Comment by stavros
8 days ago
Oof, this comment convinced me to go from loving passkeys to "maybe I should be careful". However, I don't think these are technological issues, I think they're policy issues. We need to vote for freedom of computing, and against corporations doing whatever the hell they want.
Your choices affect how policies affect you. When the government starts receiving copies of all card transactions, the person who habitually uses cash is unaffected, as is the person who habitually uses Monero.
The number of places one can reasonably use cash anymore is rapidly shrinking. Some places it’s truly impossible.
I do believe this is a policy failure and that a law should exist mandating cash acceptance “for all debts public and private”, but there is nearly zero chance of such a law ever passing in the US.
The law does mandate that. It's just that most purchases are not debts.
I’ve never seen anywhere that doesn’t accept cash? Where have you experienced this?
12 replies →
> the government starts receiving copies of all card transactions
This is a particularly American view, a sort of extreme pessimism about the risk of their government collapsing into fascism; while I can see the point in the Trump era, from a practical point of view I'm much worse off with corporations seeing my card transactions. Which includes the card issuers themselves, censoring certain types of locally-legal business.
Average American is more at risk of hassle from Equifax seeing their transactions than even ICE seeing them.
Even worse with the alt payment systems. There's a long list of things it's dangerous to say in a Paypal transaction description. Venmo make transactions public by default, which is insane.
The government can include corporations. You could even argue the American government and American corporatocracy have already swapped roles. Equifax is almost more government than the SEC is.