal tender thing is largely a myth but I would be sad if cash ceased to be used.
For me it's a civil liberties issue. Why should the vendor know who I am when I buy something? A whiff of the officious and a step towards dystopia I think.
It's more a convenience thing for the vendor.
With fewer and fewer bank branches open the average business now has to travel over 20 miles to their nearest branch.
With cards, just tap the PDQ machine at close of business and the money is in your account the next working day.
Where there is a niche in the market (in the UK) is for a ready cash card that requires neither credit check nor bank account. These are readily available in the US and other countries – the technology is there. Cashless is not perfect, but it is vastly superior to cash. Which is why cash is dying.
We need to prepare for it, and innovate to solve the snags of going cash-free, rather that kicking out at those people who are simply pointing out a very clear trend.
Tesco do this with Clubcard Pay+. Others are available.
With stories like this it's small bleeding wonder things are in a mess.
Bad enough there aren't enough training places, worse that we can't even employ the ones we do train!
Why bother?
Calling a "lefty Lawyer" "Sir Softie" would appear to garner more Tory votes according to the PB glitterati than resolving the NHS crisis. So as you were.
"Sir Softie"? Genius!
Apparently that's the answer to the failing criminal justice system, too.
Along with everything else.
Utterly pathetic from Sunak at PMQs.
More than anything, Sir Softie is so utterly naff. There’s no conviction or brutality in it. Captain Hindsight was so much better. I mean, if you want to call Keir Starmer silly names as public services collapse, the tax burden soars, turds pour into our waterways and the cost of living skyrockets, go ahead. It’s fundamentally unserious.
If it's being used at PMQs it won't be an off the cuff remark.
It will have been polled and focus-grouped by Levido first.
That means they're confident it will resonate.
, it’s just a bit “meh”. It lacks any kind of conviction.
Why are you calling SKS it?
Because he is a Softie. Even when he tries to sound tough, its a little limp wristed wet gish sort of delivery.
I don't know what a "wet gish" is and I'm not sure I want to!
FPT legal tender thing is largely a myth but I would be sad if cash ceased to be used.
For me it's a civil liberties issue. Why should the vendor know who I am when I buy something? A whiff of the officious and a step towards dystopia I think.
In the olden days I had always thought cash would be with us because of, among other things: on course betting, old people, people who don't have bank accounts, Poppy Day, blokes who do roof jobs at weekends, taxi drivers, small children, money laundering in suitcases, and, most of all, low level drug dealing - where especially neither the Revenue nor the police are especially welcomed into the information circle.
Now I am not so sure. OTOH Radio 4 still goes out on longwave and there are still cheques. What do people think? And how else can drug dealing be concealed? (Asking for a friend)
Local Elections 2 weeks away received my postal vote just now. Plenty of time to spoil my ballot with juvenile scribblings
You don't need photo ID for postal votes at least, showing even more how ludicrous the requirement is for ID for polling station votes
Its notable that even supporters of the changes seem confused why nothing on postal votes.
Particularly as postal votes were the area of significant concern and polling station fraud was not. One can only draw one conclusion...
Great post from HYUFD by the way, pinpointing the anomaly.
I was doing an extended session on constitutional reform from 1832 to 1928 yesterday.
One student was literally open mouthed all the way through at how cynical every reform bill was - solely for partisan advantage. 1832 to entrench the Whig win of 1830 and ride the wave of fervour, 1867 to control redistribution of seats, 1884-85 as a grubby deal that gave Liberals voters and Tories seats. 1918 to get supporters of the government that won the war to vote.
Some things never change...
Out of manure can come beautiful flowers.
You need people to see a benefit to doing things, so they may have grubby motivation, and then try to make that benefit everyone.
One thing the NHS could do is immediately stop all prescriptions for paracetomol & ibuprofen. A (rather fed up) GP on the radio claimed the cost to the NHS of one of these prescriptions was ~ £20 a time !
Wtf? How have they managed that?
It is a perfect example of the fact that a nationalised system of healthcare is bureaucratic and inefficient. The Labour party has been trying to convince it's less well travelled and informed followers that the NHS is the "envy of the world". It never has been and never will be. That is why no other western country has tried to copy it.
That's an interesting way to describe the Tories. And Mr Streeting wouldn't agree.
I am sure I don't need to tell you that is what is called a political pivot. The Labour Party has been trying for years to convince us that all the NHS needs is more funding. It hosed money at it it in the Blair years and the improvements were marginal at best, but doctors benefited very nicely.
The reality is that the NHS is a nationalised industry run by vested interests in the interests, not of patients, but of the vested interests. The Labour Party set it up, convinced many people that it was "the envy of the world" (to the amusement of those with better systems) and continues to believe that all it really needs is more money, when in fact what it actually needs is to be broken up
Anyway, I will spend the rest of the evening with my family.
Five years ago I got annoyed that London cabbies still only took cash and refused cards. I'm just arguing for choice.
Deeply odd how cash v. card has become such a fervent culture war issue. It's possibly fuelled by whichever group is detected to be largely on one side of it or not.
Sign of the times perhaps.
Cash is being defended by three groups: 1. Dodgy Traders who love cash as they don't pay tax on it. Have been quoted different amounts for work if I want an invoice for my company to pay vs cash. "Err, really?" 2. Nostalgia merchants who are still living pre-covid. My MIL who at Easter got arsey with wife because she wasn't carrying cash for a restaurant tip 3. People who want to withdraw lovely anonymous cash before buying something they don't want on a credit card statement.
As I understand it the old legal tender arguments went out with Covid. Its now legal not to take cash. When we get our shop open later in he summer I'm only planning to take cash because there are some elderly people and small kids who may want to use it.
For a business like ours cash is an absolute arse.
The only thing worse than cash is being given a cheque.
Cash is still useful. Some posters (and sadly, seemingly RP) look at their own lives and see no use for it: they seem not to understand that others *may* have use cases where cash is useful. It's particularly funny given that the people most against cash appear to be the left-leaning on here - who should allegedly care for those left behind in society...
As a small example: when we had covid recently, a friend got us a few groceries whilst we awaited a supermarket delivery. I paid him back yesterday, in cash. The alternatives would have been a cheque (inconvenient), or bank transfer (slightly awkward for such a small sum, esp. as I did not have his account set up). It was much easier to just walk over and hand over a couple of notes.
Admittedly, I use cash much less than I used to. But it is still useful.
Then there are other use cases: people who use cash as they have problems controlling spending; people who do not want their controlling partners to see everything they have spent, etc, etc.
I am not *anti-cash*. I laid out a few areas where it is still useful. Your example of someone has got a few groceries I accept. But do you have cash to pay them? Do they have change to give you? As cash disappears it becomes just as likely that cash becomes more, not less, difficult.
An example. We have a chinese takeaway in the village who studiously refuse to get a card reader. The nearest cash machine is 5 miles away in the next village. So if we want to use them it takes planning. Because having ended up with notes sat in a wallet for literal months we just don't get cash out regularly any more - it is by exception.
Cash won't disappear and I don't want it to. But its utility is shrinking rapidly. When you understand that fiat money is a computer-created fiction anyway it seems archaic creating these tokens to represent something which is entirely digital.
TBF, you said: "Cash is being defended by three groups:", and then gave groups in a negative manner. My point is that cash is used, and needed, far wider than those three groups.
In fact, I'm amused that you wrote that post in such a manner. The people who primarily be using cash are the people I'd expect you to care about, and be concerned about, the most.
I will say this once more, and then leave it.
The key group who use and need cash are small businesses and their customers in poorer areas. Where margins are tight, the high fees charged for card machines and card transactions are literally the difference between solvency and closure. Although there are fees for banking in cash, they are (a) somewhat lower and (b) it's in your power to vary them by deciding how much cash you do and don't bank. You don't have that power with cards.
Banks and their apologists claim it is cheaper to use cards, but this is simply not true. It is cheaper for (1) people who pay large amounts every time, so it's a smaller percentage of the overall take and (2) large corporations including banks, who are deliberately running down their branch network to increase their profits and therefore want us all to pay by card.
Now I can understand why in London or Manchester, dominated by the big corps and with a high (extortionate, truthfully) cost of living, that means cash is no longer important.
That does not mean it is the case everywhere. Outside of major cities and tourist honeypots, where you can still get a decent meal for a fiver, insisting on card only would mean some businesses paying near 20% of turnover in card fees, instead of around 5% for cash banking fees. Which seems to me utterly unfair, ridiculous and in itself pretty well criminal.
And while I have no objection to people using cards to pay (I do it myself an awful lot) I cannot understand the mentality of people who say 'I find cash inconvenient in my particular circumstances, therefore everyone who uses it must be a criminal or a moron.' Which we see one particularly weird example of on this board.
If that person doesn't like that, that's his problem. But he should understand that his is playing the games of big businesses against ordinary people, out of selfishness.
I think you may be very out of date on card fees. Square charge 1.75% on contactless and inserted cards, so 9p rather than £1.
My information is from nine months ago. I do not think it is out of date.
Anyway, I suggest we leave this. It grew out of Anabobazina's decision to criticise somebody for not paying for a bus by smartphone in 2005. I don't see why we should pander (to link to my other pun) to his obsessions on the subject, particularly when it generates so much more heat than light.
Edit - incidentally I think the 1.75% is a fee to use the machine separate from bank fees, which is what I was referring to.
Again, I did not criticise him – you are making this up. It is a lie, and I have shown you why in an earlier post.
I merely asked@Sandpit when the incident occurred as you have been able to pay for a bus with your phone for several years now, and he replied "2005, and I noted his response by liking it.
Stop repeating this fiction.
It’s a while, since I travelled on the bus, and anyway I always use my bus pass, but I don’t recall ever seeing anybody paying on our service with a phone.
London based lovers of musical theatre - get yourself down to the Bridge Theatre to see Guys and Dolls ASAP. Get promenade tickets if you can. One of the best shows I've ever seen - the atmosphere was like a revival meeting by the end - utterly joyful.
FPT legal tender thing is largely a myth but I would be sad if cash ceased to be used.
For me it's a civil liberties issue. Why should the vendor know who I am when I buy something? A whiff of the officious and a step towards dystopia I think.
In the olden days I had always thought cash would be with us because of, among other things: on course betting, old people, people who don't have bank accounts, Poppy Day, blokes who do roof jobs at weekends, taxi drivers, small children, money laundering in suitcases, and, most of all, low level drug dealing - where especially neither the Revenue nor the police are especially welcomed into the information circle.
Now I am not so sure. OTOH Radio 4 still goes out on longwave and there are still cheques. What do people think? And how else can drug dealing be concealed? (Asking for a friend)
Cheques that I get for refunds, small payments, and the like, and from the more bloody minded financial institutions, are easily dealt with - I have a Nationwide postal account to which I can send cheques for free, if it's not convenient to go to the bank, and then transfer money out online, at least to my other NW accounts.
Edit: they provide the forms and pre-post-paid envelopes.
FPT legal tender thing is largely a myth but I would be sad if cash ceased to be used.
For me it's a civil liberties issue. Why should the vendor know who I am when I buy something? A whiff of the officious and a step towards dystopia I think.
In the olden days I had always thought cash would be with us because of, among other things: on course betting, old people, people who don't have bank accounts, Poppy Day, blokes who do roof jobs at weekends, taxi drivers, small children, money laundering in suitcases, and, most of all, low level drug dealing - where especially neither the Revenue nor the police are especially welcomed into the information circle.
Now I am not so sure. OTOH Radio 4 still goes out on longwave and there are still cheques. What do people think? And how else can drug dealing be concealed? (Asking for a friend)
BBC Radio is an interesting example. Twenty years ago they were going to make us junk our old receivers and buy digital ones instead. But they relented after consumer resistance. Nowadays digital radio is a niche medium, about to be supplanted by the internet. Meanwhile, as you say, long wave keeps on rollin'.
One thing the NHS could do is immediately stop all prescriptions for paracetomol & ibuprofen. A (rather fed up) GP on the radio claimed the cost to the NHS of one of these prescriptions was ~ £20 a time !
Wtf? How have they managed that?
It is a perfect example of the fact that a nationalised system of healthcare is bureaucratic and inefficient. The Labour party has been trying to convince it's less well travelled and informed followers that the NHS is the "envy of the world". It never has been and never will be. That is why no other western country has tried to copy it.
That's an interesting way to describe the Tories. And Mr Streeting wouldn't agree.
I am sure I don't need to tell you that is what is called a political pivot. The Labour Party has been trying for years to convince us that all the NHS needs is more funding. It hosed money at it it in the Blair years and the improvements were marginal at best, but doctors benefited very nicely.
The reality is that the NHS is a nationalised industry run by vested interests in the interests, not of patients, but of the vested interests. The Labour Party set it up, convinced many people that it was "the envy of the world" (to the amusement of those with better systems) and continues to believe that all it really needs is more money, when in fact what it actually needs is to be broken up
But my point is that the Conservative Party has been claiming the same for the last decade and more, that hte world-beating NHS is safe with them etc etc. .
FPT legal tender thing is largely a myth but I would be sad if cash ceased to be used.
For me it's a civil liberties issue. Why should the vendor know who I am when I buy something? A whiff of the officious and a step towards dystopia I think.
In the olden days I had always thought cash would be with us because of, among other things: on course betting, old people, people who don't have bank accounts, Poppy Day, blokes who do roof jobs at weekends, taxi drivers, small children, money laundering in suitcases, and, most of all, low level drug dealing - where especially neither the Revenue nor the police are especially welcomed into the information circle.
Now I am not so sure. OTOH Radio 4 still goes out on longwave and there are still cheques. What do people think? And how else can drug dealing be concealed? (Asking for a friend)
Cheques that I get for refunds, small payments, and the like, and from the more bloody minded financial institutions, are easily dealt with - I have a Nationwide postal account to which I can send cheques for free, if it's not convenient to go to the bank, and then transfer money out online, at least to my other NW accounts.
Edit: they provide the forms and pre-post-paid envelopes.
Under £500 you can just use your mobile. I actually use more cheques than I did before this was introduced (a few, vs nil). It's probably saved the cheque for another decade or so.
One thing the NHS could do is immediately stop all prescriptions for paracetomol & ibuprofen. A (rather fed up) GP on the radio claimed the cost to the NHS of one of these prescriptions was ~ £20 a time !
Wtf? How have they managed that?
It is a perfect example of the fact that a nationalised system of healthcare is bureaucratic and inefficient. The Labour party has been trying to convince it's less well travelled and informed followers that the NHS is the "envy of the world". It never has been and never will be. That is why no other western country has tried to copy it.
That's an interesting way to describe the Tories. And Mr Streeting wouldn't agree.
I am sure I don't need to tell you that is what is called a political pivot. The Labour Party has been trying for years to convince us that all the NHS needs is more funding. It hosed money at it it in the Blair years and the improvements were marginal at best, but doctors benefited very nicely.
The reality is that the NHS is a nationalised industry run by vested interests in the interests, not of patients, but of the vested interests. The Labour Party set it up, convinced many people that it was "the envy of the world" (to the amusement of those with better systems) and continues to believe that all it really needs is more money, when in fact what it actually needs is to be broken up
But my point is that the Conservative Party has been claiming the same for the last decade and more, that hte world-beating NHS is safe with them etc etc. .
FPT legal tender thing is largely a myth but I would be sad if cash ceased to be used.
For me it's a civil liberties issue. Why should the vendor know who I am when I buy something? A whiff of the officious and a step towards dystopia I think.
In the olden days I had always thought cash would be with us because of, among other things: on course betting, old people, people who don't have bank accounts, Poppy Day, blokes who do roof jobs at weekends, taxi drivers, small children, money laundering in suitcases, and, most of all, low level drug dealing - where especially neither the Revenue nor the police are especially welcomed into the information circle.
Now I am not so sure. OTOH Radio 4 still goes out on longwave and there are still cheques. What do people think? And how else can drug dealing be concealed? (Asking for a friend)
BBC Radio is an interesting example. Twenty years ago they were going to make us junk our old receivers and buy digital ones instead. But they relented after consumer resistance. Nowadays digital radio is a niche medium, about to be supplanted by the internet. Meanwhile, as you say, long wave keeps on rollin'.
Isn't the norm DAB for the car, Alexa for the home in terms of radio these days ?
FPT legal tender thing is largely a myth but I would be sad if cash ceased to be used.
For me it's a civil liberties issue. Why should the vendor know who I am when I buy something? A whiff of the officious and a step towards dystopia I think.
In the olden days I had always thought cash would be with us because of, among other things: on course betting, old people, people who don't have bank accounts, Poppy Day, blokes who do roof jobs at weekends, taxi drivers, small children, money laundering in suitcases, and, most of all, low level drug dealing - where especially neither the Revenue nor the police are especially welcomed into the information circle.
Now I am not so sure. OTOH Radio 4 still goes out on longwave and there are still cheques. What do people think? And how else can drug dealing be concealed? (Asking for a friend)
Cheques that I get for refunds, small payments, and the like, and from the more bloody minded financial institutions, are easily dealt with - I have a Nationwide postal account to which I can send cheques for free, if it's not convenient to go to the bank, and then transfer money out online, at least to my other NW accounts.
Edit: they provide the forms and pre-post-paid envelopes.
Under £500 you can just use your mobile. I actually use more cheques than I did before this was introduced (a few, vs nil). It's probably saved the cheque for another decade or so.
That too, thanks. But I need to buy a new mobile (old, and not being updated, so only used for phone calls.).
Anyway, I will spend the rest of the evening with my family.
Five years ago I got annoyed that London cabbies still only took cash and refused cards. I'm just arguing for choice.
Deeply odd how cash v. card has become such a fervent culture war issue. It's possibly fuelled by whichever group is detected to be largely on one side of it or not.
Sign of the times perhaps.
Cash is being defended by three groups: 1. Dodgy Traders who love cash as they don't pay tax on it. Have been quoted different amounts for work if I want an invoice for my company to pay vs cash. "Err, really?" 2. Nostalgia merchants who are still living pre-covid. My MIL who at Easter got arsey with wife because she wasn't carrying cash for a restaurant tip 3. People who want to withdraw lovely anonymous cash before buying something they don't want on a credit card statement.
As I understand it the old legal tender arguments went out with Covid. Its now legal not to take cash. When we get our shop open later in he summer I'm only planning to take cash because there are some elderly people and small kids who may want to use it.
For a business like ours cash is an absolute arse.
The only thing worse than cash is being given a cheque.
Cash is still useful. Some posters (and sadly, seemingly RP) look at their own lives and see no use for it: they seem not to understand that others *may* have use cases where cash is useful. It's particularly funny given that the people most against cash appear to be the left-leaning on here - who should allegedly care for those left behind in society...
As a small example: when we had covid recently, a friend got us a few groceries whilst we awaited a supermarket delivery. I paid him back yesterday, in cash. The alternatives would have been a cheque (inconvenient), or bank transfer (slightly awkward for such a small sum, esp. as I did not have his account set up). It was much easier to just walk over and hand over a couple of notes.
Admittedly, I use cash much less than I used to. But it is still useful.
Then there are other use cases: people who use cash as they have problems controlling spending; people who do not want their controlling partners to see everything they have spent, etc, etc.
I am not *anti-cash*. I laid out a few areas where it is still useful. Your example of someone has got a few groceries I accept. But do you have cash to pay them? Do they have change to give you? As cash disappears it becomes just as likely that cash becomes more, not less, difficult.
An example. We have a chinese takeaway in the village who studiously refuse to get a card reader. The nearest cash machine is 5 miles away in the next village. So if we want to use them it takes planning. Because having ended up with notes sat in a wallet for literal months we just don't get cash out regularly any more - it is by exception.
Cash won't disappear and I don't want it to. But its utility is shrinking rapidly. When you understand that fiat money is a computer-created fiction anyway it seems archaic creating these tokens to represent something which is entirely digital.
TBF, you said: "Cash is being defended by three groups:", and then gave groups in a negative manner. My point is that cash is used, and needed, far wider than those three groups.
In fact, I'm amused that you wrote that post in such a manner. The people who primarily be using cash are the people I'd expect you to care about, and be concerned about, the most.
I will say this once more, and then leave it.
The key group who use and need cash are small businesses and their customers in poorer areas. Where margins are tight, the high fees charged for card machines and card transactions are literally the difference between solvency and closure. Although there are fees for banking in cash, they are (a) somewhat lower and (b) it's in your power to vary them by deciding how much cash you do and don't bank. You don't have that power with cards.
Banks and their apologists claim it is cheaper to use cards, but this is simply not true. It is cheaper for (1) people who pay large amounts every time, so it's a smaller percentage of the overall take and (2) large corporations including banks, who are deliberately running down their branch network to increase their profits and therefore want us all to pay by card.
Now I can understand why in London or Manchester, dominated by the big corps and with a high (extortionate, truthfully) cost of living, that means cash is no longer important.
That does not mean it is the case everywhere. Outside of major cities and tourist honeypots, where you can still get a decent meal for a fiver, insisting on card only would mean some businesses paying near 20% of turnover in card fees, instead of around 5% for cash banking fees. Which seems to me utterly unfair, ridiculous and in itself pretty well criminal.
And while I have no objection to people using cards to pay (I do it myself an awful lot) I cannot understand the mentality of people who say 'I find cash inconvenient in my particular circumstances, therefore everyone who uses it must be a criminal or a moron.' Which we see one particularly weird example of on this board.
If that person doesn't like that, that's his problem. But he should understand that his is playing the games of big businesses against ordinary people, out of selfishness.
I think you may be very out of date on card fees. Square charge 1.75% on contactless and inserted cards, so 9p rather than £1.
My information is from nine months ago. I do not think it is out of date.
Anyway, I suggest we leave this. It grew out of Anabobazina's decision to criticise somebody for not paying for a bus by smartphone in 2005. I don't see why we should pander (to link to my other pun) to his obsessions on the subject, particularly when it generates so much more heat than light.
Edit - incidentally I think the 1.75% is a fee to use the machine separate from bank fees, which is what I was referring to.
Again, I did not criticise him – you are making this up. It is a lie, and I have shown you why in an earlier post.
I merely asked@Sandpit when the incident occurred as you have been able to pay for a bus with your phone for several years now, and he replied "2005, and I noted his response by liking it.
Stop repeating this fiction.
It’s a while, since I travelled on the bus, and anyway I always use my bus pass, but I don’t recall ever seeing anybody paying on our service with a phone.
My pet hate on public transport is standing behind someone at the ticket barrier paying with their phone who only decides to open their app at the point they reach the barrier rather than having it ready. Or even worse, standing there looking through their bag for it. I still use an Oyster card because I need my phone free for reading PB.
“Air defence has been raised increasingly by the Ukrainians,” said one official involved in the talks. “If they use them all up, it opens the space up for air forces.”
One thing the NHS could do is immediately stop all prescriptions for paracetomol & ibuprofen. A (rather fed up) GP on the radio claimed the cost to the NHS of one of these prescriptions was ~ £20 a time !
Wtf? How have they managed that?
It is a perfect example of the fact that a nationalised system of healthcare is bureaucratic and inefficient. The Labour party has been trying to convince it's less well travelled and informed followers that the NHS is the "envy of the world". It never has been and never will be. That is why no other western country has tried to copy it.
That's an interesting way to describe the Tories. And Mr Streeting wouldn't agree.
I am sure I don't need to tell you that is what is called a political pivot. The Labour Party has been trying for years to convince us that all the NHS needs is more funding. It hosed money at it it in the Blair years and the improvements were marginal at best, but doctors benefited very nicely.
The reality is that the NHS is a nationalised industry run by vested interests in the interests, not of patients, but of the vested interests. The Labour Party set it up, convinced many people that it was "the envy of the world" (to the amusement of those with better systems) and continues to believe that all it really needs is more money, when in fact what it actually needs is to be broken up
But my point is that the Conservative Party has been claiming the same for the last decade and more.
I was once a Conservative activist (before the became the Brexit Party Lite) and I have never ever heard anyone claim that. It is a ludicrous claim. Maybe there was some stuff from David Cameron about how wonderful the NHS was/is, but I have never heard the "envy of the world" nonsense from a Conservative. Maybe I missed it?
Either way, whether Tory or Labour, you would have to be misinformed or alternatively as dishonest as an SNP executive to spout that nonsense.
FPT legal tender thing is largely a myth but I would be sad if cash ceased to be used.
For me it's a civil liberties issue. Why should the vendor know who I am when I buy something? A whiff of the officious and a step towards dystopia I think.
In the olden days I had always thought cash would be with us because of, among other things: on course betting, old people, people who don't have bank accounts, Poppy Day, blokes who do roof jobs at weekends, taxi drivers, small children, money laundering in suitcases, and, most of all, low level drug dealing - where especially neither the Revenue nor the police are especially welcomed into the information circle.
Now I am not so sure. OTOH Radio 4 still goes out on longwave and there are still cheques. What do people think? And how else can drug dealing be concealed? (Asking for a friend)
Cheques that I get for refunds, small payments, and the like, and from the more bloody minded financial institutions, are easily dealt with - I have a Nationwide postal account to which I can send cheques for free, if it's not convenient to go to the bank, and then transfer money out online, at least to my other NW accounts.
Edit: they provide the forms and pre-post-paid envelopes.
I think you can actually just photograph the cheque on your banking app, and it instantly transfers, so it's not that much of an agg to cash them TBH, but would obviously be automatic if the payer just did the sensible thing and paid via BACS. Cheques are even more of a nonsense than cash in this day and age.
Anyway, I will spend the rest of the evening with my family.
Five years ago I got annoyed that London cabbies still only took cash and refused cards. I'm just arguing for choice.
Deeply odd how cash v. card has become such a fervent culture war issue. It's possibly fuelled by whichever group is detected to be largely on one side of it or not.
Sign of the times perhaps.
Cash is being defended by three groups: 1. Dodgy Traders who love cash as they don't pay tax on it. Have been quoted different amounts for work if I want an invoice for my company to pay vs cash. "Err, really?" 2. Nostalgia merchants who are still living pre-covid. My MIL who at Easter got arsey with wife because she wasn't carrying cash for a restaurant tip 3. People who want to withdraw lovely anonymous cash before buying something they don't want on a credit card statement.
As I understand it the old legal tender arguments went out with Covid. Its now legal not to take cash. When we get our shop open later in he summer I'm only planning to take cash because there are some elderly people and small kids who may want to use it.
For a business like ours cash is an absolute arse.
The only thing worse than cash is being given a cheque.
Cash is still useful. Some posters (and sadly, seemingly RP) look at their own lives and see no use for it: they seem not to understand that others *may* have use cases where cash is useful. It's particularly funny given that the people most against cash appear to be the left-leaning on here - who should allegedly care for those left behind in society...
As a small example: when we had covid recently, a friend got us a few groceries whilst we awaited a supermarket delivery. I paid him back yesterday, in cash. The alternatives would have been a cheque (inconvenient), or bank transfer (slightly awkward for such a small sum, esp. as I did not have his account set up). It was much easier to just walk over and hand over a couple of notes.
Admittedly, I use cash much less than I used to. But it is still useful.
Then there are other use cases: people who use cash as they have problems controlling spending; people who do not want their controlling partners to see everything they have spent, etc, etc.
I am not *anti-cash*. I laid out a few areas where it is still useful. Your example of someone has got a few groceries I accept. But do you have cash to pay them? Do they have change to give you? As cash disappears it becomes just as likely that cash becomes more, not less, difficult.
An example. We have a chinese takeaway in the village who studiously refuse to get a card reader. The nearest cash machine is 5 miles away in the next village. So if we want to use them it takes planning. Because having ended up with notes sat in a wallet for literal months we just don't get cash out regularly any more - it is by exception.
Cash won't disappear and I don't want it to. But its utility is shrinking rapidly. When you understand that fiat money is a computer-created fiction anyway it seems archaic creating these tokens to represent something which is entirely digital.
TBF, you said: "Cash is being defended by three groups:", and then gave groups in a negative manner. My point is that cash is used, and needed, far wider than those three groups.
In fact, I'm amused that you wrote that post in such a manner. The people who primarily be using cash are the people I'd expect you to care about, and be concerned about, the most.
I will say this once more, and then leave it.
The key group who use and need cash are small businesses and their customers in poorer areas. Where margins are tight, the high fees charged for card machines and card transactions are literally the difference between solvency and closure. Although there are fees for banking in cash, they are (a) somewhat lower and (b) it's in your power to vary them by deciding how much cash you do and don't bank. You don't have that power with cards.
Banks and their apologists claim it is cheaper to use cards, but this is simply not true. It is cheaper for (1) people who pay large amounts every time, so it's a smaller percentage of the overall take and (2) large corporations including banks, who are deliberately running down their branch network to increase their profits and therefore want us all to pay by card.
Now I can understand why in London or Manchester, dominated by the big corps and with a high (extortionate, truthfully) cost of living, that means cash is no longer important.
That does not mean it is the case everywhere. Outside of major cities and tourist honeypots, where you can still get a decent meal for a fiver, insisting on card only would mean some businesses paying near 20% of turnover in card fees, instead of around 5% for cash banking fees. Which seems to me utterly unfair, ridiculous and in itself pretty well criminal.
And while I have no objection to people using cards to pay (I do it myself an awful lot) I cannot understand the mentality of people who say 'I find cash inconvenient in my particular circumstances, therefore everyone who uses it must be a criminal or a moron.' Which we see one particularly weird example of on this board.
If that person doesn't like that, that's his problem. But he should understand that his is playing the games of big businesses against ordinary people, out of selfishness.
I think you may be very out of date on card fees. Square charge 1.75% on contactless and inserted cards, so 9p rather than £1.
My information is from nine months ago. I do not think it is out of date.
Anyway, I suggest we leave this. It grew out of Anabobazina's decision to criticise somebody for not paying for a bus by smartphone in 2005. I don't see why we should pander (to link to my other pun) to his obsessions on the subject, particularly when it generates so much more heat than light.
Edit - incidentally I think the 1.75% is a fee to use the machine separate from bank fees, which is what I was referring to.
Again, I did not criticise him – you are making this up. It is a lie, and I have shown you why in an earlier post.
I merely asked@Sandpit when the incident occurred as you have been able to pay for a bus with your phone for several years now, and he replied "2005, and I noted his response by liking it.
Stop repeating this fiction.
It’s a while, since I travelled on the bus, and anyway I always use my bus pass, but I don’t recall ever seeing anybody paying on our service with a phone.
My pet hate on public transport is standing behind someone at the ticket barrier paying with their phone who only decides to open their app at the point they reach the barrier rather than having it ready. Or even worse, standing there looking through their bag for it. I still use an Oyster card because I need my phone free for reading PB.
Do you need to open an app for the (underground?). Don't phones auto-nfc so long as it's set up ?
FPT legal tender thing is largely a myth but I would be sad if cash ceased to be used.
For me it's a civil liberties issue. Why should the vendor know who I am when I buy something? A whiff of the officious and a step towards dystopia I think.
In the olden days I had always thought cash would be with us because of, among other things: on course betting, old people, people who don't have bank accounts, Poppy Day, blokes who do roof jobs at weekends, taxi drivers, small children, money laundering in suitcases, and, most of all, low level drug dealing - where especially neither the Revenue nor the police are especially welcomed into the information circle.
Now I am not so sure. OTOH Radio 4 still goes out on longwave and there are still cheques. What do people think? And how else can drug dealing be concealed? (Asking for a friend)
BBC Radio is an interesting example. Twenty years ago they were going to make us junk our old receivers and buy digital ones instead. But they relented after consumer resistance. Nowadays digital radio is a niche medium, about to be supplanted by the internet. Meanwhile, as you say, long wave keeps on rollin'.
Isn't the norm DAB for the car, Alexa for the home in terms of radio these days ?
Analogue radio is much less fatiguing on the ear, rather as tapes and LP's there. Hence the revival of popularity of these things among teens and twentysomethings, combined with the cool factor.
Anyway, I will spend the rest of the evening with my family.
Five years ago I got annoyed that London cabbies still only took cash and refused cards. I'm just arguing for choice.
Deeply odd how cash v. card has become such a fervent culture war issue. It's possibly fuelled by whichever group is detected to be largely on one side of it or not.
Sign of the times perhaps.
Cash is being defended by three groups: 1. Dodgy Traders who love cash as they don't pay tax on it. Have been quoted different amounts for work if I want an invoice for my company to pay vs cash. "Err, really?" 2. Nostalgia merchants who are still living pre-covid. My MIL who at Easter got arsey with wife because she wasn't carrying cash for a restaurant tip 3. People who want to withdraw lovely anonymous cash before buying something they don't want on a credit card statement.
As I understand it the old legal tender arguments went out with Covid. Its now legal not to take cash. When we get our shop open later in he summer I'm only planning to take cash because there are some elderly people and small kids who may want to use it.
For a business like ours cash is an absolute arse.
The only thing worse than cash is being given a cheque.
Cash is still useful. Some posters (and sadly, seemingly RP) look at their own lives and see no use for it: they seem not to understand that others *may* have use cases where cash is useful. It's particularly funny given that the people most against cash appear to be the left-leaning on here - who should allegedly care for those left behind in society...
As a small example: when we had covid recently, a friend got us a few groceries whilst we awaited a supermarket delivery. I paid him back yesterday, in cash. The alternatives would have been a cheque (inconvenient), or bank transfer (slightly awkward for such a small sum, esp. as I did not have his account set up). It was much easier to just walk over and hand over a couple of notes.
Admittedly, I use cash much less than I used to. But it is still useful.
Then there are other use cases: people who use cash as they have problems controlling spending; people who do not want their controlling partners to see everything they have spent, etc, etc.
I am not *anti-cash*. I laid out a few areas where it is still useful. Your example of someone has got a few groceries I accept. But do you have cash to pay them? Do they have change to give you? As cash disappears it becomes just as likely that cash becomes more, not less, difficult.
An example. We have a chinese takeaway in the village who studiously refuse to get a card reader. The nearest cash machine is 5 miles away in the next village. So if we want to use them it takes planning. Because having ended up with notes sat in a wallet for literal months we just don't get cash out regularly any more - it is by exception.
Cash won't disappear and I don't want it to. But its utility is shrinking rapidly. When you understand that fiat money is a computer-created fiction anyway it seems archaic creating these tokens to represent something which is entirely digital.
TBF, you said: "Cash is being defended by three groups:", and then gave groups in a negative manner. My point is that cash is used, and needed, far wider than those three groups.
In fact, I'm amused that you wrote that post in such a manner. The people who primarily be using cash are the people I'd expect you to care about, and be concerned about, the most.
I will say this once more, and then leave it.
The key group who use and need cash are small businesses and their customers in poorer areas. Where margins are tight, the high fees charged for card machines and card transactions are literally the difference between solvency and closure. Although there are fees for banking in cash, they are (a) somewhat lower and (b) it's in your power to vary them by deciding how much cash you do and don't bank. You don't have that power with cards.
Banks and their apologists claim it is cheaper to use cards, but this is simply not true. It is cheaper for (1) people who pay large amounts every time, so it's a smaller percentage of the overall take and (2) large corporations including banks, who are deliberately running down their branch network to increase their profits and therefore want us all to pay by card.
Now I can understand why in London or Manchester, dominated by the big corps and with a high (extortionate, truthfully) cost of living, that means cash is no longer important.
That does not mean it is the case everywhere. Outside of major cities and tourist honeypots, where you can still get a decent meal for a fiver, insisting on card only would mean some businesses paying near 20% of turnover in card fees, instead of around 5% for cash banking fees. Which seems to me utterly unfair, ridiculous and in itself pretty well criminal.
And while I have no objection to people using cards to pay (I do it myself an awful lot) I cannot understand the mentality of people who say 'I find cash inconvenient in my particular circumstances, therefore everyone who uses it must be a criminal or a moron.' Which we see one particularly weird example of on this board.
If that person doesn't like that, that's his problem. But he should understand that his is playing the games of big businesses against ordinary people, out of selfishness.
I think you may be very out of date on card fees. Square charge 1.75% on contactless and inserted cards, so 9p rather than £1.
My information is from nine months ago. I do not think it is out of date.
Anyway, I suggest we leave this. It grew out of Anabobazina's decision to criticise somebody for not paying for a bus by smartphone in 2005. I don't see why we should pander (to link to my other pun) to his obsessions on the subject, particularly when it generates so much more heat than light.
Edit - incidentally I think the 1.75% is a fee to use the machine separate from bank fees, which is what I was referring to.
Again, I did not criticise him – you are making this up. It is a lie, and I have shown you why in an earlier post.
I merely asked@Sandpit when the incident occurred as you have been able to pay for a bus with your phone for several years now, and he replied "2005, and I noted his response by liking it.
Stop repeating this fiction.
It’s a while, since I travelled on the bus, and anyway I always use my bus pass, but I don’t recall ever seeing anybody paying on our service with a phone.
Watches are starting to eclipse phones now for public transport, literally just wave your wrist over the reader as you get to the tube gate or alight the bus.
One thing the NHS could do is immediately stop all prescriptions for paracetomol & ibuprofen. A (rather fed up) GP on the radio claimed the cost to the NHS of one of these prescriptions was ~ £20 a time !
Wtf? How have they managed that?
It is a perfect example of the fact that a nationalised system of healthcare is bureaucratic and inefficient. The Labour party has been trying to convince it's less well travelled and informed followers that the NHS is the "envy of the world". It never has been and never will be. That is why no other western country has tried to copy it.
That's an interesting way to describe the Tories. And Mr Streeting wouldn't agree.
I am sure I don't need to tell you that is what is called a political pivot. The Labour Party has been trying for years to convince us that all the NHS needs is more funding. It hosed money at it it in the Blair years and the improvements were marginal at best, but doctors benefited very nicely.
The reality is that the NHS is a nationalised industry run by vested interests in the interests, not of patients, but of the vested interests. The Labour Party set it up, convinced many people that it was "the envy of the world" (to the amusement of those with better systems) and continues to believe that all it really needs is more money, when in fact what it actually needs is to be broken up
But my point is that the Conservative Party has been claiming the same for the last decade and more.
I was once a Conservative activist (before the became the Brexit Party Lite) and I have never ever heard anyone claim that. It is a ludicrous claim. Maybe there was some stuff from David Cameron about how wonderful the NHS was/is, but I have never heard the "envy of the world" nonsense from a Conservative. Maybe I missed it?
Either way, whether Tory or Labour, you would have to be misinformed or alternatively as dishonest as an SNP executive to spout that nonsense.
This sort of thing: not verbatim, admittedly, but it does give a similar impression! (Not that you rate Mr J, of course.)
“We are making progress in this national battle because the British public formed a human shield around this country’s greatest national asset: our national health service,” Johnson said on Sunday, April 12, in his first address to the nation after being released from hospital earlier that day. “We will win because our NHS is the beating heart of this country, it is the best of this country. It is unconquerable. It is powered by love.”
Anyway, I will spend the rest of the evening with my family.
Five years ago I got annoyed that London cabbies still only took cash and refused cards. I'm just arguing for choice.
Deeply odd how cash v. card has become such a fervent culture war issue. It's possibly fuelled by whichever group is detected to be largely on one side of it or not.
Sign of the times perhaps.
Cash is being defended by three groups: 1. Dodgy Traders who love cash as they don't pay tax on it. Have been quoted different amounts for work if I want an invoice for my company to pay vs cash. "Err, really?" 2. Nostalgia merchants who are still living pre-covid. My MIL who at Easter got arsey with wife because she wasn't carrying cash for a restaurant tip 3. People who want to withdraw lovely anonymous cash before buying something they don't want on a credit card statement.
As I understand it the old legal tender arguments went out with Covid. Its now legal not to take cash. When we get our shop open later in he summer I'm only planning to take cash because there are some elderly people and small kids who may want to use it.
For a business like ours cash is an absolute arse.
The only thing worse than cash is being given a cheque.
Cash is still useful. Some posters (and sadly, seemingly RP) look at their own lives and see no use for it: they seem not to understand that others *may* have use cases where cash is useful. It's particularly funny given that the people most against cash appear to be the left-leaning on here - who should allegedly care for those left behind in society...
As a small example: when we had covid recently, a friend got us a few groceries whilst we awaited a supermarket delivery. I paid him back yesterday, in cash. The alternatives would have been a cheque (inconvenient), or bank transfer (slightly awkward for such a small sum, esp. as I did not have his account set up). It was much easier to just walk over and hand over a couple of notes.
Admittedly, I use cash much less than I used to. But it is still useful.
Then there are other use cases: people who use cash as they have problems controlling spending; people who do not want their controlling partners to see everything they have spent, etc, etc.
I am not *anti-cash*. I laid out a few areas where it is still useful. Your example of someone has got a few groceries I accept. But do you have cash to pay them? Do they have change to give you? As cash disappears it becomes just as likely that cash becomes more, not less, difficult.
An example. We have a chinese takeaway in the village who studiously refuse to get a card reader. The nearest cash machine is 5 miles away in the next village. So if we want to use them it takes planning. Because having ended up with notes sat in a wallet for literal months we just don't get cash out regularly any more - it is by exception.
Cash won't disappear and I don't want it to. But its utility is shrinking rapidly. When you understand that fiat money is a computer-created fiction anyway it seems archaic creating these tokens to represent something which is entirely digital.
TBF, you said: "Cash is being defended by three groups:", and then gave groups in a negative manner. My point is that cash is used, and needed, far wider than those three groups.
In fact, I'm amused that you wrote that post in such a manner. The people who primarily be using cash are the people I'd expect you to care about, and be concerned about, the most.
I will say this once more, and then leave it.
The key group who use and need cash are small businesses and their customers in poorer areas. Where margins are tight, the high fees charged for card machines and card transactions are literally the difference between solvency and closure. Although there are fees for banking in cash, they are (a) somewhat lower and (b) it's in your power to vary them by deciding how much cash you do and don't bank. You don't have that power with cards.
Banks and their apologists claim it is cheaper to use cards, but this is simply not true. It is cheaper for (1) people who pay large amounts every time, so it's a smaller percentage of the overall take and (2) large corporations including banks, who are deliberately running down their branch network to increase their profits and therefore want us all to pay by card.
Now I can understand why in London or Manchester, dominated by the big corps and with a high (extortionate, truthfully) cost of living, that means cash is no longer important.
That does not mean it is the case everywhere. Outside of major cities and tourist honeypots, where you can still get a decent meal for a fiver, insisting on card only would mean some businesses paying near 20% of turnover in card fees, instead of around 5% for cash banking fees. Which seems to me utterly unfair, ridiculous and in itself pretty well criminal.
And while I have no objection to people using cards to pay (I do it myself an awful lot) I cannot understand the mentality of people who say 'I find cash inconvenient in my particular circumstances, therefore everyone who uses it must be a criminal or a moron.' Which we see one particularly weird example of on this board.
If that person doesn't like that, that's his problem. But he should understand that his is playing the games of big businesses against ordinary people, out of selfishness.
I think you may be very out of date on card fees. Square charge 1.75% on contactless and inserted cards, so 9p rather than £1.
My information is from nine months ago. I do not think it is out of date.
Anyway, I suggest we leave this. It grew out of Anabobazina's decision to criticise somebody for not paying for a bus by smartphone in 2005. I don't see why we should pander (to link to my other pun) to his obsessions on the subject, particularly when it generates so much more heat than light.
Edit - incidentally I think the 1.75% is a fee to use the machine separate from bank fees, which is what I was referring to.
Again, I did not criticise him – you are making this up. It is a lie, and I have shown you why in an earlier post.
I merely asked@Sandpit when the incident occurred as you have been able to pay for a bus with your phone for several years now, and he replied "2005, and I noted his response by liking it.
Stop repeating this fiction.
It’s a while, since I travelled on the bus, and anyway I always use my bus pass, but I don’t recall ever seeing anybody paying on our service with a phone.
My pet hate on public transport is standing behind someone at the ticket barrier paying with their phone who only decides to open their app at the point they reach the barrier rather than having it ready. Or even worse, standing there looking through their bag for it. I still use an Oyster card because I need my phone free for reading PB.
You shouldn't need an app open? I generally make electonic payments with phone not card because I usually have my phone in my hand, and as long as it's unlocked the NFC reads for low-value payments no matter what is active on the phone.
FPT legal tender thing is largely a myth but I would be sad if cash ceased to be used.
For me it's a civil liberties issue. Why should the vendor know who I am when I buy something? A whiff of the officious and a step towards dystopia I think.
In the olden days I had always thought cash would be with us because of, among other things: on course betting, old people, people who don't have bank accounts, Poppy Day, blokes who do roof jobs at weekends, taxi drivers, small children, money laundering in suitcases, and, most of all, low level drug dealing - where especially neither the Revenue nor the police are especially welcomed into the information circle.
Now I am not so sure. OTOH Radio 4 still goes out on longwave and there are still cheques. What do people think? And how else can drug dealing be concealed? (Asking for a friend)
BBC Radio is an interesting example. Twenty years ago they were going to make us junk our old receivers and buy digital ones instead. But they relented after consumer resistance. Nowadays digital radio is a niche medium, about to be supplanted by the internet. Meanwhile, as you say, long wave keeps on rollin'.
Isn't the norm DAB for the car, Alexa for the home in terms of radio these days ?
One thing the NHS could do is immediately stop all prescriptions for paracetomol & ibuprofen. A (rather fed up) GP on the radio claimed the cost to the NHS of one of these prescriptions was ~ £20 a time !
Wtf? How have they managed that?
It is a perfect example of the fact that a nationalised system of healthcare is bureaucratic and inefficient. The Labour party has been trying to convince it's less well travelled and informed followers that the NHS is the "envy of the world". It never has been and never will be. That is why no other western country has tried to copy it.
That's an interesting way to describe the Tories. And Mr Streeting wouldn't agree.
I am sure I don't need to tell you that is what is called a political pivot. The Labour Party has been trying for years to convince us that all the NHS needs is more funding. It hosed money at it it in the Blair years and the improvements were marginal at best, but doctors benefited very nicely.
The reality is that the NHS is a nationalised industry run by vested interests in the interests, not of patients, but of the vested interests. The Labour Party set it up, convinced many people that it was "the envy of the world" (to the amusement of those with better systems) and continues to believe that all it really needs is more money, when in fact what it actually needs is to be broken up
But my point is that the Conservative Party has been claiming the same for the last decade and more, that hte world-beating NHS is safe with them etc etc. .
Who has got a world-beating health service?
I would say the Netherlands and Germany. Both have outstanding service that is free at the point of use and are funded by a mixture of public and private funds. Neither have attempted to copy the NHS nationalised model
You wonder why this government chooses to pick a fight with healthcare staff.
There is well over 1m of them, they cost a staggering sum of money, they want a lot more and they are not actually delivering as their productivity is seriously down post Covid is my starter for 10.
Of course, a lot of this is not their fault as @Foxy has explained. Incompetence, misallocation of resources and failures of management also play a major role. But these are inevitable in such a large organisation. We are spending more than ever on the NHS both in cash and real terms and yet the demand for private medicine is booming. It’s not a happy situation for anyone.
Again, perhaps they should pause and ask themselves why.
It is worth noting that this isn't just an issue in England either, so whatever the problems are (despite my disdain for the civil service) they are clearly deep-seated and will be hard to shift.
Oh yes, just as with education and indeed the Crown where I now work pointing to faults is dead easy but solutions are hard.
Sometimes, however, the only possible solution is picking some of the low hanging fruit and fixing immediate bottlenecks such as the HEE or Ofsted. If you wait for the perfect master plan you will wait for ever and, as we saw with the Lansley reforms, it may just create a whole new set of problems anyway.
Health in Scotland has grown from 7% of total GVA in 1998 to 12% in 2021.
It's pretty much the largest part of our economy now, depending on how you measure it. Everyone chats about demographics, but it's the non-demographic growth rate that is so scary.
Income effects? Chronic conditions? Technology? Productivity (Baumol)?
Edit: this isn't necessarily a bad thing - we we get richer, the more of the economy we should dedicate to improving health and wellbeing. This is the income effect. But still.
FPT legal tender thing is largely a myth but I would be sad if cash ceased to be used.
For me it's a civil liberties issue. Why should the vendor know who I am when I buy something? A whiff of the officious and a step towards dystopia I think.
It's more a convenience thing for the vendor.
With fewer and fewer bank branches open the average business now has to travel over 20 miles to their nearest branch.
With cards, just tap the PDQ machine at close of business and the money is in your account the next working day.
Where there is a niche in the market (in the UK) is for a ready cash card that requires neither credit check nor bank account. These are readily available in the US and other countries – the technology is there. Cashless is not perfect, but it is vastly superior to cash. Which is why cash is dying.
We need to prepare for it, and innovate to solve the snags of going cash-free, rather that kicking out at those people who are simply pointing out a very clear trend.
Tesco do this with Clubcard Pay+. Others are available.
The issue there is a rather unique one in the UK.
Here bank accounts are free but those cash cards charge a monthly fee.
Elsewhere bank accounts cost money to have so the cheaper cash accounts have a far bigger niche
Betting post. The election might be closer than the odds suggest ? Turkey elections - my sense is if Kilicdaroglu does not win in the first round, then it will be a real dogfight in the second round with the advantage moving to Erdogan. Ince vote clearly critical in first round for Kilicdaroglu. https://mobile.twitter.com/tashecon/status/1648942142759288835
Currently have a profit on my Kilicdaroglu bet, FWIW.
Anyway, I will spend the rest of the evening with my family.
Five years ago I got annoyed that London cabbies still only took cash and refused cards. I'm just arguing for choice.
Deeply odd how cash v. card has become such a fervent culture war issue. It's possibly fuelled by whichever group is detected to be largely on one side of it or not.
Sign of the times perhaps.
Cash is being defended by three groups: 1. Dodgy Traders who love cash as they don't pay tax on it. Have been quoted different amounts for work if I want an invoice for my company to pay vs cash. "Err, really?" 2. Nostalgia merchants who are still living pre-covid. My MIL who at Easter got arsey with wife because she wasn't carrying cash for a restaurant tip 3. People who want to withdraw lovely anonymous cash before buying something they don't want on a credit card statement.
As I understand it the old legal tender arguments went out with Covid. Its now legal not to take cash. When we get our shop open later in he summer I'm only planning to take cash because there are some elderly people and small kids who may want to use it.
For a business like ours cash is an absolute arse.
The only thing worse than cash is being given a cheque.
Cash is still useful. Some posters (and sadly, seemingly RP) look at their own lives and see no use for it: they seem not to understand that others *may* have use cases where cash is useful. It's particularly funny given that the people most against cash appear to be the left-leaning on here - who should allegedly care for those left behind in society...
As a small example: when we had covid recently, a friend got us a few groceries whilst we awaited a supermarket delivery. I paid him back yesterday, in cash. The alternatives would have been a cheque (inconvenient), or bank transfer (slightly awkward for such a small sum, esp. as I did not have his account set up). It was much easier to just walk over and hand over a couple of notes.
Admittedly, I use cash much less than I used to. But it is still useful.
Then there are other use cases: people who use cash as they have problems controlling spending; people who do not want their controlling partners to see everything they have spent, etc, etc.
I am not *anti-cash*. I laid out a few areas where it is still useful. Your example of someone has got a few groceries I accept. But do you have cash to pay them? Do they have change to give you? As cash disappears it becomes just as likely that cash becomes more, not less, difficult.
An example. We have a chinese takeaway in the village who studiously refuse to get a card reader. The nearest cash machine is 5 miles away in the next village. So if we want to use them it takes planning. Because having ended up with notes sat in a wallet for literal months we just don't get cash out regularly any more - it is by exception.
Cash won't disappear and I don't want it to. But its utility is shrinking rapidly. When you understand that fiat money is a computer-created fiction anyway it seems archaic creating these tokens to represent something which is entirely digital.
TBF, you said: "Cash is being defended by three groups:", and then gave groups in a negative manner. My point is that cash is used, and needed, far wider than those three groups.
In fact, I'm amused that you wrote that post in such a manner. The people who primarily be using cash are the people I'd expect you to care about, and be concerned about, the most.
I will say this once more, and then leave it.
The key group who use and need cash are small businesses and their customers in poorer areas. Where margins are tight, the high fees charged for card machines and card transactions are literally the difference between solvency and closure. Although there are fees for banking in cash, they are (a) somewhat lower and (b) it's in your power to vary them by deciding how much cash you do and don't bank. You don't have that power with cards.
Banks and their apologists claim it is cheaper to use cards, but this is simply not true. It is cheaper for (1) people who pay large amounts every time, so it's a smaller percentage of the overall take and (2) large corporations including banks, who are deliberately running down their branch network to increase their profits and therefore want us all to pay by card.
Now I can understand why in London or Manchester, dominated by the big corps and with a high (extortionate, truthfully) cost of living, that means cash is no longer important.
That does not mean it is the case everywhere. Outside of major cities and tourist honeypots, where you can still get a decent meal for a fiver, insisting on card only would mean some businesses paying near 20% of turnover in card fees, instead of around 5% for cash banking fees. Which seems to me utterly unfair, ridiculous and in itself pretty well criminal.
And while I have no objection to people using cards to pay (I do it myself an awful lot) I cannot understand the mentality of people who say 'I find cash inconvenient in my particular circumstances, therefore everyone who uses it must be a criminal or a moron.' Which we see one particularly weird example of on this board.
If that person doesn't like that, that's his problem. But he should understand that his is playing the games of big businesses against ordinary people, out of selfishness.
I think you may be very out of date on card fees. Square charge 1.75% on contactless and inserted cards, so 9p rather than £1.
My information is from nine months ago. I do not think it is out of date.
Anyway, I suggest we leave this. It grew out of Anabobazina's decision to criticise somebody for not paying for a bus by smartphone in 2005. I don't see why we should pander (to link to my other pun) to his obsessions on the subject, particularly when it generates so much more heat than light.
Edit - incidentally I think the 1.75% is a fee to use the machine separate from bank fees, which is what I was referring to.
Again, I did not criticise him – you are making this up. It is a lie, and I have shown you why in an earlier post.
I merely asked@Sandpit when the incident occurred as you have been able to pay for a bus with your phone for several years now, and he replied "2005, and I noted his response by liking it.
Stop repeating this fiction.
It’s a while, since I travelled on the bus, and anyway I always use my bus pass, but I don’t recall ever seeing anybody paying on our service with a phone.
My pet hate on public transport is standing behind someone at the ticket barrier paying with their phone who only decides to open their app at the point they reach the barrier rather than having it ready. Or even worse, standing there looking through their bag for it. I still use an Oyster card because I need my phone free for reading PB.
Weird as they don't need to open the app! It will do it automatically when they touch their phone to the reader!
Anyway, I will spend the rest of the evening with my family.
Five years ago I got annoyed that London cabbies still only took cash and refused cards. I'm just arguing for choice.
Deeply odd how cash v. card has become such a fervent culture war issue. It's possibly fuelled by whichever group is detected to be largely on one side of it or not.
Sign of the times perhaps.
Cash is being defended by three groups: 1. Dodgy Traders who love cash as they don't pay tax on it. Have been quoted different amounts for work if I want an invoice for my company to pay vs cash. "Err, really?" 2. Nostalgia merchants who are still living pre-covid. My MIL who at Easter got arsey with wife because she wasn't carrying cash for a restaurant tip 3. People who want to withdraw lovely anonymous cash before buying something they don't want on a credit card statement.
As I understand it the old legal tender arguments went out with Covid. Its now legal not to take cash. When we get our shop open later in he summer I'm only planning to take cash because there are some elderly people and small kids who may want to use it.
For a business like ours cash is an absolute arse.
The only thing worse than cash is being given a cheque.
Cash is still useful. Some posters (and sadly, seemingly RP) look at their own lives and see no use for it: they seem not to understand that others *may* have use cases where cash is useful. It's particularly funny given that the people most against cash appear to be the left-leaning on here - who should allegedly care for those left behind in society...
As a small example: when we had covid recently, a friend got us a few groceries whilst we awaited a supermarket delivery. I paid him back yesterday, in cash. The alternatives would have been a cheque (inconvenient), or bank transfer (slightly awkward for such a small sum, esp. as I did not have his account set up). It was much easier to just walk over and hand over a couple of notes.
Admittedly, I use cash much less than I used to. But it is still useful.
Then there are other use cases: people who use cash as they have problems controlling spending; people who do not want their controlling partners to see everything they have spent, etc, etc.
I am not *anti-cash*. I laid out a few areas where it is still useful. Your example of someone has got a few groceries I accept. But do you have cash to pay them? Do they have change to give you? As cash disappears it becomes just as likely that cash becomes more, not less, difficult.
An example. We have a chinese takeaway in the village who studiously refuse to get a card reader. The nearest cash machine is 5 miles away in the next village. So if we want to use them it takes planning. Because having ended up with notes sat in a wallet for literal months we just don't get cash out regularly any more - it is by exception.
Cash won't disappear and I don't want it to. But its utility is shrinking rapidly. When you understand that fiat money is a computer-created fiction anyway it seems archaic creating these tokens to represent something which is entirely digital.
TBF, you said: "Cash is being defended by three groups:", and then gave groups in a negative manner. My point is that cash is used, and needed, far wider than those three groups.
In fact, I'm amused that you wrote that post in such a manner. The people who primarily be using cash are the people I'd expect you to care about, and be concerned about, the most.
We've repeated these arguments over at least three threads now, and done the subject to death. No one has changed their position.
Can we give it a rest ?
Isn’t that the rule rather than the exception on here? Three threads is just getting started..
Anyway, I will spend the rest of the evening with my family.
Five years ago I got annoyed that London cabbies still only took cash and refused cards. I'm just arguing for choice.
Deeply odd how cash v. card has become such a fervent culture war issue. It's possibly fuelled by whichever group is detected to be largely on one side of it or not.
Sign of the times perhaps.
Cash is being defended by three groups: 1. Dodgy Traders who love cash as they don't pay tax on it. Have been quoted different amounts for work if I want an invoice for my company to pay vs cash. "Err, really?" 2. Nostalgia merchants who are still living pre-covid. My MIL who at Easter got arsey with wife because she wasn't carrying cash for a restaurant tip 3. People who want to withdraw lovely anonymous cash before buying something they don't want on a credit card statement.
As I understand it the old legal tender arguments went out with Covid. Its now legal not to take cash. When we get our shop open later in he summer I'm only planning to take cash because there are some elderly people and small kids who may want to use it.
For a business like ours cash is an absolute arse.
The only thing worse than cash is being given a cheque.
Cash is still useful. Some posters (and sadly, seemingly RP) look at their own lives and see no use for it: they seem not to understand that others *may* have use cases where cash is useful. It's particularly funny given that the people most against cash appear to be the left-leaning on here - who should allegedly care for those left behind in society...
As a small example: when we had covid recently, a friend got us a few groceries whilst we awaited a supermarket delivery. I paid him back yesterday, in cash. The alternatives would have been a cheque (inconvenient), or bank transfer (slightly awkward for such a small sum, esp. as I did not have his account set up). It was much easier to just walk over and hand over a couple of notes.
Admittedly, I use cash much less than I used to. But it is still useful.
Then there are other use cases: people who use cash as they have problems controlling spending; people who do not want their controlling partners to see everything they have spent, etc, etc.
I am not *anti-cash*. I laid out a few areas where it is still useful. Your example of someone has got a few groceries I accept. But do you have cash to pay them? Do they have change to give you? As cash disappears it becomes just as likely that cash becomes more, not less, difficult.
An example. We have a chinese takeaway in the village who studiously refuse to get a card reader. The nearest cash machine is 5 miles away in the next village. So if we want to use them it takes planning. Because having ended up with notes sat in a wallet for literal months we just don't get cash out regularly any more - it is by exception.
Cash won't disappear and I don't want it to. But its utility is shrinking rapidly. When you understand that fiat money is a computer-created fiction anyway it seems archaic creating these tokens to represent something which is entirely digital.
TBF, you said: "Cash is being defended by three groups:", and then gave groups in a negative manner. My point is that cash is used, and needed, far wider than those three groups.
In fact, I'm amused that you wrote that post in such a manner. The people who primarily be using cash are the people I'd expect you to care about, and be concerned about, the most.
I will say this once more, and then leave it.
The key group who use and need cash are small businesses and their customers in poorer areas. Where margins are tight, the high fees charged for card machines and card transactions are literally the difference between solvency and closure. Although there are fees for banking in cash, they are (a) somewhat lower and (b) it's in your power to vary them by deciding how much cash you do and don't bank. You don't have that power with cards.
Banks and their apologists claim it is cheaper to use cards, but this is simply not true. It is cheaper for (1) people who pay large amounts every time, so it's a smaller percentage of the overall take and (2) large corporations including banks, who are deliberately running down their branch network to increase their profits and therefore want us all to pay by card.
Now I can understand why in London or Manchester, dominated by the big corps and with a high (extortionate, truthfully) cost of living, that means cash is no longer important.
That does not mean it is the case everywhere. Outside of major cities and tourist honeypots, where you can still get a decent meal for a fiver, insisting on card only would mean some businesses paying near 20% of turnover in card fees, instead of around 5% for cash banking fees. Which seems to me utterly unfair, ridiculous and in itself pretty well criminal.
And while I have no objection to people using cards to pay (I do it myself an awful lot) I cannot understand the mentality of people who say 'I find cash inconvenient in my particular circumstances, therefore everyone who uses it must be a criminal or a moron.' Which we see one particularly weird example of on this board.
If that person doesn't like that, that's his problem. But he should understand that his is playing the games of big businesses against ordinary people, out of selfishness.
I think you may be very out of date on card fees. Square charge 1.75% on contactless and inserted cards, so 9p rather than £1.
My information is from nine months ago. I do not think it is out of date.
Anyway, I suggest we leave this. It grew out of Anabobazina's decision to criticise somebody for not paying for a bus by smartphone in 2005. I don't see why we should pander (to link to my other pun) to his obsessions on the subject, particularly when it generates so much more heat than light.
Edit - incidentally I think the 1.75% is a fee to use the machine separate from bank fees, which is what I was referring to.
Again, I did not criticise him – you are making this up. It is a lie, and I have shown you why in an earlier post.
I merely asked@Sandpit when the incident occurred as you have been able to pay for a bus with your phone for several years now, and he replied "2005, and I noted his response by liking it.
Stop repeating this fiction.
It’s a while, since I travelled on the bus, and anyway I always use my bus pass, but I don’t recall ever seeing anybody paying on our service with a phone.
My pet hate on public transport is standing behind someone at the ticket barrier paying with their phone who only decides to open their app at the point they reach the barrier rather than having it ready. Or even worse, standing there looking through their bag for it. I still use an Oyster card because I need my phone free for reading PB.
Do you need to open an app for the (underground?). Don't phones auto-nfc so long as it's set up ?
FPT legal tender thing is largely a myth but I would be sad if cash ceased to be used.
For me it's a civil liberties issue. Why should the vendor know who I am when I buy something? A whiff of the officious and a step towards dystopia I think.
In the olden days I had always thought cash would be with us because of, among other things: on course betting, old people, people who don't have bank accounts, Poppy Day, blokes who do roof jobs at weekends, taxi drivers, small children, money laundering in suitcases, and, most of all, low level drug dealing - where especially neither the Revenue nor the police are especially welcomed into the information circle.
Now I am not so sure. OTOH Radio 4 still goes out on longwave and there are still cheques. What do people think? And how else can drug dealing be concealed? (Asking for a friend)
Cheques that I get for refunds, small payments, and the like, and from the more bloody minded financial institutions, are easily dealt with - I have a Nationwide postal account to which I can send cheques for free, if it's not convenient to go to the bank, and then transfer money out online, at least to my other NW accounts.
Edit: they provide the forms and pre-post-paid envelopes.
I think you can actually just photograph the cheque on your banking app, and it instantly transfers, so it's not that much of an agg to cash them TBH, but would obviously be automatic if the payer just did the sensible thing and paid via BACS. Cheques are even more of a nonsense than cash in this day and age.
Occasional payments unlikely to be repeated - much less hassle for both sides than giving out BACS data and setting up the transfer, even if the security is now a bit better with recipient checking.
A classic context is winding up an estate - the deceased has lots of payments coming and the deceased's bank account won't do for this. Yet many of the payments come from firms who DGAF as it is no skin off their nose to have to worry about a BACS [edit] - no more custom, see. Anyone who has to act as an executor for an old relative and who doesn't want to pay a lawyer's firm a three figure sum per hour to do the routine work (as opposed to the real legal stuff, which does need paying for) will soon find that the ability to process cheques is vital. And the restrictions many banks have on executry accounts don't help.
One thing the NHS could do is immediately stop all prescriptions for paracetomol & ibuprofen. A (rather fed up) GP on the radio claimed the cost to the NHS of one of these prescriptions was ~ £20 a time !
Wtf? How have they managed that?
It is a perfect example of the fact that a nationalised system of healthcare is bureaucratic and inefficient. The Labour party has been trying to convince it's less well travelled and informed followers that the NHS is the "envy of the world". It never has been and never will be. That is why no other western country has tried to copy it.
That's an interesting way to describe the Tories. And Mr Streeting wouldn't agree.
I am sure I don't need to tell you that is what is called a political pivot. The Labour Party has been trying for years to convince us that all the NHS needs is more funding. It hosed money at it it in the Blair years and the improvements were marginal at best, but doctors benefited very nicely.
The reality is that the NHS is a nationalised industry run by vested interests in the interests, not of patients, but of the vested interests. The Labour Party set it up, convinced many people that it was "the envy of the world" (to the amusement of those with better systems) and continues to believe that all it really needs is more money, when in fact what it actually needs is to be broken up
But my point is that the Conservative Party has been claiming the same for the last decade and more.
I was once a Conservative activist (before the became the Brexit Party Lite) and I have never ever heard anyone claim that. It is a ludicrous claim. Maybe there was some stuff from David Cameron about how wonderful the NHS was/is, but I have never heard the "envy of the world" nonsense from a Conservative. Maybe I missed it?
Either way, whether Tory or Labour, you would have to be misinformed or alternatively as dishonest as an SNP executive to spout that nonsense.
This sort of thing: not verbatim, admittedly, but it does give a similar impression! (Not that you rate Mr J, of course.)
“We are making progress in this national battle because the British public formed a human shield around this country’s greatest national asset: our national health service,” Johnson said on Sunday, April 12, in his first address to the nation after being released from hospital earlier that day. “We will win because our NHS is the beating heart of this country, it is the best of this country. It is unconquerable. It is powered by love.”
Well he is a twat, and as usual sucking up to prevailing opinion of the masses rather than trying to be a proper leader. It is not powered by love. It is powered by billions of pounds of taxpayers money, huge amounts of which are slurped up by inefficiency and vested interests.
FPT legal tender thing is largely a myth but I would be sad if cash ceased to be used.
For me it's a civil liberties issue. Why should the vendor know who I am when I buy something? A whiff of the officious and a step towards dystopia I think.
In the olden days I had always thought cash would be with us because of, among other things: on course betting, old people, people who don't have bank accounts, Poppy Day, blokes who do roof jobs at weekends, taxi drivers, small children, money laundering in suitcases, and, most of all, low level drug dealing - where especially neither the Revenue nor the police are especially welcomed into the information circle.
Now I am not so sure. OTOH Radio 4 still goes out on longwave and there are still cheques. What do people think? And how else can drug dealing be concealed? (Asking for a friend)
BBC Radio is an interesting example. Twenty years ago they were going to make us junk our old receivers and buy digital ones instead. But they relented after consumer resistance. Nowadays digital radio is a niche medium, about to be supplanted by the internet. Meanwhile, as you say, long wave keeps on rollin'.
Isn't the norm DAB for the car, Alexa for the home in terms of radio these days ?
Rapidly being replaced by Internet streaming to the head unit.
FPT legal tender thing is largely a myth but I would be sad if cash ceased to be used.
For me it's a civil liberties issue. Why should the vendor know who I am when I buy something? A whiff of the officious and a step towards dystopia I think.
In the olden days I had always thought cash would be with us because of, among other things: on course betting, old people, people who don't have bank accounts, Poppy Day, blokes who do roof jobs at weekends, taxi drivers, small children, money laundering in suitcases, and, most of all, low level drug dealing - where especially neither the Revenue nor the police are especially welcomed into the information circle.
Now I am not so sure. OTOH Radio 4 still goes out on longwave and there are still cheques. What do people think? And how else can drug dealing be concealed? (Asking for a friend)
BBC Radio is an interesting example. Twenty years ago they were going to make us junk our old receivers and buy digital ones instead. But they relented after consumer resistance. Nowadays digital radio is a niche medium, about to be supplanted by the internet. Meanwhile, as you say, long wave keeps on rollin'.
Isn't the norm DAB for the car, Alexa for the home in terms of radio these days ?
Rapidly being replaced by Internet streaming to the head unit.
Only gammons like cash and analog radio.
On the other hand, teens and twentysomethings love analog tape, analogue records and analogue synthesizers. Not forgetting analogue mixing desks.
DAB was launched in 1995, nearly 30 years ago. It has had a good run. FWIW in my part of South of England it is more reliable than FM, AM and mobile streaming over 4G/3G.
FPT legal tender thing is largely a myth but I would be sad if cash ceased to be used.
For me it's a civil liberties issue. Why should the vendor know who I am when I buy something? A whiff of the officious and a step towards dystopia I think.
It's more a convenience thing for the vendor.
With fewer and fewer bank branches open the average business now has to travel over 20 miles to their nearest branch.
With cards, just tap the PDQ machine at close of business and the money is in your account the next working day.
Where there is a niche in the market (in the UK) is for a ready cash card that requires neither credit check nor bank account. These are readily available in the US and other countries – the technology is there. Cashless is not perfect, but it is vastly superior to cash. Which is why cash is dying.
We need to prepare for it, and innovate to solve the snags of going cash-free, rather that kicking out at those people who are simply pointing out a very clear trend.
Tesco do this with Clubcard Pay+. Others are available.
The issue there is a rather unique one in the UK.
Here bank accounts are free but those cash cards charge a monthly fee.
Elsewhere bank accounts cost money to have so the cheaper cash accounts have a far bigger niche
You would think there would be incentive enough for government funded (or operated, but then you get into the problem of government tracking you, which would put some off) cash cards. Afterall, the government funds the 'real' money system, printing notes and minting coins. Set up some standard rules and enable any registered provider to issue and administer cash cards. Payment to providers based on volume of transactions, say, covering the costs from the PoS providers (I assume this would piggy-back on existing card reader infrastructure) with some margin to cover provider running costs with profit.
True fact, the spec for FM radio was developed on the assumption that it would be received from fix antennae in the home, much as we receive TV. The fact it works out and about is remarkable.
Anyway, I will spend the rest of the evening with my family.
Five years ago I got annoyed that London cabbies still only took cash and refused cards. I'm just arguing for choice.
Deeply odd how cash v. card has become such a fervent culture war issue. It's possibly fuelled by whichever group is detected to be largely on one side of it or not.
Sign of the times perhaps.
Cash is being defended by three groups: 1. Dodgy Traders who love cash as they don't pay tax on it. Have been quoted different amounts for work if I want an invoice for my company to pay vs cash. "Err, really?" 2. Nostalgia merchants who are still living pre-covid. My MIL who at Easter got arsey with wife because she wasn't carrying cash for a restaurant tip 3. People who want to withdraw lovely anonymous cash before buying something they don't want on a credit card statement.
As I understand it the old legal tender arguments went out with Covid. Its now legal not to take cash. When we get our shop open later in he summer I'm only planning to take cash because there are some elderly people and small kids who may want to use it.
For a business like ours cash is an absolute arse.
The only thing worse than cash is being given a cheque.
Cash is still useful. Some posters (and sadly, seemingly RP) look at their own lives and see no use for it: they seem not to understand that others *may* have use cases where cash is useful. It's particularly funny given that the people most against cash appear to be the left-leaning on here - who should allegedly care for those left behind in society...
As a small example: when we had covid recently, a friend got us a few groceries whilst we awaited a supermarket delivery. I paid him back yesterday, in cash. The alternatives would have been a cheque (inconvenient), or bank transfer (slightly awkward for such a small sum, esp. as I did not have his account set up). It was much easier to just walk over and hand over a couple of notes.
Admittedly, I use cash much less than I used to. But it is still useful.
Then there are other use cases: people who use cash as they have problems controlling spending; people who do not want their controlling partners to see everything they have spent, etc, etc.
I am not *anti-cash*. I laid out a few areas where it is still useful. Your example of someone has got a few groceries I accept. But do you have cash to pay them? Do they have change to give you? As cash disappears it becomes just as likely that cash becomes more, not less, difficult.
An example. We have a chinese takeaway in the village who studiously refuse to get a card reader. The nearest cash machine is 5 miles away in the next village. So if we want to use them it takes planning. Because having ended up with notes sat in a wallet for literal months we just don't get cash out regularly any more - it is by exception.
Cash won't disappear and I don't want it to. But its utility is shrinking rapidly. When you understand that fiat money is a computer-created fiction anyway it seems archaic creating these tokens to represent something which is entirely digital.
TBF, you said: "Cash is being defended by three groups:", and then gave groups in a negative manner. My point is that cash is used, and needed, far wider than those three groups.
In fact, I'm amused that you wrote that post in such a manner. The people who primarily be using cash are the people I'd expect you to care about, and be concerned about, the most.
I will say this once more, and then leave it.
The key group who use and need cash are small businesses and their customers in poorer areas. Where margins are tight, the high fees charged for card machines and card transactions are literally the difference between solvency and closure. Although there are fees for banking in cash, they are (a) somewhat lower and (b) it's in your power to vary them by deciding how much cash you do and don't bank. You don't have that power with cards.
Banks and their apologists claim it is cheaper to use cards, but this is simply not true. It is cheaper for (1) people who pay large amounts every time, so it's a smaller percentage of the overall take and (2) large corporations including banks, who are deliberately running down their branch network to increase their profits and therefore want us all to pay by card.
Now I can understand why in London or Manchester, dominated by the big corps and with a high (extortionate, truthfully) cost of living, that means cash is no longer important.
That does not mean it is the case everywhere. Outside of major cities and tourist honeypots, where you can still get a decent meal for a fiver, insisting on card only would mean some businesses paying near 20% of turnover in card fees, instead of around 5% for cash banking fees. Which seems to me utterly unfair, ridiculous and in itself pretty well criminal.
And while I have no objection to people using cards to pay (I do it myself an awful lot) I cannot understand the mentality of people who say 'I find cash inconvenient in my particular circumstances, therefore everyone who uses it must be a criminal or a moron.' Which we see one particularly weird example of on this board.
If that person doesn't like that, that's his problem. But he should understand that his is playing the games of big businesses against ordinary people, out of selfishness.
I think you may be very out of date on card fees. Square charge 1.75% on contactless and inserted cards, so 9p rather than £1.
My information is from nine months ago. I do not think it is out of date.
Anyway, I suggest we leave this. It grew out of Anabobazina's decision to criticise somebody for not paying for a bus by smartphone in 2005. I don't see why we should pander (to link to my other pun) to his obsessions on the subject, particularly when it generates so much more heat than light.
Edit - incidentally I think the 1.75% is a fee to use the machine separate from bank fees, which is what I was referring to.
Again, I did not criticise him – you are making this up. It is a lie, and I have shown you why in an earlier post.
I merely asked@Sandpit when the incident occurred as you have been able to pay for a bus with your phone for several years now, and he replied "2005, and I noted his response by liking it.
Stop repeating this fiction.
It’s a while, since I travelled on the bus, and anyway I always use my bus pass, but I don’t recall ever seeing anybody paying on our service with a phone.
My pet hate on public transport is standing behind someone at the ticket barrier paying with their phone who only decides to open their app at the point they reach the barrier rather than having it ready. Or even worse, standing there looking through their bag for it. I still use an Oyster card because I need my phone free for reading PB.
Weird as they don't need to open the app! It will do it automatically when they touch their phone to the reader!
Whatever they're doing it takes a couple of seconds longer than tapping an Oyster card. With ten people in line in front of you that accumulates!
With stories like this it's small bleeding wonder things are in a mess.
Bad enough there aren't enough training places, worse that we can't even employ the ones we do train!
Worse still is that there are hundreds of vacant anaesthetic Consultant posts.
HEE (and its devolved equivalents) is a nightmare. Sorting it out would massively help Junior Doctors in their careers, improve retention and tackle backlogs.
Just read the comments by Juniors under this rather smug HEE tweet:
Will there training spaces for the "bump" in undergrads caused by the COVID/A Level/increased university entry issue?
In general, the conditions and career structure for medical staff appear to be constructed on the basis that "Beatings will continue until moral improves". Put up with terrible conditions and OKish pay until you break through into the sunny uplands of being Senior.
This is 19th cent thinking. It is completely unsurprising, to me, that people in the 21st cent are not massively enthused by this.
It is how things were done, historically. But times have changed.
FPT legal tender thing is largely a myth but I would be sad if cash ceased to be used.
For me it's a civil liberties issue. Why should the vendor know who I am when I buy something? A whiff of the officious and a step towards dystopia I think.
In the olden days I had always thought cash would be with us because of, among other things: on course betting, old people, people who don't have bank accounts, Poppy Day, blokes who do roof jobs at weekends, taxi drivers, small children, money laundering in suitcases, and, most of all, low level drug dealing - where especially neither the Revenue nor the police are especially welcomed into the information circle.
Now I am not so sure. OTOH Radio 4 still goes out on longwave and there are still cheques. What do people think? And how else can drug dealing be concealed? (Asking for a friend)
BBC Radio is an interesting example. Twenty years ago they were going to make us junk our old receivers and buy digital ones instead. But they relented after consumer resistance. Nowadays digital radio is a niche medium, about to be supplanted by the internet. Meanwhile, as you say, long wave keeps on rollin'.
Isn't the norm DAB for the car, Alexa for the home in terms of radio these days ?
Rapidly being replaced by Internet streaming to the head unit.
FPT legal tender thing is largely a myth but I would be sad if cash ceased to be used.
For me it's a civil liberties issue. Why should the vendor know who I am when I buy something? A whiff of the officious and a step towards dystopia I think.
In the olden days I had always thought cash would be with us because of, among other things: on course betting, old people, people who don't have bank accounts, Poppy Day, blokes who do roof jobs at weekends, taxi drivers, small children, money laundering in suitcases, and, most of all, low level drug dealing - where especially neither the Revenue nor the police are especially welcomed into the information circle.
Now I am not so sure. OTOH Radio 4 still goes out on longwave and there are still cheques. What do people think? And how else can drug dealing be concealed? (Asking for a friend)
Cheques that I get for refunds, small payments, and the like, and from the more bloody minded financial institutions, are easily dealt with - I have a Nationwide postal account to which I can send cheques for free, if it's not convenient to go to the bank, and then transfer money out online, at least to my other NW accounts.
Edit: they provide the forms and pre-post-paid envelopes.
I think you can actually just photograph the cheque on your banking app, and it instantly transfers, so it's not that much of an agg to cash them TBH, but would obviously be automatic if the payer just did the sensible thing and paid via BACS. Cheques are even more of a nonsense than cash in this day and age.
Occasional payments unlikely to be repeated - much less hassle for both sides than giving out BACS data and setting up the transfer, even if the security is now a bit better with recipient checking.
A classic context is winding up an estate - the deceased has lots of payments coming and the deceased's bank account won't do for this. Yet many of the payments come from firms who DGAF as it is no skin off their nose to have to worry about a BACS [edit] - no more custom, see. Anyone who has to act as an executor for an old relative and who doesn't want to pay a lawyer's firm a three figure sum per hour to do the routine work (as opposed to the real legal stuff, which does need paying for) will soon find that the ability to process cheques is vital. And the restrictions many banks have on executry accounts don't help.
For one off payments, there was a scheme to use phone numbers - I assume it still exists. I don't think I've ever used it myself though. Odd as it uses information you (mostly) already have. Could easily have been baked into mobile banking apps, using contacts info, but I've never come across an option for that.
FPT legal tender thing is largely a myth but I would be sad if cash ceased to be used.
For me it's a civil liberties issue. Why should the vendor know who I am when I buy something? A whiff of the officious and a step towards dystopia I think.
In the olden days I had always thought cash would be with us because of, among other things: on course betting, old people, people who don't have bank accounts, Poppy Day, blokes who do roof jobs at weekends, taxi drivers, small children, money laundering in suitcases, and, most of all, low level drug dealing - where especially neither the Revenue nor the police are especially welcomed into the information circle.
Now I am not so sure. OTOH Radio 4 still goes out on longwave and there are still cheques. What do people think? And how else can drug dealing be concealed? (Asking for a friend)
BBC Radio is an interesting example. Twenty years ago they were going to make us junk our old receivers and buy digital ones instead. But they relented after consumer resistance. Nowadays digital radio is a niche medium, about to be supplanted by the internet. Meanwhile, as you say, long wave keeps on rollin'.
Isn't the norm DAB for the car, Alexa for the home in terms of radio these days ?
It may be the norm andcI will not have aakexa...but It's worrying. I was talking to.my wife yesterday about a new dog bed and dog bed adverts started appearing.on my phone.. spooky or big brother...
As well as putting more funds into the NHS we need to ease the burden on it by encouraging those who can afford it to go private. In terms of Covid as long as we avoid any new vaccine immune variant it is over for now
The whole structure needs decentralising, particularly on the issue of salary scales. Each hospital trust should be considered a separate employer with absolute autonomy to set it's own pay rates. The unions, and particularly the BMA will never agree to this of course because it will reduce their ability to bring the system to its knees
Careful what you wish for.
One of the reasons train drivers are paid so well is that unions have been able to play one company off against another.
In a situation where there is an underlying shortage of qualified doctors, and you can't microwave new doctors into existence, the fact that the NHS is a near-monopoly employer could well be saving us all money.
According to papers held at Kew, since the creation of the NHS, in 1945, keeping the wage bill down has been a goal of successive governments.
Just as it was (and is) in every other nationalised industry.
What was fascinating was how rapidly socialists identified with the aims of employers, after they became the employers. People who had been leading trade unionists trying to hold down pay and conditions....
Anyway, I will spend the rest of the evening with my family.
Five years ago I got annoyed that London cabbies still only took cash and refused cards. I'm just arguing for choice.
Deeply odd how cash v. card has become such a fervent culture war issue. It's possibly fuelled by whichever group is detected to be largely on one side of it or not.
Sign of the times perhaps.
Cash is being defended by three groups: 1. Dodgy Traders who love cash as they don't pay tax on it. Have been quoted different amounts for work if I want an invoice for my company to pay vs cash. "Err, really?" 2. Nostalgia merchants who are still living pre-covid. My MIL who at Easter got arsey with wife because she wasn't carrying cash for a restaurant tip 3. People who want to withdraw lovely anonymous cash before buying something they don't want on a credit card statement.
As I understand it the old legal tender arguments went out with Covid. Its now legal not to take cash. When we get our shop open later in he summer I'm only planning to take cash because there are some elderly people and small kids who may want to use it.
For a business like ours cash is an absolute arse.
The only thing worse than cash is being given a cheque.
Cash is still useful. Some posters (and sadly, seemingly RP) look at their own lives and see no use for it: they seem not to understand that others *may* have use cases where cash is useful. It's particularly funny given that the people most against cash appear to be the left-leaning on here - who should allegedly care for those left behind in society...
As a small example: when we had covid recently, a friend got us a few groceries whilst we awaited a supermarket delivery. I paid him back yesterday, in cash. The alternatives would have been a cheque (inconvenient), or bank transfer (slightly awkward for such a small sum, esp. as I did not have his account set up). It was much easier to just walk over and hand over a couple of notes.
Admittedly, I use cash much less than I used to. But it is still useful.
Then there are other use cases: people who use cash as they have problems controlling spending; people who do not want their controlling partners to see everything they have spent, etc, etc.
I am not *anti-cash*. I laid out a few areas where it is still useful. Your example of someone has got a few groceries I accept. But do you have cash to pay them? Do they have change to give you? As cash disappears it becomes just as likely that cash becomes more, not less, difficult.
An example. We have a chinese takeaway in the village who studiously refuse to get a card reader. The nearest cash machine is 5 miles away in the next village. So if we want to use them it takes planning. Because having ended up with notes sat in a wallet for literal months we just don't get cash out regularly any more - it is by exception.
Cash won't disappear and I don't want it to. But its utility is shrinking rapidly. When you understand that fiat money is a computer-created fiction anyway it seems archaic creating these tokens to represent something which is entirely digital.
TBF, you said: "Cash is being defended by three groups:", and then gave groups in a negative manner. My point is that cash is used, and needed, far wider than those three groups.
In fact, I'm amused that you wrote that post in such a manner. The people who primarily be using cash are the people I'd expect you to care about, and be concerned about, the most.
I will say this once more, and then leave it.
The key group who use and need cash are small businesses and their customers in poorer areas. Where margins are tight, the high fees charged for card machines and card transactions are literally the difference between solvency and closure. Although there are fees for banking in cash, they are (a) somewhat lower and (b) it's in your power to vary them by deciding how much cash you do and don't bank. You don't have that power with cards.
Banks and their apologists claim it is cheaper to use cards, but this is simply not true. It is cheaper for (1) people who pay large amounts every time, so it's a smaller percentage of the overall take and (2) large corporations including banks, who are deliberately running down their branch network to increase their profits and therefore want us all to pay by card.
Now I can understand why in London or Manchester, dominated by the big corps and with a high (extortionate, truthfully) cost of living, that means cash is no longer important.
That does not mean it is the case everywhere. Outside of major cities and tourist honeypots, where you can still get a decent meal for a fiver, insisting on card only would mean some businesses paying near 20% of turnover in card fees, instead of around 5% for cash banking fees. Which seems to me utterly unfair, ridiculous and in itself pretty well criminal.
And while I have no objection to people using cards to pay (I do it myself an awful lot) I cannot understand the mentality of people who say 'I find cash inconvenient in my particular circumstances, therefore everyone who uses it must be a criminal or a moron.' Which we see one particularly weird example of on this board.
If that person doesn't like that, that's his problem. But he should understand that his is playing the games of big businesses against ordinary people, out of selfishness.
I think you may be very out of date on card fees. Square charge 1.75% on contactless and inserted cards, so 9p rather than £1.
My information is from nine months ago. I do not think it is out of date.
Anyway, I suggest we leave this. It grew out of Anabobazina's decision to criticise somebody for not paying for a bus by smartphone in 2005. I don't see why we should pander (to link to my other pun) to his obsessions on the subject, particularly when it generates so much more heat than light.
Edit - incidentally I think the 1.75% is a fee to use the machine separate from bank fees, which is what I was referring to.
Again, I did not criticise him – you are making this up. It is a lie, and I have shown you why in an earlier post.
I merely asked@Sandpit when the incident occurred as you have been able to pay for a bus with your phone for several years now, and he replied "2005, and I noted his response by liking it.
Stop repeating this fiction.
It’s a while, since I travelled on the bus, and anyway I always use my bus pass, but I don’t recall ever seeing anybody paying on our service with a phone.
My pet hate on public transport is standing behind someone at the ticket barrier paying with their phone who only decides to open their app at the point they reach the barrier rather than having it ready. Or even worse, standing there looking through their bag for it. I still use an Oyster card because I need my phone free for reading PB.
Weird as they don't need to open the app! It will do it automatically when they touch their phone to the reader!
Whatever they're doing it takes a couple of seconds longer than tapping an Oyster card. With ten people in line in front of you that accumulates!
Debit cards and phone payments take longer than Oyster cards because on the latter the reader just communicates with the card - with the former it checks a central database. The trick is to reach forward so the card/phone reads while your'e still moving towards the gate, if you can time it right you don't need to stop. But it's not easy.
DAB was launched in 1995, nearly 30 years ago. It has had a good run. FWIW in my part of South of England it is more reliable than FM, AM and mobile streaming over 4G/3G.
For any radio format you can add a decade or so as 'legacy' because people don't typically drive a new car.
Anyway, I will spend the rest of the evening with my family.
Five years ago I got annoyed that London cabbies still only took cash and refused cards. I'm just arguing for choice.
Deeply odd how cash v. card has become such a fervent culture war issue. It's possibly fuelled by whichever group is detected to be largely on one side of it or not.
Sign of the times perhaps.
Cash is being defended by three groups: 1. Dodgy Traders who love cash as they don't pay tax on it. Have been quoted different amounts for work if I want an invoice for my company to pay vs cash. "Err, really?" 2. Nostalgia merchants who are still living pre-covid. My MIL who at Easter got arsey with wife because she wasn't carrying cash for a restaurant tip 3. People who want to withdraw lovely anonymous cash before buying something they don't want on a credit card statement.
As I understand it the old legal tender arguments went out with Covid. Its now legal not to take cash. When we get our shop open later in he summer I'm only planning to take cash because there are some elderly people and small kids who may want to use it. I know people For a business like ours cash is an absolute arse.
The only thing worse than cash is being given a cheque.
Cash is still useful. Some posters (and sadly, seemingly RP) look at their own lives and see no use for it: they seem not to understand that others *may* have use cases where cash is useful. It's particularly funny given that the people most against cash appear to be the left-leaning on here - who should allegedly care for those left behind in society...
As a small example: when we had covid recently, a friend got us a few groceries whilst we awaited a supermarket delivery. I paid him back yesterday, in cash. The alternatives would have been a cheque (inconvenient), or bank transfer (slightly awkward for such a small sum, esp. as I did not have his account set up). It was much easier to just walk over and hand over a couple of notes.
Admittedly, I use cash much less than I used to. But it is still useful.
Then there are other use cases: people who use cash as they have problems controlling spending; people who do not want their controlling partners to see everything they have spent, etc, etc.
I am not *anti-cash*. I laid out a few areas where it is still useful. Your example of someone has got a few groceries I accept. But do you have cash to pay them? Do they have change to give you? As cash disappears it becomes just as likely that cash becomes more, not less, difficult.
An example. We have a chinese takeaway in the village who studiously refuse to get a card reader. The nearest cash machine is 5 miles away in the next village. So if we want to use them it takes planning. Because having ended up with notes sat in a wallet for literal months we just don't get cash out regularly any more - it is by exception.
Cash won't disappear and I don't want it to. But its utility is shrinking rapidly. When you understand that fiat money is a computer-created fiction anyway it seems archaic creating these tokens to represent something which is entirely digital.
TBF, you said: "Cash is being defended by three groups:", and then gave groups in a negative manner. My point is that cash is used, and needed, far wider than those three groups.
In fact, I'm amused that you wrote that post in such a manner. The people who primarily be using cash are the people I'd expect you to care about, and be concerned about, the most.
The example you give fits one of the groups I described - nostalgia merchants.
Bit presumptive to describe who I am concerned about. My dad is about as tech-phobic as you can get. He is a classic cash nostalgia person, but even he now does online shopping. Took some doing but they can now do a shop without having to physically go. For someone who was adamant that he'd get robbed online its real progress.
Is caring for my parents enabling them to be able to have shopping delivered? Or pandering to his cash is king nostalgia so they can't...?
I know people want this dropped, but if you think the example I gave was one of "nostalgia merchants", then you either did not read what I wrote, or are trolling.
If you cared for people "left behind", then you wouldn't be quite so dismissive or condemnatory of users of cash.
This is beyond the debate about cash, this is about access to the modern world. Like it or not, technology has evolved at whirlwind pace. *everything* is now online, so we need to be helping people gain access.
You used cash as an example and I respect that. I could also have raised access to council services, to the tax man, to banking or services. Even when there is a paper form it gets scanned and uploaded. A bigger risk of error having to faff around uploading paper forms than there is just doing the online one.
Some people will resist modernity because they dislike change - hence my "nostalgia merchants" label. Sometimes for ideological stubbornness reasons. Sometimes because they don't understand it. Sometimes because circumstance means they don't have access to it.
Making 2023 accessible to all is the challenge. Cash is just one part of this broader issue.
FPT legal tender thing is largely a myth but I would be sad if cash ceased to be used.
For me it's a civil liberties issue. Why should the vendor know who I am when I buy something? A whiff of the officious and a step towards dystopia I think.
In the olden days I had always thought cash would be with us because of, among other things: on course betting, old people, people who don't have bank accounts, Poppy Day, blokes who do roof jobs at weekends, taxi drivers, small children, money laundering in suitcases, and, most of all, low level drug dealing - where especially neither the Revenue nor the police are especially welcomed into the information circle.
Now I am not so sure. OTOH Radio 4 still goes out on longwave and there are still cheques. What do people think? And how else can drug dealing be concealed? (Asking for a friend)
BBC Radio is an interesting example. Twenty years ago they were going to make us junk our old receivers and buy digital ones instead. But they relented after consumer resistance. Nowadays digital radio is a niche medium, about to be supplanted by the internet. Meanwhile, as you say, long wave keeps on rollin'.
Isn't the norm DAB for the car, Alexa for the home in terms of radio these days ?
It may be the norm andcI will not have aakexa...but It's worrying. I was talking to.my wife yesterday about a new dog bed and dog bed adverts started appearing.on my phone.. spooky or big brother...
Big Brother. I thought by now everyone knows that your phone listens to you all the time for advertising.
FPT legal tender thing is largely a myth but I would be sad if cash ceased to be used.
For me it's a civil liberties issue. Why should the vendor know who I am when I buy something? A whiff of the officious and a step towards dystopia I think.
In the olden days I had always thought cash would be with us because of, among other things: on course betting, old people, people who don't have bank accounts, Poppy Day, blokes who do roof jobs at weekends, taxi drivers, small children, money laundering in suitcases, and, most of all, low level drug dealing - where especially neither the Revenue nor the police are especially welcomed into the information circle.
Now I am not so sure. OTOH Radio 4 still goes out on longwave and there are still cheques. What do people think? And how else can drug dealing be concealed? (Asking for a friend)
BBC Radio is an interesting example. Twenty years ago they were going to make us junk our old receivers and buy digital ones instead. But they relented after consumer resistance. Nowadays digital radio is a niche medium, about to be supplanted by the internet. Meanwhile, as you say, long wave keeps on rollin'.
Isn't the norm DAB for the car, Alexa for the home in terms of radio these days ?
Rapidly being replaced by Internet streaming to the head unit.
Only gammons like cash and analog radio.
Only gammons support Russia's invasion of Ukraine...
Anyway, I will spend the rest of the evening with my family.
Five years ago I got annoyed that London cabbies still only took cash and refused cards. I'm just arguing for choice.
Deeply odd how cash v. card has become such a fervent culture war issue. It's possibly fuelled by whichever group is detected to be largely on one side of it or not.
Sign of the times perhaps.
Cash is being defended by three groups: 1. Dodgy Traders who love cash as they don't pay tax on it. Have been quoted different amounts for work if I want an invoice for my company to pay vs cash. "Err, really?" 2. Nostalgia merchants who are still living pre-covid. My MIL who at Easter got arsey with wife because she wasn't carrying cash for a restaurant tip 3. People who want to withdraw lovely anonymous cash before buying something they don't want on a credit card statement.
As I understand it the old legal tender arguments went out with Covid. Its now legal not to take cash. When we get our shop open later in he summer I'm only planning to take cash because there are some elderly people and small kids who may want to use it.
For a business like ours cash is an absolute arse.
The only thing worse than cash is being given a cheque.
Cash is still useful. Some posters (and sadly, seemingly RP) look at their own lives and see no use for it: they seem not to understand that others *may* have use cases where cash is useful. It's particularly funny given that the people most against cash appear to be the left-leaning on here - who should allegedly care for those left behind in society...
As a small example: when we had covid recently, a friend got us a few groceries whilst we awaited a supermarket delivery. I paid him back yesterday, in cash. The alternatives would have been a cheque (inconvenient), or bank transfer (slightly awkward for such a small sum, esp. as I did not have his account set up). It was much easier to just walk over and hand over a couple of notes.
Admittedly, I use cash much less than I used to. But it is still useful.
Then there are other use cases: people who use cash as they have problems controlling spending; people who do not want their controlling partners to see everything they have spent, etc, etc.
I am not *anti-cash*. I laid out a few areas where it is still useful. Your example of someone has got a few groceries I accept. But do you have cash to pay them? Do they have change to give you? As cash disappears it becomes just as likely that cash becomes more, not less, difficult.
An example. We have a chinese takeaway in the village who studiously refuse to get a card reader. The nearest cash machine is 5 miles away in the next village. So if we want to use them it takes planning. Because having ended up with notes sat in a wallet for literal months we just don't get cash out regularly any more - it is by exception.
Cash won't disappear and I don't want it to. But its utility is shrinking rapidly. When you understand that fiat money is a computer-created fiction anyway it seems archaic creating these tokens to represent something which is entirely digital.
TBF, you said: "Cash is being defended by three groups:", and then gave groups in a negative manner. My point is that cash is used, and needed, far wider than those three groups.
In fact, I'm amused that you wrote that post in such a manner. The people who primarily be using cash are the people I'd expect you to care about, and be concerned about, the most.
I will say this once more, and then leave it.
The key group who use and need cash are small businesses and their customers in poorer areas. Where margins are tight, the high fees charged for card machines and card transactions are literally the difference between solvency and closure. Although there are fees for banking in cash, they are (a) somewhat lower and (b) it's in your power to vary them by deciding how much cash you do and don't bank. You don't have that power with cards.
Banks and their apologists claim it is cheaper to use cards, but this is simply not true. It is cheaper for (1) people who pay large amounts every time, so it's a smaller percentage of the overall take and (2) large corporations including banks, who are deliberately running down their branch network to increase their profits and therefore want us all to pay by card.
Now I can understand why in London or Manchester, dominated by the big corps and with a high (extortionate, truthfully) cost of living, that means cash is no longer important.
That does not mean it is the case everywhere. Outside of major cities and tourist honeypots, where you can still get a decent meal for a fiver, insisting on card only would mean some businesses paying near 20% of turnover in card fees, instead of around 5% for cash banking fees. Which seems to me utterly unfair, ridiculous and in itself pretty well criminal.
And while I have no objection to people using cards to pay (I do it myself an awful lot) I cannot understand the mentality of people who say 'I find cash inconvenient in my particular circumstances, therefore everyone who uses it must be a criminal or a moron.' Which we see one particularly weird example of on this board.
If that person doesn't like that, that's his problem. But he should understand that his is playing the games of big businesses against ordinary people, out of selfishness.
I think you may be very out of date on card fees. Square charge 1.75% on contactless and inserted cards, so 9p rather than £1.
My information is from nine months ago. I do not think it is out of date.
Anyway, I suggest we leave this. It grew out of Anabobazina's decision to criticise somebody for not paying for a bus by smartphone in 2005. I don't see why we should pander (to link to my other pun) to his obsessions on the subject, particularly when it generates so much more heat than light.
Edit - incidentally I think the 1.75% is a fee to use the machine separate from bank fees, which is what I was referring to.
Again, I did not criticise him – you are making this up. It is a lie, and I have shown you why in an earlier post.
I merely asked@Sandpit when the incident occurred as you have been able to pay for a bus with your phone for several years now, and he replied "2005, and I noted his response by liking it.
Stop repeating this fiction.
It’s a while, since I travelled on the bus, and anyway I always use my bus pass, but I don’t recall ever seeing anybody paying on our service with a phone.
My pet hate on public transport is standing behind someone at the ticket barrier paying with their phone who only decides to open their app at the point they reach the barrier rather than having it ready. Or even worse, standing there looking through their bag for it. I still use an Oyster card because I need my phone free for reading PB.
Weird as they don't need to open the app! It will do it automatically when they touch their phone to the reader!
Whatever they're doing it takes a couple of seconds longer than tapping an Oyster card. With ten people in line in front of you that accumulates!
On the card fees - they are largely a rip off and are being eroded by new entrants into the market for payment provision.
On the TfL system - then annoying thing is that despite promoting using contactless card/phones, they haven't full integrated season tickets, multiple cards etc with an account.
With stories like this it's small bleeding wonder things are in a mess.
Bad enough there aren't enough training places, worse that we can't even employ the ones we do train!
Worse still is that there are hundreds of vacant anaesthetic Consultant posts.
HEE (and its devolved equivalents) is a nightmare. Sorting it out would massively help Junior Doctors in their careers, improve retention and tackle backlogs.
Just read the comments by Juniors under this rather smug HEE tweet:
Will there training spaces for the "bump" in undergrads caused by the COVID/A Level/increased university entry issue?
In general, the conditions and career structure for medical staff appear to be constructed on the basis that "Beatings will continue until moral improves". Put up with terrible conditions and OKish pay until you break through into the sunny uplands of being Senior.
This is 19th cent thinking. It is completely unsurprising, to me, that people in the 21st cent are not massively enthused by this.
It is how things were done, historically. But times have changed.
And other countries have discovered that they can get UK educated Medical staff but merely offering 20th century working standards and a tiny bit more money.
Anyway, I will spend the rest of the evening with my family.
Five years ago I got annoyed that London cabbies still only took cash and refused cards. I'm just arguing for choice.
Deeply odd how cash v. card has become such a fervent culture war issue. It's possibly fuelled by whichever group is detected to be largely on one side of it or not.
Sign of the times perhaps.
Cash is being defended by three groups: 1. Dodgy Traders who love cash as they don't pay tax on it. Have been quoted different amounts for work if I want an invoice for my company to pay vs cash. "Err, really?" 2. Nostalgia merchants who are still living pre-covid. My MIL who at Easter got arsey with wife because she wasn't carrying cash for a restaurant tip 3. People who want to withdraw lovely anonymous cash before buying something they don't want on a credit card statement.
As I understand it the old legal tender arguments went out with Covid. Its now legal not to take cash. When we get our shop open later in he summer I'm only planning to take cash because there are some elderly people and small kids who may want to use it.
For a business like ours cash is an absolute arse.
The only thing worse than cash is being given a cheque.
Cash is still useful. Some posters (and sadly, seemingly RP) look at their own lives and see no use for it: they seem not to understand that others *may* have use cases where cash is useful. It's particularly funny given that the people most against cash appear to be the left-leaning on here - who should allegedly care for those left behind in society...
As a small example: when we had covid recently, a friend got us a few groceries whilst we awaited a supermarket delivery. I paid him back yesterday, in cash. The alternatives would have been a cheque (inconvenient), or bank transfer (slightly awkward for such a small sum, esp. as I did not have his account set up). It was much easier to just walk over and hand over a couple of notes.
Admittedly, I use cash much less than I used to. But it is still useful.
Then there are other use cases: people who use cash as they have problems controlling spending; people who do not want their controlling partners to see everything they have spent, etc, etc.
I am not *anti-cash*. I laid out a few areas where it is still useful. Your example of someone has got a few groceries I accept. But do you have cash to pay them? Do they have change to give you? As cash disappears it becomes just as likely that cash becomes more, not less, difficult.
An example. We have a chinese takeaway in the village who studiously refuse to get a card reader. The nearest cash machine is 5 miles away in the next village. So if we want to use them it takes planning. Because having ended up with notes sat in a wallet for literal months we just don't get cash out regularly any more - it is by exception.
Cash won't disappear and I don't want it to. But its utility is shrinking rapidly. When you understand that fiat money is a computer-created fiction anyway it seems archaic creating these tokens to represent something which is entirely digital.
TBF, you said: "Cash is being defended by three groups:", and then gave groups in a negative manner. My point is that cash is used, and needed, far wider than those three groups.
In fact, I'm amused that you wrote that post in such a manner. The people who primarily be using cash are the people I'd expect you to care about, and be concerned about, the most.
I will say this once more, and then leave it.
The key group who use and need cash are small businesses and their customers in poorer areas. Where margins are tight, the high fees charged for card machines and card transactions are literally the difference between solvency and closure. Although there are fees for banking in cash, they are (a) somewhat lower and (b) it's in your power to vary them by deciding how much cash you do and don't bank. You don't have that power with cards.
Banks and their apologists claim it is cheaper to use cards, but this is simply not true. It is cheaper for (1) people who pay large amounts every time, so it's a smaller percentage of the overall take and (2) large corporations including banks, who are deliberately running down their branch network to increase their profits and therefore want us all to pay by card.
Now I can understand why in London or Manchester, dominated by the big corps and with a high (extortionate, truthfully) cost of living, that means cash is no longer important.
That does not mean it is the case everywhere. Outside of major cities and tourist honeypots, where you can still get a decent meal for a fiver, insisting on card only would mean some businesses paying near 20% of turnover in card fees, instead of around 5% for cash banking fees. Which seems to me utterly unfair, ridiculous and in itself pretty well criminal.
And while I have no objection to people using cards to pay (I do it myself an awful lot) I cannot understand the mentality of people who say 'I find cash inconvenient in my particular circumstances, therefore everyone who uses it must be a criminal or a moron.' Which we see one particularly weird example of on this board.
If that person doesn't like that, that's his problem. But he should understand that his is playing the games of big businesses against ordinary people, out of selfishness.
I think you may be very out of date on card fees. Square charge 1.75% on contactless and inserted cards, so 9p rather than £1.
My information is from nine months ago. I do not think it is out of date.
Anyway, I suggest we leave this. It grew out of Anabobazina's decision to criticise somebody for not paying for a bus by smartphone in 2005. I don't see why we should pander (to link to my other pun) to his obsessions on the subject, particularly when it generates so much more heat than light.
Edit - incidentally I think the 1.75% is a fee to use the machine separate from bank fees, which is what I was referring to.
Again, I did not criticise him – you are making this up. It is a lie, and I have shown you why in an earlier post.
I merely asked@Sandpit when the incident occurred as you have been able to pay for a bus with your phone for several years now, and he replied "2005, and I noted his response by liking it.
Stop repeating this fiction.
It’s a while, since I travelled on the bus, and anyway I always use my bus pass, but I don’t recall ever seeing anybody paying on our service with a phone.
My pet hate on public transport is standing behind someone at the ticket barrier paying with their phone who only decides to open their app at the point they reach the barrier rather than having it ready. Or even worse, standing there looking through their bag for it. I still use an Oyster card because I need my phone free for reading PB.
Weird as they don't need to open the app! It will do it automatically when they touch their phone to the reader!
Whatever they're doing it takes a couple of seconds longer than tapping an Oyster card. With ten people in line in front of you that accumulates!
Debit cards and phone payments take longer than Oyster cards because on the latter the reader just communicates with the card - with the former it checks a central database. The trick is to reach forward so the card/phone reads while your'e still moving towards the gate, if you can time it right you don't need to stop. But it's not easy.
Yes that is what I've noticed, I definitely get through quicker with Oyster than with a payment card or phone. And it seems to me that for whatever reason the phone takes slightly longer than a payment card. I'm happy to stick with Oyster, it's in the back of my wallet and on auto top up. It's annoying being held up a few seconds each time by other commuters though. I'm a Londoner - don't hold me up be a couple of seconds!
"One thing I am confident predicting about the next general election, Labour will use posters which will say ‘X days to save the NHS.’"
One thing I am now confident of post the Covid pandemic, this is a Labour campaign scare tactic which has finally run out of credible legs even at election time. Yes, we still face incredible challenging times in the NHS with longer waiting lists and a continued shortage of staff in the aftermath of the Covid pandemic, and now even more delays and chaos due to the uncertainty of further NHS strike action by doctors and nurses.
But the idea that we now have 'X days to save the NHS' after we built those Nightingale Hospitals that were never used on the back of very real and serious concerns that the Covid pandemic could totally overwhelm the NHS's critical care capacity have now been finally debunked. Put out campaign ads highlighting the creaking strain the current NHS is under and how you aim to improve it. But instead of the old empty scare tactics of previous elections, opt for the safety of promises to do something about cutting waiting times by brushing the dust off those empty Labour waiting time targets that always redirect the focus of these problems without actually fixing them....
Anyway, I will spend the rest of the evening with my family.
Five years ago I got annoyed that London cabbies still only took cash and refused cards. I'm just arguing for choice.
Deeply odd how cash v. card has become such a fervent culture war issue. It's possibly fuelled by whichever group is detected to be largely on one side of it or not.
Sign of the times perhaps.
Cash is being defended by three groups: 1. Dodgy Traders who love cash as they don't pay tax on it. Have been quoted different amounts for work if I want an invoice for my company to pay vs cash. "Err, really?" 2. Nostalgia merchants who are still living pre-covid. My MIL who at Easter got arsey with wife because she wasn't carrying cash for a restaurant tip 3. People who want to withdraw lovely anonymous cash before buying something they don't want on a credit card statement.
As I understand it the old legal tender arguments went out with Covid. Its now legal not to take cash. When we get our shop open later in he summer I'm only planning to take cash because there are some elderly people and small kids who may want to use it. I know people For a business like ours cash is an absolute arse.
The only thing worse than cash is being given a cheque.
Cash is still useful. Some posters (and sadly, seemingly RP) look at their own lives and see no use for it: they seem not to understand that others *may* have use cases where cash is useful. It's particularly funny given that the people most against cash appear to be the left-leaning on here - who should allegedly care for those left behind in society...
As a small example: when we had covid recently, a friend got us a few groceries whilst we awaited a supermarket delivery. I paid him back yesterday, in cash. The alternatives would have been a cheque (inconvenient), or bank transfer (slightly awkward for such a small sum, esp. as I did not have his account set up). It was much easier to just walk over and hand over a couple of notes.
Admittedly, I use cash much less than I used to. But it is still useful.
Then there are other use cases: people who use cash as they have problems controlling spending; people who do not want their controlling partners to see everything they have spent, etc, etc.
I am not *anti-cash*. I laid out a few areas where it is still useful. Your example of someone has got a few groceries I accept. But do you have cash to pay them? Do they have change to give you? As cash disappears it becomes just as likely that cash becomes more, not less, difficult.
An example. We have a chinese takeaway in the village who studiously refuse to get a card reader. The nearest cash machine is 5 miles away in the next village. So if we want to use them it takes planning. Because having ended up with notes sat in a wallet for literal months we just don't get cash out regularly any more - it is by exception.
Cash won't disappear and I don't want it to. But its utility is shrinking rapidly. When you understand that fiat money is a computer-created fiction anyway it seems archaic creating these tokens to represent something which is entirely digital.
TBF, you said: "Cash is being defended by three groups:", and then gave groups in a negative manner. My point is that cash is used, and needed, far wider than those three groups.
In fact, I'm amused that you wrote that post in such a manner. The people who primarily be using cash are the people I'd expect you to care about, and be concerned about, the most.
The example you give fits one of the groups I described - nostalgia merchants.
Bit presumptive to describe who I am concerned about. My dad is about as tech-phobic as you can get. He is a classic cash nostalgia person, but even he now does online shopping. Took some doing but they can now do a shop without having to physically go. For someone who was adamant that he'd get robbed online its real progress.
Is caring for my parents enabling them to be able to have shopping delivered? Or pandering to his cash is king nostalgia so they can't...?
I know people want this dropped, but if you think the example I gave was one of "nostalgia merchants", then you either did not read what I wrote, or are trolling.
If you cared for people "left behind", then you wouldn't be quite so dismissive or condemnatory of users of cash.
This is beyond the debate about cash, this is about access to the modern world. Like it or not, technology has evolved at whirlwind pace. *everything* is now online, so we need to be helping people gain access.
You used cash as an example and I respect that. I could also have raised access to council services, to the tax man, to banking or services. Even when there is a paper form it gets scanned and uploaded. A bigger risk of error having to faff around uploading paper forms than there is just doing the online one.
Some people will resist modernity because they dislike change - hence my "nostalgia merchants" label. Sometimes for ideological stubbornness reasons. Sometimes because they don't understand it. Sometimes because circumstance means they don't have access to it.
Making 2023 accessible to all is the challenge. Cash is just one part of this broader issue.
Although I would broadly describe myself as progressive, I have to say that my own view would be that not all resistance to change is irrational.
Digital technology has brought immense benefits in communication, and is part of all our lives whether we like ir or not ; people also need to keep up with it to stay in touch with to stay in touch with the modern world, and this particularly applies to older people.
There are drawbacks though, which interestingly the youngest nowadays seem to be most aware of ; in digital sound and photography, there are aesthetic question marks and potential pitfalls compared to the original forms, and secondly the data connectivity of everything nowadays presents immense privacy and civil liberties challenges.
Comments
But on average postal votes seem to break Tory, probably because they are disproportionately for older people.
I'm pondering whether to spoil my own paper with something like 'this government criminalises voters and votes through money for criminals.'
What do people think?
Or would Softie Starmer pay it?
I don't know if there is a sudden rise in irritable guys shooting innocent people for no good reason, or whether it's just getting more media attention.
Kinsley White, 6, was shot by a North Carolina neighbor who was upset that a basketball rolled into his yard. The gunman also shot her parents and other family members. White was released from the hospital overnight.
https://mobile.twitter.com/shannonrwatts/status/1648792325156401153
Gun law is perhaps going to be a more significant issue at the next election, beyond its usual purpose of motivating the Republican vote.
Of course, a lot of this is not their fault as @Foxy has explained. Incompetence, misallocation of resources and failures of management also play a major role. But these are inevitable in such a large organisation. We are spending more than ever on the NHS both in cash and real terms and yet the demand for private medicine is booming. It’s not a happy situation for anyone.
It is worth noting that this isn't just an issue in England either, so whatever the problems are (despite my disdain for the civil service) they are clearly deep-seated and will be hard to shift.
*Delete as appropriate
Big diesels are getting comedically cheap. If you've got one, get rid ASAP. I reckon my recent 640d purchase cost its owner 12 grand/year in depreciation in the four years that they had it.
One of the reasons train drivers are paid so well is that unions have been able to play one company off against another.
In a situation where there is an underlying shortage of qualified doctors, and you can't microwave new doctors into existence, the fact that the NHS is a near-monopoly employer could well be saving us all money.
Schumacher, a seven-time F1 champion, suffered severe head injuries in a skiing accident in December 2013 and has not been seen in public since.
Die Aktuelle ran a picture of a smiling Schumacher, 54, on the front cover of its latest edition with a headline of "Michael Schumacher, the first interview".
A strapline underneath reads "it sounded deceptively real", and it emerges in the article that the supposed quotes had been produced by AI.
The family have confirmed to news agency Reuters that they are planning to pursue the matter legally.
https://www.bbc.co.uk/sport/formula1/65333115
Sometimes, however, the only possible solution is picking some of the low hanging fruit and fixing immediate bottlenecks such as the HEE or Ofsted. If you wait for the perfect master plan you will wait for ever and, as we saw with the Lansley reforms, it may just create a whole new set of problems anyway.
https://www.theguardian.com/politics/2022/oct/27/nhs-challenges-envy-of-the-world-wes-streeting-labour
ydoethur said:
» show previous quotes
Yes, I do mean you, and you do not ‘merely’ disagree. You make wilfully false statements in an obsessive and frequently rude way on this subject, and when it is demonstrated to you that you are wrong or at the very least, seriously mistaken become unpleasant to the point of being abusive.
It never seems to occur to you to simply accept what information you’re given and learn from it. Which makes you come across as ‘a loon.’ You even take criticisms aimed at you as aimed at others.
I have no idea why you behave in such a peculiar way on this subject, but to give you some idea of how you come across compared to your behaviour on this Farage’s discourse on the EU appears positively reasonable.
Anabob replied:
I’m not the one making false accusations, you are. I have just shown you why you were wrong about what I said to Sandpit, and you ignored my explanation and continued to rant.
In the past week, I’ve been called a “moron”, a “fuckwit”, accused of “throwing the poor under a bus”, a “loon”, and various other names.
I have taken most of these in remarkable good humour.
Cash is dying. We need to prepare for that as a society. I am not calling for its abolition, simply speaking the truth about the collapsing demand for it, both from businesses and consumers.
Why don’t you engage with the debate instead of calling me childish names?
So not much different to the last few elections then.
Register of postal vote, applicants, with samples of their signatures, would enable checking, although might be a bit tedious.
I think a good place to start would be to teach all youngsters about government and politics (GCSE mandatory perhaps) so they can see how the system works and how it could be made better. They will then have a better idea about political parties and vested interests.
We need to prepare for it, and innovate to solve the snags of going cash-free, rather that kicking out at those people who are simply pointing out a very clear trend.
Much of the argument over going cash follows similar lines to the digitisation of TV, or decimalisation, or against the Ulez, that it will hit some groups hard and that they won't be able to adapt.
Yet, they are already adapting to cashlessness – we see that every day.
That said, we do need to prepare for it as a society and address any flaws in the system, but simply indulging nostalgia for an outdated bartering tool is not the way to do it!
Life is too short and I have shopping to do and a living to earn. See you later, enjoy the sunshine.
If you cared for people "left behind", then you wouldn't be quite so dismissive or condemnatory of users of cash.
https://twitter.com/Acyn/status/1648843685067472896
I merely asked @Sandpit when the incident occurred as you have been able to pay for a bus with your phone for several years now, and he replied "2005, and I noted his response by liking it.
Stop repeating this fiction.
So now you slope off without apologising.
Now I am not so sure. OTOH Radio 4 still goes out on longwave and there are still cheques. What do people think? And how else can drug dealing be concealed? (Asking for a friend)
It's just that voter behaviour changed markedly, after 2010, as baby boomers and Generation X switched heavily towards the Conservatives.
You need people to see a benefit to doing things, so they may have grubby motivation, and then try to make that benefit everyone.
The reality is that the NHS is a nationalised industry run by vested interests in the interests, not of patients, but of the vested interests. The Labour Party set it up, convinced many people that it was "the envy of the world" (to the amusement of those with better systems) and continues to believe that all it really needs is more money, when in fact what it actually needs is to be broken up
Edit: they provide the forms and pre-post-paid envelopes.
Which is pretty good evidence for it not being true, on balance
(Also, aren't these the ratios from the crudely doctored figures in the leaked docs?)
I actually use more cheques than I did before this was introduced (a few, vs nil).
It's probably saved the cheque for another decade or so.
“If Russia can get in with bombers, Ukraine will be in trouble... It’s looking grim”
https://mobile.twitter.com/HenryJFoy/status/1648613604227272707
I'm hoping this is timely lobbying, rather than desperation. But it could be closer to the latter.
Either way, whether Tory or Labour, you would have to be misinformed or alternatively as dishonest as an SNP executive to spout that nonsense.
https://mobile.twitter.com/EuromaidanPress/status/1648959140163715072
https://www.aljazeera.com/opinions/2020/4/21/boris-johnson-the-hollow-priest-of-the-nhs
“We are making progress in this national battle because the British public formed a human shield around this country’s greatest national asset: our national health service,” Johnson said on Sunday, April 12, in his first address to the nation after being released from hospital earlier that day. “We will win because our NHS is the beating heart of this country, it is the best of this country. It is unconquerable. It is powered by love.”
It's pretty much the largest part of our economy now, depending on how you measure it. Everyone chats about demographics, but it's the non-demographic growth rate that is so scary.
Income effects? Chronic conditions? Technology? Productivity (Baumol)?
Edit: this isn't necessarily a bad thing - we we get richer, the more of the economy we should dedicate to improving health and wellbeing. This is the income effect. But still.
Here bank accounts are free but those cash cards charge a monthly fee.
Elsewhere bank accounts cost money to have so the cheaper cash accounts have a far bigger niche
The election might be closer than the odds suggest ?
Turkey elections - my sense is if Kilicdaroglu does not win in the first round, then it will be a real dogfight in the second round with the advantage moving to Erdogan. Ince vote clearly critical in first round for Kilicdaroglu.
https://mobile.twitter.com/tashecon/status/1648942142759288835
Currently have a profit on my Kilicdaroglu bet, FWIW.
A classic context is winding up an estate - the deceased has lots of payments coming and the deceased's bank account won't do for this. Yet many of the payments come from firms who DGAF as it is no skin off their nose to have to worry about a BACS [edit] - no more custom, see. Anyone who has to act as an executor for an old relative and who doesn't want to pay a lawyer's firm a three figure sum per hour to do the routine work (as opposed to the real legal stuff, which does need paying for) will soon find that the ability to process cheques is vital. And the restrictions many banks have on executry accounts don't help.
Only gammons like cash and analog radio.
In general, the conditions and career structure for medical staff appear to be constructed on the basis that "Beatings will continue until moral improves". Put up with terrible conditions and OKish pay until you break through into the sunny uplands of being Senior.
This is 19th cent thinking. It is completely unsurprising, to me, that people in the 21st cent are not massively enthused by this.
It is how things were done, historically. But times have changed.
Netherlands and Denmark will acquire 14 Leopard 2A4 to be refurbished and delivered to Ukraine as early as next year. Would be interesting to know where they are coming from.
https://mobile.twitter.com/AlexLuck9/status/1648953203302748160
At least they're planning ahead, I guess.
The US remain the only NATO nation with really significant readily usable reserves.
Just as it was (and is) in every other nationalised industry.
What was fascinating was how rapidly socialists identified with the aims of employers, after they became the employers. People who had been leading trade unionists trying to hold down pay and conditions....
You used cash as an example and I respect that. I could also have raised access to council services, to the tax man, to banking or services. Even when there is a paper form it gets scanned and uploaded. A bigger risk of error having to faff around uploading paper forms than there is just doing the online one.
Some people will resist modernity because they dislike change - hence my "nostalgia merchants" label. Sometimes for ideological stubbornness reasons. Sometimes because they don't understand it. Sometimes because circumstance means they don't have access to it.
Making 2023 accessible to all is the challenge. Cash is just one part of this broader issue.
On the TfL system - then annoying thing is that despite promoting using contactless card/phones, they haven't full integrated season tickets, multiple cards etc with an account.
One thing I am now confident of post the Covid pandemic, this is a Labour campaign scare tactic which has finally run out of credible legs even at election time. Yes, we still face incredible challenging times in the NHS with longer waiting lists and a continued shortage of staff in the aftermath of the Covid pandemic, and now even more delays and chaos due to the uncertainty of further NHS strike action by doctors and nurses.
But the idea that we now have 'X days to save the NHS' after we built those Nightingale Hospitals that were never used on the back of very real and serious concerns that the Covid pandemic could totally overwhelm the NHS's critical care capacity have now been finally debunked. Put out campaign ads highlighting the creaking strain the current NHS is under and how you aim to improve it. But instead of the old empty scare tactics of previous elections, opt for the safety of promises to do something about cutting waiting times by brushing the dust off those empty Labour waiting time targets that always redirect the focus of these problems without actually fixing them....
Digital technology has brought immense benefits in communication, and is part of all our lives whether we like ir or not ; people also need to keep up with it to stay in touch with to stay in touch with the modern world, and this particularly applies to older people.
There are drawbacks though, which interestingly the youngest nowadays seem to be most aware of ; in digital sound and photography, there are aesthetic question marks and potential pitfalls compared to the original forms, and secondly the data connectivity of everything nowadays presents immense privacy and civil liberties challenges.