"There is no evidence that" is a phrase that drives me nuts. What they mean is that there is not a randomized controlled double blind study that shows something. My favorite explanation of the problem with this is: "Parachute use to prevent death and major trauma related to gravitational challenge: systematic review of randomised controlled trials" [1]
We know that viruses can live on wood and paper. We know that many people touch currency, and transfer viruses to and from currency. We do not need a randomized controlled trial to know that this might present a risk, especially with one of the most virulent and deadly pathogens ever encountered.
> "There is no evidence that" is a phrase that drives me nuts.
This is a phrase said in the article by Marilyn Roberts, a microbiologist at the University of Washington School of Public Health.
Also by the US Centers for Disease Control: “It may be possible that a person can get Covid-19 by touching a surface or object that has the virus on it and then touching their own mouth, nose, or possibly their eyes, but this is not thought to be the main way the virus spreads.”
May I ask your virology qualifications?
This is followed up by:
> with one of the most virulent and deadly pathogens ever encountered
Even to a layman this raises some eyebrows. Considering the grievances about semantics here could you please back up that assertive statement with some evidence?
Your quote from the CDC supports what parent said... It can be transmitted through cash. China also banned cash transactions in response to the virus (and they seem at least as competent as the CDC so far).
I'd prefer to put actual money where my mouth is, would you care to bet a fair sum on my comment above? I definitely would. There are peer-to-peer betting option available to us.
I would bet everything I own that this virus doesn't kill half of the flu/pneumonia deaths of 2017 by WHO numbers. That's for even money. Please let me know, we can work something out.
By that argument, we would have to boycott everything anyone with a disease ever touches - hard surfaces (virus is known to survive for up to a week) such as train rails would be tricky one - since we would have to send it back to the manufacturers with every suspicious contact?
I think cash has been known as dirty for a while now. There are ways to manage infection, without boycotting i think - with things such as washing hands frequently being sufficient in many cases.
In train stations and airports where I’m at, they are sanitizing handrails regularly, because even though there is “No evidence” that unsanitized handrails pose a risk of transmitting the disease, we do have hard evidence that it stays for long periods on metal, and the rest is a no-brain’er. “No evidence” is not a valid argument against this practice.
There is a bit of Shooting the Elephant as well. A large percentage of the public will be unconvinced about the 'no evidence' and expect the authorities to do something.
I pay cash for all my in-person purchases to attempt to prevent companies from data-mining my spending habits. I'll switch to cashless if it's just as private.
I feel like the practical effect of this is that you're just subsidizing all those people that use credit cards to get frequent flyer miles. Stores raise their prices because most people use credit cards, so you're paying for that no matter what. Might as well get some frequent flyer miles.
Having said that, I'm shocked that you don't get monthly statements from your health insurance company that say "hey you bought a lot of potato chips and ice cream, pay us a dollar extra a month." It's coming, though, I'm sure.
Many stores have lower prices for cash customers, sometimes significantly, so I could just as easily say that credit card customers subsidize my lower prices. Free "miles" are nice (if you fly), but cash is always more valuable than scrip.
That was never the case AFAIK. “Discount for cash” was prevalent before the rule change in January 2013 which allowed surcharges on credit card transactions.
I don't think they make very much money at all from selling your info. The banks that issue credit cards make most of their money from interest and interchange charges (what the bank charges the merchant for a person using the card - varies from 0-2%)[1]. Rewards are what the pay people to use their card and they hope to make them up with the former methods.
Do you have a reference on how much they make from selling data? Do banks release such info on their annual reports?
yes, great point. But, the bill isn't due til you're ~65+. It takes patience to think "unhealthy eating is more expensive than it appears because present-value for old-age healthcare costs aren't included".
The bill was due far before 65 for my mom who eats very unhealthy. There is a lot of daily pain and suffering caused by obesity and an increase in preventable health issues that need to be treated.
For me cash isn't so much about privacy (though that's nice) as about control. When you use a credit card or the like you are having a large impersonal corporation that has historically been influenced by both state actors and public opinion deciding who you can enter into transactions with.
I try to do that as much as possible. I don’t want all of my interactions and transactions to be going through many intermediate parties. I also want to keep the freedom of cash alive for those who find it difficult or impossible to get or learn to use cards and online payments.
All the grocery stores here (Colorado) put their staple foods behind loyalty-program discounts. Presumably the loyalty ID is just as good an identifier as a CC#.
I wrote a perl script to automate signing up for and downloading the bar code image for my local grocer's discount card without actually giving any name or information. I just print out a new one every month or so.
New employees occasionally get confused by the lack of a name but it's never a problem. I pay in cash, of course.
All the loyalty programs here (California) will let you provide a phone number rather than carrying a card. You should be able to use e.g. 867-5309 if you're really looking for anonymity.
There are websites that will give you a phone number for this purpose, but really what you want is a number that other people at the same store use, not a number that other people somewhere else in the country use.
At the grocery store I go to, the cashiers typically ask if you have a loyalty-program card and if you don't, they offer to swipe their own so you can get the discount. I suspect that's not allowed by their employer, but I don't see much downside as a cash-paying customer.
I really wish those loyalty cards were actually tied to my credit card. I’m tired of having to type my phone number into the system each time I buy groceries (with the same credit card).
At a lot of stores, it's pretty easy to get those without filling in the information lol. Usually they'll just hand you a form with the cards attached and ask you to fill it in online.
I have several cards like that which are not tied to anything.
Not if they want to aggregate your data with a thousand other databases.
Also, people can sign up for those with an alias, or throw away the loyalty card and get a new one on a regular basis (e.g. right after redeeming your points).
I can understand better privacy of cash when buying something uncommon. But when doing standard everyday shopping, I don't really see much point.
It's either:
1. Every day I pay with a card at the grocery store, this leaks information about my whereabouts, or
2. Every X days I withdraw cash at the ATM, this also leaks information about my whereabouts
Is there any advantage (in terms of privacy) of using cash in such scenario? The only thing that comes to my mind is that price is also leaked when using a card. But I don't see much use of this information.
I've been carrying enough smaller denomination bills and coins so that I can provide exact change, or say no thank you to the coins they offer in change.
The biggest hurdle is pre-paying for gasoline. I just signed up for a gasonline credit card (rather than using my main credit card as there is a much higher chance of my card getting skimmed at a pump; it happened to me a couple of times before I went cash-only).
At least with the fuel card, I will get the same discount as I did when paying cash. I also have a box of gloves in my vehicle to handle the fuel pump with.
There are pros and cons to cash and cashless. For most people in a normally functioning modern society cashless is in theory convenient "better": automatic electronic transaction record (for your own use), no making change, quicker, less physical items to carry, etc. The #1 advantage for modern cash users is privacy. Some people don't want to have all of their transactions tracked and mined by others. Not considering privacy, there isn't much cash has over cashless aside from working offline, but again, normally functioning modern society.
My favorite thing about using Apple pay is I don't have to touch anything (most of the time, anyway). I just double tap my watch and hold it near the card reader and that's it.
It's more like the banks and payment companies. Your data is monetizable, so the people who create cashless systems have a strong incentive to make them less private than cash, in order to increase their revenues.
Most payment systems allow the "bank" to make money in various ways. Either you've deposited some money and they get to collect interest on it for the time between then and when you withdraw it (like checking accounts), or they get a percentage of transactions (like credit cards), or the system is one where the tokens expire after a period of time (like gift cards) and some of them go unspent which allows them to keep the money etc.
A system can be private and be funded in any of those ways. The incentive to provide privacy is that it allows them to out-compete other payment systems without privacy, and then they get more deposits/transactions/unclaimed funds.
The primary reason this doesn't exist isn't that companies wouldn't provide it, it's that there are various laws that effectively prohibit transaction processing systems that provide meaningful cryptographic privacy guarantees.
This is where a lot of people had hope for blockchain -- most of those laws apply to the payment processor and it doesn't inherently require any payment processor entity for them to apply to. But with that comes a lot of other disadvantages (limited transaction volume, wasteful energy consumption, lack of a controlling party to provide up-front resources to address early user experience issues), not to mention the speculation-inducing deflationary nonsense, which would have to be overcome before it could expect to become popular with ordinary people.
Enough of those might eventually be addressed enough to make such systems enter common usage, but we would obviously be better off to do something about the laws prohibiting cryptographically private payment processing systems using ordinary payment processors instead of forcing people onto these ugly workarounds for something everybody should have a right to anyway. It's still not any of the government's business what books I read.
If you are legitimately interested in understanding this train of thought, I highly recommend checking out the book The Age of Surveillance Capitalism by Shoshana Zuboff (sp?)
This is not a true representation of the population served ads. Are you confident the small benefit most receive is worth throwing out to avoid outliers like this?
Absolutely not. I gues I'm one of those weirdos that want privacy and to be able to pay the money that I earned for things without being tracked.
They re-coup this by overcharging businesses as well as having some VERY valuable data. I don't want to play the stupid credit card game either and try to guess which card I should get to get the most "deals".
All I want is a convenient way to pay that doesn't invade privacy. The only two payment methods that satisfy this that I know of are cash and cryptocurrency. I'm not a fan of cryptocurrency for many reasons so cash is my only option.
I can understand your point of view, but personally I don't care if credit card companies know what stores I go to, what I'm buying and if they sell that data. I get targeted marketing, some extra junk mail, in return for a 1 to 5% discount.
In the unlikely event I find the need for an illicit purchase, I'll use cash.
> In the unlikely event I find the need for an illicit purchase, I'll use cash.
You seem to be alluding to the "I have nothing to hide argument". Just because you think you have nothing to hide, doesn't mean you do. Things you don't think you need to hide now may become things you wish to hide in the future. Just because you "have nothing to hide" doesn't mean that you're not entitled to privacy. Would you want me looking through your transaction history?
You are correct, there is no doubt. I just don't see this as likely enough to happen, so I take the convenience of using credit cards and the benefit of credit card points / free stuff.
I would not want my detailed transaction history being public, but am okay with it being used for targeting in a pseudo-anonymized way.
On average credit cards have almost 2x the volume of germs as cash[1], but in this era I would be more concerned about the POS terminal itself.
Even with contactless cards or Apple Pay I still have to touch the same screen the previous customers (even just to tip). I would expect the terminal to be as dirty as a typical public door handle.
There may be a hygiene case for using QR codes as is universal now in China - but until we solve the privacy concerns I wouldn’t argue for it.
The number of germs isn't a useful measure. A credit card is probably full of your own germs, while cash comes to you with a representative sample of other peoples' microbiota. A screen could be effectively wiped even for every single customer, or you could wash/disinfect that one fingertip, or use one of the strawberries you are paying for (remember not to eat it).
There are still prompts on the terminal like “credit or debit” or “please enter your PIN” or “type your phone number for reward card points” or “push X if you want orphans to starve”. (Safeway has the last one commonly.)
When my dad comes from Canada to the US, he still has to touch it because he has to enter a PIN. But at most stores, when I use the chip from my US card, I don't have to touch the terminal at all.
> On average credit cards have almost 2x the volume of germs as cash[1]
They measured this by surface area, which makes zero sense in this context. You need to measure by value spent. If I need to spend $200 over a week in multiple errands, how many germs for a card vs cash? The credit card is always the same germs while the notes are new germs every time they change hand and can spread nasty stuff much more easily.
QR is a pain compared to contactless payments. The problem I have is that I have a transit card as well as a credit card, so I can’t just slap the back of my phone (which has both cards) onto the POS.
"Though it’s theoretically possible, there is no evidence..."
Article is a lot more ambiguous than headline. But I'm getting tired of this kind of argument, especially now with coronavirus, where obviously we aren't going to have the definitive answers yet. Applying human intelligence to an uncertain situation (i.e. using theory instead of experiment) says we should be extra careful. Oh but "what about people who...", so let's ignore intelligent thinking and tell people to continue taking extra risks.
What "war on crypto"? Cryptocurrency bros started out with lots of theories how they are the new gold standard and how much politicians (and the "privately owned" Fed) will hate them. But the general reaction at least in democratic countries was... mildly bemused interest?
They shut down the third-wave c-list-celebrity-endorsed token scams, yes. And when it became possible to do 6-figure money transfers with limited traceability and across borders, they forced exchanges to follow KYC laws. To the surprise of absolutely no one except people saying "taxation is theft" and thinking they are very clever, laws do apply online.
But a "war" it wasn't. The failure of cryptocurrencies to have any meaningful impact on the real world not measurable in cubic feet and degrees Celsius is to be found in its inability to be actually useful. Because the problems it was trying to solve never were problems: nobody needs a zero-trust payment solution because people do trust the banking system, to some degree. Nobody wants a currency completely separate from politics because the decisions of democratically legitimised institutions filled with PhDs tend to be at least slightly better than the arbitrarily set parameters of some algorithm that cannot be changed, or the feudalism of leaving all power in the hands of whoever has the most GPUs.
It’s a war on cryptography, not cryptocurrency. Governments have gotten addicted to being able to intercept communications and feel threatened by any technology that might prevent them from doing that. This leads to all the positive uses being threatened because it’s extremely hard (or maybe impossible) to cripple nefarious uses without collateral damage to legitimate ones.
Yeah, I may or may not have made the embarrassing mistake of misinterpreting which definition of “crypto” was intended. Although “encryption” would seem more natural under your interpretation?
I’d still object to the overused “war on..” phrasing for what’s a standard disagreement on policy. But substantively it’s obviously hard to deny that at least the US government is working against encryption.
The word "war on crypto" (or rather, "crypto wars") is well-established and has been for at least 25 years, possibly longer. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Crypto_Wars
Privacy is a solvable problem. I could say your reasoning is the short-sighted one, as you simply presume the next problem is insurmountable.
This is how we end up with schools in NYC kept open, flights continuing way too long, people mocked for wearing masks, and other stupid behaviors from agendas overriding caution.
Seeing how there is no strong evidence for cash being a transmission path for the virus, I could use the same argument the other way around and interpret your position as being on an agenda to override the caution of privacy advocates.
And then people/businesses will stop taking cash because it was "recommended" which is almost the same outcome as banning it.
You're right that providing information is reasonable, suggesting that people not be given the ability to be private, or force them to essentially have a bank account is not.
All the businessmen I've talked (tiny sample) to seem to prefer cash. One of my favourite restaurants gives me an extra egg in my soup because I pay cash.
It would be surprising if all the businessmen started turning away customers because they didn't pay by card, even with a government recommendation.
Last year I bought some Blu-rays during Black Friday at Walmart. On my way to the car I got an email that the movies I just bought were available to stream through iTunes, Amazon, Google Play, etc. To my knowledge, I’ve never linked one of the streaming licensors with Walmart. So not only are they keeping track of my purchases, they are sharing that info with third parties based on assumptions (I’m assuming email address). I’m sure some think it’s convenient, but I found it really creepy.
I can't find it now, but I've seen a couple of annecdotal posts where people with high credit limits got there credit limit lowered right after using the same card at a Walmart for the first time.
Maybe those people had other changes in their spending/paying habits, but if credit card companies lower people's credits, how do they make that determination to do so?
The last time I can definitively remember using physical cash was to scavenge my truck to gather 6 quarters for a vending machine that refuse to take card in West Virginia on a ski trip. And that was more than a month ago.
I feel this is a futile stone to die over. It will never happen. Swede here, turning 27 now. When I was 13 (yes 2007) I got my own debit card which my parents deposited my "monthly" money/stipend in to allow me to build a sense of value.
I haven't used cash in my life. Whenever I get cash from tips (yes I've worked service jobs) I simply feel annoyed. Like, I plan to actually spend this illegitimate tax free money but then I have to bring it with me???
Refusing card is just going to push you out step by step until noone cares. Because I, or anyone I socialize with sure don't.
I know there's endless arguments about privacy and so on that comes up by everyone this topic is touching. But from what I've gathered, people can cover their laptop camera and feeling conscious. But giving up the convenience of a debit card will never happen. (Yes this is Europe, we don't care about building credit. Debit cards are how we roll.)
Who are these nefarious leaders? Mastercard? Visa? I have one of either to safeguard when abroad.
The bank I choose to mainly use for 1€/month? The party in a proportional system I choose to vote for because I felt they were right and not the least worst optoion?
And thank you for the nazi reference. I felt it had a lot of impact.
Nations should always circulate physical cash. Cash is a national security requirement for the function of society during disasters, man made and otherwise. Your card will not work. Cash is a human rights issue for those who are underbanked, unbanked, or value their privacy.
We teach our kids to save and manage money with physical currency and make them hand it over to buy their toy or candy or whatever for exactly this reason.
Sometimes we’re out and they’ve not brought money with them, so we get clear agreement for them to pay us as soon as we get home. That results in much more anguish and tears (at home) than the former case, I guess because they’re now giving over cash for “nothing” (that they don’t already have).
True, I spent a lot less on leisure eating when I switched over to Cash only for few months. The pain of actual cash notes going out from your wallet makes you rethink many of the purchases.
I don’t know about this, on the rare occasion I have cash when I spend it feels like I’m getting the item for free. However every time I get a monzo notification saying how much I just spent and how much money I have left for this month, I wince a little. I think it’s just what you’re used to
What do the doors have to do with this? "There is more than one point of contact in a store, therefore you might as well not even try to reduce their number." is the same kind of defeatist, just-give-up argument from the headline.
You're also touching all that food you just bought, and you just touched your nose, oh and you took out your phone and checked Facebook while waiting in line.
Money has evolved from gold/silver coins to forms of brass, copper, other mixes for coins and banknotes been mostly paper and recently moved towards plastic.
Which made me wonder - do bacteria and viruses live longer upon modern money than money of old.
Sanders-style minimum wage hikes won't do us much good when there's 20, 30, or even 40% unemployment, which will soon be a reality if these lockdowns persist.
Yang-style UBI would not be livable without a job anyway, it'd just allow landlords to pocket even more dollars from urban dwellers. That would not help the unemployed and minimum wage folks at all – especially if we cut other benefits and implemented VAT (a tax based on consumption, which is basically regressive) to pay for this. For the unemployed there should simply be a solid state safety net with livable unemployment benefits. Although in this crisis it's critical that we keep jobs so that it's possible to restart economic activity as smoothly as possible when the danger passes.
A lot of urban dwellers are only there for the job market. There's plenty of space in the US where $1K/month is enough, but if you can't find work you get $0.
That's true, but nobody's going to move now with all the hazard and uncertainty, and when the world boots up again, the distribution of jobs is rather going to stay similar.
I don't think that's true, because most of the economy doesn't involve things needed for subsistence. I mean, look around, everyone's talking about "essential" things.
You could simply give every household in the US $5000 for next month, and another $5000 for the month after that, and the total would be under $2 trillion. Easily absorbed by the size of the US economy once it's going again. People saying we can't afford this is like a parent with a diabetic kid who's going on about all the reasons why candy is bad for him but he's got low blood sugar right now. A piece of candy won't cure the diabetes, and infinite candy is obviously not a good idea, but it is what is needed right now before irreversible damage sets in.
I’m not saying we can’t afford it, or that we shouldn’t do it. I think in the immediate term we probably have to. I’m only saying that dollars won’t fix things if this goes on for very long at all. A dollar represents some portion of current economic output. If there’s no economic output, you might as well burn your dollars for heat.
The economic output that we don't have right now is the "nonessential" stuff. Giving people money right now is just a loan based on the "nonessential" stuff coming back online in the future. It makes perfect economic sense, I'm getting really upset at the idea that people dismiss this as futile or impossible.
The point of giving people money is so we can preserve the means of producing both essential and nonessential things going forward.
In any reasonably wealthy modern country, a small fraction of the output is used for subsistance.
The idea that we can't save things scares the shit out of me because the way I interpret several historical examples of countries or societies being destroyed is not that they went unaccountably crazy or evil, but that they had superficially logical economic theories that made them destroy everything on purpose as everyone accepted there was no alternative.
We have to do what we can, and dollars may help us in the short term. But “destroying everything on purpose” is exactly what I’m afraid of. Shutting down the economy for 18 months while we hope for a vaccine is not feasible, and printing money won’t make up for actual shortages.
Nobody is or would be shutting down everything until there is a vaccine. At the current rate, everyone in the world will be infected in two months. If we succeed in slowing things down, it might peak lower but slower. But I don't see how this can last a year plus.
And anyway, we aren't or wouldn't be shutting down everything, just "nonessential" things. By the way, cannabis and alcohol are "essential".
Well, despite a long back and forth, I’m pretty sure we agree on all the things (although I may be a little less confidant that we can turn off the “non-essentials” without damaging everything else - as long as it’s very short term we’ll deal with it.)
Yeah no...I can't imagine not having cash. Every card purchase i make is made at a cost to my privacy, having my personal data mined. If there is a digital product or card (like cash gift cards) where it's value cannot be revoked dynamically and can be exchanged for goods without requiring an active network connection, I am all for it. But those are the entry level requirements for me. Anything short of that comes at a cost I would not want to pay.
It’s probably not even about the cash itself but being in close contact with the cashier as you hand it over. They are doing that the whole day and we’ve been told many times to stand at least a meter away from each other.
Also card/contactless payments are quicker than cash, and cutting seconds off transactions adds up and reduces the amount of time people have to queue and stay in the store.
I always pay in cash (although I have a bank account for transactions dealing directly with the government, but I always withdraw the money when possible). However, recently with this virus, I am not buying anything at all, just using what I already have. Once the quarantine is finish I intend to continue to use cash for payments.
> Apple Pay does not work if you are wearing a mask
Unless you have an Apple Watch, you don't need to use your phone when you have one of those (just once in the morning when you put on the watch, to authenticate)
I am hopeful that it comes back through-the-glass in the next iPhone. I was perfectly happy with it on my last iPhone, and there are times (tabletop) where it is better than Face ID. That said, the new iPhones/iPads can scan your face pretty off-angle, so it's not as bad as it was at launch (iPhone X).
viruses live a lot longer on hard surfaces than soft surfaces like fabric and tissue. Lifetime on soft surfaces that can absorb moisture from the virus is like 15 minutes.
Even though we might have not hard evidence, I still think it's the first reasonable argument I heard, so I went conctactless at least for the time being.
Perhaps Coronavirus and Covid-19 specifically are not transmitted this way. There are plenty of contiguous diseases which are. From a retail worker safety perspective it is the right way to go
SARS-CoV-2 has been demonstrated to live on surfaces for multiple days. I don't know if your phone touching the card reader or handling cash is going to change much.
We know that viruses can live on wood and paper. We know that many people touch currency, and transfer viruses to and from currency. We do not need a randomized controlled trial to know that this might present a risk, especially with one of the most virulent and deadly pathogens ever encountered.
[1] https://www.bmj.com/content/327/7429/1459