Cashless society!?

john59 "gets it," nothing to quibble with, in his post.

Watch the 6 p.m. local news -- does it not seem strange to you that virtually EVERY crime or accident or breaking news has been captured on tape or video?? You can't even pick your nose in an empty elevator any more...

ANYTHING can be done in the name of national security; forget habeas corpus, forget due process, forget laws passed by Congress and shelved down at your local library. Anything goes.

I will say that I don't know any stackers waiting for "it" to happen. They pray it doesn't happen because starting Day 2, their kids will never have a normal life, and the richest country on earth goes down with all the rest.

 

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IMO, the greatest nemesis to the cashless society is not stackers, preppers or make believe soldiers shooting paint balls at each other. It's that topic we're not allowed discuss.

 

If what you would like to bring up was personal attacks, agreed - they would not be OK. If it was a political comment, simply take it to CT's "sister forum" partisanlines.com ...

Christian

 

Religon

 

Cashless society and prepping for Armageddon are two different issues, but since the conversation veered there, I'll add this...

There's a terrific book called "One Second After" by William Forstchen that looks at life in the near-term aftermath of an EMP (electro-magnetic pulse) attack on the U.S.

In theory an EMP attack would render all modern electronics (and machines that rely on them) useless. So, no communications, no media, no trucks, trains or aircraft to deliver basic human necessities, etc. It's not a tin foil hat thing...a genuine threat (again, theoretically) that's been studied at length by Congress and the Defense Dept.

No doubt the author had an agenda, but if so, he does an excellent job of hiding it. He takes a dispassionate, non-politicized look at how immediate and sweeping the impact would be on everyday existence, and identifies many ramifications one might not automatically anticipate.

Most interestingly to me, his Armageddon isn't what we normally envision thanks to the movies. There's no mass destruction, no clouds of deadly radiation. Everyone is alive and everything remains intact — except for a modern functioning society.

Anyway, to bring this back to the subject of money, in the author's post-EMP world, the currencies of the day quickly become bullets, medicines (to your point about pharmacies, Kurt), and of course, food and water. Money as we know it, in any form, is useless.

 

No. It doesn't seem strange at all. Indeed, it's starting to seem strange when something happens that isn't captured on video. Here's why.

For the entire twentieth century, getting photos or footage was kind of a big deal. (Prior to that, they were essentially nonexistent.) A camera, even late in the century, was something you carried along if you though you were going to be taking photos; a video camera was gear, something you lugged, hoping that you had enough batteries and tape to capture what you wanted.

And, by the way, a "phone" was something that sat on your desk or hung on the wall.

Now, suddenly, everyone is expected to carry a device that lets them record effectively unlimited photos and video footage, make calls, send messages, and access a global multimedia network. Not because it's suddenly critical to record and report everything, but because it's sometimes nice to do so, and it's absurdly cheap to build a device that can do it.

I remember, a very few years ago, paying north of $500 for a standard-definition video camera. A tape capable of holding an hour of footage cost five or ten bucks. Transferring that footage to a computer took one hour per hour of footage.

Now, you can get webcams with better picture quality than that video cam for under $20; shop aggressively, and you can get them for under $5. A wall-mountable IP camera is well under $100; a system with a bunch of cameras and a disk to record (say) the last 24 hours of video from all of them is under $1000.

How many robberies or shoplifting incidents do you think it would take for a merchant to lose more than a thousand bucks? Under the circumstances, how does it make sense not to just leave cameras running everywhere, all the time?

And once you have that video, you can copy it around in much less time that it took to record it. Upload it to YouTube, and you've just distributed it to the whole world, for free.

The only "conspiracy" here is the insatiable drive of electronics manufacturers to sell more stuff, by making it cheaper and more useful, and the insatiable drive of people everywhere to get public attention.

 

Maxfli

No pharms? American zombies unplugged from their happy pills? That's going to be ugly.

 

Forstchen has written dozens of nifty books, numerous apocalyptic.

Here's a link to his booklist on Amazon: http://tinyurl.com/l5h45qx

 

Man some folks need to get out in the real world a bit.

Cash will go no where anytime soon for these very specific reasons.

Illegal workers. As per the landscaper example earlier, they won't work for debit cards, they want cash and that issue is prevalent in our most basic commodities. Farming, fishing, low paying jobs, construction, etc all rely on undocumented labor to thrive.

Illegal drugs. This is a biggie, no drug dealer will want to be paid by something traceable. And in case no one has been paying attention, but the war on drugs has failed. Miserably. That is a statistical fact.

Tax evaders. These people exist in all levels of society. Basically anyone who deals in cash as a merchant these days does so simply to blur the lines and be able to under report their income and pay less taxes.

There's also people like me who question what the government spends that money on. I don't agree that it is being used correctly and therefore I don't believe in giving them a portion of every dollar that I earn.

Black market goods and services. Try paying an illegal prostitute with a debit card.

Other situations occur too. I have on many occasions observed food stamps/EBT cards being sold for $.50 on the dollar. The addict wants the cash and the other party gets double their grocery money.

Cash isn't going anywhere. Or the idea of a private payment system anyway.

 

Serious question: there's a good chance these illegal workers will gain citizenship in the not-to-distant future. Don't you suspect that part of deal will be that they become legitimate, salary-check-receiving, tax paying participants of society?

Apparently they will take checks! Talk show host Jerry Springer famously wrote a check to a Newport, KY prostitute while he served on the Cincinnati city council.

 

On a related note, I don't agree with all the ways that Exxon spends the money it makes off of gasoline sales, so I'm thinking about occasionally stealing gas from their underground tanks. Let the people who agree with all their corporate policies pay for gas.

 

Originally he was a biographer and historian. It seems the success of "One Second After" may have put him on a more lucrative career path.

 

Yes, the idea of millions of people suddenly going through Zoloft and Prozac withdrawal is a frightening thought!

 

You have the option of not buying from Exxon.

 

Day by day we are becoming a cashless society. The black markets will always be there. Even as you know, the biggest problem for the drug dealers is to launder their money. Tax evaders and the illegal work market is not the government's biggest concern. As we go towards a cashless society more of the black market dealings will disappear and not increase.

The government is doing it under everyone's noses and everybody takes it as a joke. That's why they can and will do it. Even on this forum people are more worried about getting their prozac than retaining their liberty. Breaking news: in a cashless society you will be able to get your prozac.

 

What about the waves after the amnesty? Do you think people will stop coming to this country? I don't. And I also realize we can't just keep making every person who jumps the border a citizen. Especially when they have nefarious intents like working here and receiving benefits so they can send their undocumented cash back 'home'.

 

No amnesty just the boot

 

Not valid at all. Exxon is a private company that provides a product. Our society relies heavily on that product, but I could live without Exxon if I needed to.

The government on the other hand is put in place by the people and derives its power from us. So your example doesn't apply. The philosophy almost worked, but when the government is supposed to represent the people, the people should be comfortable paying for the services and expenditures.

There are entire beaurocracies that take our money and have ZERO oversight or accountability on where it gets spent. With that in mind, I refuse to give them every little dollar when they do things in MY name and I get no say-so, especially when our government is supposed to be run off our input.

We went to war over 'No taxation without representation'.

 

We went to war over 'No taxation without representation'. The questions is would we do it again ?
And we have no say-so but Exxon Mobil has

 

OK, this thread is now crossing the political / world events line. Stop this here, and go back to the relationship of cashless to cash discussion as it pertains to our site.
Thank you Jim