The Fed doesn't want to make money by dragging down the economy with a transaction fee. They may not even legally be able to collect fees - based on their charter/federal law/etc. Now, if the IRS was building an e-dollar, they have an explicit job to collect money from citizens for taxes levied by Congress. That'd be different.

Economically, rent seeking is a bad thing that economists that work at the Fed actually are trying to avoid.

Uh, no one here said Blockchain.

This is a purely centralized system backed by the Fed that is run on remarkably few computers that allows for digital transfers. Basically they've rebuilt Visa/ACH/SWIFT as a combination of secured, automated centralization for digital transactions. The environmental costs are extremely low. The financial cost is effectively non-existent as the Feds are trying to pay for it. This is a pure win for everything except privacy (of which you had no privacy anyway for the electronic stuff already in use).

True - bartenders do love cash tippers. Thank you for the civil Internet discourse!

Tipping at a NYC bar, after going to an ATM:

• $18 Drink
• Give bartender $20 bill.
• Bartender gives you two $1 bills in return.
• Now what? I want to leave the staff a $3-$5 tip depending on how elaborate the drink was. This is the situation that has always prevented me from using cash. I never have enough five dollar bills, it seems.

Groceries, restaurants is when you lost me - these things are so much more convenient to pay with a card. Having the right bills for tipping is awful.

Metro/bus trips is when you infuriated me :) You're the guy dropping nickels into the bus machine instead of swiping your card?! I'm kidding of course, but every time I have tried to use cash to buy a (NYC) Metrocard, it has resulted in a lot of pain for me - the machines never want to accept my bills.

For me, credit card is all about ease of use - it is so much easier to know that I can always pay for anything - and have a monthly record of it - than trying to figure out where all the cash went.

I tend to agree with you on all points. It is not hard to imagine that every transaction on Visa's network is already getting logged by the government. Transferring this power to the government directly changes effectively nothing.

I'm curious - how much cash are you keeping in your possession? During the beginning of the pandemic, I took out several thousand dollars emergency cash in case things went really oddly. Of course, they didn't and I eventually put most of that back into the bank. (Actually I ended up using less cash during the pandemic.) No harm done. Now I tend to keep a few hundred dollars on me, and sometimes when I travel (domestically) I don't have more than $25 in my wallet. I'd say I don't use cash more than 2 or 3 times a month.

While your example of buying a tool or car part is fine, it's not specifically better than using a credit card. Am I really worried about a Venmo payment from a neighbor for the lawnmower I bought off him? If he gets picked up for selling meth, it's not like I'm going to get roped into some giant drug bust when the lawnmower was me buying one thing one time.

This is the crazy part, this is true!

If I know your bank account number -- which is written on every check -- and your routing number -- which is also written on every check (also is public if I know your bank) -- then I can make ACH payments! All day long! For any amount! They'll probably settle! (if your account has the funds)

The issue is when you check out your account sometime in the future, you say: "Hey, this isn't me!" and your bank says: "no problem" and undoes the transaction. They literally take money out of the account you transferred it to. Done! This is a ridiculous pain for the banks, and a lot of times they charge back to another bank, so it's really on the receiving bank to make sure someone isn't stealing and withdrawing the funds. Obviously in the case of a utility, they have an account with the receiving bank, it's probably never empty, so when I use your money to pay my electric bill, my electric company's bank gives your bank the money back and then the electric company says to me: "WTF? Give me the money" and we're back at square one.

Protections in place are only partly algorithmic. If I do an ACH transfer from your account (unauthorized) to my shady shell company account, I'm probably not doing one transfer. I'll probably do it to a lot of people, which looks great - I get to steal more money! But it's also more likely someone is going to spot that transfer. At that moment, the bank fraud department kicks into high gear. Now they can freeze the receiving account, and they might decide to roll back all the ACHs that they can't verify to that account. If the bank sees a new account open, and all of a sudden a bunch of ACH transfers into the account - what do you think they do? They definitely don't just figure it's fine. They proactively start looking and trying to figure out who the receiver is, before they ever let the money go.

Yeah, I oversimplified by lumping them all together. ACH works really well, but still requires some fees be paid - it's not terrible on this front. I've personally never paid a fee, but like you stated usually someone is. However, ACH is far from instant. It usually takes a day to get to the right account, sometimes much much longer (3-5 days). The reason is that ACH batches all transactions (or many transactions) for the day together, which lowers the transaction cost. The issue is there is settlement risk. I think the way that plays out is if I try to ACH you money, and then later I decide to ACH someone else the same money, it might be possible for both to be in pending until the end of the day/a few days. Eventually one of these will fail and someone will be very upset. The system the Fed is testing solves for the near instant settlement.

I'm not an expert, but this is actually meant to replace Visa and other payment processors that are currently making 2-3% every time you swipe your credit card. It's an enormous drag on the economy in terms of fees that merchants pay, and the government would rather you transact in good old cash, but there's too many costs around keeping a register full of valuable paper. The government would like you to do things digitally, instantly, and centralized.

The comparison here probably shouldn't be in to Visa, but rather to something like SWIFT, ACH, or Wire transfers - which actually do move money digitally, but are:

1. incredibly human intensive, and therefore
2. slow and
3. error prone while also being
4. expensive.

Why bother worry about a 3rd or 4th place finisher in the primary? This guy won't win in March, and he definitely wouldn't win in November. Any "plans" he publishes are the same as a random blogger who has political opinions. This isn't a real plan, with no real details, for an essentially not real candidate.

If you could vaccinate 1,000 people (or influence 1,000 people to get vaccinated) directly or indirectly, you would probably save 1-5 lives. Pretty good return if you're trying to save people! In low vaccination communities, the local (or federal, I don't care!) has a responsibility to be in every corner and supermarket offering vaccines.

I'm not a big fan of the NYC government's management of the pandemic, but one thing that was an unequivocal success was vaccinating people in the subway stations. It was a great way to reach an underserved population - neighborhood by neighborhood. Every place with low uptake rates should be looking at doing similar.

There's a sect of Christianity called "Christian Scientists" founded in the late 1800s in Massachusetts. You might know them best from the newspaper/magazine The Christian Science Monitor - which is actually a pretty good place to get non-biased reporting! The church itself is pretty well divorced from the newspaper, so the religious zealotry doesn't make it in there.

Anyhow, Christian Scientists are big into "faith based healing" which means that they believe in medicine (and actually use it) but also believe that prayer is what makes it more effective.

You're definitely right about the timeline here. I am not sure all of the rationale, but I think it's likely the article has misstated/exaggerated or missed some details for simplicity. I wonder if there's some tie in because it's the same corporation. If I buy Pepto Bismol - does that money go directly to them doing research on fetal stem cells? Better not buy Pepto Bismol!

One of the issues with this is that many vaccines are made from stem cells, so there are people that are claiming religious exemption to the COVID vaccine, but gladly getting a flu shot (because this whole thing is actually somehow political). A hospital in Arkansas is requiring those seeking an exemption based on that reasoning to sign an affidavit attesting they will also stop taking 30 over-the-counter medications that were also developed using fetal stem cell lines to include Tylenol, Tums, and ibuprofen. This is, frankly, how we have to treat people who decide that the COVID vaccine is "because of their religion." I stand by my original point: it's all a bunch of bullshit.

Fundamentally I agree, fat shaming doesn't work. The "decision" to be overweight is a *much* harder thing to change than the decision to be unvaccinated. Aside from that, there are plenty of people who have actual diseases (mental and physical) that keep them from getting to a healthier weight. You can also easily regress! If there were a vaccine to be thin, I think we'd have people lining up around the block, regardless of symptoms.

The decision to be vaccinated is so easy! You wake up one day, walk to literally any pharmacy and you're (partially) vaccinated! Done! If you are responsible enough to show up a few weeks later, congratulations, you've lowered your risk of death/hospitalization by 10x - 100x depending on your age group!