Japan is living in the future that the 1990s dreamed of.

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%.

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.
- Cash is needed nonetheless because when there is a downtime for whatever reason, it is not good if the only thing you have is a card.
- Mullvad lets you mail them cash, but I don't think it's scalable nor fast enough to be widely used.
- 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.
- 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?!
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.
- 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.
- 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 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...
Honestly there should be governmental electronic cash with the same advantages as cash, i.e. no fees & no traceability.
- there are very easy free bank accounts to open.
  Traceability is the tricky part.
- I dunno, there are good arguments for traceability. Bitcoin has complete traceability, up to its endpoints.
Here in at least the state of California (not sure if this is country wide) those bank "convenience" fees are limited to no more than $1.50 by law.
- Yes cos California is little Europe and we love the modern thinking
- Are you talking credit card fees or bank transaction fees?
- My bank (RBC) charges me $2.50 after 10 or so free transactions, doubled if tapped.
  I switched to Neo and I love it.
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.
Using credit card companies is dubious.
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.
- because it doesn't work. case in point: it hasn't. It improves on one aspect, and regresses (very very badly) in every single other aspect.
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.
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.
- thats an american thing, civilized nations dont let banks do that
- 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.
No thanks
I don’t pay them. The business conducting the transaction does :p
- You mean, the fee is already baked into the sticker price, so you're paying it regardless of which payment method you use.

Why the fuck "cash society" is backside? It means they care about privacy.

Not taking cash = backwards.
Not taking digital payments = also backwards.
- suggesting crypto?
The post isn't about privacy, if it was, faxing wouldn't be on there. I'd wager a strong guess it's about convenience on one hand while choosing to be inconvenient on the other.
Edit: or maybe it's more about high tech in some sectors and low tech in others, still not about privacy.
- Because a piece of highly debated governance structure, manifest as a piece of technology was put on the "bad" list, (by accedent?) implying the old way is out of date and switching is as much of a "you dont need to think, its just better" (no brainer) as switching your floppy disks and CRTs for USB sticks ano OLEDs. Tech advancing is usually but not a definite good thing.
- Why privacy would mean no fax? Fax is mostly more secure than email.
And money recycling.
Suuuure, "privacy". Wink wink.
- I'm a criminal! Wank wank, nudge nudge
Question: do the Japanese actually care about privacy? I know I do, but if you were to ask a Japanese person why does their country use cash, would they say "We have considered a system of payment cards and decided against it for privacy reasons" or would they just shrug and say "I dunno, I'm not in charge of payment systems, I use what I have"?
Not necessarily. It might be privacy but it could also be a combination of other reasons too - a cultural aversion to paperless transactions, a lack regulation for electronic payments, lack of a decent indigenous payment system, lack of financial safeguards, prevalence of fraud / skimming devices etc.
Some European countries were more into electronic transactions than others but with stuff like SEPA, chip & PIN, contactless payments I think most people are just fine using electronic payment unless they have reason to control the transaction in some way. For example I usually pay pretty much everything electronically but I still pay taxis and most restaurants with cash. Also tradesmen if they'll give me a discount for cash.
- I used to work in a shop when I was younger, and the older generation always asked for "cash discount". Why on earth would we do that, my boss said to me. We need the money to be in the shop's bank account, not laying around somewhere and not being used.
  I remember carrying several 100k of our money, late at night, to our banks night safe and drop it in. That sucked. And they charged us for this too
Cash is traceable in most countries for decades now. Cash doesn't mean privacy.

When I found out about all that I was honestly kinda glad my country, Germany, isn't the only one that's in the past in terms of bureaucracy and digitalization of services.

But cash is a weird point to add. A society without cash would kinda be dystopian ngl

Without cash, you can't have privacy. All card or contactless payments are logged and probably sold to advertisers or anyone with enough cash who wants that info.
- Very true. But those advertisers and data brokers (and governments) have convinced most people that the convenience is worth it, and that only criminals desire that level of privacy.
I’m an immigrant in Germany and kind of had to laugh at this, because the cash thing is so hard for foreigners here. Since the pandemic it’s been better, but I had multiple moments before it where a grocery store or gas station only accepted cash with zero warning.
I didn’t like having much cash on me at first, because I was worried about losing it or having stolen. After about a year, I did lose my wallet, but the found things bureau at town hall called me to return it, cash still inside it. They charged 10% (iirc) and split it wiith the person who found it.
Edit: name of town hall changed for clarity
- I'm currently in Scotland and have experienced the exact opposite xd I was kinda shocked when certain shops and stalls at festivals only offered card payment. Like just a few days ago I went into town and saw that the Christmas market was already up and running so I thought I might as well buy myself a mulled wine. At the stall I realized I didn't have that much cash on me (especially since mulled wine is extremely expensive in Scotland for some reason. Borderline scam lol) and asked if card payment would be okay thinking they would refuse since it's just a stall on a Christmas market so why would they be able to accept card payments right? The clerk answered "Oh yeah we only accept card anyway". I was kinda shocked a bit but I got my mulled wine so all's good :D
- Why should the town charge you?

Cash society is a bad thing since when

Psyop to make people think that electronic is superior.
Since forever.

Most of those negatives sound fine to me.

Yeah, like what's wrong with cash?
- America doesn't really have a functional system for this yet either. It's a lot easier to just tap your phone on a brick and be done with it, but currently the tap method is pretty hit or miss. And bank transfers are atrocious - why do we pay venmo to do something that Korean banks just straight up do for everyone? In Korea you can just give someone your deposit number and with a couple buttons you send money easily/instantly.
- I have a really slim wallet, which is only possible because I never have to use cash. Also cash is dirty. I can wash my phone once a week to keep it clean but I can't do that with cash (well I can but what's the point, and I'll get accused of money laundering /j). It's inefficient since you have to count your coins and bills and the cashier needs to do the same and then you have to check if you got the right change. You can also misplace cash, especially coins.
  Meanwhile I haven't had to handle cash for like 6 years now except for extremely rare circumstances and it just feels way better.
- It's not even accurate anymore. Cards are accepted in a lot of places.
  It was absolutely true 10 years ago, though. It's inconvenient always needing to think about how much cash you need to bring, and having a pocket full of change because it's significant denominations.
  Also, their banks are only open on weekdays and close super early. Bank lines were (are?) massive because everyone had to go at the same time due to work hours.
- Annoying to deal with
...how? The only acceptable one (Even though I personally don't like it) is cash.
Fax sucks ass and should have been put in the grave LONG ago, Flash drives are superior to Floppy in every way and fuck paper filing, digitized paperwork is far superior.
- If people actually upgraded from FAX, I would have completely agreed. What we have today is an abomination which doesn't work. Not even a week ago I had an issue with some paperwork where tax office required me to fill some form in PDF, then print it, then sign it, scan it and send it to them. I have a phone with a pen, so I did all of that and skipped few steps. Signed the document on screen. No no no no no. They didn't want that. They want my signature on paper which I never have to send them but my signature signed through screen is not good enough.
  FAX is basically all of this with fewer steps and I can easily see why they wouldn't want to move away from it. It it works, don't fix it mentality. Luckily this trend is slowly going away, but damn. Not to mention same IRS office required me to generate a certificate which I can use to digitally sign documents. But I couldn't do this either, since they accept that only on some documents. A mystery.
  As far as floppy disks are concerned, this is mainly for industrial machines. They are still a huge user. Those machines are not replaced every 2 years as they are more robust and made to last. So having a machine older than 30 years still working in industry is nothing new and considering upgrade costs literally millions, it's simply not worth paying that much money to upgrade to USB.
- Floppy drives are the brontosaurus among these, excusive paper filing sucks too, but cash society and fax telecom is not that bad.
- We use fax in the USA more than you'd think. I'd call that a wash.
  Paper in your filing cabinet will never be messed with by a ransomware attack. Ransomware attacks seem to happen to businesses and hospitals just about daily here. I'm actually watching a news story on a hospital ransomware attack as I write this.
  Floppy drives? Yeesh that one is a bit weird.
Yeah honestly living there for a while, I came around a bit on doing things by paper.
It's slower, certainly. But the Japanese are scary efficient at it, and there is a lot of infrastructure to support it.
And in the case where things go wrong or are confusing, at least you can take the forms and actually go and talk to someone, rather than staring at a computer screen that offers nothing.

Germany is the same but without the bullet trains and the robots wiping your ass.

Well, also plus random homeless guy yelling at you about Vladimir Lenin, the roads looking like Romania ca. 1983 and a cadre of stern government employees showing up out of nowhere to shout "NEIN!!" and disappear. Very futuristic in a sort of Metro 2033 way.
- As a Romanian, that would be overestimating our ability to maintain roads.
we have plenty of bullet trains - 367 last I checked, plus bullet trains from other countries - they're just chronically late because of car-focused policies over the last decades causing the infrastructure to basically rot away.
still no ass-wiping robots though, maybe one day...
- yeah we have a bunch of ICEs, but no transrapid for us. japan has a bunch of maglev trains.
Yeah, when I think of Germany, I think of papers.
Germany doesn't have bidets? France does.
- Bidet as it may

I think someday we will look back and consider if taking everything digital was ever the right choice. Friend always uses the term, "high tech downgrade." The more I interact with the internet the more I learn how it pushes the limits of our society in not so great directions.

I think the opposite can be said too. t's pushed society forward in so many great places as well.
- I'm not saying there should be no internet. I am only saying maybe some restraint would be advantageous for everyone.
Digitizing some things, like medical records and rare texts, have been extremely useful.
- Digitization of records in general is extremely useful.
I think the problem was that technological advances were faster than social ones. We ended with new ways to control people, and new forms of inequality.
Many of our problems with technology are rooted in a company abusing from their power. Even the troubled ways we communcate online today are a product of how bigh tech manipulated social networks.
The Internet is great. It connects people. I learned so many things even I lived in a small town in a third-world country.
But ads, scam, and 15-second videos are bad. The current Internet is nasty and not as beautiful as it was.
Two sides of a coin, I suppose.

Guess I’m the only one in the thread that hates cash. It’s filthy and messy. Much better to just beep my watch and move along

The one thing I don't like about digital payments is that so far, they've all been owned/controlled by various major card processors, like Visa. That control really gives those processors a dominant position and basically free money.
- This. I love how much easier it is to manage digital make-believe numbers, than tons of leaflets and pucks that represent make-believe numbers.
  I just wish the system that handled it was more... democratic? Instead of corporate feudalism with credit scores...
- I really just don't care. The ATM you got the cash from gets a cut of the fees. It's all corporate bullshit anyway
- As opposed to using debit or credit, which is also owned and controlled by all of the major credit card companies.
Cash should always be available and accepted, but personally I absolutely avoid it unless absolutely necessary.
I can't remember the last time I used cash too buy something.
- I only use cash to buy things from people in my area.
- Because theft of money via credit cards is a thing thats never happened.
Oh yeah. Maybe it's because I'm still in the just-got-my-first-credit-card phase, but damn I love that little piece of plastic. I'm clumsy and suck at using cash, but I feel so graceful with a card.
- What is this comment? Who talks like this?
As soon as I could pay for things with my phone, I did. Now I'm annoyed when I can't.
Agreed. I think cash should always be there as a fallback. But 9/10, I prefer to use card because cash is so dirty, and is harder to keep track of.
If I go to my bank app. I know exactly how much I have. Whereas if I keep cash in my wallet, I have to count it all out and keep track of it in my head. I don't like that. It's just more awkward for me.
Yes but how do you pay your prostitute? I'm surely not in the mood to explain my wife what's that $200 transaction on my card from a MELINDA TEEN at midnight that day I was supposed to be late at work.
- the fuck is wrong with you
Watch is more convenient, it's also insanely insecure. Watch out for NFC scanners in public.
- This is just pure bullshit scare tactics. In order to successfully make a transaction, I have to have my watch facing me, double click the button, and then hold it near the terminal for a few seconds. There is no way someone could just swoop in and do a transaction without my knowledge. It's bullshit fearmongering like this that makes people scared of new features like NameDrop. Quit it.
- In my experience with my Apple Watch you have to activate the wallet functionality in order to pay for something by clicking the side button twice, which should make it harder for somebody to just walk around with a terminal charging random people. Phones usually need to be unlocked to make payments too. In theory NFC credit cards could be scanned like this, and if you're worried about that you can look into NFC blocking wallets... I'm not super worried about it, though, because usually you wouldn't be on the hook for such a fraudulent charge.
- Use credit cards and just report fraudulent charges

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.
For me, the main drawback is rather than you need to get to a machine to get your physical money pieces regularly. Sometimes you run out, there's no machine, or you have no time to find one, and it can put you in troubles, like being stuck in the middle of transit or getting at the cashier and realizing you don't have enough.
- Your in a cash+card hybrid country, right? In my country at least, you can go into a chain grocery store, buy somthing (doesnt matter what) and pull a small to medium amount of cash from your card. They are (slowly as to not alert people) trying to tear that system down and go cashless.
- Before I kind of blundered unintentionally into going mostly cashless, I'd just get cash out when I went grocery shopping. But thankfully by the time I was in charge of my own money it was pretty rare to need to spend money without the option of paying via EFTPOS.
Valid point. But I assure you if you lose your wallet in Japan with $300 in it (because, statistically, nobody will steal your wallet), you'll find it at the police station next day.
(That's the most statistical thing that can happen, please do not try.)
- Went there on vacation recently and my girlfriend left her luggage in an elevator and forgot it for 15 minutes. It was at the police box a block over.
I had my wallet stolen years ago, within an hour someone had purchased thousands of $$$ worth of MacBook pros from the Apple store.
Don't lose your debit card!!! The bank doesn't do charge backs!
- how?
  they would need a pin for that, for contactless payment there is a limit, I believe 200 euros in my country.
  so did you write your pin down on a paper and put it in your wallet or do you have your money stored at a terrible bank?
You also won't have that money to spend if the power goes out.
- Manual credit card machines have existed long before electronic ones.
- If the power goes out on a global scale, you won't be able to spend cash either.
Wallet in a cashless society? Are you stuck in the early 2000's?
Now, cashless means Phones+NFC, which means when your wallet, a.k.a your phone, gets stolen you get taken somewhere until you allow access to your phone and banking apps where there should be an easy 10~30k in savings + loans they can extract
GG
- People have savings? Sounds like the 90s.
- You think people don't have and use credit and debit cards anymore? Really?
- "Taking you somewhere" is far too much effort. They can just watch you enter your passcode on your phone in a bar, then swipe your phone from you and gain access to all your accounts.
  https://youtu.be/QUYODQB_2wQ
- Where you getting the 10k figure, and how many people do you know who would have thay on hand.
- This scenario is of course impossible if you only carry cards or money 🤷
  /s
im gonna press X to doubt that you carry $300 to the grocery store, let alone that you carry that much groceries by hand while walking home
- Yeah homie I dunno there. I'm in Quebec right now and it's extremely rare for me to get out of even a simple grocery run for less than $200. I could easily carry home 300 dollars worth of groceries, even buying mostly generics.
- $300 is not at all unusual for groceries these days if you have a family.
- It is not hard to rack up $300 in groceries where I live. I'm lucky to walk out w/o spending at least $100 for my smaller trips.
  And that's just for me.

You put paper filing and cash society on the "bad" list. It's like it's wrong for people without an internet connection or privacy conscious people to file stuff. "Pls use our brand-spanking new web UI that loads a shit ton of Javascript and steals your data on top of it!" Oh and cash society. No, why would anyone want to pay in a privacy-conscious way. Naw man, pay with a card...

With a way less harsh tone, I agree with your first point. Credit cards magical for the user but are full of deamons that they cant see just by using it. I'd prefer a cash only society to one where a private company controlls all access to money. Hybrid is alright but makes the situation maluable (in my country, because of the card, some compamies will make it hard or refuse to take legal tender).
"Pls use our brand-spanking new web UI that loads a shit ton of Javascript and steals your data on top of it!"
You derailed your point, biggest thing you can do right now is use ublock or noscript. Pull as much money as you need in cash and live off of it instead of using your card.
It's not about having the option, I love having alternatives. It's about 90s ways being the only choice when they could have better options. E.g. You need to send a form. It's already a pdf file, send it by email, right? No, it has to be physical mail... or fax if they have a number. Oh, and you have to stamp on it. No pdf. Multiply that by time constraints and local bureaucracy mixed in.
Oh, another fan of living in a stone age.
- It's a downgrade if you can't choose the stone age way. And with things like physical cash that downgrade is pretty bad. I don't want a record of the 15€ my friend gave me for stealing the bathroom key last time we were at McDonald's.

As a German -Homer disappears in hedge

We only have a bit of the first panel (technology wise) and all of the bottom one

As someone who filled out multiple copies of the same contract by hand to buy a house recently, which had to be stamped with my seal and not signed, AHHHHHHHHHHghgghhg. On average, I only have to fax something once every several years. NTT, the main telecoms provider, STILL requires that you fax paperwork to get internet (at least for NTT East as of two years ago).

Using cash is great (except for my airline miles account), but one of the biggest banks in Japan is notorious for outages. ATMs here also, until very recently, had business days and hours. That's finally mostly gone, at least. They can still run out of money at the year-end holiday season as everyone is home with family and they're not always restocked in some locations, but more ATMs also helped to solve this. The problem with things transitioning to electronic payment is also those payment processors take a cut. We have all kinds of payment apps here, but many small businesses I know hate using it. The ones I know that use it most generally have larger foreign customer bases (anecdotal to business owners I know; may not be generally true in all of Tokyo/Japan).

FAX machines is still a thing in 2023!
- America's healthcare system still lives off of fax machines

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.

South Korea is more the first case than the second, no?
- Completely fair.
  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.
I'm not from the original "developed" nations but imo occupation is a pretty big factor in one's identity.

What's bad about cash?

Change / coins are pretty annoying imho
Cash is fucking awesome
i think the issue is more that people don't really understand what is good about cash and what is bad about the alternative
and the economic and societal reasons why cash is vastly preferable.
Nothing. It must be great. My weed dealer accepts nothing else!
It stresses me out giving the cashier a math problem to solve. I know they can a calculator, but still.
- That's specifically a USA problem only. In the rest of the world, the price you see is the price you pay (not inc. restaurant service fees, etc, which are more BS exported from the US)
  There is zero reason that the price sticker on a shelf or menu shouldn't be what you actually pay. It's not like online shopping where they need to calculate shipping based on distance, or tax based on state of the receiver. And there is no reason they couldn't even put both prices on the sticker.
  But in America, they do it for one reason: capitalism. It's a marketing scheme. Makes you think you're getting a better deal and paying less while you shop, so shoppers tend to spend more.
  It's why fuel costs $2.19 ^99/100
  Because that's seen as cheaper than $2.20.
  Sorry, but they're not going to be rounding that final price down to save you 1¢.
  In short: you're as much a victim as everyone else.
- I've worked at a till long ago. You ring up the customer then type in how much they gave you then the machine tells you how much change to give.
- It's not a million dollar problem, it's a few cents issue. You'll be fine

I'd argue using cash, paper, floppies is fucking advanced and the right move.

Source - I work on tech

- Mini Rant:
  When you think about it software development is a relatively young profession compared to medicine, law, construction, public services, the arts, and so on. This is why modern tech kind of sucks despite being so cool, I say we are in the "Hey maybe we shouldn't build our huts right on the river" phase of writing code, still figuring out problems that will appear mind numbingly simple in the future.
  Another issue is the fact that tech builds on itself and its flaws can be painted over with abstractions, while the aforementioned professions can't get away with being subpar for too long. So the full metaphor really is after the river floods we build on top of the ruins and claim victory because we are slightly more elevated and will take less damage during the next flood.
  The secret to better tech is rebuilding everything from scratch. The internet wasn't designed with security and bad actors in mind. Plenty of corporations are running a Frankenstein system that contains code older than most millennials, botched modernization efforts, buzzword laden over-engineered applications, and bugs that aren't features just permanent residents in your code base.
  ....But there is profiteering to contend with, good code takes time, time is money, good code is expensive. "Good enough" code is easy to write, so its better for the bottom line.
  In the end it really is....
  Developer: "Hey the river flooded and our huts were demolished, we should move to higher ground and build there"
  Corporate Leadership: "No that is too expensive, just build on the ruins and next flood we should be safer, oh also you're laid off"
  I know you didn't ask for this, but its been on my mind for a while and I felt like this was a good time to get this out of my head haha
- Enough with this American take, electronic voting works fine in Brazil, only right wingers complain about it, and the American ones also complained about their paper votes when they lose.
I would love if we kept the floppy form factor but with SSD flash on the inside.
I loved the solid feeling of disks and that "kachunk" of the drives.
They were also easy to label!
Paper databases are a terrible system
- Github uses black-and-white film. Depends. You can print qr codes or some other crazy encoding scheme.
How exactly is a floppy more advanced and the right move? Or fucking paper and photocopiers,/printers.
- It's like non-security tech savvy people embracing IoT devices throughout their homes - smart bulbs, smart toasters, etc - fucking disaster waiting to happen.
  Keeping stuff offline with paper and floppies is exceptional SecOps. It's obviously more work, and ease-of-use is degraded, but if we ever see real cyber warfare, having stuff on paper and/or airgapped storage is the best one can hope for
Ahh yes, floppy disks, where if you breathe on it, you just corrupted 1.44 megabytes of data.

Cash Society isn't a bad thing imo.

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.

I find it pretty funny seeing people talk about how Japan is not as advanced as people think. Meanwhile my home state the majority of people don't have Internet. I've been getting pretty convinced that most places use fax machines due to how few places have Internet. Anyplace that has any amount of beurocracy uses paper files. There are a considerable amount of places were cell signals simply don't work. The only way reason I know of public transport busses is because of movies. VHS player are common place for house holds. Many work vehicles were made in the 60s and we still use buckets to collect sap when sugaring. Card readers are rare so some gas stations require you to pay with cash. All around the only advanced tech things Vermont has to offer are our winter cars and the f13s that occasionally blow peoples ear drums out.

Okay but Vermont is basically a white people nature preserve, isn't it?
- Well it's a pretty shitty preserve
- Imagine saying that about another race/place
Bro time travelled from 1992 to make this comment
- I did too, but it took 30 some odd years
Most people don't have home Internet because almost everyone has it on their phone. Plenty of people don't own a computer anymore unless it's for work.
Tf is sugaring
- Making maple syrup at industrial scale
Both things can be true, but Vermont doesn't have a giant "We're a high-tech place!" image harped upon constantly that can feel like false advertising.

Cash society is good.

There's nothing wrong with having/paying by cash though.

Any timeline without cash is not healthy.
Also they've been paying for stuff with their phones for years and years—on exactly what basis are they a cash society (though there's nothing wrong with that)?
- Yeah actually i think a steady flow of physical currency moving hands is a great thing. And with the large amount of cheap shops and vending machines they move cash around plenty.
  But also i once bought groceries while waiting for a train in japan that involved selecting everything through an app paying ahead digitally and picking it up at a special location right outside the station.
  Yeah like its literally the future we dream of complete with respect and re-use of goods that still work with a massive second hand market.

regressive drug laws

still not so up to date LGBTQIA+ laws
- 80 hour work weeks

Needing to ask your boss so he can ask his boss so he can ask his boss so he can verify if you can sharpen your pencil

The future has way too much nationalism and misogyny.

Japan uses cards, it's just that they love their trains so much, they put their money on their fare cards I stead of using credit cards.

I still have my Suica card, it's got $50 on it still.

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
- Damn, you werent kidding! They had 3,992 homeless people in 2020. That's 0.3 per 10k. The US were at 582,462, or 17.5 in 10k in 2022.

Until you find out that those Nuclear launching pads still running with 1970 bug ass floppy disks. Things just work.

They replaced those in the like 2018 or 2019.
I kinda want one of those disks for my collection though... "This is my 5150, Vic 20, Nuclear Missile Launch Floppy, Thinkpad 300..." Some quality conversation starters I thinks.

Floppies are still a huge thing in heavy industry. Many of those machines are still being used and you have to enter code somehow.
Fax machines are definitely being phased out.
NTT East, at least as of a little over two years ago, hard requires a fax to set up internet still. It's infuriating.
- Also in the US the medical industry still does a ton of faxing.
What privacy from cash? Do you use an ATM or bank account to get your cash?
Then you're either on the business security cam or the local police network cam. There is no privacy even with cash.
- All your shopping behaviour and more can be tracked easily by card purchases. Cash purchases are much harder to track.
  At least that's how I see the advantage of cash here. Maybe I do miss something though

Don’t forget the impending population disaster (because they never feel the touch of another person these days, their government literally has to try and encourage them to drink just so they’ll fuck already- and can’t stand immigration) and all those depressed young people using seemingly everything from the slopes of Mount Fuji to their own apartments as log-off locations, and then nobody noticing their bodies for months.

Not to mention the impending massive economic crisis they're about to go through - Japanese automotive industry is heavily in debt and watching China eat their lunch. While China was building battery plants and electric cars, Toyota was chasing hydrogen and other go-nowhere technologies.

If it ain't broken...

Live in Japan. Plenty of things are quite broken :/

Living the casette futurism dream.

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)

Floppy disks??

Nuclear arsenals use floppies, and for good reason.
Personally I use spinning hard drives as floppies, but same idea (offline storage, usually off-site as well if I have time)
- I'd think Blu-ray m-disc would be a bit safer than a floppy that could have a bit flip from being too close to an iPhone (magsafe).
- I'm gonna need an explanation as to floppies and hard drives being so similar. I can easily buy a brand new hard drive. Floppy disks and drives, not so much...

All of those apply to Germany as well. Except floppies ...

People still use fax machines? I wouldn't even know where to look for a fax machine these days! Is Kinkos still a thing? I think that's where I had to go the last time I faxed something 20 years ago lol

Hello, fax machine? This is Germany!
Healthcare in the US still relies on a surprising amount of faxing.
- And yet they never picked up SMS messages, they just used email on their phones all the while.
The UK National Health Service (NHS) still loves fax machines. There was supposed to be a plan to phase them all out by 2020 but it never happened.
They are still somewhat common in some B2B sectors here too, although most businesses have migrated to e-fax systems now.
The Australian government used faxes well into the 2000s, I think the last three faxes I sent though were through my modem
You can actual use the Internet to send a fax to a standard fax machine. There are websites for that.
Most copiers can have a fax card added. And most businesses that need a fax machine don't even do that. They have their VoIP phone service set up a virtual fax machine. If it even needs a physical part it's probably a little black box in a network closet, but now most don't even do that.
Real fun thing, did you know faxed advertisements were and are still a thing? At work we get like 3 random ads each day that come out of the machine.
- When I have to check the efax and see these, I almost always save the clipart for use in inter-office memes before deleting them.
  I'm pretty sure that's the most engagement these things have got in the past 20 years.
Prescriptions need to be faxed where I'm from.

I like cash and fax machines. But floppy disks need to be retired. And paper filing is incredibly slow compared to digital databases.

Paper filing is good, digital filing with proper backups is good.
At my job for a staff evaluation I have to fill out a paper checklist, scan it, then enter the information digitally, then print the digital one and file it in the employees file with the original checklist and then upload a pdf of the paper checklist AND the digital one...
Instead of just having the evaluation portal open on a tablet and doing it ONE TIME with a good backup system.
- Yes, I agree it's good to have a backup system.
  [edit] I mean having a paper filing system as backup.

They have those cool blue plastic trays with rubber mats that you put your money in though. And they're everywhere.

japan being the most cyberpunk nation besides communist China and South Korea

What kind of 12 year old smartphone addict shit is this, that thinks fax machines, paper copies, cash and floppies are bad things?

Fax machines are such bad things though.
Faxes and egregiously copying temporary things to paper are the worst.
Sorry, I just worked in a community computer center where people wasted so much paper trying to print stupid things from websites, and were forced to send 80 pages to their lawyers/government/propertylords/whatever, through a dial-up connection in terrible black and white, for $1.00 a page.
It took like 5 seconds per page and to actually send took between 5-20 minutes. . .if it didn't just error out and force you to start over.
The worst nonsense is forcing people to download and print some 50 page agreement just so they can sign two pages and fax it back. That should be a jailable offense lol.
Cash and paper can stay.
Can we PLEASE just make normie-friendly email encryption so faxes can die for good though?!
I noticed you mentioned fax twice. Sorry if you're a paper company rep or something. I'm just speaking from a place of pain lol.
- With that much hassle, mailing them the document back and forth would be a better way.

Filet mignon from a vending machine is for everyone in Japan.

Hot coffee in a can!

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.

Features all around

"This post is sponsored by the World Economic Forum"

That's the"cash society"one.

Plus the highest debt/GDP ratio in the world by far.

edit Oh wait, Venezuela topped them. Well done, socialism!

Venezuela hasn't been socialist for a while. I don't see their workers owning the means of production.
Venezuela and Japan have the highest, but you forgot to mention the United States is 12th -"While the U.S. boasts the highest GDP in the world,, it nonetheless spends more than it earns. Major contributors to the national debt include the world's largest military budget, tax cuts (which reduce government income and rarely result in a corresponding increase in economic growth), COVID-19 relief efforts, and mandatory-but-underfunded programs such as Medicare."
Brunei and Afghanistan have the lowest. You need a better metric to make your pro neo liberal take💀
Source - https://worldpopulationreview.com/country-rankings/debt-to-gdp-ratio-by-country
Well... debt/GDP ratio and its effects depends on how well are you able to service the debt and how much is the confidence on GSecs... P.S. Japan is considered one of the safest when it comes to GSecs