In their defence, it is a difficult concept to grasp. My dad started his career shovelling gravel for a few dollars an hour. Now he’s a vice president making very good money. In his mind, anyone can replicate what he did by working hard instead of being lazy and asking for handouts.
I eventually got through to him one day when he was talking about hiring for a senior management position. He was interviewing all these people with fancy degrees and credentials. I asked why not promote one of his hard workers? He laughed and said the person needs to be more than a hard worker to manage multi-million dollar projects. But where would he be now if his old boss had thought the same thing? My dad has none of the credentials of the people he was interviewing. He’d still be shovelling gravel 60 hours a week for minimum wage if nobody gave him the opportunity to advance. How could he think hard work will be rewarded when he doesn’t even reward it himself? That’s when he admitted the world works differently now.
I read one story the young adult finally convinced his dad when he showed him a job posting for his old job. It payed less than when he had it, not even accounting for inflation.
I remember that story and can relate. It took showing my parents the cost of my tuition at a university now and comparing it to when they were 18, then doing the same for the yearly wage of a fast food worker, before they realized that cost inflation has out-paced wage inflation by a crazy amount and no, people can’t just sustain themselves through college to get a leg up in society.
There was something a while ago where people were worried in the 70s-90s (can’t remember the decade) where house prices had increased to 1.8x to 2.7x the Average annual income and were unaffordable.
Outside the US college is sometimes stilll a good path. I’ve seen people blow it (useless degrees with no plan to get a job with it, etc.). but if you pick the right field it helps a lot.
I was searching for apartments a few years ago when I still lived with my parents. My Dad was frustrated with my search taking so long (basically accusing me of dragging my feet) asked me why I kept saying I couldn’t afford to live in any of the places near where we lived / my workplace (I live in one of the highest cost of living states in America). I made a bet with him that if he could find me an apartment that was within my budget of $2,200/month within a week, I would sign the lease and move out as soon as they would let me move in. If he couldn’t, he had to admit that finding an apartment in this area in this economy was not as easy as it was when he was my age (I was originally going to ask him to pay me $500 if he lost the wager, but he backed down from that so I took away any monetary incentive and just went for the moral victory instead).
Of course, three days after we made the bet, he came back to me and said “What happened to all the apartments that used to cost $800/month? These leases are more than what we pay for our mortgage!”. Somehow, he was still living in a reality so far removed from our own that he had no idea just how bad things had gotten.
Even still, weren’t their dozens of people shoveling gravel and only a couple of vice presidents? The pyramid structure of corporations imply that not everyone can go from the entry level work to the c suite. It’s an attrition and numbers game.
Plus, most companies now outsource their grunt work. The janitor cannot become the CEO anymore, because the janitor is a contracted worker, making minimum wage, not invited to the Christmas party, and prevented from speaking to anybody in a position of authority.
Oh, yes, the contractors, not-exactly-people existing only when convenient. And the conditions for them are usually bad even when their manager tries to improve those, because tops see no additional value in improving conditions for someone that doesn’t exist work in the main corp
There’s several people in this thread going off about how it’s not inconsiderate to wake people up at times like 1pm or 4pm regardless of sleep schedule or any other circumstances.
There’s also another post about people mowing their lawns at the ass crack of dawn and it’s full of morning people telling night people to fuck off and that it’s their own fault.
I’ve also regularly interacted with people who simply do not respect night workers at all
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)
How about the fact that as the overall population becomes top heavy with the elderly and fewer young people … the economy won’t be able to sustain paying for older people because there will be too few young people driving the economy.
This isn’t meant to divide … this is an honest worry of mine because I’m middle aged and by the time I get old and feeble, the economy probably won’t be able to afford to care for people my age.
Unless you’re a billionaire, millionaire or the child of one, we’re all screwed.
It gets even better: the high cost of essentials - especially housing - in relation to salaries makes said young people refrain from having as many kids as they would otherwise have (basically 1 or none instead of 2 or 3) meaning the problem is going to get worse.
We have never been able to afford the elderly because the elderly are extremely resource intensive. Getting old is extremely expensive and has been. Do not get old.
And the best way to avoid this in the future is to continue to lower the population so eventually we won’t have so many elderly people. Stop making people, they will likely get old and be unsustainable.
I don’t disagree. Yet people on the top heavy side continue to disproportionately support the individuals who collectively make it more difficult to live comfortably at any age. Those at or around retirement age are in this situation almost purely as a result of their choices, and/or a colorful, almost deceitful, blindness.
I can’t blame any of them though. Many of us below 40 have had access to a million points of data via the internet over the years. So identifying these issues has been much easier for your average person. Of course on the other hand…
I think the big issue is we can’t seem to truly agree on a course of action long enough to make anything happen. So…I don’t know. Apart from us all pushing ourselves and people we trust into lower offices, I do not feel I am wise enough to suggest any solution.
We’ll save money on out-of-control healthcare costs if the elderly just died instead of lingered. A tree needs to have the dead or dying branches pruned or they’ll endanger the trunk. The elderly are willing to sacrifice themselves for the economy; that’s what the Lt. Governor of Texas said during COVID.
Not supporting this perspective, but I’ve heard social darwinists say “the weak should fear the strong” and other horrid shit unironically.
I know this type of scary talk. It also comes up when people talk about assisted suicide. Some people on the fringe believe it would be a good option for addicts, the homeless, etc.
They believe it’s a rational standpoint. In reality they ignore the consequence this approach would have for our society on a psychological level.
I shoukd always have the right to choosing a comfortable death though. Otherwise I’ll have to go walk into the woods and hope mother nature isn’t cruel that day.
These types people always talk as if they’re immune to sudden, life-changing events. It’s all fun and games until some random a-hole hits you while driving drunk and makes you permanently disabled. Maybe you’re unlucky and have your entire city/neighbourhood burn down from an uncontrolled wildfire.
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.
That said, when there was a proposal to increase standard work hours in South Korea recently, the people rejected it loudly. There is a desire in SK by many to achieve work life balance, which would be something of a slur in Japan.
Everything I’ve ever seen of Japanese culture would indicate so much as speaking against something like that would get you ostracized by the vast majority.
Right, but different generations have experienced different levels of economic and cultural turmoil that have shaped their political and ethical ideologies.
People who embraced Reaganomics and the general back slide of civility have destroyed their ability to empathize with anyone outside of their small community.
Younger generations still display this type of learned behavior, but it’s a small minority when compared to the majority of boomers. I’m probably in the same generation as you, but I don’t really share your confusion about the schism.
I feel like GenX were the last gen to believe that everything would be fine if you just get a degree and do your time. We’re the last generation that had the privilege of not having to pay attention to politics.
War, recessions and having a hard time happens to every generation.
Yes, but how society responds to those challenges is really what matters, and that’s not consistent.
Getting old does make you lose empathy
I’ve always been told that, but I don’t really believe it. The older I’ve gotten the more empathetic I’ve become, and this seems to run true with all of my aging friends.
my grandparents, it’s because they don’t think anyone’s listening or respects them so they go all in.
Eh, that may be true for your grandparents. But most of my geriatric patients tend to be highly influenced by conservative fear mongering.
The billionaires, corporations and lack of power for the common people are the issues to be addressed, not the elderly. Only a small percentage of people make all of the decisions that are making all of the generations have a fucking hard time right now.
I think that is a highly reductive way to describe it… The older generation has consistently voted away their rights, electing the people making “all the decisions”. The older generations have held more influence for longer than any other generation in American history.
Who do you think empowered the rich and the political class? Who do you think voted for and continues to vote for the people making all our lives miserable? How about you go and ask the average Medicare patient who made their lives so hard, I bet they won’t agree with your theory…
The difference is that they had the opportunity to elect people to make their own lives worse, and everyone after has had that choice made for them by people who should have retired decades ago.
If you’re going to go by all of your generalizations, then you have to understand that the young don’t vote, that’s why the old make such a difference
Ahh if only it was someone’s responsibility to educate younger generations on the importance of voting…
corporations and lack of power for the common people (union busting, price-fixing wages, taking away rights, etc.) are what’s killing all generations.
Right, but you’re pretending that all this occurred in a vacuum? Did the corporations vote to elect the people who led the attacks on unions? Did corporations vote to elect the politicians who allowed taking away our rights?
These didn’t all happen at once, that generation decided these were ideas that would benefit themselves. And it did, they lived through the most economically prosperous times in America and got to retire before all their greed came crashing down around them.
Seriously, you’re sticking up for the corporations and ultra rich who use extreme propaganda to influence everyone?
And who owns and operates those corporations?
You are operating under a false dichotomy, it’s not an either or situation. Yes corporations are negatively impacting our society, but that doesn’t negate the fact that the lion’s share of the profit created by those companies are going directly into a boomers pocket.
We are arguing about the cultural and ethical beliefs of generations. Bringing up corporations doesn’t inherently mean anything without context, and with context it doesn’t really improve your argument.
The elderly inherently share more blame for the status quo because they’ve had the most time to influence the status quo.
That’s more of a California thing. They’re talking about the fee charged by the CC company to the merchant, which is usually absorbed by the merchant. You’re talking about businesses charging you extra for using your credit card, which I have only seen in California.
Very large amount of people end up paying fees from ATMs to get cash. And, if there weren’t card service, you bet the banks would add fees to any type of cash access, eg: all ATMs and bank withdrawals.
Other countries don’t have ATM fees, either. I can go to almost any cash point with any bank and withdraw for free. It’s only certain ones that charge, typically places with a captive audience eg festivals or certain retail parks.
The US is incredibly strange for charging people money to get their cash.
I’ll just tell you about Japan… they will have “outside of business hours” ATM fees just because. Link to website
With the Postal Bank it is possible to carry around your passbook in place of your debit bank card to access your account. Even from an ATM that automatically records transactions in there which is kind of retro yet cool.
Yeah, those are the only ones that might charge. Standalone ones in shops, not at a bank branch, and in particular in places where people might be out drinking.
My experience in the US is you pay fees whenever you withdraw from a bank that isn’t your own. In other countries, you don’t pay fees unless you withdraw from an independent machine, and even then many are free.
I dunno though, I had a cushy US bank with no branches of their own, so they didn’t charge fees anywhere. BoA were bastards though, and I’ve heard terrible things about Chase.
I’ve never had to pay a fee to withdraw cash from an ATM in the USA, unless it was from a different bank than mine. Other banks charge for the convenience of taking your money from their ATM, when you don’t have an account with their bank or affiliate.
It’s easy to avoid those fees by just going to your own bank’s ATM.
For the record - that’s generally also how it works in Europe. Or well, Germany at least. Also there are independent ATM companies (Euronet and the like) not affiliated with major banks who charge outrageous fees to everyone desperate enough to use one of their ATMs.
Japan does, and it’s actually worse than the US bc the ATM from your own bank charges you if you use it after 5 pm or on the weekend. They also shut down some ATMs at either 5 or 9 pm.
Despite the facade, Japan is pretty backwards with technology. The classic way to look at it is a country of duality with bipedal robots and fax machines, although faxes are finally dying out finally. Some examples are that they still produced VCRs until 2016, many places depending where you are didn’t take credit cards up until about 5 years ago (although they seemingly mostly jumped over the credit card thing and went straight from cash to mobile pay systems), and as of 15 years ago I still saw the presence of 3.5" floppies, although those needed to be connected to computers via USB floppy drives.
I live in Europe, and when I withdraw from ATMs when traveling in Germany, I only use “trusted” ATMs like official banks (never Euronet or other “scam” ATMs), but because it’s outside of my own country, it’ll cost ~5€ per withdrawal. In my own country I don’t pay, no matter which bank’s ATM I use.
The cost of a bank account has nothing to do with fees for electronic cash. Fees for electronic cash are collected per each transaction and are paid by the business you buy from. These huge fees are why businesses are slow to adopt electronic cash in Germany, they see no reason to pay 1%+ of their revenue to Mastercard or Visa or whatever.
Mastercard and VISA are not banks and don’t offer bank accounts.
Bank accounts are free. Transfers to and between banks are free.
That 1% fee you’re talking about is a processing fee from the credit card companies, which are separate financial institutions acting as middlemen to the banks.
There is no need to use their services. You can just transfer bank to bank for free, with free bank accounts. No MasterCard or VISA involved at all.
You… do not know what thread I was replying to, do you?
What is being talked about is high fees associated with each transaction done with electronic cash. Please read the comment I directly responded to again: lemm.ee/comment/6705330
It is necessary to use their services (or at least some other entity collecting fees) when you pay without cash in a store. You can’t go to a store and pay with direct bank transfer.
If only there was some way of federating spending in a way that would make private credit card companies obsolete. I’m still confused how no one sees any future in block chain and just say “it’s all a scam”.
Block chain has become a buzz word, just like AI or NFT’s, but they sure as hell makes some people a chunk of money before everyone realises what it actually means.
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.
Seems like an easy fix for a business, just change their prices so that they don’t have to use coins. Make everything an integer number of dollars. If the items are too cheap to round up, encourage a three for two deal or something like that.
Sales tax doesn’t change that frequently. It’s easy for a business to predict and account for it when setting their prices.
… the euros’ lowest paper bill is 5€. 1 € and 2€ coins are bulky pieces of shit too.
And a bakery is the worst affected kind of business even if there was a 1€ paper bill. A loaf of good bread is 1.40€, if you round up it’s way too expensive and if you round down they may not even make a profit. Can’t exactly buy 3 loaves of bread either unless you got a family of 6 to feed.
That’s the real crux, banks charge businesses to deposit cash. They do it in such a way that there’s no way to escape their ever-increasing fee percentage.
The mattress solution is more and more appealing, imo.
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.
Unfortunately I think the amount of cash tax fraud that exists is far more reasonable than the amount of straight up fraudulent, yet “legitimate”, expenditure that governments allow. See, for example, covid PPP loans.
Write offs, PPP loans, deferrals, and all the other accounting tricks that the government carved out for the primary benefit of the wealthy are definitely a bigger loss of tax revenue. One guy writing off a personal vehicle for his personal business is probably what a busy restaurant makes in 4 months of cash purchases. Suppliers and distributors are also unlikely to deal with large volumes of cash just as a matter of practicality and risk, and the fact that you can’t have a functioning business with employees that need paychecks without going through banks which go through the government, unless you’re operating with an entirely under the table staff which is just begging for trouble.
The people insisting on using cash are the ones with a big pile of it, with origin dubious to unknown. Anti tax evasion is the best part of digital banking. Threats to privacy is the other side of that coin unfortunately…
Re: credit card companies: you’re right, and you’re not the first to say it.
South East Asia is pissed off at them and their fees too. Starting in Thailand (but spreading) their big banks got together and made a QR code system for instant sending of money (similar to what Australia did with PayID which obfuscated bank account numbers with your own phone or email address, and stacked with Osko, a fast transfer system to bypass the slow (days) bank to bank transfers).
You will see street vendors with food carts with a QR code on it. You want to buy something? You order, they say the price, you scan the code, send the money, show your phone, get your food.
(You can have codes with the payment amount already in it, like in a bill, but since this is just a food cart on a sidewalk, they just have one generic “pay me” code)
Because they are bank to bank, it’s all fee-free.
And yes, in the USA you have Venmo and similar, which has other issues, I think.
In the Philippines so many people use pay-as-you-go and prepaid phone plans, and load up their account with credit, they’ve gone further. People could gift credit to other people for a long time. Now, you can actually pay for things with your phone credit there. (GCash, which confused me for a Google product for a while). There’s only two mobile/cellular phone companies in the country (all the rest are resellers), so it has some monopoly issues. But what it means is since everyone has a phone (doesn’t have to be a smart phone. A nokia style dumb phone is fine), you don’t need cash or to pay VISA/MC.
Cash is garbage. Using cash electronically is good.
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?!
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.
That’s a weird take. A system is better because it’s free?
I re-read your comment and I missed the fact that you said online buying, sorry about that.
One advantage of traditional CC over Bitcoin is buyer insurance against fraud. If someone gets a hold of your Bitcoin wallet, he can take out everything and you have no recourse.
If someone steal your credit card and make fraudulent purchases, the transactions will be cancelled and you won’t be left on the hook.
The credit companies do not insure against fraud, they simply take the money out of the merchant account and put it back into yours. Now it’s the merchant who has no recourse, if they have already shipped the product. So the only difference between CC and crypto is who is typically left holding an empty bag in case of theft - the payer or the payee. Certainly not the banks!
I’d argue in terms of assigning responsibility, it seems more fair to expect you the customer to keep your digital wallet secure from thieves, than to expect the merchant to try guess every time whether the visitor to their online store happens to be using a stolen credit card.
Retaining some ability to spend and use cash is vital because otherwise, all our financial transactions are totally controlled by the banks, and they are completely untrustworthy. The cost is inconvenience.
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.
Yep. Having worked in the industry for a long time, including trying to transition to EMR and such, I get this. In Japan, one of the reason fax machines are still important that is not often talked about is that they generally have a bank of pre-programmed numbers. This is seen as a way to reduce the chance of exposing PII to others by accident. This is not wrong, but the same could be implemented for other systems such as email (or the host of EDI that exist). I literally just had a training that said we should not even send a fax ourselves, but have someone observe that we hit the correct pre-programmed button for it.
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