IT Chaos - all left high and dry.

[Scott777]

I'm just gonna leave this here as food for thought.  Cash is king.  And one way to resist the onslaught against cash is to cause trouble for the shops who refuse it.  They tried to stop cash during the scamdemic, saying it spreads Covid (obviously plastic cards are impervious to Covid  🤣).  A great idea was to go into a supermarket, fill up a trolley with stuff, and if they refuse cash, just walk away.  We cannot allow cash to disappear.  Resistance is not futile.  Next will be social credit, and the CBDC will replace all banks.

[papasmurf]

Well don't come out with stupid statements like you can't pay with an old Nokia.
If the system is down in the shop a normal credit card won't help you either.

As explained Nick I have a smart phone I cannot use because it is too sensitive due to loss of feed back in my fingers. (I am no alone in that. The other problem is Cornwall council is going over to digital by default despite the technology being unreliable in the area.) Soon I won't be able to use a council car park. (I am not alone in that either.)
Precisely which is why I stick to cash whenever possible. The technology is often not working locally. 

[Nick]

Nick I am not alone in having problems with smart phones due to a disability. Also often in local supermarkets using a smartphone to pay does not work because the supermarket system is down.
(Locally only yesterday the pharmacy in the next village could only accept cash because of the problem.)

Well don't come out with stupid statements like you can't pay with an old Nokia. 
If the system is down in the shop a normal credit card won't help you either. 

[papasmurf]

I can't pay with a plank of wood either, just as irrelevant.

Nick I am not alone in having problems with smart phones due to a disability. Also often in local supermarkets using a smartphone to pay does not work because the supermarket system is down.
(Locally only yesterday the pharmacy in the next village could only accept cash because of the problem.)

[Borg Refinery]

In Historic Shift, British Newspapers Begin Warning Of "Perils" Of Cashless Society After Global IT Outage (link)


Related (mainly for Scott777):

CrowdStrike, the firm causing a global computer crash, is a WEF partner, largest shareholder is Vanguard


It keeps changing links to enormous 20 font for some reason..

[Borg Refinery]

Tech is all well and good, but we need a fallback when things fail - the fact the Chinese often pay in cash prob helps them evade their social credit system, they're smart at getting around it by now I'd imagine (seeing as it was intro'd in 2014).

It seems to me more and more stuff works less and less these days both on computers for personal use as well as larger scale computing in the world in general, maybe I didn't pay as much attention before, but big outages and problems with my computer(s) were much rare in the old days - which is weird because computers used to supposedly be much less reliable before the likes of Windows XP and Mac OS X and so on.

The other cool thing in the old days is there was a wider marketplace, more competition - and you had other competitors like silicon graphics, sun microsystems and of course IBM were a bigger player in servers and now I think they've pared down the server part of their business a lot. Now just a few companies control almost everything - look how ridiculously big Apple have got, if you followed Apple in the old days you must be amazed that they got this huge in such a relatively short space of time

An amusing aside: I tried to get ChatGPT to code me something in Objective-C, some kind of app that would run on OSX and it complained the whole time that I was asking too much of it - so I got it to write the code for me as an "example" of how it should work and bit by bit it improved on it.
I worry how much stuff is actually being coded by AI now and whether major infrastructure essentially relies on ChatGPT aka Marvin the Paranoid Android..

[Nick]

Not with my phone, Nokia 3310. I have a smart phone I cannot use, it is too sensitive for my fingers.

I can't pay with a plank of wood either, just as irrelevant. 

[patman post]

I double tapped my power button and the camera came on.   (Yes, I know it can be configured differently).

In other news, I was on a bus today making use of my free bus pass when a woman got on with a toddler and another young child. She tried 3 times to pay for the bus fare and failed using her phone, it just would not accept it. She was going to get off the bus, I was about to say I'll pay when a young chap beat me to it and paid for her. It's moments like that when I know humanity and love still exist between us.
He paid for her in cash, of course.

Cash not an optiion on London buses, but tappable credit/debit cards are...

[papasmurf]

You don't need any signal at all to pay with your phone.

Not with my phone, Nokia 3310. I have a smart phone I cannot use, it is too sensitive for my fingers.

[Nick]

The number of "not spots," and frequent loss of mobile phone signal sometimes for days where I live makes technology a pain to use. (We still have an old fashioned phone box by the village green because of it.)

You don't need any signal at all to pay with your phone.

[papasmurf]

I double tapped my power button and the camera came on.   (Yes, I know it can be configured differently).

In other news, I was on a bus today making use of my free bus pass when a woman got on with a toddler and another young child. She tried 3 times to pay for the bus fare and failed using her phone, it just would not accept it. She was going to get off the bus, I was about to say I'll pay when a young chap beat me to it and paid for her. It's moments like that when I know humanity and love still exist between us.
He paid for her in cash, of course.

The number of "not spots," and frequent loss of mobile phone signal sometimes for days where I live makes technology a pain to use. (We still have an old fashioned phone box by the village green because of it.)

[Barry]

But that is for an entirely different reason as we both know .
As for phone App's, you don't need to find the app, you just double tap the power button and all your cards are there instantly, but you can't legislate for numbskulls.

I double tapped my power button and the camera came on.   (Yes, I know it can be configured differently).

In other news, I was on a bus today making use of my free bus pass when a woman got on with a toddler and another young child. She tried 3 times to pay for the bus fare and failed using her phone, it just would not accept it. She was going to get off the bus, I was about to say I'll pay when a young chap beat me to it and paid for her. It's moments like that when I know humanity and love still exist between us.
He paid for her in cash, of course.

[Nick]

you've seen what the social credit system is like in China

China is probably the biggest user of cash that I've witnessed but again, that is for black economic reasons. They also have a system called Fapiao, a so called government official receipt system, but I could buy these so called official bits of paper for a fraction of the printed value, great of expensing . Don't know if you ever went to Denmark but they are virtually cashless and have been for a long time. I was paying with card in taxi's 20 years ago.

[Nick]

But in general I'm the same , I get paid in cash so I pay in cash

But that is for an entirely different reason as we both know .
As for phone App's, you don't need to find the app, you just double tap the power button and all your cards are there instantly, but you can't legislate for numbskulls.

[cromwell]

Yep, that's the issue with hoarding cash, there's no good solution here: either face the wrath of the social credit systems, or get your cash seized instead

The future isn't bright but it is orange....... (especially if Trump gets in)

:D