Japan has been in the year 2000 for the past 50 years.
Not the first time I see this, still makes me laugh
Cash is king, we shouldn’t be paying MasterCard and VISA for every purchase we make.
Case in point: when the UK left the EU, MC and VISA immediately increased their transaction fees from 0.3% to 1.5%.
Just saw a sign in my bakery today begging people to pay by card because getting small coins from the bank is hard and expensive.
TBF here in Belgium Bancontact has a local monopoly (about 1 % flat fee, no fixed cost per transaction; that seems fair and intuitively cheaper than holding, insuring, depositing cash, dealing with employees skimming off the top, of the time lost counting bills).
Also the government heavily incentivizes electronic payments because those can’t be pocketed without paying VAT. That’s a MONUMENTAL amount of tax fraud being chipped at by the progressive disappearance of cash.
Honestly there should be governmental electronic cash with the same advantages as cash, i.e. no fees & no traceability.
Electronic is faster, more convenient, safer, easier to track, and doesn’t need a stupid purse to carry around.
Haven’t touched cash since 2020, couldn’t be happier.
Cash isn’t much use for making purchases online, which is also where an ever increasing amount of spending is done.
There’s no coin or note slot on my laptop, and contrary to the internet’s advice throwing money at my screen doesn’t seem to work either.
I used to be a big proponent of cash but with the bulk of my financial activity happening online now I can’t help it feeling a bit redundant.
Yes that’s fair enough, cash doesn’t work online - but bitcoin is a better solution for online transactions than cards.
I mean, we haven’t even got into the subject of data tracking. If you think Facebook is bad, consider for a moment how much your card provider knows about you. Banks and card companies have learned from Facebook, and data brokerage is now a trillion dollar industry - with only 8 billion people in the world (many of whom don’t use the internet or have data being traded), that means your data is worth roughly $1,000 a year. Surely, as the manufacturer of the data, you should be getting some of that?!
Lol Bitcoin is not better than cards for online shopping, the only thing it’s better for is buying whatever you’re smoking.
Objectively, bitcoin is better for online transactions. It’s not even all that safe for buying drugs - every transaction is recorded permanently in an open ledger, so it’s actually much easier to trace (at least up to the end points where traditional currency is exchanged).
It might be less widely accepted, but that’s only because of how insidiously endemic MasterCard and VISA are.
How is bitcoin objectively better? That’s a pretty bold statement that needs some backing arguments.
They both have pros and cons, but until BTC have garanteed near instanteneous transaction confirmation, I don’t see how that would work at the grocery store for example.
Bitcoin is objectively better based on the way it works. Subjectively, with the established infrastructure behind it, traditional card payments are artificially better - purely because of convenience. But on a level playing field bitcoin works better and is less susceptible to negative influences.
The grocery store is not typically an online transaction. I did specify online transactions. For buying groceries online, bitcoin would be better - there are no fees when trading bitcoin. When trading cash, there are no fees.
When putting cash into a business account, there are fees, and as almost all businesses put their money into an account they pay these fees. These cash deposit fees and card processing fees have grown in such a way as to entrap nearly all commercial transactions.
Objectively, it’s better if there aren’t fees, particularly when the fees are not proportional to the actual service the fees are supposed to represent.
Features all around
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.
Cash Society isn’t a bad thing imo.
Germany is the same but without the bullet trains and the robots wiping your ass.
Fax machines are definitely being phased out.
Floppy disks? How old is this meme? In the nearly twenty years I’ve been in Japan, I’ve never even seen a floppy disk.
Paper filing is an option if you want it.
And as for cash, electronic payments have really taken off in the last year. I still value my privacy though. So I stick it out in the slow line up.
All in all, there’s a kernel of truth to the meme. What the outside sees as a Blade Runner society drenched in neon, the reality is more “if it ain’t broke, don’t fix it” kinda place.
Cash society is a bad thing since when
Why the fuck “cash society” is backside? It means they care about privacy.
Not taking cash = backwards.
Not taking digital payments = also backwards.
I would say this is not bad at all. Nothing wrong with the things that portrayed as bad. Specially using cash
I don’t know how old you are but in case you weren’t there: floppy disks were actively out to destroy your data and are in fact bad for society.
And their website design…
A/B testing clean, minimalist, modern designs common in the West against modern Japanese designs always shows better results for the Japanese designs amongst Japanese consumers. I don’t think they’re going to cater to the 2.5% of foreign residents and others that might use Japanese sites (though I often wish they would)
As a German -Homer disappears in hedge
We only have a bit of the first panel (technology wise) and all of the bottom one
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
I was just in Japan and how safe it was blew my mind.
This sentence makes me laugh. Where are you from?
Argentina, unfortunately.
And don’t forget how they treat homeless folks, either
I know it’s not technology, but with all those other achievements, there could be mountains of improvements
There are so few homeless in Japan that it’s not really worth talking about. I have seen maybe one homeless person there.
One average sized city in the US probably has more homeless people than the entire nation of Japan.
It is a lot of homeless people but they sleep in internet cafes instead https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Net_cafe_refugee
Better alternative than corner of street
