Dumbass business practices have nothing to do with cashless societies.

A business that doesn't have a cheap iZettle/Square/whatever reader under the counter, a backup SIM on a different network, or similar is just asking to lose business. It's like having a cash register that doesn't open... well... find another way to take people's money rather than standing there looking gormless.

And things like those readers are dirt-cheap and charge about 2%. I'd rather be taking 98% of my customer's money than nothing.

Just because some spotty teenage "manager" can't work that out is nothing to do with a cashless apocalypse. It's to do with literally failing to observe the primary rule of IT... always have a backup.

Now if ALL the cell networks and ALL the broadband goes down in an area and ALL the power and ALL the batteries in everything run flat... then you might have a problem. But a store taking literally hundreds of thousands per year, employing several staff, and not bothering to put a $20 reader behind the counter for emergencies? That's nothing to do with the price of a sandwich.

Same used to happen in McDonald's if they had to fall back to handling cash, to be honest. The teenagers just weren't able to do the sums on paper, even. So if the till (checkout) stopped working.... they used to give up or take MINUTES for every customer to add up the total, take the money, work out change, etc.

If you have no payment method, shut the shop. If that seems extreme, well, it's what happened effectively anyway. It's no different. The way to avoid it is to never be without a payment method that works, which means several backups.

Hell, places like supermarkets etc. in my company have local broadband / leased lines AND satellite connectivity on the roof. Because they can't afford to be without it because they would lose thousands every second even in one store.

I've been cashless for 20 years, I've never had a problem. In fact, the only problems I've witnessed were with cash (where stores literally didn't want to take cash, or didn't know how to) and with things like one particular credit card provider falling over, but, hey, I have half a dozen different cards in my wallet alone. Why?

BECUASE YOU SHOULD ALWAYS HAVE A BACKUP.

So much this.

Musk has the same billionaire self-worth issues many of them seem to have and the technological successes SpaceX and Tesla represent aren't his badges of honor but to stand there and imply SpaceX and Tesla hadn't achieved pivotal successes makes it hard to take those people seriously.

And for better or worse, Musk was leading the ship while those successes happened. Was it due to his leadership or despite it? I, for one, am not in a position to tell but to just gloss over them reeks of personal agenda against the man.

You've got a point there but you left yourself open to the counter: Musk also managed to ferry people to the station at a price NASA couldn't match with the shuttle.

I gotta say, snickering at the fact that a rocket of so far unparalleled proportions and capabilities, as far as I am aware, isn't working on the first try seem petty in the face of the aforementioned success.

Wage garnishment is a literal legal process in any developed country.

Haven't been paying your child support? Then your EMPLOYERS are legally required to take it out of your pay before you ever see a penny.

Tax debt, etc. all kinds of reasons why they use it. Sorry but the "I'm going to hide in a cash-only industry" thing is not only outdated but soon to die and actually raises MORE suspicions than just having a bank account. Money laundering regulations are slowly killing off the ability to operate like that and living a cash-only life is becoming increasingly difficult in any developed country now.

I thought SpaceX WAS doing pretty well and wa sbeing rather cost-effective so far?

What am I missing?

Years ago I worked at a gift vards/loyalty cards SaaS provider. Two unusual clients were a school that had gone cashless and a domestic cleaning franchise.
Someone transfers some money to the platform and then unbanked people make redemptions at different points of sale.

Well, I for one did install Bazzite yesterday. Not sure yet whether I like the immutability or deapise it. Time will tell.

It's a interesting and legitimate sci-fi scenario but the real problem isn't going to be waste heat it's going to be diverting huge amounts of limited resources, ie construction and money and time, to building out nuclear power plants for the sole purpose of AI to replace white collar workers.

So instead of machines serving all of us they are going to survey very very very very tiny group of people. Techno feudalism.

Dude that heat energy has to go somewhere. So even if you have miraculous electricity you're still going to be belching heat into the atmosphere.

But fusion is getting the headlines while these big tech companies are building out nuclear power plants.

The resources that are going to go into building those plants are going to be diverted from other projects. They don't have to be but they will be because there is very very very little money for anything besides corporate profits.

The economy doesn't have to be a zero-sum game but it is. That's the mistake a lot of people make.

Honestly the more I see the more I think we are eventually going to give nukes to religious lunatics and it's going to be game over.

Down to the last cinder so that we can put a shitload of white collar workers out of work and drive up shareholder value just a little bit more.

I'm kidding I'm kidding. It's a lot more shareholder value.

Remember kids, it's a big club and you ain't in it.

Um did you forget Microsoft Office exists? Offices a little more than twice as profitable as Windows...

Microsoft forces computer upgrades as a giveaway to the oems. It's not for there well-being it's so the dell and HP and all of them have a chance to sell a new computer. This helps keep those oems locked into windows.

To be honest with Windows 10 I don't think they cared nearly as much because they were pretty damn sure the oems couldn't do jack shit and they were right.

The reason Windows 11 requires a computer upgrade is so they can do some of the nastier DRM and eventually lock down the platform like Apple iOS is. That's been their dream since Windows 8 but software vendors saw it coming a mile away and wouldn't have anything to do with Microsoft.

This isn't caused by enshitification. This is just Microsoft never being able to put together a decent tablet at a good price.

Microsoft has never been good at much of anything. Take away the antitrust violations and they wouldn't even be around anymore.

But thanks to those antitrust violations and our complete unwillingness to vote for politicians that enforce law they can do things like lose 6 billion dollars on the OG Xbox and then just throw out another one and then throw out another one and lose money on that one and on and on and on.

But people aren't leaving Windows because Windows got worse. For r the average user even Windows 11 is fine. You have to be a gamer or someone doing advanced content creation to notice the difference. And I mean advanced, if all you do is throw together a YouTube channel with a bit of 4K video you won't notice the problems Windows 11 brings to the table.

But the fact of the matter is most people just use computers to access email and shop and maybe a bit of porn and a cheap Android tablet is good enough.

If Microsoft was a more nimble company they could have put out a cheap Windows CE tablet to compete with Android but they're not so they ended up chasing Apple money on overly expensive devices and anyone who's dropping $1,000 on a tablet is just going to buy an Apple device.

Microsoft would have monetized the user anyway.

Corporations don't want to make money. They want to make all the money. They are in all consuming all devouring Force.

You wouldn't have people being charged with human trafficking just based on random travel patterns because you wouldn't have a fascist government looking for reasons to charge people with crimes they didn't commit.

You're putting the cart before the horse. The problem is once you have a fascist government all the individual security and privacy in the world won't save you. If all else fails they will just come down on you like a ton of bricks with simple violence.

And by yourself you can't stop fascism because billionaires always want fascism. Before that it was billionaires but that's just inflation. If you're going to withstand the assault of people with that much money the only way you can do it is by grouping together with large numbers of people.

So protecting your individual privacy won't stop the actual thing you're afraid of, which is being arrested for crimes you didn't commit.