Japan has been in the year 2000 for the past 50 years.
Not the first time I see this, still makes me laugh
Why the fuck "cash society" is backside? It means they care about privacy.
Not taking cash = backwards.
Not taking digital payments = also backwards.
The post isn't about privacy, if it was, faxing wouldn't be on there. I'd wager a strong guess it's about convenience on one hand while choosing to be inconvenient on the other.
Edit: or maybe it's more about high tech in some sectors and low tech in others, still not about privacy.
When I found out about all that I was honestly kinda glad my country, Germany, isn't the only one that's in the past in terms of bureaucracy and digitalization of services.
But cash is a weird point to add. A society without cash would kinda be dystopian ngl
Without cash, you can't have privacy. All card or contactless payments are logged and probably sold to advertisers or anyone with enough cash who wants that info.
I’m an immigrant in Germany and kind of had to laugh at this, because the cash thing is so hard for foreigners here. Since the pandemic it’s been better, but I had multiple moments before it where a grocery store or gas station only accepted cash with zero warning.
I didn’t like having much cash on me at first, because I was worried about losing it or having stolen. After about a year, I did lose my wallet, but the found things bureau at town hall called me to return it, cash still inside it. They charged 10% (iirc) and split it wiith the person who found it.
Edit: name of town hall changed for clarity
Guess I’m the only one in the thread that hates cash. It’s filthy and messy. Much better to just beep my watch and move along
The one thing I don't like about digital payments is that so far, they've all been owned/controlled by various major card processors, like Visa. That control really gives those processors a dominant position and basically free money.
This. I love how much easier it is to manage digital make-believe numbers, than tons of leaflets and pucks that represent make-believe numbers.
I just wish the system that handled it was more... democratic? Instead of corporate feudalism with credit scores...
I think someday we will look back and consider if taking everything digital was ever the right choice. Friend always uses the term, "high tech downgrade." The more I interact with the internet the more I learn how it pushes the limits of our society in not so great directions.
I think the opposite can be said too. t's pushed society forward in so many great places as well.
I'm not saying there should be no internet. I am only saying maybe some restraint would be advantageous for everyone.
Everyone who is saying there is nothing wrong with cash is right. However, there is one major drawback to cash which is no longer a big problem in societies which are mostly cashless. Namely, if your wallet gets stolen and you have $300 in it, you've lost that $300 forever. If your wallet gets stolen and they get your cards, you can just cancel them and aren't even charged for fraudulent purchases.
I realize that means less privacy, but I can't afford to lose that kind of money just walking to the supermarket to buy groceries.
They solved that problem by having no thieves lol
For me, the main drawback is rather than you need to get to a machine to get your physical money pieces regularly. Sometimes you run out, there's no machine, or you have no time to find one, and it can put you in troubles, like being stuck in the middle of transit or getting at the cashier and realizing you don't have enough.
Germany is the same but without the bullet trains and the robots wiping your ass.
Well, also plus random homeless guy yelling at you about Vladimir Lenin, the roads looking like Romania ca. 1983 and a cadre of stern government employees showing up out of nowhere to shout "NEIN!!" and disappear. Very futuristic in a sort of Metro 2033 way.
we have plenty of bullet trains - 367 last I checked, plus bullet trains from other countries - they're just chronically late because of car-focused policies over the last decades causing the infrastructure to basically rot away.
still no ass-wiping robots though, maybe one day...
You put paper filing and cash society on the "bad" list. It's like it's wrong for people without an internet connection or privacy conscious people to file stuff. "Pls use our brand-spanking new web UI that loads a shit ton of Javascript and steals your data on top of it!" Oh and cash society. No, why would anyone want to pay in a privacy-conscious way. Naw man, pay with a card...
I'd argue using cash, paper, floppies is fucking advanced and the right move.
Source - I work on tech
I would love if we kept the floppy form factor but with SSD flash on the inside.
I loved the solid feeling of disks and that "kachunk" of the drives.
They were also easy to label!
What's bad about cash?
As someone who filled out multiple copies of the same contract by hand to buy a house recently, which had to be stamped with my seal and not signed, AHHHHHHHHHHghgghhg. On average, I only have to fax something once every several years. NTT, the main telecoms provider, STILL requires that you fax paperwork to get internet (at least for NTT East as of two years ago).
Using cash is great (except for my airline miles account), but one of the biggest banks in Japan is notorious for outages. ATMs here also, until very recently, had business days and hours. That's finally mostly gone, at least. They can still run out of money at the year-end holiday season as everyone is home with family and they're not always restocked in some locations, but more ATMs also helped to solve this. The problem with things transitioning to electronic payment is also those payment processors take a cut. We have all kinds of payment apps here, but many small businesses I know hate using it. The ones I know that use it most generally have larger foreign customer bases (anecdotal to business owners I know; may not be generally true in all of Tokyo/Japan).
I take pity on Japan as the only nation on Earth to fully internalize grind culture as their source of existential meaning to an even more toxic degree than the United States.
If they didn't exist, I probably would deem such a thing unsustainably improbable, but there it is.
To be clear, I'm not referring to places where the poor are exploited to work even longer hours at more physically brutal jobs for basic survival, I'm talking about self proclaimed "developed" nations whose citizens are indoctrinated to proudly jump into the productivity volcano as some kind of honor/life's purpose/sense of identity in itself, and who wouldn't have it any other way.
Cash Society isn't a bad thing imo.
I find it pretty funny seeing people talk about how Japan is not as advanced as people think. Meanwhile my home state the majority of people don't have Internet. I've been getting pretty convinced that most places use fax machines due to how few places have Internet. Anyplace that has any amount of beurocracy uses paper files. There are a considerable amount of places were cell signals simply don't work. The only way reason I know of public transport busses is because of movies. VHS player are common place for house holds. Many work vehicles were made in the 60s and we still use buckets to collect sap when sugaring. Card readers are rare so some gas stations require you to pay with cash. All around the only advanced tech things Vermont has to offer are our winter cars and the f13s that occasionally blow peoples ear drums out.
Okay but Vermont is basically a white people nature preserve, isn't it?
That's what I'm saying for a long time after being in Japan a couple of times.
30 years ago, Japan was 20 years in the future, and they liked it so much, they never changed since.
What kind of 12 year old smartphone addict shit is this, that thinks fax machines, paper copies, cash and floppies are bad things?
Fax machines are such bad things though.
Faxes and egregiously copying temporary things to paper are the worst.
Sorry, I just worked in a community computer center where people wasted so much paper trying to print stupid things from websites, and were forced to send 80 pages to their lawyers/government/propertylords/whatever, through a dial-up connection in terrible black and white, for $1.00 a page.
It took like 5 seconds per page and to actually send took between 5-20 minutes. . .if it didn't just error out and force you to start over.
The worst nonsense is forcing people to download and print some 50 page agreement just so they can sign two pages and fax it back. That should be a jailable offense lol.
Cash and paper can stay.
Can we PLEASE just make normie-friendly email encryption so faxes can die for good though?!
I noticed you mentioned fax twice. Sorry if you're a paper company rep or something. I'm just speaking from a place of pain lol.
Needing to ask your boss so he can ask his boss so he can ask his boss so he can verify if you can sharpen your pencil
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