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<p>[QUOTE=&quot;ewomack, post: 14237485, member: 15588&quot;]I&#039;m one of those people that never have any cash. I&#039;ve lived that way for years now. It happened organically, I didn&#039;t plan it. I just realized one day that going to get cash had become more of a pain than just using plastic, it didn&#039;t even occur to me. Some stores and restaurants in my area even started preferring credit to cash. Once vending machines became swipe-able I didn&#039;t need to carry a pocket full of jingly change around, either. I find it a lot easier, honestly, but I do miss cash and coins, yet I now find them both more annoying to deal with. I still have a jar of cents collected from change fermenting somewhere. It&#039;s not even worth cashing in and my bank removed their change counter service from all locations anyway. I have not experienced a system going down in years, either, and many stores now have backup plans for that, so I don&#039;t think that&#039;s generally as large of a problem as it used to be (though it can still happen, of course). As for privacy, I&#039;m not sure what to do about that. With increased surveillance on just about every street corner, even tracing a cash transaction may come down to no more than knowing the time a person entered and exited a store and which transactions the store made that day. Many stores have cameras trained right on the registers. Surveillance has become pretty cheap. If someone with the right access wanted to trace something paid with cash, they probably easily could. I would prefer more privacy as well, but cash will provide only limited, and sometimes no, protection at this point.</p><p><br /></p><p>As for the analogy between the US and Roman money debasement, I think one could argue about the details and the nuances endlessly. In some ways they resemble each other, in other ways they don&#039;t. But metal in and of itself doesn&#039;t guarantee value. Gold and silver don&#039;t have value merely because they exist. People still have to want them and agree on an exchange value. I don&#039;t think reverting to a gold or silver standard at this point would work, and it could arguably backfire (I&#039;ve read in more than one place that given the population rise, there isn&#039;t enough gold to even support a feasible gold standard anymore). And if everything collapses, then I&#039;m not even going to want silver. I would much rather have a chicken or a pile of beans. Hopefully things will never go <i>that</i> far down the drain, though.</p><p><br /></p><p>That said, I do agree that we have too many people on the Earth, and we keep stretching things beyond capacity as if it will never matter. We&#039;ve been saved by technology (i.e., Borlaug&#039;s &quot;Green Revolution&quot; of the 1960s, but even <i>he</i> thought that was a band-aid) in the past, but there is no guarantee that technology will save us again. It might, it might not.</p><p><br /></p><p>In any case, I have no idea if civilization is heading for a crash-boom or not. Things certainly seem and feel shaky, but who knows? Surviving a crash-boom, depending on the size, seems to take a lot of luck. Things don&#039;t usually degenerate or crash in easily predictable patterns (plenty of books exist on past collapses for the curious, many even remain unsolved or hotly debated).</p><p><br /></p><p>I have chosen to not live in fear over things that I can&#039;t control. I&#039;ll prepare where and when I can, but how does one really prepare for the unknown? All you can hope is that you diversify enough or just happen to do the right thing to &quot;make it through,&quot; whatever that may end up looking like.[/QUOTE]</p><p><br /></p>

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